[Noisebridge-discuss] Hi everyone.

[rachel lyra hospodar]

I have been thinking a lot about what went down this week, and the
ramifications for Noisebridge.  Noisebridge itself, let's remember, is
a technology.  A tool.  It is a system of organizing things that
serves a goal.  That goal?  It varies for its various users, but my
impression of the consensus is this: encouraging the creative use of
technology.  That means disseminating technological skills, creating
access to technological tools, but most importantly, disseminating the
"hacker" mindset of creative problem solving.  There seems to be a
consensus around radical inclusivity.  There is definitely a consensus
around being open to the public, around the idea of *public* access to
this space being important.

i am going to start with some things I take as given, and would like
for you to examine them.

	-Systems evolve in a similar way to organic life forms.
	-Societies are systems that we use to offload cognitive processing to
the cloud.  Through a set of shared agreements, we are able to create
a piece of software that runs without using our primary processor.
Cool, huh?  An example of this is the set of shared cultural contexts
that allow you to walk down a busy street without getting hit by a
car.
	-An organism may persist even if it is operating inefficiently.
	-Over time, the types of organisms that exist most plentifully will
be those that functioned the most efficiently.
	-it is inefficient to discard most of your resources without even
assessing their potential.  Some of them probably could have
contributed to the efficient function of your organism.
	-Human society, while imperfect, is still wobbling along functioning
as our cloud.  America is a bounded instance of an attempt to improve
on that model.  Noisebridge is the same.

OK.  So then what?

Human society, American society, our society, a cloud that in
aggregate still runs great portions of Noisebridge, is constantly
discarding most of its human resources without assessing their
potential.  How many awesome hackers are languishing in a ghetto in
New Delhi, or in prison cells all over America?  How many are among us
right now, walking all around us, and not even knowing they are
hackers?

At least twice as many as we've got right now.

We don't even have to spring them from prison. We don't even have to
fly to India to visit them. We just have to stop telling them they are
not hackers.  We don't even have to tell them that they are hackers
(although that helps).  They will figure it out on their own.  After
all, they are hackers.

We can't really that easily help the dude who is hacking his
toothbrush into a shank in solitary lockdown.  We don't need to.
Well, we do.  Fuck, we do.  But there aren't as many of us as there
are prison guards, keeping him in there.  Maybe if there were more
hackers we could figure out how to hack the prison industrial complex.
Fortunately, there are a bunch of extra hackers, among us right now,
walking all around us, and not even knowing they are hackers.

At least twice as many.

We don't even have to spring them from prison.

We don't even have to fly to India to visit them.

We just have to stop telling them they are not hackers.

Did you know that every time someone who is openly female contributes
to the linux kernel she gets explicit harassing messages from a
particular individual?  I found that out this past week.  Sigh, yawn,
how terrible and annoying and I didn't do it and I didn't get those
messages so why should I care?

It's costing us half our hackers, friend.

Jesse Z said explicitly on Tuesday that the reason he has been
harassing me is because he doesn't think I'm a hacker.  I came to
noisebridge to find collaborators and technical advice and equipment
for my open source interface project.  I project managed a
consensus-based website build for OWS which was kind of like herding
cats in the middle of a riot. I've taught scores of artists how to use
wiki to manage shared projects.  I'm a fucking hacker.  I actually
founded a sewing/art hackspace in Oakland thankyouvery much, where a
group of us pool our resources to create and maintain a space for
creative use of technology, and a set of tools for the sustainable
creation of micro-climate pods that enable humans to settle areas
outside of their narrow evolutionary band.  Pretty cool, huh?  What
tech is that?  Clothes.  I'm a fucking hacker.

Why do I even have to defend my hackerness in this message?  I don't,
actually. I am confident in my social standing as a hacker badass in
this community.  Or not, whatever.  You don't have to like me.  Just
get out of my way.  So why am I even defending myself in this message?
 Because when someone calls up a shitty piece of software that's
running on my cloud, I am forced to run it too.  Even when it says
things that my local software knows are bullshit.  The cloud knows
better, man.  You are running what it fucking tells you or you can't
even use the damn internet.

So,

Until we live in a society that does not exclude women from technology
spaces, anytime we want to be in technology spaces we are shaped by
that absence.  Those of us who are paying attention will be the ones
waving our arms and going "hey this dude's a fucking creep" and by
fucking creep we mean "excluding scores of potential hackers through
wildly antisocial behavior".  Those of you who are not paying
attention to the way that technology spaces are shaped by the absence
of women are still being affected by it.  You're the ones wondering
why I don't want to talk to you while I am trying to get work done.
It's because I have to constantly deflect vaguely sexual attention to
even be in public.  No, I am not being melodramatic.  When I walk down
the street I have my backpack on and am walking all purposeful and the
way I dress looks like a dude from far away.  I don't wear a lot of
little dresses.  Why do you think that is?  i look good in a little
dress, too.  In a space like Noisebridge, where we all have our guard
down a little bit more, it seems socially acceptable to come over and
interrupt what I am doing to demand that I tell you about it... but in
that moment my choice is do my work, or entertain you.  I'm happy to
chat, I love people, so sometimes this is ok.  How can you tell when
it is ok or not?  There are systems that we use culturally to keep us
from killing each other.  When they mismatch a little, it's annoying
and i am sending social cues that you are ignoring, and you are
sending social cues that I don't like. When they mismatch a lot,
sometimes that is categorized as rape.   Oh, and also sometimes people
are dicks.

So let's be clear about how people are supposed to behave in public at
noisebridge, and then be firm about people who aren't doing that.  Not
because we are not all beautiful little snowflakes with a right to act
however we choose (we are!) but because of triage.  The chilling
effect of one harassing individual over many months is pronounced - it
costs us many potential hackers.  We are committed to radical
inclusivity, and acknowledge that all humans deserve community, even
those with whom we do not agree.  That doesn't mean we need to let
them shit in our punchbowl or hog all the punch.  We can tell them to
stop drinking the punch before they drown in the bile of their own
chronic liver failure.  They probably won't stop until we take the
damn punch bowl away, and we'll feel like an asshole for taking it
away, but at least that way a couple other people can have punch too.

Do we need felony assault charges to tell us someone is being a dick?
Do we use the court system to arbitrate who is allowed in our space?
No.  We are smarter than that BS, right?  That's the system that put
all those hackers in jail in the first place.

I am adopting a version of the http://adainitiative.org/ policy - it
explicitly defines a behavioral standard so that everyone knows what
is expected of them.  Their research (on tech conferences in
particular) indicated:
    Often, the person doing the groping or harassing honestly believed
that their behavior was acceptable for the venue. Just as often, many
other people went on record agreeing with them.
    People who saw these incidents didn’t know how to respond to these
incidents or weren’t sure who to report them to.
    Conference organizers sometimes didn’t learn about an incident
until long after it happened. When they did find out in time to take
action, they often didn’t know how to respond to the incident.

Below is my first draft, 2 simple sentences.  Feel free to suggest
changes.  For this to work in our community it needs to be widely
supported.  I expect some of you to mock the fact that I feel a need
to write this very serious email.  For all of you who wish you didn't
have to take this so seriously, well, so do I.  You just have a choice
about it.  I don't.  And that, in a nutshell, is privilege.

Harassment includes offensive verbal comments [related to gender,
sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race,
religion, housing status[your specific concern here]], deliberate
intimidation, stalking, following, inappropriate physical contact, and
unwelcome sexual attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing
behavior are expected to do so immediately.

R.

Further reading - I really enjoyed reading this review about
transformative justice:
http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/13-work-transform/
It says:
Transformative justice is about community transformation, not
retribution. While it can be cathartic to treat people who cause harm
as “monsters” who need to be “punished,” proponents of transformative
justice argue that we should develop skills to compassionately support
perpetrators. The goal is to help perpetrators take responsibility for
their actions without enabling or minimizing their abusive behaviour,
and also learn to transform the social conditions that supported the
abuse in the first place.


Oh, and here's a bonus.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/07/25/online-tracker-led-rapist-to-his-victim/