mk30inclusivecommunities.md

ny hackerspaces and hacker communities are interested in how they can create welcoming, open, and safe spaces that allow anyone to feel at home but may not be sure how to go about doing this.

Based on our experience, there are three main elements that should help you create communities where everyone feels at home:

Decide to prioritize maintaining a safe, welcoming, and open community and agree that the community will take action to maintain this atmosphere. Take actions to actually create the safe, welcoming, and open community/space. Let everyone else outside the community/space know that your community values being open, welcoming, and safe and that you are taking action to create and maintain this environment

The best part is that these three elements can help turn lots of different kinds of communities (activist communities, online communities, etc.) and lots of different kinds of spaces (educational spaces, companies, really any organization) into open and welcoming spaces.

Let's look at each one in-depth:

1. Decide to prioritize maintaining a safe, welcoming, and open community and agree that the community will take action to maintain this atmosphere.

How does social exclusion work?

Many communities are discovering that if they’d like to have an inclusive space, it’s not enough to have a space that is merely open/accessible. Many hackerspaces that have open memberships and are accessible to members of the public wonder why they don’t have more participants from historically excluded groups (women, people of color, queer folks, less-educated folks, and just people from the wider community at large). Often the question arises when membership stagnates (or dwindles) or when members start to wonder why their own hackerspaces (or even hackerspaces at large) are failing to attract people from the wider communities that we are all a part of. The nice thing is that once you start thinking about this as a problem, you’re halfway there.

Many people who feel comfortable and confident in technical spaces (hackerspaces, tech companies, coding meetups, open source online communities, technical forums, and science/tech educational programs) have trouble understanding why someone might not feel welcome in an open hackerspace. Here’s something that helps me: first think about what kinds of spaces I feel comfortable in. Spaces where I know the rules and where I would feel fine walking right in and know that I would feel like I belong.” Examples for me include libraries, cafes, parks, fancy restaurants, bookstores, offices, schools and universities (ie, your usual haunting grounds of white, educated people). Now try thinking about the converse: What are the kinds of places where I would feel uncomfortable? Where I might be unsure of “the rules,” might expect to feel out of place, or like someone might hassle me or poke fun at me for being there. Places where I might be on edge and not sure of myself or not sure of what other people thought about me or might be wary of feeling out of place and like I don’t belong. Places where I might be worried about making a faux pas or looking foolish.” For me, those places include gun ranges, strip clubs, mechanics, some hardware stores, fancy shops, fancy neighborhoods, The Farm, construction sites, police stations (really anywhere where there are a lot of police), military places, wealthy people social gatherings, religious events, tech and gaming conventions, and free weight rooms at gyms.

Additionally, it’s extremely important to recognize that many people are placed in categories by our society that come with all kinds of expectations or stereotypes. Let’s explore some of the standard stereotypes around technology for different groups. Many people assume that women and people of color are likely to be “non-technical” (in fact, many women are expected to not even be interested in technical subjects). Many people of color are expected to be less educated than whites. Many immigrants are expected to have poor understanding of English and/or ability to speak English. Older people are expected to be slower learners and not technologically savvy.

How does this work in the world? Although the usual policy at our hackerspace is to greet newcomers, I’ve seen people of color ignored because members weren’t sure if they were “just people off the street.” I’ve been at social events with technical folks where I ended up speaking to the only other woman at the event, sitting in the middle of technical folks who were all speaking with each other and ignoring us. I’ve seen people have extreme difficulty communicating with people without much formal education or technical expertise (lots of jargon, etc.). I’ve also seen people presume that others have no technical expertise and then be surprised when the person does have expertise. And of course, the most common form of disrespect in technical situations is simply condescension. We’ve all encountered condescending hackers, but it’s salt in the wound when you know that you’re being condescended to because of your race or gender (a hacker once said to me “oh, so you ARE a hacker!” when they saw me using the search engine DuckDuckGo. Dude - using DuckDuckGo does not make one a hacker. That is so condescending!).

And guess what - people in excluded groups are extremely aware of the stereotypes that others have for their group. They are aware of this because it is everywhere in our culture and because they have often personally experienced someone treating them as if they fit the stereotype. So believe me - they know. Due to repeated experiences being stereotyped against (or knowing lots of people who have been stereotyped against), folks in these groups become guarded and expect to be stereotyped, to be disrespected, to be treated as a member of a category of people as opposed to an individual. In short, they expect to be treated by others first as if the stereotype were true and second as if they were individual humans. This is very depressing. It creates skeptics out of us. It makes us mistrust. It makes us presume bad faith first and makes others have to earn our trust. For some people it even makes them see sexism/racism/intent to do harm where none exists. And ultimately it makes us not want to be a part of communities and spaces where we expect to be stereotyped against, where we expect people to treat us with disrespect and to not have a clue that they are doing this. Many of us have dealt with enough disrespect to where we don’t want to even bother with communities/spaces that might be exclusive and so we just don’t participate at all.

Where do these expectations come from? In other words, how do people come to see places that they’ve never been to or have maybe only been to once as “for people like me”/”a place where I might belong” or “not welcoming of people like me”/”a place where I wouldn’t feel like I belong”? Many people have never been to hackerspaces

Here is the litmus test: When you meet a person, do you make judgments about what they’re like and change how you interact with them based on their appearance, or do you treat them with a base level of respect and good faith, as if they could be anything, and wait to learn more about who they are?

But guess what the upside is? The upside is if we are treated as humans, if we find communities and spaces where we are treated as individuals, we want to be a part of those spaces! We tell other oppressed people about those spaces.

Amongst us hackers it may be obvious that friendly, open hackerspace are all about learning and admitting things you don’t know, but if might instead look like it’s filled with people who have a lot of expertise and might judge you for not knowing things, assume that you don’t know things and treat you with disrespect, or talk down to you. Let’s be real, we’ve all been around a pedantic hacker (or any other technical person) who leaves the people around them feeling dumb and humiliated because the person intentionally or unintentionally failed to communicate something technical in an a way that allowed for the other person to understand. (There are many reasons for failures in communication that will be explored elsewhere.) These kinds of experiences color people’s expectations of hackerspaces, the people at hackerspaces, and the kinds of interactions that they might have with people at hackerspaces. Please add on top of your usual pedantic hacker talk the possibility for being treated differently for being a woman or a person of color. (my experience is that many men treat new women in hackerspaces & other technical spaces differently from new men. if you don’t think that your space has this issue, please watch how men in your space interact with new women and pay attention to how you interact with new women. Is the woman being treated with the same amount of respect and seriousness as a new leet hacker? If not, then it helps to examine why not.) and other technical spaces differently. Many people have had experiences “duh, people are chill with you if you don’t know stuff!” Open doesn’t mean shit without entitlement. Your open isn’t the same as my open. Many people don’t feel entitled.

Many groups (including extremely entrenched institutions such as corporations and the military, but also anarchist hackerspaces and other radical spaces/communities) are discovering that diversity will not happen without an explicit commitment and action to create diverse communities. There are lots of well-documented instances of technical spaces (including corporations, accelerators, conferences, and OS projects) having success when they make a commitment to creating diverse communities and then take action to realize that commitment.

But the first step is to realize that it’s necessary. This way you can get your community on board with actually creating the safe space and also signal your commitment to external parties.

2. What does it mean to actually create safe space? It means that if you want your community to be a safe, open, diverse, and welcoming community, then you have to practice your commitment to these principles in how you interact with other people in the space every day and in how you deal with problems. You also have to ensure that everyone in your community is on the same page and is also working to create safe space. Start by looking around and paying attention. Who are your core members? Who comes by all the time? Then switch sides: who is missing? Literally count how many active members you have who are women, people of color, etc. Examine the physical environment of your space. If there is stuff in your space (posters, goofy photos, etc.) that would make you as a woman or a person of color feel like you wouldn’t belong? IE, are they mancaves that feel like boys’ clubs? Do not oppress people. Do not tolerate any oppression. Compassionately and with good faith confront people who use any discriminatory language. The person might not understand what they did wrong or might get defensive. Keep in mind that your goal in confronting someone isn’t to let them know that they’re bad or that they’ve made a mistake, but to achieve a particular outcome Help fellow hackers and hackerspace members understand the importance of prioritizing inclusivity and help them get to a place where they share this goal and take action to make it a reality. The goal should be to have as many people in your space as possible be inclusivity evangelists. This is the only way that you’ll get to see the positive network effects that come from Care about the people in your community and treat them as you would treat people you actually care about. The people in your community are capable of infinite growth and potential. Treat them with the benefit of the doubt. Their successes are your successes and make you richer - delight in them. Assume good faith. Answer their questions. Help each other. There is, of course, a corollary here. People abuse spaces, abuse other people’s trust, and more. When people act in bad faith, confront them in a good faith way and deal with the situation as your space has determined it wants to deal with people who act in bad faith. If people act in good faith but mess up or are not living up to the expectations of the space, help them to the point that you are capable of. We can all do well to care for each other more, but many people (especially in America) need more help than hackerspaces and the people within hackerspaces can provide. Make sure your community has thought through what you will do in these kinds of situations and that you have lots of people who are willing to step up to solve a crisis. Treat members’ complaints and the things they say about the environment seriously. Make yourself and ideally lots of members a trusted individual that someone feels comfortable going to to discuss the healthiness of the environment and/or bring complaints and concerns. Alternately, have a designated person. There are many techniques to becoming a trusted person. The main element is being a warm, genuine human who actually cares about the people in the community and treats them as you would treat the people you actually care about. If one member is being hurt, go to bat for them. Do not sell them out or sweep them under the rug. Develop robust conflict resolution stuff that’s appropriate for your community and implement them. Have ground rules: No discrimination, etc. Lay the ground rules out Plan activities and events

3. You can have the most awesome, loving, safe, welcoming, open community in the world that functions as a happy little hive of productive collaboration, empowerment, and positive change in the world, but if you are interested in growing your community and increasing participation from traditionally-excluded groups (or just everyone!), then you need to let other people know that what you are is an awesome, loving, safe, welcoming, and open community. Because of the way that exclusion works, There are a number of ways to do this: publicize your community's commitment to creating and maintaining an open, welcoming, and nonintimidating environment/ use whatever medium will reach the group that you’re trying to reach. you can write blog posts, make videos, share photos, put up posters, whatever. we’ve had luck at our hackerspace by literally putting up handmade posters in the space that communicate our understanding of the problem, commitment to solving it, and the ways we go about doing this. what do you want to communicate? i think that the key elements here are 1) stating that you are aware of the exclusion/discrimination, 2) stating our commitment to breaking these things down, and 3) listing our approaches to doing this. so our posters at sudo room state that we 1) recognize the many forces that exclude people from technology and 2) that we are committed to breaking down tech intimidation by 3) being welcoming, helping each other learn, etc. It helps to use plain english (as opposed to theoretical english) and reiterate (so our posters say something like “still think that you’re not a tech person? still don’t believe us that you are welcome here? no seriously, you are welcome here.”) Publicize incidents and how your community handled them. Be honest about what’s going on in your community, don’t act as if everything’s hunky dory, and publicize what you’re doing as part of your anti-oppression efforts and the reasoning behind them. Be honest about what’s worked (and working) and what didn’t work or isn’t work. Talk about where you have room for improvement and what you’re going to do in the future. Follow through and when you do accomplish what you said you would, publicize those outcomes and lessons learned as well. let new people in your community/space know that you have this commitment. For example, when there’s a new person in the space and I hop up to give them a tour, I talk about how we are interested in technical and non-technical hacking, give examples of all the different kinds of projects we have going on (including examples of both technical and “non-technical” projects), indicate that we are welcoming to newcomers and people who don’t have much tech background, and say that we collaborate to learn and work on projects. publicize at, reach out to, and seek collaborations with the places/communities where the folks that you’d like to include are already at. For example, here in Oakland, local schools and community colleges are a great place to meet and find folks who might be interested in being a part of our community, but who might otherwise feel excluded from it. Additionally, we have started to reach out to a local sewing cooperative just a few blocks from us to involve more folks who are a part of the skilled crafts community but who might not see themselves as “hackerspace folks” (even though duh, they are!). Please note that you should be in a constant process of checking your own privilege when engaging with folks in other communities. You are not a savior bringing the good news of hackerspaces to the uneducated masses (as my mother likes to put it, “sewing machines for poor people.” <= you don’t want this!). You are looking for active collaboration out of a spirit of seeing what we can all build together if we choose to walk together down a path that lets us explore Please also note that many folks who do this kind of thing run into unforced errors in offending people due to extreme tonedeafness. i hate to break it to you, but this often comes from a paternalistic attitude towards the groups that you are trying to recruit. Don’t have a “sewing hack night to get more women to come.” Have a sewing hack night because someone in your space is stoked to organize a sewing hack night and you think that it could get lots of different people involved! Don’t have childcare “to get more moms,” but because a hackerspace that allows people with families to participate is a happier and more robust hackerspace. Be genuinely interested in, welcoming of, and supportive of new people. You literally have no idea if the person you’re talking to is the most brilliant hacker in the ENTIRE WORLD so it’s best to exercise humility and genuine warmth and interest in new people you meet. In other words, treat all new people as potential core members. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Act as if you believe in the possibility of empowerment and the possibility of everyone to learn and grow and become a righteous hacker. Avoid talking down to people, getting on a high horse, judging them for what they don’t know, or ruling them out. Let them know that they are welcome in your community and that in fact, they are already a part of it... Give people the benefit of the doubt, err on the side of trust (with caution), and plug people in right away. Connect people to other people, let them know what is going on, and offer to put them in touch with the people working on other projects. This requires that you are aware of who’s working on what, or that your hackerspace has excellent project documentation. INVITE TWICE.

How does this all fit together and why do you need all three?

1. Without a commitment to creating safe, diverse, welcoming spaces, traditional systems of exclusion will recreate themselves.
2. Commitment means nothing if you’re not willing to turn that commitment into something tangible by actually doing the hard work of creating and maintaining a diverse community. Prioritizing diversity means that you will not be happy until your space looks like the wider world: men and women, young and old folks, families, people of all ethnic backgrounds, queer folks, folks of different economic means, people with lots of different levels of education, and more (and don’t forget that men think that 30% women in a space make it 50/50!).

The craziest thing is that once you are a part of an inclusive, diverse community, things really are different and noticeably better. I can’t tell you how wonderful our space is on kids night with lots of families being involved or when we have lots of queer folks around (we are not doing a good enough job with queer folks!). I can’t tell you how weird it is when there are only men in our space on a given night (I actually really can’t because I’m not a man, but other men in the space have told me that it is in fact different!). I can’t tell you exactly how much better it is when the space looks like Oakland. When the space is living up to the promise of being an inclusive and welcoming community.

And besides the vast improvements in well-being, how do you know if you’re doing a good job? When people come back and when people bring their friends. When people brag about your space in front of you when you run into them on the street with your friends. When someone new shows up and says “oh my niece told me about you guys and said that you are really welcoming.” And the ultimate compliment, when someone says to you “wow, you guys really ARE a community filled with love.” We try. It’s precarious and requires constant vigilance against the erosion of community feeling, and is hard to maintain, and hard to get new people on the same page wrt maintaining community feeling (it’s easy for community feeling to dissipate when there’s a big influx of new people) but when you get it, and it meshes, and it gels, and everyone is humming along happily, it’s worth it.

Challenges: New folks - getting them on the same page about our values and helping them learn what the practices are of our space that we take to maintain a safe space. New folks - not getting the program and disrupting safe space by talking over people or worse. Conflicts - nuff said. Burnout - diversify. Slippage over time - don’t let things slide! Slippage during growth - don’t forget your old members. Don’t forget new members.