Feminist Point of View: A Geek Feminist Retrospective

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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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Feminist Point of View: A Geek Feminist Retrospective

Feminist Point of View: A Geek Feminist Retrospective

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