Tech…The Model For Safe Spaces For All?

I AGREE COMPLETELY!

It’s not hard today to find conflict, disharmony, and blatant disrespect. Actually, it often feels like it’s EVERYWHERE but it needn’t be.

Tech, if for no other reason than economic, is beginning to understand that diversity and inclusion matters for the survival of products, services, and INNOVATION. It may seem safer to prefer “your kind” over another but what the technology field is waking up to is the fact that without differing perspectives working through issues that affect the masses, your ability to develop solutions is greatly limited and these limitations WILL affect the bottom line.

Those who use technology to solve problems aren’t looking for safe solutions…they are looking for solutions that allow them to have the greatest impact on the largest scale.

To be this kind of technologist requires one to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. It requires one to seek out and not run away from conflict. It requires one to respect the opinions of others, particularly if the perspective is one in which they have no prior experience.

Technology has and always will be about taking risks. Going where not only no one has ever gone before BUT imagined before. It’s always welcomed the rule-breakers, the disrupters, the GEEK!

So can tech become the model for how to create safe spaces for all…DAMN RIGHT IT CAN! Because the community has learned that it MUST in order to survive.

Will it be easy…of course not…but what’s new. Hell, learning to code is one of the hardest things many have EVER tried to do but does that stop them…NO! They keep moving forward…step by step…line of code by line of code…until one day, they look back to realize just how far they’ve come. And that’s how safe spaces are created.

It starts with one conversation, one decision not to do something that may offend, one action to empathize rather than criticize someone else’s point of view.

It only takes one…

Done OVER and OVER again…

Until you can look back and realize just how far we’ve come…

IT ONLY TAKES ONE…