Category: Diversity

Diversity-friendly software at SXSW 2017

Shireen Mitchell and I talked about Diversity-Friendly Software at SXSW 2017. Here’s the video

And here’s the slides.

http://www.slideshare.net/JonPincus1/diversityfriendly-software-sxsw-2017

We covered a lot! Here a list of references, along with some notes.

 

Anti-patterns

Best Practices

Diverse representation, inclusive culture, equitable policies

Setting intention

Accessibility

Flexible, optional, self-identification

Emerging techniques

Gender HCI

Threat modeling and harassment

Algorithmic Bias

Let's create a virtuous cycle!

Learning from Hacker News’ “Detox” Experiment

Political Detox Week – No politics on HN for one week. Like everyone else, HN has been on a political binge lately. As an experiment, we're going to try something new and have a cleanse. Starting today, it's Political Detox Week on HN. For one week, political stories are off-topic. Please flag them. Please also flag political threads on non-political stories. For our part, we'll kill such stories and threads when we see them. Then we'll watch together to see what happens

The guys from YCombinator (YC) who run the popular Hacker News (HN) discussion site have always been wary of allowing political discussions.  YC’s original CEO Paul, current CEO Sam, lead moderator Dan, and key influencers on the site like Thomas argue that political topics inevitably lead to acrimonious and low-quality discussions.  Over the years, HN has done a lot to cut down on political discussion.*

Of course, politics aren’t completely banned.**  Many aspects of technology and entrepreneurship are inherently political.  Just like everywhere else online, these discussions got more heated over the course of 2016.  By October, when part-time YC partner Peter gave $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign and Paul claimed on Twitter that few had done more than Sam to help defeat him, it was hard to avoid politics on HN.

The frequency and intensity of political discussions continued to increased after the election.  And the tone became less civil; mirroring the trends across the US, more and more people on HN shared opinions that others found sexist, racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, etc. etc. etc.

So in early December, Dan (aka dang) announced an experiment: a week-long “political detox”, where political stories were banned. Some people weren’t quite sure what this meant, so Dan clarified:

The main concern here is pure politics: the conflicts around party, ideology, nation, race, gender, class, and religion that get people hot and turn into flamewars on the internet.

“Of course it’s delusional”

nneonneo: Many of the top-level comments here are against this move. I, on the other hand, would like to express my strong support for this move. Political discourse is antithetical to rational, intelligent discussion.

Unsurprisingly, the announcement got a lot of support.  nneonneo’s top-ranked comment is a good example.

There was also a lot of pushback.   Nitasha Tiku’s Tech Commenters Cry Foul After Popular Silicon Valley Forum Bans Politics on  Buzzfeed has some great quotes from Zoe Quinn, Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard, Danilo Campos of HNWatch, Matthew Garrett, and others.  For example:

“Silicon Valley routinely makes impacts on race, gender and class—but discussions of those things is forbidden on Hacker News for a week 🤔”

Danilo, on Twitter

 

And here’s an excerpt from the HN discussion

minimuffins: The idea that we can carve out a space that exists outside of politics and ideology is delusional.

dang (lead moderator): Of course it’s delusional. The concepts can’t be defined to begin with, nor can they be separated in any consistent way. And still we have to moderate this site.

jdp23 (me!): Perhaps grounding your moderation policies around concepts you know are undefined and inseparable isn’t the best basis for moderating the site.

dang: It’s the best basis for moderating the site because the alternative is impossible.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

“Dear @ycombinator: this is fucked up”

Matthew Garrett, on Twitter

Looking at the bright side, the experiment did bring a rare moment of unity.  People who thought this was a bad policy and people who approved of it joined together in a flagging frenzy.

ubernostrum flagged and commented every story that had political aspects – and got temporarily banned as a result.

idlewords, minimaxir and I each submitted a story about something that could have a major impact on the tech industry.  It got killed each time.

William Gibson’s New York Times op-ed about privacy met the same fate.

So did Georgia Wells’ Wall Street Journal article about how tech companies aren’t meeting their own goals for improving diversity.

Nobody was immune.

 

“YCombinator’s Winter Reading List just got flagged off their own discussion site’s front page for political content.”

Pinboard, on Twitter

What YC learned from the experiment

The experiment lasted two days.  Dan quietly announced its end in a comment on a discussion about regulation.

Although it hasn't been a week, I think we've learned as much from it as we're going to, so it can be over now. Among what we learned is that it's impossible to define 'politics' with any consensus because that question is itself highly political, and that HN is at its best when it can meander through all the (intellectually) interesting things, some of which inevitably have political dimensions. … In other words, the existing guidelines have it about right

I asked Dan what else they had learned.  His reply

The main thing we learned is that a change like that won’t solve HN’s civility problem, which was the big question we had. But we learned other interesting things too, like that a week is too long for trying out an idea like this. Also, if we say we’re trying out an idea briefly, some people think we mean permanently. Communication on the internet is hard.

A thread asking folks on HN what they had learned didn’t get a lot of traction, but the handful of replies were interesting.  For example, here’s what wingerlang said:

I didn’t even know it ended. *** I read the initial post but since then forgot about it and HN seemed like usual business.

What else can we learn?

 

“If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault”

Anil Dash (2011)

Dan’s main learnings were actually pretty obvious even before the experiment.  adrienne was one of many people on HN who predicted it:

I mean, fundamentally my position is the same as Anil Dash’s… Trying to separate out “political” from “apolitical” topics is not going to solve the fucking problem. Being better moderators and not letting people be tremendous bigots even if they’re ‘civil’ are the ways to fix the problem.

Indeed.

Still, it seems to me that there are some other very interesting things to learn from the experiment.  Before I share my thoughts, though, I wanted to once again ask for other perspectives.

What did you learn?

 

 

* For example, the ranking algorithm penalizes stories about politics, and Paul repeatedly tweaked the ranking algorithm to penalize specific topics like the TSA or the NSA.  The flagging algorithm lets a relatively-small number of people remove a post from active discussion.  The “controversy detector” shuts down heated discussions; so when a contentious story makes it to the front page, people pile in with lots of strongly-words posts and it quickly drops to page 3 where it’s much harder to find it.   Ken Shirriff’s 2013 article How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties and the accompanying HN discussion have more details

** In fact, from time to time YC actively encourages talking about politics, like when they joined the fight against the anti-internet SOPA bill and it was suddenly a perfectly acceptable topic.

*** wingerlang wasn’t the only one that didn’t even know the ban had ended.  For some reason the moderators never made the announcement as a separate thread.  Several days later, posts were still being killed for being political – including discussions about Russia potentially hacking the US election, which certainly seem on-topic for Hacker News.  Apparently not.

Gender HCI, Feminist HCI, and Post-Colonial Computing

Emma Willard’s Temple of Time (1846)

Last major update, October 2018*

For years, I’ve asked software engineers and designers I run into at conference if they know about gender HCI (human-computer interaction), feminist HCI, or post-colonial computing. More recently, I’ve added intersectional HCI, anti-oppressive design, and design justice to the list as well. The response is usually something along the lines of “sounds interesting, but never heard of it.”

Which is a shame. These fields have some great insights about how to create software that works better for everybody. A very brief overview:

  • Gender HCI focuses on the differences in how different genders interact with computers
  • Feminist HCI is concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems that are imbued with sensitivity to the central commitments of feminism — agency, fulfillment, identity and the self, equity, empowerment, diversity, and social justice.
  • Post-colonial Computing centers on the questions of power, authority, legitimacy, participation, and intelligibility in the contexts of cultural encounter, particularly in the context of contemporary globalization
  • Intersectional HCI is a framework for engaging with the complexity of users’ and authors’ identities, and situating these identities in relation to their contextual surroundings.
  • Anti-oppressive design “considers both the values embedded in technological design and the environment that surrounds how a technology is built and researched.”
  • Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism), and is also a growing social movement

At some level it’s not surprising that this work isn’t as well known as it should be. Much of this work has been done by women of color, queer and trans people, and others who are marginalized within the tech world. Much of this is heavily influenced by the social sciences, which are also marginalized by tech. And much of this work is also by the kinds of biases against that anti-oppressive research that Alex Ahmed, Judeth Oden Choi, Teresa Almeida, Kelly Ireland, and I discuss in What’s at Issue: Sex, Stigma, and Politics in ACM Publishing.**

So here are some slightly longer overviews of these different areas, each featuring a handful of key papers, along with a few videos. As you read this, Like any literature survey, what’s here is filtered through my background and interests; if there’s other work that you think should be here, please let me know!

Continue reading Gender HCI, Feminist HCI, and Post-Colonial Computing

It’s time to double down on diversity and inclusion

lights-and-candlesTwo days after the election, New Tech Northwest had a diversity-in-tech event in Bellevue. To be honest, I wasn’t in the mood. Networking’s an effort for me even in the best of times, and this is most definitely not the best of times. But then again it seemed better than spending more time being depressed about the results, so I decided to go.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.  Almost all the speakers talked about the election, sharing their shock and sadness, saying things like “I didn’t know if I would be up to coming tonight”.  It came up in a lot of the casual discussions with other attendees as well.  Several people told me it was the first time they had been out of their house since Tuesday.

By the end of the event, most of us were in a noticeably better frame of mind.   Some of it was just the experience of being in a diverse crowd of interesting people, talking about something we’re all passionate about  Most of all, though, it was the very first speaker who changed the mood – for me, and I think for a lot of others as well.

How to react?

Cynthia Tee, Executive Director of Ada Developers Academy started her talk off by saying “Yes, I’m going to go there,” and shared how the morning after the election she spoke with a diverse group of women, non-binary, and gender fluid students. What message to send them?

 

“It’s time to double down on diversity and inclusion.”

Cynthia Tee

 

Yeah, really!

Cynthia’s Preparing for the Years Ahead on the Ada Developer Academy tumblr goes into a lot more detail about what she means. Here’s an excerpt:

What happened last night and today makes us more defiant, and determined to double down on the change we’re after. We each look inward and ask ourselves what we can do individually – and as a team – to combat oppression, speak up against it, and support other organizations who champion equity…. There is no place for neutrality, complacency, or silence. As a community, we want to move through this historical moment with solidarity, agency, activism, and pride.

Indeed.

A few days later, here’s what EricaJoy said in her post After:


It is time for leaders in the the tech industry to double down on their Diversity and Inclusion efforts.

EricaJoy

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here!

Reasons to double down

 

“Progress is not inevitable, it requires our intervention.”

Malkia Cyril, at Fusion Magazine’s Real Future Fair

In the aftermath of the Trumpocalypse, there are a lot of reasons to double down on diversity and inclusion.   The most important: a lot of blacks, Latinxs, women, Muslims, LGBTQs, immigrants, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups are being targeted and need our support right now.  Several of the links in the reading list have suggestions about how you can help.

And let’s face it, the lack of diversity in the leadership and engineering teams of companies like Facebook and Twitter helped contribute to where we are today.  The environment they’ve created empowers harassers and trolls; magnifies hate speech and false news; pushes people into filter bubbles and echo chambers; optimizes for psychological manipulation and radicalization; and tracks people’s preferences, locations, associations, and personal data without protections against authoritarian governments.

Now the same kinds of non-diverse teams at non-diverse companies are building VR worlds with no defense against sexual assault and algorithms that embed historical biases in the code at the expense of marginalized groups.   Is this really what we want?

The world’s ready for a new approach to software, one that embraces differences and sees diversity as a strength.

Diverse teams are more creative and better at problem solving.  Yes, it can be challenging to get people from different backgrounds to communicate effectively and work together well;  but as I was pointing out just last week, we know a lot about how to create inclusive environments.   The diversity-in-technology community can be a key part of a multiracial, multi-cultural, international, transpartisan alliance of people who want to work together to change things – in tech, and more broadly.

And finally, while the short-term priority is to limit the damage from this election, here in the US and around the world, we’re not just trying to get back to the situation we had before.  Our goal is to build the kind of world we want to live in.  For me – and hopefully for you as well – diversity and inclusion are at the center of the future we’re creating.

Postscript: additional reading, ripped from today’s headlines

Here’s a handful of links from the last week or so that I’ve found especially valuable.  Read and share!

 

 

Observations from TechInclusion 16

What action will you take to build an incusive tech ecosystem?

Last month’s Tech Inclusion conference in San Francisco was everything I look for in a conference experience: excellent content, outstanding networking, and a great mix of attendees – entrepreneurs, diversity and inclusion  experts, policy people, executives, designers, engineers, marketers, investors, and hard-to-categorize people.  The vibe was wonderful as well, positive with a sense of excitement, with the aid of remarkably good food and coffee.

In short, I really enjoyed it, learned a lot, met some interesting people, and came away feeling like it was a very good use of my time.

There are already several other good posts on the conference (see the list at the end), so I’m not going provide a detailed play-by-play.  Instead, after reflecting on the conference for several days, I’m going to highlight a few themes that struck me as particularly important.   Read on for more about

  • A roadmap for building a diverse and inclusive companies
  • Diversity as a strategy
  • Embedding diversity in the software
  • Final thoughts

Continue reading Observations from TechInclusion 16

How does it look through their eyes?

In mid-October 2016, not long after a video surfaced with Donald Trump boasting about committing sexual assault, Peter Thiel made a $1.25 million contribution to his campaign.

Discussion ensued, largely focusing on Thiel’s involvement with Silicon Valley accelerator and investment firm Y Combinator, where he’s an unpaid part-time partner and his friend Sam Altman is CEO; and with Facebook, where he was an early investor and remains a board member.

Should Y Combinator and Facebook cut ties with Thiel?

If they don’t, what (if anything) is an appropriate response?

Here are a handful of news articles with the details.

What lens are you looking through?

Many people in the tech word have strong opinions on the subject. A lot depends on the lens you look through – the essence of standpoint theory. For example, women in tech often see things differently than guys. And the differences are even greater between black, Latinx, Asian, multiracial women (and other women of color) and white guys.

So here are some perspectives from various women in tech – tweets, articles, and other public posts. It’s in chronological order, from October 15 through October 24. Of course, it isn’t an exhaustive list. It’s based on what I saw from the people I follow on Twitter and Medium, my friends on Facebook and other social networks, discussions on Hacker News, links from TechMeme, and what I found with Google and Twitter searches.

How does it look through their eyes?

Continue reading How does it look through their eyes?