Tag: diversity

Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software: the article the ACM wouldn’t publish

Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software was originally written as an invited contribution to the Human to Human issue of XRDS: Crossroads, the Association of Computing Machinery’s student magazine.  After a series of presentations on diversity-friendly software, it seemed like an exciting opportunity to bring broaden awareness among budding computer scientists of important topics that are generally overlooked both in university courses and the industry.

Alas, things didn’t work out that way.

Overriding the objections of the student editors, and despite agreeing that the quality of the work was high and the ideas were interesting, the ACM refused to publish the article. The ACM employees involved were all professional and respectful, and agreed on the importance of diversity.  Still, due to concerns about discussions of sex and sexuality offending ACM subscribers and members, they would not even consider publishing a revised version.

The CHI paper What’s at Issue: Sex, Stigma, and Politics in ACM Publishing (authored by Alex Ahmed, Judeth Oden Choi, Teresa Almeida, Kelly Ireland, and me) explores some of the underlying institutional and sociopolitical problems this episode and others involved in editing the Human to Human issue highlights, and proposes starting points for future action for HCI-related research and academic publishing practices.

This revised version of Sex pleasure, and diversity-friendly software is written as a companion piece to What’s at Issue. After a brief background section, it includes extended (and lightly-edited) excerpts from the earlier version of the article, and my reflections on the experience and the opportunities it highlights for software engineering. An appendix includes a brief overview of diversity-friendly software along with links to more detailed discussions.

Continue reading Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software: the article the ACM wouldn’t publish

Listen to Black Women!

Sign saying

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

The Moment by Shireen Mitchell (aka @digitalsista) are both well worth listening to.   Shireen’s been calling attention to this for a while, and this Moment weaves together various threads and articles.  Nicole’s one of the leading voices for intersectional diversity, inclusion, justice, and equaity in the software industry, and the replies include her perspective as a Latinx woman as to why listening to black women is so important in this context. Safiya Umoya Noble’s recent Wired article Social Inequality Will Not Be Solved By an App is also well worth listening to, as is her outstanding book Algorithms of Oppression.

But what I especially want to highlight in this post is the overall theme.

Listen to Black women.

It’s good advice in the workplace.  It’s good advice professionally – collaborating with (and listening to) Shireen, Tammarrian Rogers, and Lynn Cyrin helped me raise my game and took our work on diversity-friendly software to a much higher level.  It’s good advice in politics and activism.  It’s good advice for protecting democracy.  It’s good advice in general.

Of course, I’m far from the first person to say this.  But a lot of white people, and a lot of guys, still act like they haven’t gotten the memo.

Fortunately, this is one of those rare pieces of advice that it’s very easy to act on.  Start by looking at your own behavior: are you hearing Black women’s voices?  Are you really listening to them?

Then get to work on to your friends, family, and colleagues.  Encourage them to listen; amplify Black women’s voices to make it easier for them.

It’s really not that hard.

Listen to Black women.

 

Image credit: Jeff Swensen, Getty Images, via Kiratiana Freelon’s March for Black Women Organizers Want to Put Our Issues Front and Center During March for Racial Justice on The Root

TechInclusion Seattle and Open Source Bridge: a diversity-in-tech twofer!

Two of my favorite conferences, in back-to-back weeks, make the Pacific Northwest the place to be for diversity and inclusion in technology this month.

Tech Inclusion Seattle - Driving an Inclusive Future

It kicks off with TechInclusion Seattle, June 14-15.  Here’s how I described TechInclusion SF late last year:

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.

Wayne Sutton, Melinda Briana Eppler, and the team at Change Catalysts do a great job organizing conferences, so unsurprisingly the agenda for the Seattle event features a similarly exciting mix of people: Saara Romu of the Gates Foundation, Jessica Eggert of Include Seattle, Tammarrian Rogers and Aurea Astro of Microsoft, Leslie Miley of Venture for America, Ellie Tumbuan of The Justice Collective, Andrew Mcgee of Greater, Surya Venka of and many others.   As if that’s not enough, this time the list of hard-to-categorize people includes … me!

I’ll be speaking about Diversity-friendly software and strategy on Wednesday, June 14, at 3 PM. * Just to drive home the point about how good the networking is at TechInclusion: one of the examples of diversity-friendly software I’ll be talking about is O.school, where I’m currently Tech DIVA (Technical Diversity, Inclusion, and Values Advisor).  And how did I connect with O.school?  By striking up a conversation with their CEO Andrea Barrica after a panel she was on at TechInclusion SF!

Open Source Bridge logo

 

Next comes Open Source Bridge, June 20-23 in Portland.  Here’s how I described it in If you enjoyed Tech Inclusion, you might also like …

Open Source Bridge (“the conference for Open Source Citizens”) is a 100% volunteer-run conference that’s been going strong since 2009 with a very strong diversity focus…. It’s more focused on development and design than some of the other conferences, with a lot of discussion of community organizing and the business of open source as well.

As always this year’s schedule looks amazing, starting with the keynotes: Nicole Sanchez on Tech Reform, Walé Ogundipé on Doing away with (bad) shibboleths (it’ll be really interesting to see how everybody pronounces the talk’s title), and Emily Gorcenski on Fake Science!  Sad! A case study of the perils of Open Data.  As a Mastodon fan, I’m also really looking forward to Federating with Trouble by the toot.cat admins; and the programming tools geek in me is very excited about my former MSR colleague Michael Ernst’s Create your own type system in 45 minutes.  It’s going to be a great conference, so if you’re in or near the software industry it’s worth checking out whether or not you’re into open source.

This year Open Source Bridge has added a track on activism – including my Thursday morning session Grassroots Activism is Hard.  Can Open Source Help?

Grassroots activists have to deal with many challenges — including the tools they’re using. Sounds like a great opportunity for open source! This session will survey progressive and transpartisan grassroots activists’ needs and today’s solutions (including techniques that work for explicitly intersectional groups), look at some existing open-source offerings and how they could evolve to better meet grassroots activists’ needs, and identify future directions that could be even more impactful.

A lot of diversity-in-tech and citizenship-in-open-source people live multiple lives, so if you’re also a grassroots activist, I’m very interested in hearing about the tools you’re using, what works, and what doesn’t.  Here’s a blog post with more information and a link to a survey.  And if you know somebody who’s involved in grassroots activism, especially with an intersectional focus, please pass the link along!

And while I’m making requests …

Open Source BridgeOpen Source Bridge is really is a grassroots all-volunteer effort, produced on a shoestring budget by the Stumptown Syndicate.   As they write in We need your help,

In order to cover the costs of producing a community conference, we rely largely on sponsorships. We haven’t been as fortunate this year in monetary recruiting and would love extra help in spreading the word about Open Source Bridge to your company or tech managers.

So those of you who are at tech companies in the Pacific Northwest, or within flying distance of Portland: as you’ll hear at my Tech Inclusion talk on Wednesday, investing in diversity-friendly software offers some significant technical advantages.  Sponsoring an event like Open Source Bridge is a great way to start connecting with the community, and giving one or more engineers or designers at your company a great chance to learn skills and make connections.  Please check out their sponsorship prospectus, and see if it makes sense for your company to sponsor!

 

* If you’re looking for a taste of what I’ll be talking about, you can check out the talk on Diversity-friendly software that Shireen Mitchell and I did at SXSW this March … or if wikis are your thing, here’s a session on Supporting diversity with a new approach to software Tammarrian and I did at Open Source Bridge last year.]

Grassroots activism and open source – coming soon, at Open Source Bridge!

Open Source Bridge logow00t! I’m delighted to announce that my proposal for a Open Source Bridge session on Grassroots activism is hard. Can open source help? has been accepted! Thanks to Aditi Juneja, Harry Waisbren, and Chris Benson for the feedback on earlier versions.

Here’s the abstract:

Grassroots activists have to deal with many challenges — including the tools they’re using. Sounds like a great opportunity for open source! This session will survey progressive and transpartisan grassroots activists’ needs and today’s solutions (including techniques that work for explicitly intersectional groups), look at some existing open-source offerings and how they could evolve to better meet grassroots activists’ needs, and identify future directions that could be even more impactful.

You can read the whole proposal here.

Open Source Bridge is “the conference for open source citizens”, and one one of my favorite conferences. There are lots of other great proposals  (I’m especially looking forward to the one on Federating with Trouble by the toot.cat admins),  so by all means check out, if you’re interested in open source software or diversity in technology. The conference is from June 20–23; session my tentatively scheduled for Thursday, June 22 at 10 a.m..

Between now and then, I’ll be surveying the landscape today — and documenting details on the wiki (an approach that worked extremely well for the session Tammarrian Rogers and I did last year on Supporting Diversity with a New Approach to Software). For example:

  • Describe grassroots activist groups’ typical needs
  • Look at the kinds of solutions in use today
  • Highlight techniques from projects like Resistance Manual that take an explicitly intersectional focus
  • Look at some existing open-source offerings, how they can help today, and how they could evolve to better meet grassroots activists’ needs

If you’ve got any thoughts on those, please share — here, on Twitter, or on Mastodon, where I’m @jdp23@toot.cat!

Transforming Tech with Diversity-Friendly Software

This presentation builds on earlier work with Shireen Mitchell, Tammarrian Rogers, Lynn Cyrin, and Deborah Pierce. Thanks also to my colleagues at O.school for the great feedback in the run-through!

Here’s the slides (along with speaker notes). I’ve made some minor revisions in response to feedback — and to include a bit more information.

 

Update, August 2018:
Please see the revised version, with links and references (and  few updates), currently posted on Medium

Previous work

This presentation builds on a series of four presentations, with different collaborators, on diversity-friendly software.

TRANSform Tech, by the Transgender Law Center, sponsored by Lesbians Who Tech and Salesforce

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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