Episode 27: How open are open source communities?
Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio
Episode 27: How open are open source communities?
01:02:53
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Guest: Dr. Christina Dunbar-Hester
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under the million stars by Springtide
Rate. Review. Subscribe.
In this episode, the hosts talk about open source software and how its seemingly liberal ethos can perpetuate some of mainstream tech’s gender and racial biases. STS and communications scholar Christina Dunbar-Hester joins in to talk about her book Hacking Diversity and how some open source advocates are attempting to make their communities more inclusive.
Show Notes
We’re all to blame for Wikipedia’s huge sexism problem by Roger Highfield
Most Wikipedia Profiles Are of Men. This Scientist Is Changing That. by Maya Salam
Physicist accuses Wikipedia editors of sexism after female scientists she wrote profiles for tagged ‘not notable enough’ by Phoebe Southworth
Why Did Fans Flee LiveJournal, and Where Will They Go After Tumblr? by Heather Schwedel
LISTEN: #100 Friends and Blasphemers by Reply All
How Desire Built One of the Best Information Archives Online by Thursday Bram
NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America by Constance Penley
Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures
On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life by Sara Ahmed
Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism by Anita Say Chan
Coding Freedom by Gabriella E. Coleman
Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity by Rayvon Fouché
Subject(ed) to Recognition by Herman Gray
A genealogy of hacking by Tim Jordan
When Old Technologies Were New by Carolyn Marvin
Black Software by Charlton D. McIlwain
Infrastructural action in Vietnam: Inverting the techno-politics of hacking in the global South by Lily U Nguyen
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: Welcome to episode 27 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. As usual, with you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science.
Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Leila: Today on the show, we are going to be talking about something that we've talked about plenty of times on the show over the last couple years, technology. Usually this involves dunking on tech bros of the Silicon Valley variety in one way or another. I mean, I can't guarantee that won't somehow come up in this episode, but that's not the focus this time.
Leila: Today we're going to be talking about technology but taking a slightly different view by looking at open technology and open-source communities. Later in the show, communications scholar Christina Hester-Dunbar is going to join us to talk about her new book, Hacking Diversity, and some of the ways that open-source advocates are attempting to improve diversity in their own communities.
Leila: First to get us started, I want to explain exactly what open source is and what it isn't. So generally "open source" refers to software that users can modify, adapt, and share because it's designed to be publicly accessible. So the source code that underpins open-source software can be accessed and changed by anyone. So on the other hand, in non-open-source software—so this is what we would call proprietary software—the source code is only available to the person or organization who created it. So that means that users get what they get and don't have the option to adapt it for other uses.
Leila: So this includes things that we're all familiar with, like Microsoft Office and Adobe. And most people use both open-source and proprietary software pretty regularly. So proprietary probably comes in the form of something obvious, like Microsoft, and then open source in the form of something like Wikipedia, which likely pops up as the first search result in Google when you're trying to look something up.
Anna: Open source also comes with a particular kind of ethos that promotes collaboration, creativity, transparency, meritocracy, and something that we're gonna talk a little bit more about later with Christina Hester-Dunbar [Christina Dunbar-Hester] called voluntaryism. Is that how you say it? Voluntarism?
Leila: I think that's probably fine. If you say it fast, it comes out sounding the same.
Anna: Voluntarism. There we go. I think that we would all agree that most of these principles of open source, they are good. Generally admirable and good. Thumbs up. But open-source projects and communities can be sort of just as prone to cultural biases and power hierarchies as any other community.
Rebecca: Surprise!
Anna: Yes. I mean, after all, like everything else in tech, open source is created and shaped by live, human people-beings. So let's go back to Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia is something we've all probably heard of if not used at some point. Certainly all of us have used Wikipedia. And Wikipedia uses open-source code so that a community of users can create new entries and edit them. And in the spirit of open source, Wikipedia relies on that transparency, so people can go in behind the scenes and see everything that's been tweaked in an article. And you can kind of see the history of its creation and editing.
Leila: And who did it, their usernames as well. Yeah.
Anna: Yes. Yes. It relies on collaboration through its community of writers and editors to create entries that are fact-checked, edited, well sourced. That's the ideal, is what I'm saying.
Leila: Yeah. We're gonna get to that.
Anna: And it relies on this sort of spirit of voluntarism, meaning that if you wanna do it, you can, and you volunteer to be a Wikipedia editor. Anybody can do that. So some genuinely great things have come out of this. You know, some teachers and professors have students research, write, and create Wikipedia entries in lieu of papers, which is a really cool assignment where students can see their work being useful out in the world. And it gets to be a grade, but it kind of raises the stakes for students, so that's pretty cool. But there's a dark side to everything.
Rebecca: Not everything is right.
Leila: There's a dark side.
Rebecca: Surprise! There are issues as well. Especially over the last couple years, we've seen Wikipedia really start to reproduce—or the reproduction become more obvious—of some of the same problems of equity and conclusion that we see in other communities, and certainly not that different than we see in all of those terrible stories about Silicon Valley tech bros that we like to complain about.
Rebecca: So, for instance, there is a massive, massive, obvious gender gap on the platform. About 90% of Wikipedia's editors are men, which is one of those things that it's just so on the nose as to feel fake. Ninety percent of Wikipedia's editors are men. And only 18% of Wikipedia's 1.5 million biographies are about women. Just it's so on the nose, guys.
Leila: Well, and that, to me, still sounds incredible because there's always Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons for women in art, women in science, women in literature, women in philosophy to build up this biographical database.
Rebecca: Yeah. It's gotten better, and it would have gotten worse if not for all of these efforts. And yet here we are. And this is the thing where it's like you can kind of see a one-to-one obvious ratio between the people who are making a thing and then what they produce. And when the majority of community members are men, it's just not that surprising that so relatively few entries are about women.
Rebecca: But that brings up the question. So this is an open-source platform where participation is voluntary, right? You don't need a computer science degree from an Ivy League school to participate. You don't have to impress some tech bro to get a job at his fancy startup. The code to use Wikipedia is pretty easy to learn. It's not some kind of complex programming software or programming language. It's easier than HTML, frankly.
Rebecca: So what's going on here? Why don't more women just create more biographies of women if that's what they want? And, as we were just talking about, many women have. And why hasn't that moved the needle? Well, I think we can start to figure that out by looking at what happens to all of those biographies that people have been adding of women to the platform.
Rebecca: So in 2017, British physicist Jessica Wade began a project to create more entries for women scientists on Wikipedia. And this is one of many projects like this. And as of 2019, she, just herself, through her own efforts and project, had created over 700 pages. So that's a pretty huge endeavor, and that's obviously pretty successful just based on the sheer amount of entries that she's created.
Rebecca: But it's also just been extraordinarily challenging for her. In November of 2019, an editor flagged 50 of Wade's profiles for deletion because the subject was not, as they call it, notable enough. So this just means that the women Wade were writing about, according to this person who flagged them, didn't have enough mentions of their work in secondary sources to meet Wikipedia's notability rules for entries.
Rebecca: So in theory having a rule that says that someone has to be notable in order to get an entry on Wikipedia makes sense. This is true for the encyclopedias that people would sell door to door as well. And in a platform like this, it's a way of making sure that I don't write a Wikipedia entry for my cat.
Leila: Does your cat have a Twitter profile, Rebecca? Don't lie.
Rebecca: No. Though my cat should get a Twitter profile. Or like for me. I'm not notable enough, either. But many of the women that Wade was writing about and making biography pages for are currently alive and producing research as we speak. And many of them are considered leaders in their fields.
Rebecca: Presumably Wade knew something about what she was talking about, and she chose particular people who she thought should pass the notability tests. And so it's hard to believe that they don't actually live up to these standards. In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Wade said, quote, "It was incredibly systemic. They went through all the profiles I'd written and decided a few, who were completely notable and justifiable for the site, should have had a horrible tag that said they weren't notable."
Leila: So I think in this case, voluntarism kind of falls apart. Katherine Maher, the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, even gets it. In an interview with the Telegraph, she said, quote, "You can understand why, with circumstances like this, it is frustrating for women who do decide to edit Wikipedia to remain involved when there are efforts who deliberately undermine their work." Yeah.
Rebecca: You think?
Leila: You think? So, I mean, this kind of exposes one of the problems with saying, "Well, it's a volunteer thing, so anyone who wants to participate can just participate. Nobody's stopping them." When it's clear that when you look back at Wade's situation—I know that there are others—that that doesn't really matter.
Leila: And I think this debacle also exposes a problem with the idea of meritocracy in open source. When media coverage of men and women is already at an unequal playing field and women academics are cited less than men, it's going to be more difficult to scrounge up the amount of sources needed to meet that arbitrarily set notability rule that Wikipedia has. So from the get, women are at a disadvantage, and this quote-unquote "meritocracy" on the platform inherently favors men.
Anna: And I think Leila and I have particular recent experience with this idea of missing sources and establishing notability that way.
Leila: Yeah.
Anna: I mean, just in this example of women scientists, it's incredibly difficult to do that for women in the past in particular. But then another thing with the women that Wade is working with, too, if it's a matter of secondary citation, we know that women academics in all fields don't get cited as much as their male counterparts. So if we're doing this by tallying up citations and stuff, that's always going to disadvantage women, and particularly women of color.
Leila: Yeah. Yeah. And one of the women that got flagged, one of the entries that Wade tried to add, I think her name is Clarice Phelps, and she was a—she's not "was;" she is alive—a black woman who works at Oak Ridge. And she was a co-discoverer of an element.
Rebecca: Yes. Yes. I do. I remember this story. Ugh.
Leila: Yeah. And then her profile or her biography got deleted. It was kinda the same issue with Donna Strickland, who came out of nowhere, winning a Nobel Prize and didn't even have a Wikipedia page 'cause she didn't meet the notability rules before she got a Nobel Prize. The standards of which women have to be notable is discover a new element, Nobel Prize to be able to get on Wikipedia.
Rebecca: It's one of those things where both the markers of notability are less accessible to women because of sexism out in the world. To use a problem from when it comes to historical examples that's come up in these discussions a few times is one marker of notability is that you had an obituary in the New York Times. Historically there have been few women who have had obituaries in the New York Times. And in fact the New York Times recently published a ton of them, I think in part in response to this problem, which is—
Leila: Yeah. They're doing retrobituaries, right? Writing obituaries for people that they missed back then because they were too racist and sexist to write them at that time.
Rebecca: Right. Right. Yeah. Which is kinda cool, that they're trying to make up for that, realizing how important obituaries are to the historical record. But, yeah, I feel like even when the notability is objectively equal, women still end up falling under greater scrutiny.
Rebecca: The experience that people who I know who are Wikipedia editors who work really hard on getting new articles for women note is just that there's a greater assumption that if a random person comes across a new article and skims it for notability, if it's an article about a woman, they're just more likely to mark it as not notable. And so I know regular Wikipedia contributors who are extra careful before publishing an article about women, a new one, because they know it's gonna get a higher level of scrutiny.
Leila: One thing about the issue with the sources that still kinda blows my mind is just because there are other secondary sources about a person doesn't mean, one, that they're good or reliable or accurate. Anna and I know this because we discovered at least two women that probably likely were not real and did not exist that have Wikipedia pages as if they were real and did exist.
Leila: And one of the ones that I was looking at is Aglaonice, who maybe could have existed. We're not sure. But the Wikipedia page presents everything about her as fact. Even the sources that it uses is not even using them correctly because the academic papers about her that they're citing also admit that she might not have existed.
Rebecca: You'd think that would be an important detail to include.
Leila: And so it blows my mind that there are women who likely did not exist, and if they did exist, not in the way that Wikipedia is presenting it as fact, while women who are discovering new elements in the present and their work is verifiable by other living humans around them are not able to get a Wikipedia page. That blows my mind.
Anna: You can easily Google many stories about just wild Wikipedia drama. Yeah. The sexism thing is definitely super prevalent, but even just petty beefs about someone's pet favorite topic that they have. It's a whole other internet ecosystem of its own that has its own rules. And I think maybe that's an important thing to think about.
Anna: These communities have their own culture and their own rules and their own way of doing things that may be built up by and structured by what we think of as the good ethos of open-source communities. But we have to think about what the actual substance of them is and what it means to actually participate in that community, especially if you're not, I guess, the editors who just parade around here and take everything down and you're just trying to help. I don't know.
Rebecca: At the Science History Institute, we have a Wikipedian in Residence who's lovely. And a lot of her job is explaining what—she does a lot of "How to Use Wikipedia" workshops. And so much of what she does involves saying, "So these are all the unspoken rules. And I know most of them are dumb, but this is the way that I have found to navigate all of this community." And it just goes to show that, yeah, even if quote-unquote "anyone" can do it, you sort of have to have an insider who is going to welcome you in.
Rebecca: And this gets back, I think, to the whole 90% of the people are men because, again, if you need an insider and insiders are more likely to recruit people who look like them and you need that as an entry into this community, then it's gonna continue to perpetuate this idea that there are mostly men in there. You know, it was a project that was started by men and requires, yeah, this weird specialized knowledge.
Anna: Just because you set it up for me to spike the ball about dunking on tech bros, I'm just thinking about the ethos of transparency and how it seems like if you are a person in tech and you just say the good words, then you expect everybody to give you credit for the good thing that goes with the good word happening, right? But on Wikipedia, what transparency means in real terms is that you can see the back end of Wikipedia and you can see all the changes that were made.
Anna: But when we're talking about unspoken rules and this own kind of internal language and culture, that's not transparent. Like you said, you need an insider to show that to you. It's just another case of you have to be really on alert for techie buzzwords like this because they don't mean what people are trying to tell you they mean. It just means you can look at the code and you can look at the people working on it. It doesn't mean that you automatically know how it works. Again, because it's run by real human beans, real people.
Rebecca: So yeah. We've got another open-source internet project that we're gonna talk about today that is near and dear to my heart and to my adolescence. So did either of you guys ever have a LiveJournal?
Leila: I did not. I know what it is, but I never had one.
Anna: You know, I think I had one that I never posted in. I don't know. I had a MySpace.
Leila: You should check in on that and see what's happened since then to that page.
Anna: Yeah. I would have to search my AOL email address.
Rebecca: Well, I was one of those big old nerds that did have a LiveJournal and was involved in fanfic writing communities on LiveJournal and also wrote about my day and everything in between. I have friends still that I originally met because we read each other's LiveJournals.
Anna: That's nice, though. I like that.
Leila: Aw. That's great.
Rebecca: So I was deep in that community. I do think it's hilarious, the different ways that people remember using LiveJournal. I do remember it in this very fandom, fanfic-writing-specific way, but also just a lotta people did just use it like teenage diary writing kinds of things. I found an article in researching this about people reminiscing on the different ways they used LiveJournal. And some people were talking about how it was a way that was outside the space of high school and college drama where you could still talk to drama but felt removed from that slightly, which I thought was charming. But, yeah, so that's my LiveJournal memory.
Rebecca: But before we get too deep into me reminiscing about my late adolescence, here's a little background for the uninitiated. LiveJournal was and is an open-source blogging platform that was created in 1999 by Brad Fitzpatrick. It reached its peak in popularity around 2005 or 2006, which in my memory, it feels like it lasted so much longer than that, which just says something about the early aughts and the world.
Rebecca: But long before Facebook, it served as a place for adolescent angst, oversharing, and keeping in touch with faraway friends, I think in some ways like MySpace did. We forget about these pre-Facebook social media spaces and how weird they were in a great way.
Leila: Yeah, I had one of those.
Anna: Putting song lyrics as your away message on MySpace. So good. "Don't talk to me. I'm listening to My Chemical Romance."
Leila: So because LiveJournal is built on open-source code, it is incredibly adaptable for users and allows them to make different kinds of customizations depending on their coding skill and interests. So for example, it's easy to change colors and fonts without knowing even how to code, but people who want to do a little bit more can completely customize the look of their journal.
Leila: A lot of people learned coding in order to get their LJ looking just the way they wanted. Some people even launched other journaling platforms using the same code. The most notable is probably Dreamwidth, which launched in 2008 and was created by former LiveJournal employees.
Anna: So something that makes LiveJournal different from Wikipedia—well, there are many things.
Rebecca: Many things. So many things.
Anna: But an important difference is that most of the people who used LiveJournal are female, are women instead of men like on Wikipedia. I probably wanna say women and people who are not cis men. And so this is a space where women are quote-unquote "hacking" an open-source code, and that's despite the fact that like many tech communities, open-source coding community itself is majority male.
Anna: So it's like this enclave for women to be doing this kind of hacking and coding and customizing and this little community of people doing tech. So I wonder what it is about—and I have my own ideas about this, but why is LiveJournal the place where this starts happening as opposed to other platforms?
Leila: I was thinking that I think there might be some gendering to the journal aspect of it, like keeping a diary, and that that is typically a practice that is coded female, even though when we look back on history, men were keeping the same types of day journals that women were, so I don't know even. Whatever. It probably has something to do with emotions.
Anna: Yeah. Yeah. I was just gonna say something like that. If you're a "writor" and you're a dude, it's perfectly fine to keep a journal, but otherwise it's just totally gay, I guess. I don't know.
Rebecca: Yeah. No. Yeah. I think that there's something, yeah, about journal keeping and emotional and social journal keeping that just feels super femme, female-coded that I think leads to this kind of thing. The other thing, I don't know. Something I was thinking about is also that in putting this together, I realize that when people were creating all-new looks for their LiveJournals and rewriting the code and stuff, I don't think I've ever heard it referred to as "hacking" or even "coding." It's called "customization." I feel like that is an interesting choice that in some way—I don't know.
Rebecca: By doing that, a woman or girl or, again, non-cis-male person, someone who hasn't seen themselves in tech before, could look at something like LiveJournal and not say, "Oh, like other representations of tech, this is not for me." They use words like "customization," and it's about making my journal pretty in the same way that I like my doodle all over my school notebooks. It's just a different way of doing that. And because it's creative on a totally different stream than the tech stream, I think that that allows more space for people who don't feel welcome in tech communities.
Rebecca: So another thing that I think might have added to the female-driven nature of LiveJournal is this way that it served as a home for a lot of different fan communities in the early 2000s, especially fanfiction writers, fan artists, and other creators of derivative works. And these are communities that, since the day of Star Trek fanfiction newsletters that people literally sent through the mail, have been majority women. It's like there's this stereotype in, I think, fandoms that women write fanfiction and men memorize—
Anna: Lore.
Rebecca: Yeah, memorize lore. Yeah. And obviously that's a gross simplification. I think it is something that plays out a little bit here.
Anna: Oh, yeah, I agree. I can't speak to fandom on LiveJournal because, like I said, I don't even think I had one. I am gonna look into that just to make sure. But I definitely wasn't writing fanfic when I woulda been LiveJournal age because I didn't even know that that existed because I lived a very sheltered internet life. I was mostly just on the AOL message boards lookin' for posts about Wicca.
Anna: But there, the history of fan communities and especially of fanfiction writers is very much a gendered history. There's a very good book you can read about the sorta beginning of fanfic culture that starts with Star Trek newsletters by Constance Penley called NASA/TREK.
Leila: Oh, God, that book is so good.
Anna: It's so good. I love it.
Rebecca: Thank you for reminding me that I need to read that. Yeah.
Anna: It's great, and it has some very saucy Kirk/Spock fan art in that book.
Leila: Yeah, not safe for work, that one.
Anna: It is not safe for work. But that's a good place to start. And she just does a really great job of thinking about the way that women formed these communities and the reason that women in particular formed these kind of communities and the reason that lots of early, especially Trek, fanfic was MLM fanfic. And there are very interesting reasons for that that have to do with—read the book.
Rebecca: In 2018, social scientist Casey Fiesler conducted a survey of people who were involved in fan communities about where those communities had migrated over time, and she found that from about 2005 onward, the majority of people she surveyed were active in fan communities on LiveJournal. But when you look at Fiesler's data, you see a pretty significant decline in fan participation on the platform between 2012 and 2014. So what happened?
Leila: Buckle up. LiveJournal does still exist today, but it's a very different platform than it once was, and how it got that way is pretty crazy and involves Russia. So here's a short version. A company called SixApart bought LiveJournal from its created in 2005 and then sold it to a Russian-based company called SUP in 2007.
Leila: There were immediately concerns about how SUP was running the company, in part because of some clumsy usability changes they made but also because people in Russia and in other parts of the world were worried that Russia's censorship and anti-obscenity laws would apply to a platform that was seen as a free speech haven by fanfiction writers and Russian journalists alike. Because of these concerns, 8.2 million people left LiveJournal in 2011 alone.
Leila: Then in 2016, LiveJournal, I guess, didn't learn its lesson and moved its servers from California to Russia, officially making the content subject to Russian law. Today any journal that gets only 3,000 views a day is considered a media outlet and therefore subject to the country's censorship laws. So in addition to that, the platform's terms of service restrict content the Russian government considers quote-unquote "obscene," which, of course, includes all content related to LGBTQ people.
Anna: So where, then, did the fandom that lived on LiveJournal ultimately end up going? According to Fiesler's survey, fans split off into a few different online spaces. The social media platform Tumblr is probably the biggest and most well-known of these spaces.
Rebecca: But the other two are Archive of Our Own and Dreamwidth. Archive of Our Own, or AO3, which is much easier to say, is a fanfiction repository that was created in 2007, the same year that SUP bought LiveJournal. If you wanna read about this, Thursday Bram wrote a great piece about AO3 for Lady Science last year. I really recommend that you check that out if you wanna deep dive into the history of AO3 and the way it was built from the ground up as a feminist, user-driven space. AO3's great.
Anna: It is great. It's really fascinating. The architecture of the archive is so good. It's so well made.
Anna: As we mentioned earlier, Dreamwidth is a direct offshoot of LiveJournal that took LiveJournal's open-source code and adapted it, which is a process that coders call forking. Both AO3 and Dreamwidth are open-source projects that have maintained a commitment to diversity and inclusion since their founding. And they are also both run by nonprofits, and the majority of the staff and volunteers who contribute to both projects are women. This is very good.
Rebecca: Yes. We approve. So something that's fascinating to me about what happened with LiveJournal is that I think it's this moment when, again, in the pre-Facebook era, when people had to confront the power that a for-profit company had over an online space. So LiveJournal for many users felt open and driven by the needs of the community, but it wasn't really.
Rebecca: And I think that today a lot of people, especially people like us who spend too much time online and talk about it, are way more aware of corporate ownership, and where a server is located matters or the ideology of the owner of a platform matters. I think we think way more about Mark Zuckerberg and who owns Facebook and what that means for our privacy than we—
Anna: Looking at you, Jack.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Than we did in the early 2000s. And I think it's this weird fundamental moment and change about how we think about the internet, in that, yeah, I don't think people on LiveJournal in 2005 thought that much about the ownership aspect of the space. I could be wrong. Maybe there were a lotta people who did. But yeah.
Anna: Yeah. But I think that that's also—even if there were people who did think about it, I think it's more part of the conversation that even happens inside these spaces themselves now. Like one example that I was thinking of is recently, last year sometime, Tumblr changed their terms of service so that you can't post any not safe for work stuff. And they have a moderating algorithm or whatever that goes through and flags posts, and it's really bad and flags things that are not boobs all the time and stuff like that.
Anna: And there's just so much discussion on Tumblr itself about the nature of the platform, about the decisions that are made by the people who own it, about the kind of ideological reasons for making this change. And I think that's surfacing, and the platforms having this complete circle about "This is where we discuss what happens on this platform," I think maybe that's new for sure.
Rebecca: Yeah. I think that also it goes back to what we were talking about a little bit about Wikipedia and transparency, and people are way more, or at least somewhat more, savvy about transparency versus transparency. Yeah.
Rebecca: And I do think that's why something like AO3 is such an interesting version of an open-source world and that there's a reason why we love it and why it is so female driven and it feels like a different kind of project than a lot of spaces online. It's because they have thought about "Okay, what are our values? How are we being transparent about them? What does it mean to be a nonprofit instead of a for-profit space?" and have thought about all of these different ownership pieces in a way that Tumblr doesn't and Facebook doesn't and LiveJournal didn't.
Leila: Well, I think this is a good place to bring in our guest because she has some stuff to say about the communities themselves talking about their communities and things that they're trying to do to fix these very problems that we're talking about.
Leila: Let's welcome to the show Christina Hester-Dunbar [Dunbar-Hester]. She is an STS Scholar and associate professor of communication at the University of Southern California-Annenberg and the author of the new book Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Communities. In Hacking Diversity, she looks at the efforts of open technology communities to improve diversity and inclusion but also how these efforts to quote-unquote "hack" their own culture, much like they would a technological problem, fall short of justice for minoritized people. Welcome to the show.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Hi. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Leila: Well, just to get started, I wanted to say I love how you describe the process of putting this book together, going from quote-unquote "scattered thoughts" to idea to research to writing and then finally to written. And I'm not gonna ask you to take us through each one of these stages, but if you could share with us those initial scattered thoughts that got you interested in studying open-source technology and communities.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Sure. This may bring me into a realm of embarrassing admission, but this is a sort of second project or almost a coda in certain ways to a project I had done earlier, which was about media activism and people making claims about and trying to sort of think through political beliefs about democratic participation and emancipation using technology. And that study looked at people who even though they were building—excuse me. Even though they were very aware of the brand-new, newfangled technology of the internet, were building radio stations.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And this was in the early 2000s, so pretty recently. It wasn't like digital tech was out of reach for them. And so I was interested in sort of tracing their particular beliefs and practices around technology and how they related to a broader politics of emancipation.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And one of the things that they were really invested in was questioning expertise and really building technical artifacts, radio stations, electronics, soldering circuit boards as a kind of DIY that was meant to sort of spark an awakening for people that you don't have to leave technological practice or technological decision making to so-called experts. You can do it yourself. You can put your hands on the technology. And so that was a really important pedagogical and political tool for them.
C. Dunbar-Hester: What they ran into, though, was a collision between their belief that this was universally accessible and a really great way to spark people's political imaginations with the fact that there are and were historical patterns around who in the society holds expertise or is anointed as a technical expert, largely having to do with race and gender. And so that was my initial project.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And I was a little naïve when I went into that project. I thought I wasn't gonna look at, say, race, class, and gender issues because especially gender issues, feminist studies of technology, there were already really excellent ones, and I kind of thought, "Other people have covered that. I don't really need to do it here."
C. Dunbar-Hester: But what wound up happening was it was just so salient in the site. My actors were really struggling with their own deeply held, very inclusive beliefs on the one hand and the fact that they were, in spite of themselves, basically reinscribing some of these patterns. And so that was an earlier project. Those topics were about one chapter of that book, which is called Low Power to the People and came out on MIT Press in 2014.
C. Dunbar-Hester: When that project was done, it was around the time that I was noticing the stirrings of people confronting these issues in hacking and open-source communities in a very direct way and in a way that was new in those communities. And so I basically thought, "I've been naïve. Let's maybe put some of what I've learned about how important this stuff is and how hard it is to work and make it the focus of a new project." And so that's when I started the research that became this book.
C. Dunbar-Hester: But it really was a direct, for me, a through line between that earlier project and even some of the same people who I was talking to them about radio activism stuff, and they were telling me, "Oh, we just came back from the HOPE Conference, Hackers on Planet Earth, where we did an intervention."
C. Dunbar-Hester: I talk about this in the book. They were selling T-shirts that had this graphic that they made on them that was playing on the Ted Stevens remark about "The internet's not a series of tubes. Or it is a series of tubes. It's not a truck that you dump something on." The sort of shot heard 'round the world for people laughing about net neutrality stuff. They detour into that and turned it into a feminist hacker intervention. And so I was like, "Oh, there's this interesting stirring here." And I just kinda followed that thread and wound up with this book.
Leila: And that shirt, right, if I'm remembering correctly, it's series of tubes, and it's the fallopian tubes, right, on the shirt?
C. Dunbar-Hester: Yeah. Exactly.
Rebecca: That made me giggle. I had the thought, "If I was a person at this conference, I would probably buy this T-shirt." Not gonna lie.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Yeah. It was a real crowd-pleaser, and they did sell T-shirts for a little while. And every time I put that graphic up in a talk, yeah, people are pretty amazed. It's a good one.
Rebecca: And how are those communities seen as lacking in diversity?
C. Dunbar-Hester: Ah. Complicated answer. So there's a strongly held, not necessarily explicit, but a sort of core tenet is that it's available to whoever wants to come do it, and the openness here is doing a lot of work. Open source means the code is open, but it's also, I think especially in the sort of Western political imaginary, sort of sparked certain beliefs about, you know, liberal town square or a sort of place that all may enter. And that's, again, a sort of unquestioned, tacit, and longstanding belief of folks who participate in this. And there wasn't a lot of impulse to self-study about whether or not these beliefs were actually true, or if they weren't, why they weren't.
C. Dunbar-Hester: The historical artifact I point to in the book that I think galvanized conversations that mighta been happening anyway but gave people something to really latch on to and sink their teeth into was an EU study in the mid-2000s that was an economic policy report looking at open source and thinking of open source as a place that the governments of the EU could support innovation. But basically when they studied open source, they found that there was incredibly low participation, and they were, I think, framing that essentially as a missed economic opportunity.
C. Dunbar-Hester: But that report gave community members this piece of research that—instead of doing their own self-study—but that allowed people to articulate some of the stuff that I think they'd been observing. It showed that the rate of participation by women was less than 2%. Gender sort of opened the conversation.
C. Dunbar-Hester: There are also threads of discussion about Global North/Global South relations. English language has been sort of hegemonic presence, and so people coding in other parts of the world to participate in sort of mainstream open source wind up using language and grammar and syntax from English. That also, of course, there are other cultural, racial, ethnic categories. So I really view this as a mutable category. Gender seemed to sort of open it up, but then it goes a number of different places.
Leila: And early on in the book, you explore the evolution of the word "geek" and that its association with things like maleness and whiteness precede computing. So kind of these issues of diversity that you were talking about kind of wrapped up in this word. And so can you take us back through a brief history of "geek" and the context that it gives us for thinking about the problem of diversity inclusion in hacker spaces and open technology today?
C. Dunbar-Hester: Yeah. Absolutely. That's a great question and one that is sorta fun for the researcher. Something I do is sit down with the Oxford English Dictionary, right? The first iteration of "geek" has nothing to do with its modern-day most common iteration around tech geeks or whatnot. It's actually circus freaks, and the person who bit the head off a chicken was a geek. So there's this sort of grotesque, freakish dimension that is embodied in this certain way, and that's from the early 20th century. The first application of the word to computing or just to being sort of diligent is maybe by the '50s. And certainly by the '80s, "geek" has got a kind of subculture around it.
C. Dunbar-Hester: So the other thing to recognize is the rise of technical expertise, especially around electronics, that happened, again, around the turn of the 20th century. So preceding electronic computing by a number of decades, but work in history of radio and history of electricity showed ways in which the practitioners of those electronic pursuits, basically what we now call electrical engineering, didn't have the social status that it does now when it was new. When it was new, it didn't really have much cultural meaning or status attached to it at all.
C. Dunbar-Hester: So one of the ways that the people engaged in pursuing it and carving it off as domain where their expertise, you know, mattered to the wider society. They hitched their own status—and these were mostly native-born to the US white men—they hitched their own social status to their work with this new technology. And one of the ways that they did this was to essentially set outside members of other social groups, so including women, including rural people, immigrant, indigenous people, and members of the lower classes. So they invented their own expertise and social status alongside the technology.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And the way these two threads come together is that, as I said, the sort of original "geek," it was an insult, really, and it meant you were kind of a freak about something. You know, as these threads sort of come together, as computing eventually—and electronics more widely, but especially computing—gain this social status, "geek" kinda flips from being a term of insult to more of a kind of fond in-group identification or teasing, and then eventually it just kind of becomes "the geeks who are taking over the world" or something, right? It's complex, but it has come.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Along with its rise in stature and sort of importance of, quote, "tech" in our society, has been imported the earlier cultural work of exclusion, of essentially folks who weren't white, weren't men, weren't native born, etc. And so one of the hard things, I think, with the communities that I'm looking at in the book is understanding the sort of full implications. You know, whether or not they agree with it, that history is there.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And I think you can even make an argument that the project even of talking about STEM as a separate and important thing in the society is a project of social sorting. And so to sort of buy into a very vaunted notion of technology is to buy into some of that cultural work, unless you're really sophisticated about separating the two out. And that's kind of, I think, where we are now.
Rebecca: Yeah. One thing that you talk about in the book was when you discuss sort of race in 20th century electronics and that basically if you're a white man who's tinkering with stuff, you're a cool tinkerer or a successful tinkerer. And if you are a black man who is tinkering with stuff, then you're causing trouble. And that's a gross simplification, but I feel like that's part of the story there you tell.
Rebecca: And it was definitely one of those moments where I was like, "Right. Right. Of course." 'Cause it shows how the way in which these both racial and gender and also gender divisions that show up in all aspects of our society are also showing up very, very plainly mapped onto these geek communities as well. So I thought that was a really interesting example.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Yeah. Absolutely. Part of what a hacker is or has the potential to be is someone who's a little bit of an outlaw or, you know, a little bit of a mischief maker. Again, preceding computing, doing stuff like picking locks or doing amazing, tricky things with the telephone system to place long-distance calls without paying, whiteness has been a resource for folks engaged in that to have those activities be viewed as harmless masculine pranking rather than criminal behavior.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Members of, say, African-American communities aren't necessarily striving to be outlaws in the same way that technological actors who are white are. They might be striving for recognition in the mainstream without being treated as an outlaw.
Rebecca: So your book is, of course, as well as tracing the history and how these different hacking and open-source communities work, you specifically are looking at diversity initiatives in these open technology communities. And you note that, perhaps because they're in open technology communities, they sometimes will use this idea of finding technological hacks to social ills. And so can you give some examples of some of these hacking methods that they are attempting to apply to problems of diversity and inclusion and why you think they often fail?
C. Dunbar-Hester: Multiple times I run into language where people are saying, "This lack of diversity along X, Y, Z axis or this instance that we had of harassment or abuse in our community is a bug. We need to strip it out, change the code, put in a patch, whatever" and using these sort of readily available metaphors from hacking and coding.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And, I mean, on the one hand, I think it's very understandable that this would be the language that they would go to if that's the vocabulary that you're using. And it may even also be a way of bounding it and making it almost seem manageable for a voluntaristic tech community, like, "We're able to hack and patch other kindsa problems, so if we call it this, then we'll be able to handle it." And I'm eminently sympathetic to that.
C. Dunbar-Hester: The thing that I think can be more problematic is not recognizing that there are basically issues of scale here. There are things that these communities can do and have done, I think, very effectively, things like instituting codes of conduct or making explicit rules about governance in ways that can bring to the surface assumptions about how a project or a space would be run. Again, a lot of things with voluntaristic founding histories happen because one person or a couple people were really enthusiastic and they kept showing up.
C. Dunbar-Hester: This is called founder syndrome or charismatic leader stuff. Those are the people whose energy brought the thing into being and maybe kept it going initially, but those associations, often through sort of friendly goodwill, they breed homophily. They breed bringing on people who maybe resemble those folks but also agree with that. And so I think one thing that these groups can do is say, "Is this how we wanna run this project? Do we wanna maybe explicitly have governance rules or have a rule that we're gonna turn over leadership every X number of months or years or something?"
C. Dunbar-Hester: However people decide to do it, I think, is obviously up to them, but even just saying, "Well, are we actually happy running things according to invisible norms that we never talked about, or do we wanna bring them up and subject them to scrutiny by the community?" Just having those conversations. I think those are very appropriate. Sometimes tense or challenging, but scale appropriate and effective for talking about what's going on.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Where it gets a little trickier. The status of technology in our culture has, for a very long time, been associated with the status of certain kinds of people who are designated as experts in technological fields. That sort of bigger project and the way that tech sort of writ large is freighted with matters of social sorting, of social dominance.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Those are bigger problems for a voluntaristic group to handle. I mean, I think the very first thing that people can do is kind of understand some of that stuff and maybe get their analysis right. But it's really hard to solve that stuff within your community because people are bringing to it cultural legacies that far precede any of these individuals.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And another thing, I think, that's going on is we're in a cultural moment where tech is assumed to be so powerful and the sort of end-all, be-all. That doesn't necessarily mean we have to agree with that or we have to look to it as the place where we solve all kinds of social problems. And I think, again, this is something that technologists sometimes don't get right, but again, it's not something they can solve within their own milieus. "Diversity in tech," quote-unquote, might be an outgrowth of a more sort of just and equal society and not the cause.
C. Dunbar-Hester: But if we were really to sort of zoom out and think about social justice, we might think about public school and other kinds of economic equality and libraries and health care and things that, really, again, are not appropriate for volunteer technologists to solve. Again, I'm not faulting anyone for not getting that accomplished in those spaces. They're really hard problems. But again, I think at the very least we should be clear about the terms.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And so I wouldn't actually say that they're necessarily failing at all. It's, I think, sometimes they are failing to live up to the potential of some of the stuff that they're wanting to engage in, but some of these problems really exceed the domains that they're working in. And the other thing I do wanna point out about these spaces and how there's a kind of slippage in rhetoric is diversity is a really corporate- and institution-friendly concept. And so I think sometimes there's a really strong and sincere idea that these folks are doing social work by doing diversity work in tech.
C. Dunbar-Hester: And I wanna sort of point out, again, if you don't engage matters of power and social structure and stuff, you can actually wind up doing stuff that just kind of cultivates market-friendly things, cultivating, consuming subjects or producing subjects for diverse markets. And again, I'm not saying it's terrible if you wanna do that, but you should be kind of maybe aware of the waters you're swimming in were largely—I'm tripping over metaphors. But it's really hard to do that kind of work without having it feed back into these logics which sometimes are the opposite of the intention that you're bringing to it. Rebecca: I found your book fascinating, so thank you for getting in touch with us and connecting us with it.
C. Dunbar-Hester: Yeah. Thank you both so much. I love your project, the Lady Science, and I'm thrilled to be participating in your project there.
Leila: All right, y'all. That's gonna do it for us today. Tell us what you thought about the episode by leaving us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. And if you have questions about any of the segments today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. And for show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com.
Leila: We are an independent magazine, so that means we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter and Instagram at @ladyxscience.
Image credit: Source code for open source software AngularJS (Flickr | CC BY 2.0)