Software is Political

I posted this recently to the Civicspace community email list:

Communication is gendered.

Men dominate, interrupt, don't listen, take other people's ideas and make
them look like their own, distort what other people say, when they do
listen they listen to other men, speak with more authority, talk more, and
talk longer.

If you create a regular online means for communication (ex.
discussion forum, blog, email list), if you don't do anything, most
of the time it will be dominated by men. This choice is political
because by doing nothing you are supporting sexism. When you and
other people make this choice to do nothing day after day, you
support an institutional sexism which has severe consequences on
women (glass ceiling, lower pay, sexual and violent assault, eating
disorders, forced gender roles, etc), and less serious ones on men.

You could choose to do something. You could have a forum, for
instance, that by default looks at whether men are dominating. For
instance, you could track the percent of posts by men, the percent of
topics started by men, and the overall length of men's posts (as a percent
of the total length). This information could be put into a header or
footer on a forum, or sent out once a month to an email list. It would be
a small step towards recognizing how sexism is rampant in our online
communication, and the beginning of the solution to this problem.

Software is political. Regular software reproduces the status quo. It
reproduces sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism. The role of men in
online communication is just one possible example of many.

I am not advocating censorship. Anyone can use the software.

I am advocating for a progressive-minded community that takes into
account progressive goals when deciding where to put its resources
and what kind of software to develop.

We should work with groups that are working for progressive social
change, community organizing groups, the Progressive Democrats
Association, Green Party, United For Peace and Justice, Jobs With
Justice, labor unions, National Youth and Student Peace Coalition,
ACORN, NAACP, NOW, NGLTF, Sierra Club, etc. We should involve them in our
user-testing, outreach (training them how to install and use the
software), and in determining our plans for future features.

I'm planning to do my part (stay tuned for a software release soon), but
I'm just one person (with rather limited resources, eg zero funding) and
would really like to see these values adopted and acted on by the
community.

Aaron
"The institutions that are in power create the technology that helps
them." (Kirkpatrick Sale)