In order to achieve our diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI) goals, we are committed to conducting a critical and honest assessment of our DEAI efforts each year to review Knology's progress towards our objectives and identify areas for growth. The 2022 audit took place in the first quarter of 2023.

Workforce

Knology remains committed to embodying DEAI values in our workforce. As in past years, when thinking about workforce, we continued to focus primarily (though not exclusively) on the diversity of our core staff. Over the course of 2022, Knology hired four new staff members, and at the conclusion of the year, we agreed that our workforce reflects considerable diversity—which we define not only in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, but also with respect to age, nationality, religion, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, class and socioeconomic status, education, marital status, language, physical appearance, and more.

Despite important strides in this area, there remains room for improvement. With regard to our workforce, one of Knology's goals is to recruit staff from BIPOC and other historically and persistently excluded groups. Toward that end, in 2022, we conducted a deep dive to identify ways of ensuring that our job announcements reach members of these groups. Our research enabled us to strategically post job ads on a series of member listservs for different BIPOC and historically underrepresented professional associations and networks. In addition to posting on these platforms, we also began tracking our success at recruiting from them.

In the coming year, we will continue to expand on these efforts. When preparing and posting job listings, we will seek to include both our Fellows and Board members, who both represent and work in historically underserved academic spaces. We will also seek to build on our success in forging partnerships and coalitions with individuals and organizations that complement our backgrounds, experiences, and positionality.

Workplace

Within the workplace, we strive to encourage an inclusive, equitable, and accessible work environment for all staff. In 2022, we strengthened and solidified a remote work culture, hiring three staff members not located in New York. For NYC-based staff, we also developed a hybrid work model to encourage in-person collaboration while maintaining flexible working schedules. These efforts enabled us to encourage a healthy work-life balance, while also increasing Knology's status as a multi-state organization.

In the coming year, we will continue to advance our remote work practices and our hybrid workplace model. As remote work makes jobs more accessible for workers from marginalized, historically underserved groups and eliminates barriers to employment for those unable to work in physical, office-based environments, we believe that our commitments here have laid the foundation for the creation of an even more diverse workforce.

Work Practices & Products

In 2022, staff actively discussed ways to bring more of a DEAI perspective into our work. As a result of these discussions, we have rethought the way we talk about demographics, our positionalities, and various methodological concerns pertaining to DEAI issues. Though we have not yet standardized the practice of writing DEAI sections into our work, in several reports and peer-review publications, we created positionality statements. We plan to build on this progress in the coming year.

In 2022, we engaged in a number of new projects focused on accessibility, while also developing several proposals aimed at meeting the needs of vulnerable populations. We also made strides in terms of language access, creating bilingual content, a translation policy memo, and a guide for translation practices. In 2022, we started to translate our first publication into Spanish. A public release of the report will come in 2023.

As part of our project work, in 2022, a number of staff participated in accessibility training sessions. These sessions focused not only on physical accessibility concerns, but also on strategies for making digital content more linguistically and technologically accessible. To incorporate what we learned into our DEAI practices, we created an accessibility email account, which allows individuals to request whatever accommodations they need (physical, technological, etc.) in order to comfortably participate in research. Along with this, we also added closed captioning options to all Zoom data collection sessions. Finally, we took some small but important steps to increase accessibility options on our website—for example, by creating audio-visual materials and ensuring that these are accompanied by readily available transcripts. In the coming year, we plan to build on these foundations, and create a clear, research-based accessibility statement.

Across these three areas, action steps for 2023 include:

• Produce at least four podcasts / videos / non-text based shares of our research;
• Promote job opportunities to historically and persistently excluded groups;
• Create a series of templates for accessible consent forms, both from a language as well as a reading-level perspective;
• Conduct more pre-testing of research instruments; and
• Design web content from a DEAI standpoint.