feminist IT exchange #01 notes

Notizen

On the eve to 8th of March we met for a first general feminist IT exchange. Overall 15 people from different meetups and other contexts in/around IT showed up. After a short intro and overview of the (potentially) feminist IT landscape in Vienna, we got to know each other a bit better and collected ideas for what an ongoing feminist IT exchange could look like. Check out the slides for this meeting for a few notable quotes and the outline of the meeting.

The meeting definitely hit a nerve and generated some energy, so chances are high that there soon will be another feminist IT exchange. Apart from that, also the feminist linux meetup will most likely be revived in the next months. While the aim was not to produce a concrete conclusion and road map for further activities, we all liked the opportunity to come together in a different context and format than in our usual community activities. And it was nice to have a broader discussion about feminist approaches in IT (in general), as well as in our own contexts (in particular).

Now for the specific ideas we collected. First of all, we found plenty of topics:

Flip-chart with post-its on it, collecting the different topics people would like to discuss.

Here’s all the topics from the flip-chart displyed in the image above, in no particular order (it will be up to future feminist IT exchanges to make sense of that and potentially to cluster it into more focused topic streams):

  • IT as means for social good
  • impact of IT on marginalised people
  • project ideas & current events in IT
  • playing games
  • techno feudalism
  • hegemonics in infrastructure
  • privacy
  • digital self-defence
  • programming workshops
  • Linux, OSS in business
  • working conditions
  • movies, books, etc.
  • online violence
  • socio-economic impact of IT
  • open source & commons
  • shared knowledge
  • setting up a feminist server
  • cool tech stuff someone found
  • sexism someone encountered
  • talk about tricky/bad situation someone encountered at work/school
  • what is feminism
  • environmental tech & perma computing
  • untold histories of FLINTA* in IT
  • accessibility
  • how other initiatives can become more inclusive
  • how to change IT in a way that makes it actually inclusive and not primarily focusing on profits & power accumulation
  • useful strategies for a new/better culture
  • how can we do IT better
  • workshops / learning / empowerment with skills
  • whatever rabbit hole we fall down

So, while some of the topics would probably fit quite well into some of the already existing meetup groups, others might lend themselves better to an open discussion in a broader feminist IT exchange. But no matter how we approach it, we definitely could already fill the next few years with interesting exchanges. The crucial question then of course is how often would we want to meet:

Flip-chart with post-its on it, collecting the frequency participants would like to join in feminist IT exchanges.

Here most people went either for a monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly frequency. Two people could even imagine meeting twice a month or every other week.

The more specific discussion we had after our collection, was sparked by the third flip-chart, on who we think should participate in feminist IT exchanges:

Flip-chart with post-its on it, collecting ideas on who should participate in feminist IT exchanges.

Again in no particular order and only slightly clustered:

  • FLINTA* (this was mentioned several times, once as „FLINTA of all ages who like computers“)
  • non-cis-male people
  • feminists in or around IT
  • queers in IT
  • no tech bros
  • everyone who is interested
  • anyone working in or interested in IT
  • for specific topics it might be nice to also have experts
  • also people with migration background
  • everyone who wants IT to contribute to a „good life for everybody“ (in mixed settings)

The discussions we had afterwards pointed towards many good reasons for different invitation policies, and that it might not be possible to just find the one „right“ invitation policy. But we left it open to whether a next feminist IT exchange should adopt any of these. The most common story shared of course was, that it is just nice for once to not be in a male-dominated environment speaking about IT. So while coming up and experimenting with different and more open invitation policies, it will be a balancing of our own energies. Because it is a deliberate effort that might sometimes be in conflict with what individual people just need right now.

Now to close with the most important aspect: we hope there will be future feminist IT exchanges, and it is likely that this will be facilitated out of one of the contexts we assembled at our meeting. But this also was just an initial impulse. There is no trademark and no central authority on what a feminist IT exchange is. So don’t rely on us! Get active, meet with other folks who don’t want to be complacent with the current IT culture, and start doing IT differently together.