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Feminist Point of View: A Geek Feminist Retrospective

Skud
June 25, 2014
980

Feminist Point of View: A Geek Feminist Retrospective

Presented at Open Source Bridge 2014.

The Geek Feminism wiki is one of the central resources for feminist activism in geek communities ranging from open source software to science fiction fandom. Learn how the GF wiki started, how it's run, and what we've learned about doing activism the wiki way.

Skud

June 25, 2014
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Transcript

  1. 6/28/2014 slides.html#1
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    Feminist Point Of View
    A Geek Feminist Retrospective
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    Content notes
    This presentation deals with sexism and issues surrounding it
    It contains links to accounts of abuse, violence, etc.
    I have provided content notes/trigger warnings inline for these
    Pages on the GF wiki and blog also include trigger warnings inline
    You are welcome to leave this talk at any time with no judgement
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    What is Geek Feminism?
    Wiki (2008)
    http://geekfeminism.wikia.com
    Blog (2009)
    http://geekfeminism.org
    Backchannels
    Mailing lists, IRC, etc.
    Structure (lack of)
    No formal organisational body
    No manifesto or statement of values
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    My role
    I started the blog and wiki
    I was an admin for a few years
    I stepped down from adminship in 2012
    Now I'm a participant (albeit an opinionated one)
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    The Geek Feminist community
    "men, women, trans and genderqueer people, married people, single people,
    polyamorous people, monogamous people, parents, childless people, people of
    colour, mixed race people, immigrants, people of a variety of religions or no
    religion, people with disabilities, heterosexual, bisexual, gay and lesbian
    people, asexual people, people with > 20 years experience in technical fields,
    members of the "digital generation", students, academics, unemployed people,
    people who wear suits every day for work, professionally published writers,
    artists and crafters, community managers, open source developers, people
    who work with proprietary/non-open source software, gamers (online and
    off), science fiction fans, anime and manga fans, vegetarians and vegans,
    femmes, butches, androgynous people, people who have worked as sex
    activists and educators, people who produce erotica/porn, people with PhDs,
    people with no degree, introverts, extroverts, people on the autism spectrum
    and off it, people with other mental health diagnoses..."
    — Source
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    RTFM cards by Brianna Laugher. Photo: CC-BY-SA.
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    Origins: an urge to document
    I was involved in open source, LinuxChix etc
    I wanted to research women in open source, tech, etc
    Also, issues and problems we faced
    I had trouble expressing myself -- lack of vocabulary
    No prior education in feminism, gender studies, etc
    Idea: start a wiki!
    Write things down as I learned them
    Handy reference for people and projects I learned about
    Note-taking for my own self-education in feminism
    Potentially, an RTFM resource
    geekfeminism.wikia.com
    I chose Wikia for ease of admin
    They handle spam/vandalism
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    The Wiki today
    Scope
    Examine geekdom from a feminist point of view
    Introduce geek women to feminist concepts in their own language
    Improve the visibility of women in geekdom and orgs that support them
    Provide evidence for sexism in geekdom
    Explore oppressions that intersect with gender in geek culture
    Content
    High level concepts: intersectionality, privilege, allies
    Women in geekdom: individuals, organizations
    Timeline of Incidents, Timeline of Geek Feminism
    Common issues: impostor syndrome, splaining, tokenism
    Silencing tactics
    Shared resources, eg. anti-harassment, therapist guide, feminist reviews
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    Feminist Point of View
    (or at least a feminist point of view)
    This is not Wikipedia
    We are not neutral
    We do not have to present opposing views
    We do not require citations; lived experience is valued
    Not everyone gets it
    We have to constantly assert this
    We ban egregiously and persistently anti-feminist editors
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    Why we document
    People often criticise us for documenting problems, saying we're harming the
    community.
    We consider it a core part of what we do.
    "Had you asked me in 2003 for troublesome incidents in Free
    Software -- are we doing anything wrong, or is this a problem we've
    inherited from other people who did things wrong, or is this just a
    thing about women, that they don't like to be too nerdy in their spare
    time? -- I don't know that I would have been able to give you
    examples of anyone doing anything much wrong. A few unfortunate
    comments about cooking and babies at LUGs, perhaps."
    Mary Gardiner, Why we document, 2009
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    Retroactive meta-documentation
    We've been better at documenting what others do than what we do
    We usually start doing things in an ad hoc fashion
    Documentation of what we do comes later
    For example
    Wiki Editorial guidelines date from late 2013!
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    2009: Geek Feminism blog
    Standing Out in the Crowd
    July at OSCON: my keynote about women in open source
    Result: hundreds of blog comments, anxiety, dread
    Wanted: safer space, shared responsibility, and support
    The blog is launched
    About half a dozen people I knew
    Mary, Val, Liz, Sumana, Yatima, Maco, Tempest, Lesley
    (I can't quite remember! We don't have it documented.)
    Influences: Hoyden About Town, Shakesville, Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog
    A quick start: up and running in a few days
    Comments policy based on Hoyden About Town (Mary and Skud)
    Blog contributor guidelines (Google doc, also Mary and Skud)
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    The problem: scaling feminist activism
    Too much 101 and repetition
    Abuse and harassment
    Burnout (short and long term)
    What we wanted
    A forum where this was on topic
    A curated audience, already feminist identified
    Faster ramp-up for new activists
    Focusing on multiplier-effect projects
    Sharing the load to minimise burnout
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    GF blog, the early days
    2009: "a watershed year"
    Content note: These links lead to accounts of harassment, may include
    sexual content, etc.
    CouchDB "program like a porn star" talk
    RMS "emacs virgins"
    Mark Shuttleworth "girls don't understand computers"
    (Trigger warning: violence and threats against women) MikeeUSA
    We were making it up as we went along
    Less developed feminist sensibilities
    We wasted more time on non-allies
    We used more humour, trolling, etc
    We're now more careful (and/or professional)
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    Racefail
    First half 2009
    Sprawling discussion about race and racism in science fiction publishing
    and fandom
    "Sides" seemed somewhat generational
    older generation: single-author blogs, real names, etc
    younger generation: livejournal, pseudonyms, etc
    O HAI RACEFAILZ: Notes on reading an internet conflict
    What we learned from Racefail
    Linkspam as a tactic
    Vocabulary:
    Derailing and silencing tactics
    Parallels and similarities
    between anti-oppression movements
    between geek communities
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    What we didn't learn
    Racial diversity is something we're still not great at
    Almost all of us are white
    Bloggers: 20% people of color by headcount, fewer by number of posts
    Linkspam and Wednesday Geek Woman regularly include people of color,
    but still a minority
    Other intersections
    We have several queer, trans, and genderqueer/gender non-conforming
    contributors/participants
    but would like more trans women's voices in our public spaces
    We are mostly from developed, English-speaking countries
    We have disabled contributors and work on accessibility, but could do
    better
    We have few direct contributions by younger and older women
    We claim interest in all geekdoms, but tend to cluster around coding and
    SFF
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    Our culture starts to settle
    (As usual, this was all retroactively documented years later.)
    What makes Geek Feminism different?
    We dropped the F-bomb
    Pan-geekdom, not particular to one field
    Invite-only spaces / checks for shared values
    (But not women-only)
    Systems approach: kyriarchy, intersectionality, patterns of abuse...
    Evidence-based feminism: documentation, statistics, data viz
    Women as a minority in geekdom
    Very different from mainstream feminism
    Minority issues: invisibility, xkcd 385, increasing numbers
    More likely to challenge gender norms
    We have/lack different privileges
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    2011 onward: spawning new initiatives
    Visualisation: Geek Feminism Family Tree
    Source on github
    Notable descendents
    Anti-harassment policies
    The Ada Initiative
    Feminist hackerspaces (Seattle Attic, Flux, Double Union, etc)
    Meanwhile, elsewhere...
    Proliferation of geeky, feminist-flavoured media
    Uptick in feminist content in mainstream media
    Uptick of geek coverage in feminist media (eg. Jezebel)
    Dev bootcamps and coding schools, many aimed at women
    Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms enabling feminist projects
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    2011-2012: Harassment incidents
    Harassment within our community
    A GF contributor was harassing people at events and online
    We had no process to deal with this
    The GF AHP was mostly for conferences, not dispersed online groups
    Bonus complication: this person had admin rights
    Result: asked to leave community and hand over admin rights
    Harassment from outside
    Harassment incident at a conference (which had no AHP)
    Harasser used GF terms / cited our wiki
    Harasser was not known to us, but we were implicated
    Characterised as "The Dark Side of Geek Feminism"
    We really didn't know what to do about this, except to say "Don't."
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    Geek Feminism needed a CoC/AHP
    But it was difficult
    Primarily online spaces
    Dispersed communities, no fixed membership
    Do we want to respond to harassment:
    which occurs outside our spaces
    by people not formally associated with us
    Holding ourselves to a higher standard
    Protecting against bad-faith reports
    Creating a GF CoC
    Began in 2012
    Stalled several times
    Annalee Flower Horne led the current CoC effort
    Our Code of Conduct is live as of today (June 26th, 2014)
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    2012-2013: the blog slowed down
    Blogging overall has slowed down
    Shift to other social media (especially Twitter)
    Other commitments: Ada Initiative, AHPs, other outreach programs
    Burnout (2 years seems normal)
    Technical difficulties combined with lack of tech availability
    We considered whether the blog had run its course
    Keeping it alive
    Mary recruited a specialist linkspam team
    The blog is shifting more toward aggregation
    Our backchannels remained active
    We kept supporting each other
    Other active orgs kept momentum going
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    2014: 6 years without flaming drama
    Challenges, but not schisms
    Differences in approach
    Availability, energy, and burnout
    Blurred boundaries for people with multiple affiliations
    Internal incidents of oppressive behaviour and language
    Harassment incidents
    Technical and administrative bottlenecks
    Most drama came from outside
    Ongoing harassment and abuse (especially blog comments)
    Vandalism and trolling (especially on the wiki)
    People who disagreed with our approach (this is fine! but sometimes there
    was drama)
    Muckraking journalism
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    How we kept it together
    Marshalling our energy
    no 101/RTFM
    strong moderation (including banning, locking pages)
    3rd party hosting (wikia, wordpress.com)
    Distribution of work/stress
    supporting/reviewing each other's writing
    sharing comment moderation
    linkspammers
    Best practices/etiquette: a superset
    trigger warnings (from fandom)
    linkspam etiquette (from fandom)
    accessibility measures (from disability activism)
    trans-inclusiveness
    Boundary-setting (see next page)
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    Boundaries, not manifestoes
    Our first boundary-setting: Comment policy
    Wiki scope and behaviour: Editor guidelines
    Blog content: Guest post policy, linkspam guidelines
    As usual, many of these were retrospectively documented
    Other ways we define what we do
    Existing content/canon
    provides continuity and context
    but it's jargon, which is hard for newcomers
    can be a weight tying us to the past
    Inclusion/invitation processes (mostly lightweight)
    eg. 3 guest posts = invitation to be a regular blogger
    Double Union wrote our manifesto for us
    See their Base Assumptions
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    An anarchist collective
    Leigh Honeywell pointed this out to me the other day.
    Whoa.
    My impostor syndrome, let me show you it.
    I thought this was just how we did things on the Internet.
    Structure, or lack thereof
    Unincorporated
    No formal finances, low costs, informal hat-passing
    No official leaders
    admins in various roles
    step up and do it / step down anytime
    "servant leadership"
    but: Tyranny of Structurelessness
    Collaborative, consensus-driven, evolving processes/guidelines
    ... but they evolve slowly and are documented more slowly
    e.g. embarrassingly slow to adopt a full CoC for all our spaces
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    Lessons learned
    Don't make our mistakes
    Don't wait so long to document processes
    Make roles and responsibilities explicit
    Assume that membership will change and people will leave
    Share responsibility and keys to everything (no personal accounts)
    Start with a full Code of Conduct and ways to enforce it
    Make paths to inclusion/invitation clear to outsiders
    Give credit for individual work
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    Lessons learned
    But you might want emulate these...
    Conserve your energy / prevent burnout
    Work with people who share values, not attributes
    Adopt best practices and etiquette from as many sources as possible
    Build reusable toolkits and focus on those with the highest return
    Take a systems approach, recognise patterns
    Use backchannels for organisation and mutual support
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    Where next?
    Caveat: these are just ideas I've heard about, not formal plans
    A more formal structure?
    would allow us to accept donations
    Labor issues, paying contributors
    volunteer labor = people with time on their hands = privilege
    maybe participate in OPW or similar programs
    Keep working on intersectionality
    explicitly inviting intersectional voices
    paying contributors may help with this
    Document what's worked for us (and hasn't)
    Major wiki improvements, community building around the wiki
    Build more toolkits/resources
    Spawn more groups that use our ideas
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    How to get involved
    Wiki editing // Editor guidelines - no account required
    Blog comments // Comment policy
    Guest posts // Guest post policy
    Send us links // Instructions in every linkspam post
    GF Classifieds // Here's how; Latest classifieds post
    Join #geekfeminism on irc.freenode.net (open channel)
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    Credits
    Geek Feminism bloggers, guest posters, and commenters
    Linkspamming team, especially lead linkspammers (most choose to be
    anonymous)
    Wiki editors and admins, especially Tim Chevalier, Rick Scott, Sarah
    Stierch, and Mary Gardiner
    Policy and community management: Annalee Flower Horne, Mary
    Gardiner, Valerie Aurora, Leigh Honeywell
    Technical support by Tigtog, Liz Henry, Leigh Honeywell, Matt
    Zimmerman, Mary Gardiner, and others
    Hundreds of contributors and participants overall. Thank you!
    More info // Contact
    [email protected] // Twitter: @Skud
    http://geekfeminism.org // Twitter: @geekfeminism
    These slides will be posted on geekfeminism.org
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