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I need to hire a tech person
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Edit: thank you to those who commented. Per the below, all phase 2 candidates have now been contacted.
I need to hire a tech person to help with this website. I tried to do a general web search but the results were corporate and discouraging.
What I’m specifically looking for is:
- a more functional way to organize ongoing projects (including documents to be uploaded)
- better user navigation (including an easier, less annoying way to subscribe)
- better networking with people I think are cool / people who might be interested in reading on these topics
- other random ideas that I don’t want to discuss publicly, one of which involves research and math programming
I’m not opposed to some other expert advice, but know now that I hate both endless scroll and unnecessary clicks. Also relevant: I am much more comfortable with people who have experienced at least one type of marginalization. Also: I’m in Canada et j’invite les francophones à postuler mais pour la plupart je préfère m’exprimer en anglais. Also: my ideal working arrangement would be largely in writing with occasional phone calls.
I don’t really know how to go about this, but if this sounds of interest to you, please leave a comment, which I don’t intend to approve to publish, it’s just I haven’t set up an email address yet. (Add that to the list.)
It would be helpful if your comment included a bit about you, including URLs to examples of your work that can be browsed without logging in.
My plan, once I did some browsing, would be to contact some number of people to get some sense of what they think would be involved. I don’t want to create great quantities of work for people, but I would appreciate a degree of jargon-less specificity.
After that, TBD, but I want to be as clear and as fair as I possibly can be. Because I have some role modelling to do, apparently.
[dun dun DUUUNNNNN]
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Me and the Supreme Court
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I’ve been thinking about the Supreme Court a lot lately. Well, and also since I was a kid.
I was, in particular, an early fan of Chief Justice McLachlin, and Justice Wilson. They saw through legal and societal fictions, and led through consensus and in dissent. I admired them. In Street Legal, which I started watching at age 9, I saw my path.
My first paid publications were about the Supreme Court. My recollection is that as part of that experience I got to attend a legal conference for free and hear Chief Justice McLachlin speak! There could be no paid job more exciting for a 20-year-old law nerd. Neither article was within my subject-matter interest, though, and I truly hope both got fact-checked by actual lawyers prior to publication.
My continuing interest in the Court enabled me to go to law school. I’m convinced the reason I got a full scholarship is because I’d happened to read a case that a member of the panel of interviewers wanted to talk about. Meaning: I read the entire case, not just the headnote or news coverage. I thought the relevant panel member, who was of some prestige in the legal community, was overstating what the Court had said in that particular case, and I gave the panel my take. I’m pretty sure that’s the moment that got me the funding for my degree. Because I read Supreme Court cases for fun.
My focus continued throughout law school, and I earned two interviews for a Supreme Court clerkship. I was not surprised to not get an offer from either of them. A few years later, with additional credentials, I earned seven more interviews. Two of the Justices said to my face they would be choosing me, but then they didn’t. I don’t know why. I’ve wondered since then if I hold the record for most Supreme Court clerkship interviews without an offer.
“To be near the Supreme Court” was a strong reason for moving a thousand kilometres to Ottawa, where I had no friends and no job. Eventually I found work that eventually permitted me to be sitting at the table as Parliamentarians asked questions of Supreme Court nominees! This was unspeakably exciting. (To be clear, I was not permitted to ask questions myself.)
Now, I just have a vague goal of writing something that will get translated by the Court. I’m not sure what the path to that is. Maybe this is a start.
Part of the reason I’m thinking about the Court now is because I think it has some stressful years ahead, as governments fail more and more citizens and Charter rights become the only option (other than revolution).
I think about the options the Court has particularly in the area of criminal and correctional law, and in particular with respect to the growing numbers of Indigenous, impoverished, unhoused, and mentally ill accused. I wonder how the Court is going to respond to the rights of students to demonstrate against genocide on university campuses, without being mistreated by armed police. And what will they say about environmental and other public health laws that are duly enacted but all but doom future generations to wildfires and drought and infection?
Is the unjust deference of NAPE our future, or the strong leadership of Bedford? I’m obviously hoping the latter.
Be a bulwark.
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Failure to user test
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One of my recurring gripes is failure to user test. It makes life unnecessarily bad because it is entirely avoidable.
Prenons, par exemple, la ville de Gatineau, qui tient une élection partielle le 9 juin 2024. Selon le dépliant que j’ai reçu:
“Entre le 11 et le 23 mai 2024, chaque personne inscrite recevra un avis d’inscription par la poste. … [S]i vous ne recevez pas l’avis d’inscription … il faudra vous présenter à la commission de révision afin de vous inscrire.”
Les dates de révision de la liste électorale? Les 21 et 22 mai, alors si votre avis d’inscription n’arrive pas le 23, il faut simplement construire une machine à remonter le temps.
Le dépliant aurait pu indiquer que les citoyen.nes puissent verifier leur état d’inscription sur le site web avant le 23 mai, quand l’information pourrait être utile. Mais non. Ça, j’ai dû le découvrir moi-même, tardivement.
I was also annoyed last week by the “event guide” for Doors Open Ottawa, which I absolutely adored prior to the pandemic. The guide used to be a tabloid-size brochure distributed to coffee shops, with photos and information about each building that could be visited, including accessibility info and a map so visitors could see what buildings were near to each other in order to maximize efficiency / indulge curiosity. The guide was fun and useful to peruse in advance and be guided by the days of.
The event guide this year is a total of four pages, two of which simply list the name of each building, a partial address, and the hours of viewing. No blurbs. No photos. No info about toilets or parking. Maybe it’s clear from the name what the building is. Maybe it’s clear from the address what part of the city or environs the building is located in. But, or, maybe not. There’s plenty of information on the website if you open enough tabs and spend enough time clicking, I just don’t understand who organizers think this “event guide” will be useful for.
Except the mayor, of course, who has claimed a full quarter of the guide for his messaging *and* saved on layout and printing costs.
If you want people to participate, you have to think about their needs. If you’re not guided by users’ needs, what are you doing?
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Injustice against white men
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What kind of society are we even living in if a white man isn’t entitled by birth to every single job that exists.
It certainly used to be that 100% of political jobs and church jobs and legal jobs and teaching jobs and medical jobs (etc.) were reserved for white men, and the piece would have you believe it is an injustice that, on occasion in contemporary society, certain jobs are designated for other groups.
The piece suggests that white men’s sense of entitlement to every existing job is in fact so strong that they may find themselves compelled to lie on their job applications – for example, by declaring themselves to be non-binary, or pretending to support diversity and inclusion – rather than accept the principle that a workforce approaching 100% white men is bad, actually.
There are certainly true injustices in hiring to be addressed, like how résumés with white-sounding names get more callbacks than those with names identified with Black or Asian cultures, even for employers who purport to care about diversity and inclusion. Or how male applicants are considered more qualified than female applicants with the same qualifications. Not to even mention the existence of laws that function to bar Muslim women from jobs they are entirely qualified for.
But the piece doesn’t deal with any of these examples of actual discrimination, or accept the necessity of occasionally prioritizing demographic groups other than white men in an attempt to redress that group’s historical and ongoing overrepresentation in positions of societal power and privilege.
Instead, it starts from the premise that white men are entitled to 100% of the things they want, going so far as to quote Martin Luther King in support of the notion that it is injustice that a white man was excluded from two teaching positions in the white-man dominated field of computer science.
It is not. White men and the columnists who coddle them would do well to learn the difference between a sense of entitlement and actual injustice.
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Voices against bad policy
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It’s time for an update on the federal government’s garbage 3-day-in-office policy, in respect of which I remain an opinionated spectator. I had volunteered to help my former union but the only response I got was the general mailbox advising they had forwarded my message to the President’s office. This was unhelpful since my original email had already cc’ed the President’s office. Nonetheless, I sent them the link to my ideas, and I continue to think unions should start quantifying the costs to employees of pointless commuting, for use later on in the fight.
But I have since heard from current members that the union is actually quite busy and full of fire, which is encouraging. A recent well-attended webinar explained to members the union’s actions and arguments and it sounds like they’re working various angles, including legal and public relations. Some ideas, I am delighted to report, trend toward malicious compliance.
It also sounds like the union has found precedents from other jurisdictions where the onus is on the employer to justify the requirement for in-office time, separately for each employee. This type of substantive equality approach should obviously be favoured by a Liberal government headed by the First Child of the Constitution Act, 1982, at least if constitutional principles are more important than appeasing real estate developers who feel entitled to profit always and loss never. (I am not holding my breath for Trudeau et al to suddenly start matching their practice to their rhetoric.)
One important point made repeatedly by union presenters is that members can’t just sit back while others do this work: power comes from collective action. Employees have to participate en masse to get the employer to take things seriously. Solidarity is the way to protect individuals and achieve change.
There’s a nice touch at the end of the webinar where union presenters do a live demonstration of how to make a protest phone call. I think this helps demystify the process for members, who might then feel confident enough to do the same, although unfortunately no one answered the phone. It seems if you call Anita Anand you have to sit through a full minute and a half of bilingual messaging before being permitted to leave a voice mail. They deter you at every step, these people who are paid handsomely to listen to their constituents.
A different current union member sent me a link to an excellent piece in the Ottawa Citizen by Brigitte Pellerin, who is also sarcastic about sandwiches and in favour of pushing back to zero days in office a week in response to government/employer overreach/disrespect.
I welcome more union members to share information so I can continue my opinionated spectating. I would especially appreciate links to the employer-onus policies in other jurisdictions.
I also invite members, if they think the idea of quantifying unnecessary commute costs is a good one, to repeat it to other members and their unions. One voice alone isn’t enough in this fight.
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About the author
CKirkby
- earned degrees in language / literature and law (but is not currently a lawyer or a journalist);
- worked for over a decade on Parliament Hill;
- misses writing; and
- appreciates thoughtful comments, en anglais ou en français. (Email addresses are not published.)
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