Tag: geek feminism

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Blogging for Geek Feminism, a short history

With yesterday’s release of Spam All the Links, I’ve finished my long awaited project of departing the Geek Feminism blog.

I was involved in the blog on, if not from the first day of its existence, at least from the first week of it. My involvement in the blog was huge, and comprises among other things:

  • over 200 posts to the blog
  • founding and for a long time running the Ask a Geek Feminist, Wednesday Geek Woman and Cookie of the Week series
  • doing a linkspam post by myself multiple times a week for about a year
  • recruiting the initial team of Linkspammers and setting up their manual, mailing list and of course, the script that supports them
  • recruiting several other bloggers, including Tim, Restructure! and Courtney S
  • a bunch of sysadmin of the self-hosted WordPress install (it’s now hosted on WordPress.com)

My leaving the blog is delayed news. I initially told the co-bloggers I was leaving close to a year ago now (mid-August, if I’d waited much longer on writing this I could have posted on the one year anniversary), because my output had dried up. I feel in large part that what happened was that I spent about ten years in geekdom (1999–2009) accumulating about three years of material for the blog, and then I ran out of things to write about there. I also have two more children and one more business than I had when I was first writing for it, and, very crucially, one less unfinished PhD to avoid. But I had a handover todo list to plod my way through, and Spam All the Links was the last item on it!

I remain involved in Geek Feminism as an administrator on the Geek Feminism wiki, on which I had about 25% of total edits last I looked, although the same sense of being a dry well is there too.

The blog was obviously hugely important for me, both as an outlet for that ten years of pent up opinionating and, to my surprise, because I ended up moving into the space professionally. I’m glad I did it.

Today, I would say these are my five favourite posts I made to the blog:

“Girl stuff” in Free Software, August 2009 (original link):

Terri mention[ed] that she had resisted at times working on things perceived as ‘girl stuff’. In Free Software this includes but is not limited to documentation, usability research, community management and (somewhat unusually for wider society) sometimes management in general. The audience immediately hit on it, and it swirled around me all week.

Why we document, August 2009 (original link):

I do not in fact find writing the wiki documentation of incidents in geekdom very satisfying. The comment linked at the beginning of the post compared the descriptions to a rope tying geekdom to the past. Sometimes being known as a wiki editor and pursued around IRC with endless links to yet another anonymous commenter or well-known developer advising women to shut up and take it and write some damned code anyway is like a rope tying me to the bottom of the ocean.

But what makes it worth it for me is that when people are scratching their heads over why women would avoid such a revolutionarily free environment like Free Software development, did maybe something bad actually happen, that women have answers.

(I’d be very interested in other people’s takes on this in 2015, which is a very different landscape in terms of the visibility of geek sexism than 2009 was.)

Why don’t you just hit him?, December 2010 (original link):

This is the kind of advice given by people who don’t actually want to help. Or perhaps don’t know how they can. It’s like if you’re a parent of a bullying victim, and you find yourself repeating “ignore it”, “fight back with fists” or whatever fairly useless advice you yourself were once on the receiving end of. It’s expressing at best helplessness, and at worst victim-blaming. It’s personalising a cultural problem.

You are not helpless in the face of harassment. Call for policies, implement policies, call out harassment when you overhear it, or report it. Stand with people who discuss their experiences publicly.

Anti-pseudonym bingo, July 2011 (original link):

Let’s recap really quickly: wanting to and being able to use your legal name everywhere is associated with privilege. Non-exhaustive list of reasons you might not want to use it on social networks: everyone knows you by a nickname; you want everyone to know you by a nickname; you’re experimenting with changing some aspect of your identity online before you do it elsewhere; online circles are the only place it’s safe to express some aspect of your identity, ever; your legal name marks you as a member of a group disproportionately targeted for harassment; you want to say things or make connections that you don’t want to share with colleagues, family or bosses; you hate your legal name because it is shared with an abusive family member; your legal name doesn’t match your gender identity; you want to participate in a social network as a fictional character; the mere thought of your stalker seeing even your locked down profile makes you sick; you want to create a special-purpose account; you’re an activist wanting to share information but will be in danger if identified; your legal name is imposed by a legal system that doesn’t match your culture… you know, stuff that only affects a really teeny minority numerically, and only a little bit, you know?

But I’m mostly listing it here because I always have fun with the design of my bingo cards. (This was my first time, Sexist joke bingo is better looking.)

I take it we aren’t cute enough for you?, August 2012 (original link):

… why girls? Why do we not have 170 comments on our blog reaching out to women who are frustrated with geekdom? I want to get this out in the open: people love to support geek girls, they are considerably more ambivalent about supporting geek women.

The one I’m still astonished I had time for was transcribing the entire Doubleclicks “Nothing to Prove” video. 2013? I don’t remember having that kind of time in 2013!

Thanks to my many co-bloggers over the five years I was a varyingly active blogger at Geek Feminism. I may be done, at least for a time and perhaps in that format, but here’s to a new generation of geek feminist writers joining the existing one!

Hand holding aloft a cocktail glass
from an image by Susanne Nilsson, CC BY-SA
Image credit: Cheers! by Susanne Nilsson, Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike. The version used in this post was cropped and colour adjusted by Mary.
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Code release: Spam All the Links

The Geek Feminism blog’s Linkspam tradition started back in August 2009, in the very early days of the blog and by September it had occurred to us to take submissions through bookmarking services. From shortly after that point there were a sequence of scripts that pulled links out of RSS feeds. Last year, I began cleaning up my script and turning it into the one link-hoovering script to rule them all. It sucks links out of bookmarking sites, Twitter and WordPress sites and bundles them all up into an email that is sent to the linkspamming team there for curation, pre-formatted in HTML and with title and suggestion descriptions for each link. It even attempts to filter out links already posted in previous linkspams.

The Geek Feminism linkspammers aren’t the only link compilers in town, and it’s possible we’re not the only group who would find my script useful. I’ve therefore finished generalising it, and I’ve released it as Spam All the Links on Gitlab. It’s a Python 3 script that should run on most standard Python environments.

Spam All the Links

Spam All the Links is a command line script that fetches URL suggestions from
several sources and assembles them into one email. That email can in turn be
pasted into a blog entry or otherwise used to share the list of links.

Use case

Spam All the Links was written to assist in producing the Geek Feminism linkspam posts. It was developed to check WordPress comments, bookmarking websites such as Pinboard, and Twitter, for links tagged “geekfeminism”, assemble them into one email, and email them to an editor who could use the email as the basis for a blog post.

The script has been generalised to allow searches of RSS/Atom feeds, Twitter, and WordPress blog comments as specified by a configuration file.

Email output

The email output of the script has three components:

  1. a plain text email with the list of links
  2. a HTML email with the list of links
  3. an attachment with the HTML formatted links but no surrounding text so as to be easily copy and pasted

All three parts of the email can be templated with Jinja2.

Sources of links

Spam All the Links currently can be configured to check multiple sources of links, in these forms:

  1. RSS/Atom feeds, such as those produced by the bookmarking sites Pinboard or Diigo, where the link, title and description of the link can be derived from the equivalent fields in the RSS/Atom. (bookmarkfeed in the configuration file)
  2. RSS/Atom feeds where links can be found in the ‘body’ of a post (postfeed in the configuration file)
  3. Twitter searches (twitter in the configuration file)
  4. comments on WordPress blog entries (wpcommentsfeed in the configuration file)

More info, and the code, is available at the Spam All the Links repository at Gitlab. It is available under the MIT free software licence.

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Are your lulz low quality? Valerie Aurora is here to help

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Warning for mention of sexual assault, and extensive discussion of harassment.

In May, my GF co-blogger and Ada Initiative co-founder Valerie Aurora posted Handy tips for my Internet harassers on her blog. They included:

Threatening my job: Unfortunately, I am my own boss. Try emailing one of the Ada Initiative sponsors? Although they might take that as a sign that the Ada Initiative is doing important work and make another donation. Hmmmm. Maybe create a Yelp page for my file systems consulting business and leave bad reviews? Endorse me for CSS on LinkedIn?

Rape and death threats: Run spell check! There’s nothing more jarring than reading an otherwise creative and well-written death threat and then seeing “decapetate.” Also, chain-saws are so last year. Remember, Gmail won’t display images by default. P.S. I happen to know one of the members of Nirvana and your bright idea has already been done.

Why did she do such a thing, and what resulted? Geek Feminism obtained an exclusive tell-all interview.

Q. Have you received any harassment as a result of this post? Was its quality indeed improved?

Sadly, no. Part of the problem is that my friends loved it — I’ve never had so much positive feedback on a post — but they didn’t want to share it with other people online. I like to joke that it’s the ultimate in dark social since people only talk about it offline using vibrations in the air called “sound.” I think that my friends are more afraid of me being harassed than I am.

Q. The post is pretty out there! Why did you put this post up? What point are you trying to make?

“Self-doxxing” myself (thanks, Kate Losse for the term) was inspired in part by how incompetent and bad the online harassment that I’ve received has been. Most people doing online harassment are just trying to impress other online harassers, at the same time that what they are doing is, frankly, totally unimpressive. The reality is, anyone can spend $25 and get another person’s home address and a bunch of other personal information, but we act like it is some kind of amazing act of computer hacking. By showing how bad people are at online harassing, I’m hoping to remove some of the motivation for people to do the harassment, or at least make them spend more time on it before they get the reward of “so cool, bro!”

I was also inspired by Krystal Ball , who ran for U.S. congress in 2010. When her political opponents tried to slut-shame her into quitting her political campaign over “sexy photos” of herself that they published, she turned around and shamed THEM — both her opponent and the media outlets that published the photos. It was glorious, and it hit home for me: if we let the existence of sexy photo of a woman prevent her from serving in political office, then I and every woman born after 1990 were out of luck. Women’s representation in political office would go down.

Q. Should other people do this?

For most people, no, I wouldn’t recommend it. It was okay for me for a lot of reasons: I already went public about sexual abuse in my family, I’m white, I’m my own boss, I don’t have children or a partner, I have skills that are in high demand, I have lots of friends and a huge support network — my emotional, physical, and economic safety is pretty good. Most women have a lot more to lose.

However, I think it is a very good exercise to think about worst cases like this: what if the thing I am most afraid of other people finding out got published all over the Internet? Because a lot of times, that thing actually doesn’t reflect on you – the shame is on the person who did the original act or publicized a private matter. It can be healing to plan what you might do, even if you don’t actually go public with it yourself.

Q. Why won’t you accept my endorsement for CSS on LinkedIn? I taught you everything you know, dammit.

I’d hate to embarrass you by letting anyone else know that you are the source of my mangled <div>’s! [Ed: good point, well made.]

Q. When are you monetising this? How can investors contact you? How big is your Series A and at what valuation?

Actually, that is a great idea. Instead of vetting a political candidate and saying yes or no, you investigate them and then publish everything that might be a problem in a funny blog post.

Or better yet, here is my favorite idea: If I ever run for political office, I’m going to scan in all my embarrassing naked photos, then watermark them with the email addresses of various journalists. Then email them anonymously to said journalists. Then when the photos get published (it’s “news,” someone else would have, etc.), I can expose the specific person who decided that slut-shaming a candidate was “news” and put the shame where it belongs. Sexism-shaming as a service, SSaaS. I’m accepting funding now.

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Code of Conduct timeline and postmortem

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Last week, Geek Feminism announced we’ve adopted a Code of Conduct.

As Annalee said in that announcement, this comes long after adoption of codes in other communities, especially events:

You’ve been promoting Codes of Conduct for years. Why didn’t you adopt one of your own sooner?

We dropped the ball in a big way here. We’ve known for at least two years that we needed a Code of Conduct internally. We’re sorry for the inexcusable delay.

We thought it would be useful to other communities to discuss how this happened.

Timeline

May 2008: Skud founded the Geek Feminism wiki, two and a half years before anti-harassment policies and codes of conduct began to be promoted by geek feminists.

August 2009: Skud founded the Geek Feminism blog, more than one year before anti-harassment policies and codes of conduct began to be promoted by geek feminists. At the time of launch. the blog had a strong comment policy which remains in essentially the same form (albeit expanded since). We weren’t the first by a long way to have such a policy (in fact it was based fairly closely on that of Hoyden About Town) but this was at the time unusual among the technical blogs and forums that many of the original bloggers frequented.

November 2010: Warning for assault Nóirín Plunkett was assaulted at ApacheCon. Within the month, Valerie Aurora had released a draft anti-harassment policy for events and finalised it for events to adopt. This is the policy that is now maintained on the wiki.

I have not found any discussion of Geek Feminism adopting such a policy internally at this time, which isn’t surprising considering it was envisaged as being for in-person events.

Early 2011: there were person-to-person complaints within the Geek Feminism community that an individual within it is harassing people when Geek Feminism contributors meet up in person (as sometimes happens at conferences we attend and similar).

January 2012: AdaCamp Melbourne (the first event I know of run by Geek Feminism community members that occurred after the development of the event anti-harassment policy) has an anti-harassment policy.

July 2012: Blogger Nice Girl reported harassment at OSCON by attendees identifying as geek feminists and using terminology from our wiki. (We do not know the identities of these people.) In August, Skud wrote on the blog:

We are taking a few different steps to address the specific concerns raised. One is that we are reviewing our wiki pages to make sure that we have information on slut-shaming and that it is appropriately cross-linked with articles about sexualised environments at geek events to help reinforce/educate people that criticising an individual woman’s choice of clothing is very different from criticising (for instance) a business that uses booth babes as a marketing device.

The second thing is that we are setting up a process so that people can contact us if they experience harassment by someone associated with GF. This is a work in progress, especially since GF is (as mentioned) a loose affiliation with no official membership, and because we may be asked to deal with harassment that occurs outside our own spaces. However, if someone is harassing another person under GF’s name or in a way associated with GF, then we want to provide a private way for people to contact us, and respond appropriately.

On the same day, Skud wrote the first version of the wiki’s Slut shaming page.

At around this time, Skud founded Growstuff, reducing her available volunteer time; her participation in the blog and other Geek Feminism activities dropped drastically over the next few months.

July/August 2012: Emails about the harassment by a Geek Feminism member discussed earlier began to circulate among Geek Feminism bloggers, presumably with our awareness of internal harassment risks heightened by the public and private discussions of Nice Girl’s reports. More than one person reported feeling unsafe and no longer recommending our backchannels as safe spaces. Skud first became aware of these reports at this time.

Given the seriousness of a known harasser operating in a community central to anti-harassment policy promotion, it didn’t seem appropriate to wait for a policy and response group as mooted by Skud to be in place and instead Valerie Aurora spearheaded a letter asking this person to leave the community, which was signed by several others including myself. The person left our community.

After this, I cannot find any further internal discussion of an anti-harassment policy for approximately another year.

April 2013: Recognising her lack of availability for volunteering due to work commitments, Skud formally announced she was stepping down as a Geek Feminism administrator. There was a discussion about handing over various technical responsibilities but not (that I can find) about the anti-harassment status.

July 2013: I sent an email to the blogger backchannel reminding them that an anti-harassment policy is still to be developed. There was a short and inconclusive discussion.

October 2013: Annalee produced an early draft policy document with many unresolved questions, particularly who the policy was intended to apply to, and how reports would be resolved. Comments on the document were made by several community members.

November 2013: Rick Scott began to formalise existing editorial practice on the wiki in the Editorial guidelines page, which was revised over a few months by a small group of wiki editors. It is intended more to communicate norms to newcomers and onlookers than to protect wiki editors from each other.

January 2014: Discussion had died down on Annalee’s draft. I sent an email with some open questions but no one including myself follows up before May.

May 2014: Annalee produced a new draft anti-harassment policy and circulated it for discussion. Skud, Tim, Valerie and myself all commented and edited substantially. Annalee asked for consensus on adopting it, Valerie suggests she JFDI, and I ended up proposing a timeline through to late June for circulating it more widely, giving people time to familiarise themselves, appointing the Anti-Abuse team, and then making the document public.

June 2014: The Anti-Abuse Team was appointed after an internal feedback process. Annalee announced our Code of Conduct publicly. I made our policy made available for reuse and promoted adoption by other communities.

Post mortem

Things we did right

Skud established best practices (particularly the comment policy) at the time our community was founded.

When it became clear that harassment in our community was a periodic problem, we acknowledged publicly that we had not put best practices into place (a anti-harassment policy) and began discussing one suitable to our community.

We returned to the issue periodically without further external prompting or known (to me) incidents of harassment and eventually got a policy in place. In the process, we hope we have developed a new best-practice policy for communities to use so that others do not have to go through this process.

Our new policy has a pretty sophisticated description of various types of harassment, based on a wide variety of personal experiences and reports of harassment received by those of us who do anti-harassment action or advising in other communities. It is better adapted for a long-lived community than the event policy is, by, eg, considering incidents of harassment in the past and in other communities. It has a more explicitly feminist stance in, eg, stating that it centres the concerns of marginalised people, and that tone-policing will not be regarded as harassment.

Things we did wrong

Various individual members of the community were slow to recognise harassment in our community based on first-hand reports from victims.

We were very slow at responding to the known need for a policy, especially for a group which was among the leaders in advocating that in-person events adopt policies. Even on the most generous reading of this timeline, there was explicit discussion of an internal anti-harassment policy in August 2012, at the time Skud discussed Nice Girl’s harassment, meaning that nearly two years passed between us explicitly committing to it existing and it being put in place. We seem to have been caught in a common problem here: we had no active need for the policy (that I know of personally), and so we did not push ahead with it.

Less central members of our community report that they wondered why we didn’t have a code of conduct, but did not feel empowered to ask about it.

Where to from here?

It is far better to have clear documentation concerning safety in particular, and common problems in general, before they are needed. We hope our reusable policy gets adopted by other communities or assists them in drafting their own, to avoid some of the slowness involved in starting from scratch.

Skud reviewed our community structure and documentation in the lead-up to her Open Source Bridge talk and found various inadequacies. She and Annalee have each raised the issue of reviewing our community’s processes,. We would need to look at questions such as:

  • are we following best practices in anti-harassment, anti-abuse and establishing safer spaces?
  • is our group unusually reliant on certain individuals and if so (it usually is so in any community), how can we share knowledge and resources so that there are less single points of failure?
  • is our documentation sufficient for a newcomer to the community?

Does anyone have pointers to similar review processes in other groups? That would be really handy.

Skud suggests that in addition, with important projects like a code of conduct, a relatively structureless group like ours explicitly appoint people to the project, so that they feel empowered to act on it. We particularly need to be alert to Warnock’s dilemma (does silence signify consent, ignorance, lack of understanding, lack of interest or contempt?) in discussing changes to our community. We also need to be alert to hidden hierarchies, to, eg, the sense that nothing can go ahead without approval from, say, Skud as founder or myself as the most frequent poster.

Annalee suggests that we need to improve our institutional memory with documentation like that above, together with internal private documentation where it is impossible to make things public. This helps identify when things were done for a very good reason, versus having emerged essentially by accident, versus never having been done at all by anyone. We also need to clarify (probably continuously) about whether we are a JFDI community, or whether projects must have people appointed to them, or other.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Annalee, Maco, Skud, Valerie and one of the linkspammers for their review of this post. Except where explicitly attributed, all opinions herein should be taken to be mine, informed by discussion with others in Geek Feminism but not necessarily co-signed by them.

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Is harassment in your community unwelcome? Adopt a Community Anti-Harassment Policy!

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Last week, the Geek Feminism community announced that we’ve adopted a code of conduct in our community. Our code begins:

The Geek Feminism (GF) community is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all Geek Feminism sponsored spaces, including our blog, mailing lists, and wiki, as well as any other spaces that Geek Feminism hosts, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Geek Feminism Anti-Abuse Team.

We took quite a long time to do this, after two harassment incidents associated with the Geek Feminism community (albeit, one probably not by people who are actually active in our spaces and who therefore can’t be excluded from them). We’d love it if others learned from our example and adopted a policy within their own communities. To that end, as of today, our Community Anti-Harassment Policy is available for re-use under Creative Commons Zero/public domain and we are beginning to develop associated resources, just as we have done over the past few years for the Conference anti-harassment policy

Here’s what you need:

  1. a policy (remember, ours is available for re-use, either as is, or in a modified form)
  2. a contact point where harassment reports can be received
  3. a group of responders who receive reports and have the power to act on them up to and including excluding harassers from your community

If your community does not have an obvious way to create a group of responders, start discussing how you can create one. In many communities, there is likely to be an existing volunteerocracy at the very least. Can these people reach consensus that your community should be safer from harassment, and that they are unwilling to work with harassers? Simply announcing to people that they must cease a behaviour, or they must leave the community, is in fact very effective as long as there is basic consensus around community norms. For online groups technical structures can help, but social structures are in fact the root of anti-harassment. You don’t need ops or admin power or the crown of the ancient rulers to enforce anti-harassment policies in your community, you need consistent anti-harassment responses by people with social power.

If you don’t know that your community has concensus on being anti-harassment. as a start you can declare your own personal anti-harassment stance, and publicly call for your community to adopt a anti-harassment policy, and a structure that enables the response team to exclude people from the community.

As Geek Feminism shows, activist groups or groups that have advocated for anti-harassment are not safe from internal harassment and still need a policy. And groups with no known harassment incidents are also not safe; it’s quite likely that people in your community have experienced harassment they felt unable to identify or report. Take steps to ensure harassing behaviour becomes known, and that it is known to be unacceptable.

One specific model we encourage you to avoid is the Our community is amazing! So wonderful! We rock! PS no harassment model in which you spend a lot of time affirming your community’s goodness and make a general statement about anti-harassment in passing. We discourage putting this in your anti-harassment policy for these reasons:

  1. you probably do not know the extent of harassment in your community without a policy and a reporting mechanism, and may not rock as much as you think
  2. stating that you are “anti-harassment” without saying what harassment means to you doesn’t give your existing community and potential new members the information they need to find out if their safety needs are a close enough match for your community’s norms

Stating your community’s great work or exemplary behaviour can be really useful for establishing social norms and letting people understand what joining your community means. They form a good basis for specific policies. But don’t make such statements in your anti-harassment policy, make them in a separate document listing your community’s values and goals. And it may be best to say that you aspire or intend to create an amazing space, rather than that you have definitely attained that goal. Statements that you are definitely no questions amazing may be used to silence people with critical feedback and in the end reduce your amazingness.

We also discourage private anti-harassment policies (shared only within a community or within its leadership), for reasons outlined by the Ada Initiative [disclaimer: I co-founded the Ada Initiative].

Do you already have a community anti-harassment policy, or have we convinced you to adopt one? List your community on the Community anti-harassment adoption page! And thank you.

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Quick hit: Google publishes their EEO-1 diversity data

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

As promised earlier this month, Google’s diversity data is now up on their blog.

They write:

We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.

Their numbers — globally — are 70% male, 30% female (this seems to add up to 100%, which suggests that either Google or the EEO-1 process need to review their gender categories), dropping to 17% female among their technical employees. We’ve tabulated some data at the Geek Feminism wiki. You can compare with female-male breakdowns from some other companies (many quite small) at We Can Do Better.

Google’s US workforce is also 2% Black, way below US national figures of 13% nationwide and 3% Hispanic against 17% nationwide. (Nationwide figures from US Census numbers dated from 2012 and rounded to the nearest whole number to have the same precision as the Google figures.)

What do you think? Is disclosure a meaningful action here? Are you surprised by Google’s figures? Do you think the rest of the tech industry will or should follow?

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Geek Feminism: a family cloud

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Skud and I were both separately musing recently on the complex ancestry of some of the Geek Feminism, geek feminist, geek social justice and similar initiatives. Things like this: Double Union arose partly from discussions among AdaCamp San Francisco alumni, AdaCamp is a project of the Ada Initiative and draws on my experiences with my earlier LinuxChix miniconf (later Haecksen) event, the Ada Initiative exists in turn partly because Valerie Aurora and I met through LinuxChix, and so on.

Skud then founded the Geek Feminism family tree project which maps influences from one project to another in geek feminism and geek social justice projects. It’s enormous!

As an example, here’s the portion of the graph that relates most closely to the origins of the Geek Feminism blog and wiki, and the projects that have arisen from them:

Flowchart of relationships between geek feminist and social justice projects
Part of the Geek Feminism family tree

Important note: this is an edited version of the graph that excludes many projects not so directly related to the Geek Feminism blog and wiki. You can see the most recent version of the full image for a better idea of how complex this is. Please check it before reporting that your project hasn’t been added yet!

Contribution guidelines:

  • This project is ongoing and does not claim to be complete. We’d love your help. Corrections and additions welcome! If you’re a github user you could submit a pull request directly to Skud. Otherwise feel free to leave comments here with suggestions of what nodes and lines to add, change, delete or annotate!
  • A line is intended to denote some form of influence or inspiration, not ownership or perfect agreement. So, for example, a project might have been inspired by another, or filling gaps in another, or founded by members who met through another, and so on. The two projects may or may not be aligned with each other.
  • You can view a fuller description of some of the relationships between projects in the source file for the graph.
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Quick hit: when non-macho guys are on top of the heap

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

There’s a discussion around the journalism startups that well-known journalists are involved in, and the extent to which they are yet another set of startups full of white men. (Basically, yes.) Emily Bell wrote Journalism startups aren’t a revolution if they’re filled with all these white men.

I thought readers here would especially enjoy Zeynep Tufekci’s contribution, No, Nate, brogrammers may not be macho, but that’s not all there is to it. An excerpt:

Many tech guys, many young and recently ascendant, think something along these lines: “Wait, we’re not the jocks. We aren’t the people who were jerks. We never pushed anyone into a locker and smashed their face. We’re the people who got teased for being brainy, for not being macho, the ones who never got a look from the popular girls (or boys), the ones who were bullied for our interests in science and math, and… what’s wrong with Dungeons & Dragons, anyway?”

In other words, as Silver puts it, “We’re outsiders, basically.”[…]

[L]ife’s not just high school, and there is not one kind of hierarchy. What happens when formerly excluded groups gain more power, like techies? They don’t just let go of their old forms of cultural capital. Yet they may be blind to how their old ways of identifying and accepting each other are exclusionary to others. They still interpret the world through their sense of status when they were “basically, outsiders.”

Most tech people don’t think of it this way, but the fact that most of them wear jeans all the time is just another example of cultural capital, an arbitrary marker that’s valued in their habitus, both to delineate it and to preserve it. Jeans are arbitrary, as arbitrary as ties[…]

How does that relate to the Silver’s charged defense that his team could not be “bro-y” people? Simple: among the mostly male, smart, geeky groups that most programmers and technical people come from, there is a way of existing that is, yes, often fairly exclusionary to women but not in ways that Silver and his friends recognize as male privilege.

Tufekci’s whole piece is at Medium, come for the Bourdieu, stay for the Dr Seuss!

Posted on

Open thread: never say “fake geek” again!

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Hello again! Hopefully everyone is enjoying our newly working blog (no one is seeing regular 503 errors right? RIGHT? no seriously, let us know if you are). We’re celebrating with an open thread for comments on any subject fitting our policy!

Feature item for this open thread is Nothing to Prove (subtitled version available in Amara) by geek sister musicians The Doubleclicks. The band talk about the song and video on their blog. Additional images can be submitted on geekgirlvideo.tumblr.com. Transcript at the bottom of this post.

(
{“video_url”: “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4Rjy5yW1gQ”}
)

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About open threads: open threads are for comments on any subject at all, including past posts, things we haven’t posted on, what you’ve been thinking or doing, etc as long as it follows our comment policy. We’re always looking for fluffy, fun, silly, cute or beautiful open thread starters, please post links to Pinboard with the “gffun” tag.

Partial transcription of video:

Transcriber’s note: the video clip consists of many short videos of a geek or sometimes two geeks holding up a sign to the camera. for time reasons, I am only transcribing the signs, not giving a description of people’s appearance or their surroundings, other than noting geeks who appear to me to be men. I’m aware that several of them are geek celebrities, but I haven’t looked them up. Signs are in square braces.

[Opening credits: “Nothing to Prove”, a music video by the Doubleclicks.]

I entered this scene through rejection and honesty

[Two people: Hi there! We are geek girls.]
[I started playing DnD in 6th grade. I never stopped.]

Nerds weren’t mean, they were weird and that worked for me

[I learned to read with comic books.]
[I’ve been a gamer since before I can remember.]

After 10 years of teasing when social skills failed me

[I grew my hair out / so I could dress up as Princess Leia.]

Dungeons & Dragons cured all that ailed me

[I played Myst when it was released. I was 11. It was the GREATEST DAY OF MY LIFE!]

We read books, we played games, we made art, we watched Lost

[My Transformers played with my Cabbage Patch Kids.]
[I received my first console when I was nine years old.]

We said things like “D20”, “shipping” and “Mana cost”

[My regular Saturday night “date” was the 5th doctor.]
[Comics taught me women can be beautiful & powerful.]

It felt good to be myself, not being mocked

[Founder and president of my high school Star Trek fan club.]
[I spend HUNDREDS of hours on cosplay.]

Still self-conscious, though, we whispered things about jocks

[Adult and child: I’m raising the next generation of Geek Girls!]
[Accounting associate by day, Elf Ranger by night.]

But one day, you grow up, come into your own

[I was obsessed with Star Trek: The Next Generation and had a super huge crush on Jonathan Frakes. / Now we’re friends. It’s weird.]

Now geek’s not rejection – it’s a label I own

[I write code for particle accelerators.]
[I’m in ur HOUSE OF IDEAS writin ur COMICS.]

Then ignorant haters come to prove me wrong

[Two people: being a geek girl is really awesome / … except when it isn’t.]

Tell me I’m not nerdy enough to belong

[I love video games but BOYS tell me I’m not a REAL GAMER.]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[That look of surprise when I talk about Star Trek? It gets old.]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[Why are you surprised I want to be an ASTRONAUT when I grow up?]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[I’m a SCIENTIST not a secretary.]

(rising music)

[I own a comic + game shop but people just assume I’m humoring my geek husband.]

Fake Geek Girl test – that’s a funny one, go ahead

[People say I only play video games because of my boyfriend but I owned over 200 games before I even met him!]

How many comic books are there I haven’t read?

[I work at a comic book store. Male customers tend to ignore me completely or ask if there is a man around to help them.]

I know it feels good to have a contest you win

[Being ASIAN and a GEEK doesn’t mean I have to like ANIME.]

It would feel even better if I wanted in

[I was told I traded my cleavage for free comics.]

So women aren’t geeks, so is that your conclusion?

[I have to use a gender-neutral pen-name just to be respected.]

That this is some secret club based on exclusion?

[I was told I “sound smart for a girl in a pink skirt.”]

12-year-old dorks would say you’re being selfish

[A con vendor told me that the smaller dice sets were for women to wear and show off (accessories). The regular ones were for men to, you know, play games with.]

And then they’d go write in their journals in Elvish

[Two people: Here’s a message for the haters, elitists and bullies / from us, the geek girls and our friends]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[Man: No one gets to tell you how to be a geek.]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[Man: If someone has to pass a test to hang out with you / YOU’RE the problem. ]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[You think I do this for your approval? Mwa ha ha. / Get over yourself.]

(instrumental)

[Man: There are no fake geeks / … only real jerks.]
[Who died and made you Batman?! Wait. Was it your parents? / In that case I’m very sorry. / Never mind.]
[I don’t need you to tell me how much I like anything.]
[We’ve both been ridiculed for our hobbies. Be supportive. We’re on the same side.]

I’ve got cred but honestly, I shouldn’t need it

[I don’t need to go to a con to be a geek. I am & I haven’t.]

This world needs all kinds of folks to complete it

[Please don’t let my gender turn you into an elitist. We love the same things for the same reasons.]

You’ve got gamers, and artists and comic subscribers

[Don’t tell my daughters that Lego, Robots and Superheroes are for boys.]

Cosplayers, crafters and fan-fiction writers

[Geek equality equals geekuality now!]

You can stop – never say “fake geek” again

[I was a geek before I saw a cult film or played a game. I don’t need your approval in the end.]

Our club needs no bouncers – all who want in get in

[Be respectful and I won’t eat you.]

But go ahead, if you want, to own that role fully

[Men: Staring ≠ respecting. Men are women too!]

I ain’t got nothing to prove to a bully!

[I’m a geek and I’m awesome. / And I don’t need your permission.]

(instrumental)

[DON’T PANIC.]
[Man: Don’t be a dick.]
[I’m older than ‘your Mom’ and I still love MMORPGs!]
[I’m a geek. / Search your heart. You know it to be true.]
[I founded a camp to teach girls how to program.]
[I am a cardboard-flipping card gamer.]
[You can’t take the geek from me.]
[Buuugs!]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[I’m a geek!]
[I am a geek! (and I am good at sports)]
[I’m a geek!]
[I’m a geek]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[I’m a geek!]
[I am a RPG nerd!]
[I am a geek!]
[I’m a geek ♥]

I’ve got nothing to prove

[I’m a geek]
[Man: I will do anything for $5]
[I am a costume geek!]

(instrumental)

[I cosplay for attention. LOL NOT.]
[I’m me. NERD.]
[I’m a geek!]
[I’m a fraking NERD!]
[I’m a cosplayer.]
[(sign held off-screen)]
[I’m a NERD.]
[I am a geek grrl!]
[I am a geek]
[I’m a geek!]
[I am a GEEK]
[I am a GEEK!]
[I am a tabletop geek girl!]
[I’m a / Browncoat / Comic book collator / Convention panelist / Tabletop gamer / Fanfic writer / Geek]
[I solved the [Rubik’s] cube in 36 seconds on TV 30 years ago. Now I publish the card game Fluxx.]
[I just knew that one day Star Trek would be cool. Take that EVERYONE from junior high!]
[I turned nerd watching the 90s Xmen with my Dad.]
[Child and adult,: I am a geek girl in training. I love the Science Channel. / I am a scifi/fantasy book, gadget, games (before kids), science and technology, artsy fartsy geek. aka a general all-purpose geek girl.]
[Trek-obsessed cosplaying grammarian librarian.]
[I got my husband into GAMING.]
[I am a geek!]
[It’s not easy. But I’m a geek.]
[I crochet my own Elder Gods!]
[I have been playing video games for almost 28 years!]
[Two people: Geek friends = great friends!]
[When I ran a two-week line up for the first Star Wars prequel, my homeroom teacher called me an EMBARRASSMENT and said I was ruining my school’s reputation.]
[My Mom let me read her copy of The Jedi Academy trilogy when I was 10!]
[I was born making Vulcan hands.]
[I often contemplate the merits of a Hogwards education.]
[I got my PhD in electrical engineering with a research focus in computational neuroscience.]
[I am a Wizard, Jedi, Scooby, Xman, Baker Street Irregular, Companion, Brownvoat, Starfleet Officer, Dread Pirate, Walker, Wizard, Geek.]
[Ich bin ein Aussenseitern.]
[I’m geeky enough for me.]
[I teach robotics to kids, make my own cosplays, and I work as a professional NPC at my local comic book store. (And I watch lots of geek TV shows.)]
[I was the one who introduced my fiancé to D&D. To me he is the newbie.]
[I was BORN pulling things apart & putting them back together. Now I do science on a boat. #geekforlife]
[Write fanfiction. Do cute and sexy cosplay. BE YOURSELF. Do what you want.]
[Adult and child: I can be a ballerina AND kill cylons! / Why are you surprised I want to be an ASTRONAUT when I grow up?]
[When I was six my family brought me to PAX. I loved it!]
[I said I liked Illusion of Gaia. He asked me how many red jewels the game contained.]
[Chem teacher told me I would never make a good SCIENTIST. I start my PhD in biology in September.]
[Don’t worry if you haven’t read, watched and played everything, given time you will explore!]
[In high school and university guys were shocked that I played video games and read sci-fi/fantasy books.]
[I am a geek! YAY!]

Haters are gonna hate!

[Two people: Geek girls are awesome and we are not going away! / Deal with it.]

(credits roll)

Transcript notes: subtitling used the Amara tool, lyrics are available in the Youtube description for the video. In order to capture the signs towards the end that are only displayed for two frames, I downloaded the video with youtube-dl and stepped through it frame-by-frame using Totem and Máirín Duffy’s instructions for frame stepping.

Posted on

Open thread: technical difficulties

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

You may have noticed that Geek Feminism has been regularly down this month displaying errors about “503 Service Unavailable”. We sure have. We’re working with our host to try and resolve the issue; hopefully we’re on our way. We wanted to let you know that we have noticed.

Chewed up network cable by Jeremiah Ro, CC BY-SA
by Jeremiah Ro, CC BY-SA

While we’re here, if you’re interested in following our new posts on Twitter, we’ve unfortunately lost access to our former Twitter handle @geekfeminism: you can now follow @GeekFeminismOrg.

Finally, this is itself an open thread for comments on any subject fitting our policy!

About open threads: open threads are for comments on any subject at all, including past posts, things we haven’t posted on, what you’ve been thinking or doing, etc as long as it follows our comment policy. We’re always looking for fluffy, fun, silly, cute or beautiful open thread starters, please post links to Pinboard or Delicious with the “gffun” tag.