Browsers use it when they connect to servers on the World Wide Web sites, and it is used to accurately deliver email and transfer files from one location to another. Applications that do not require the reliability of a TCP connection may instead use the connectionless User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which emphasizes low-overhead operation and reduced latency rather than error checking and delivery validation. (Emphasis added)

What I mean is this: TCP is a lot of checking in and ensuring that the receiver is ready to get a packet and that they got the same packet you sent. This is what it is to be “at home.” There is a continual back-and-forth with a set group of people, lots of checking in and building. UDP, on the other hand, is what “at speed” feels like – lots of broadcast, but not a whole lot of making sure the message lands, nor what to build with it. Whole lot more being pushed out, but very little (if any) assurance of message being heard.

To put it another way, when bouncing around the world (as lovely at it is), there is no closed loop back to me letting me know that what I am doing matters. It is sending packets into the breech, shouting into the abyss. There are constant new introductions, and not a whole lot of processing. And shifting from that to the TCP of home is a non-zero effort. Suddenly, it is expected not only to adapt action to context, but to know how to receive the packets which define context. It is absolutely worthwhile, but it does take awareness and effort.

Now let’s extrapolate this to social expectations and what sociologists call the Halo Effect, which is a way of looking at cognitive bias. When we have all these packets going back and forth, we have an easier time processing if we have some filters in place. We can expect that our dear friend so-and-so will often talk about a shared interest. We also know they have our best interests at heart. To take every packet as a unique instance gives us very dense information, but also requires a lot of processing power (which means those power cycles are being allocated to that, rather than other things).

When filters set in place for optimizing exchanges are incorrect, packets get dropped. Sometimes, the social situation crashes from too many packets being dropped. It becomes possible to only be heard by sending packets which are recognizable based on existing filters. Which, in turn, makes those filters seem correct. No need to examine those filters if they seem to be correct and working. Extra credit if you want to talk about filters and addressing tables picked up from the other people in your network, and how that can be detrimental or useful.

View from my room on Stubnitz

It’s the first quiet time I’ve had in a week, the last being a six hour moto ride through the English countryside. Sheep perched on stone walls, eyeing us as we went by, hugging curves and throttle. Between then and now have been hours of hard work, rockstars of response tech tools building and conversing, finding overlaps and launch points. Between that and the ship were also bombs in Boston, staying up late into the night funneling the energies of people seeking information, freeing up brain cycles to respond rather than question.

And today was Camden Market, strange back alleys and food smells. Wandering aimlessly with no purpose, simply to see and examine, ask and listen. The papers held by passengers on the London Underground all have Boston on their front pages. Half the emails in my inbox are the same, the vast myriad of my social (fingers in) pie (charts) exhibiting ripples. I find a shop that sells mediocre doner and examine horse statues. Tomorrow is Krakow, after the flight to Warsaw and the 3 hour express train. The distraction and calm are perfect in coping with the vast ocean between me and anyone I could be hugging, which is the most I could be doing right now anyway.

Tonight I’ll sit on my tiny bench on Stubnitz, with my too-quickly-ending book, and listen to sounds of an empty banking hub from out my window. The disco balls will hang deep in the ship, refracting light inside the hull; and I’ll daydream about sailing away with them, with spotty wifi and floors to scrub, to write about what I haven’t yet researched.

This means I’ve been reading rather a lot around how activist groups change over time based on how they interact with the rest of the world, each other, and themselves. Most recently, I finished Revolutions in Reverse, a collection of David Graeber essays. A standard sequence which became clear to me is the following:

• Individual groups work towards their objective from their perspective, build up some sort of core and maybe a following.
• Occasionally, something massive comes up, and some of these groups band together. While they have different perspectives, they share an objective for a short period of time. Basically, alliterative alignment-based alliance.
• After the shared objective is achieved, the thrill of victory makes groups want to continue to work together. Other shared objectives are sought, but alliances crumble due to the different perspectives which made the larger grouping so robust in its diversity.
• Individual participants become disenchanted because of these dramas and depart from the larger grouping at the least, and often their orginial core group as well.

Essentially, people set aside basic debates while a pressing objective is at hand. In facilitation work, instigating projects is a great way to get people over their social anxieties and political differences in order to create bonds which later might surplant those issues. As my friend Slim once said on the twitters, “sweat is a far more honest social lubricant.” The issue is when those collusions are expected to last longer than is actually reasonable.

What I have been wondering is this: Why don’t we just shake hands after the larger objective has been achieved, and go on our merry ways? To me, this is far more sustainable culturally. Personally, one of the things which I love most about meeting people doing good work completely unrelated to my own is that there are so many things wrong in the world, in such intertwined and complex ways, if we were all working on the same aspect, no impact would be made. I don’t want to continue being joined forces, because I want to know you have my back in the larger scheme of things. Talk about the breakup before you start dating (or the “Founder’s Prenup“) – adults should be able to act like adults, even when they go their separate ways. Then you have the ability to work together on big things in the future, instead of still being butthurt about something that happened in the past.

I see this approach as similar to the move to portfolio-based employment from one long career employment. People associate with you for a discrete project based on what you’ve done in the past, which then gets added to your portfolio. Why not the same for social structures and political movements? We gather around a project, celebrate it when it’s done, and move on. Sometimes we end up working consistently with the same set of people because it makes a lot of sense, but it’s not the starting assumption. In my wariness, I don’t believe this will solve large problems, only allow us to fail for better reasons. Does anyone have any examples around this, of it working or not working, or at least being tried?

Potentially related: Temporary Autonomous Zones

First, let’s get the initial argument out of the way. Sexism exists. It definitely exists in tech communities. There are long-standing scientific studies on it, whole departments of colleges based around it, and the next person who thinks we’re past it (not “doesn’t want to talk about it,” but thinks it doesn’t exist)² is being taken out back to be flogged as a fundamentalist³. Here’s a handy timeline. This entry deals mostly with women and sexism. You all should know by now that “women” is but one word used to refer to an area of a matrix, but I feel like using my wordiness on other topics today. Know that I’m focusing on one facet of an entire intertwingled object of marginalized populations⁴.

Everyone grows up with social scripts, unless they are raised in a box with no interaction with anything (no way IRB is letting you do that one!). The cadence of your voice to your posture to how you indicate interest are all influenced by social scripts. These scripts abstractly guide how we interact with one another – we are cued from past interaction, seen or participated with. This is part of why it is difficult to get women to speak at conferences – because they don’t see the value of their words, because the bulk of interaction has pointed at that⁵. Individuals from the projects won’t take a promotion because authority is seen as negative, and they don’t want to have authority over their peers. And because these roles continue to be filled by not-that-demographic, that-demographic never sees that it’s possible for them to do it. Women specifically are also socialized into letting people down easy and into making space and providing support for other people and the group over themselves (which is great when it’s reciprocated!). So, a society that objectifies women also sets the expectation that they will be objectified. We tend to grow into the expectations set on us⁶.

When women talk about being cat-called on the street pretty constantly, and the response it “I don’t see that” from her male peers, that is because they don’t. It doesn’t happen (as much, or at all) when they are with her⁷. And they don’t know how to be aware of it when it does happen around them (and are often participating in it). As someone in the penumbral⁸ space of gender norms, let me queersplain something to you. I don’t get catcalled much, because the way I walk and interact with people is pretty head-on. I am not scared to get in fights, to make eye contact, and to call people on things (most of the time). My upbringing is to thank for this. My parents consciously reduced the amount of exposure I had to mainstream social scripts through television and magazines. They made sure I felt comfortable in my own skin. My self-possession is a learned behavior⁹, and one that I am privileged to have obtained early on. But because I apparently also have hips, harassments still happen to those around me. I see it on a regular basis, and have to constantly decide if it is worth engaging in conflict.

Persistent, low grade harassment is so invisible until seen in aggregate, that when someone does snap, it’s seen as out of proportion. We have the ideas of straws and camels backs, and practice of drip water torture for a reason. Small things add up. When asked to laugh with you about the absurdity of the situation, and that “dongle” is indeed a funny word, maybe the laughter will be a beautiful moment of shared understanding. But when it’s not about the abhorrence at the system itself, such comments are instead just another straw. It can’t be taken lightly because it’s one of many. The individual voicing that comment is responsible for being a part of that load, when in fact they should be actively lightening it. The people who share that load with you get to joke with you about how utterly ridiculous it is that you can’t be using your strength to carry other things. It would be easier to just roll with it, but that also continues a culture that makes such comments ok. It is harder to fight.

Which gets us very smoothly into this whole Pycon thing, and how Adria is a very public figure.

When you are a highly visible person, you are expected to adhere more closely to the outlines of social scripts. For privileged populations, that means being MORE of what indicates success – demanding, manic, callous. If you are from a marginalized population, it still means fitting MORE closely to those expectations within that demographic. We call them archetypes for a reason. Individuals from those populations, rare already in roles associated with success, are demure and muted so as not to tip a boat they already feel shaky in¹⁰. At the same time, people of privilege are socialized to retain their privilege. Two to tango and all that. Because of all this, I feel a public response to a systemic issue occasionally trumps individualized response¹¹.

The thing about this specific situation is that the same startup culture which claims Safe Space To Fail for tech doesn’t provide the same support and space for learning social lessons. Social lessons which are hard, but somehow the technical community has persuaded themselves and the rest of the world they are exempt from learning. That inability to care for our own, let alone others, is killing us and keeping our brightest from finding home.

The reason this debate is so visible is because it shows the tension between what we think is the case (why some will think this is dead-horse beating) and what is (many people’s daily existence). It shows the tension between where tech and social affect each other. And perhaps most tangibly, it shows the tension between the ideals of our society and our shitty labor laws. No one should have been fired over this, though we should still be having discourse. Hate to say it, but the same patriarchy¹² that makes all this shit a part of everyday experience for so many is also what upholds the idea that your employer knows best and you have no desire nor ability to stand up for yourself and each other.

The response here is not more in-fighting and drama (which are not even true responses). The action here is to realize where the flaws are and to band together, to have nuanced conversation. We need unions. We need to support marginalized groups while not infantalizing them by taking control of their own ability to stand for themselves. It’s hard work. No one said it would be smooth, but brilliant people are used to sticking to what comes easily.

1. (Can it be a wizard hat? You bet your fingers it can be)
2. This is like saying racism is done in the US because we have a black president. Your desire to move forward blank-slate does nothing to the actual starting point of a vast majority of the population. Lack of acknowledgement of history is what is preventing many potential allies from doing anything except perpetuate the current state. Handy Infograph.
3. It’s the equivalent of someone saying “I don’t believe in webpages” and you saying “but you’re reading one right now” and them saying “silly coder, you really should look around you.” If they actually decided to figure out what you were talking about, you might sit and explain it to them, open up conversations, give them a book. Here’s my favorite starting place for feminism: Said the Pot to the Kettle: Feminism for Anarchist Men.
4. Which is what meant by references to “minority,” we mean “represented in the minority” – a language misstep that I do not intend to keep making. This misunderstanding of “minority” as “population minority” is similar to cracks implying scientific “theory” is a wild guess.
5. I challenge you to observe a room of people and tally how often people are checking their phones when a man is talking versus when a woman is talking. Audiences indulge in distraction far more when a woman is speaking, and not because of subject matter knowledge nor presentation style. Imagine how that effects your self-assurance when doing public speaking. See if you catch yourself checking your own phone more often in different cases.
6. Whole other entry in the works about halo effect and expectations vesus desire. But I didn’t want to overload you right now.
7. If your response to this is just always having a male companion, you are an event-addressing, non-systems fuck.
8. (insert favorite word into a ranty post +10 points)
9. Just as yours, or lack thereof, is learned.
10. I keep my blue hair, let me tattoos show, don’t hide my sexuality not only because it’s me, but because it also sets the tone for future people. It is a conscious choice, and one that sometimes detriments my ability to make professional progress. My subcultural markers are opt-in. My sex and sexuality are not. My desire to have all of them show is something I choose at personal cost for societal gain.
11. Only addressing these things individually is like playing whack-a-mole.
12. Look how far I made it in this entry without using the word! Look look look!

So far as tools which can immediately be deployed in the field, not much. Not to say it doesn’t happen at all, but it is rare. The amount of forethought and digging which must happen to find the specific pain point which tech can help ease or automate is not something the affected population or the responders really have time to deal with while they are also doing response. Even when something appropriate is built, you have to worry about dissemination, training, and failure modes. Thus why the most useful things come out of things like Random Hacks of Kindness and CrisisCamps are awareness building and warm fuzzy feelings.

Yes, both warm fuzzies and awareness are legitimate, useful things. Too often, as technologists, we are separated from our world. We spend time behind screens, acutely aware of crises and issues but detached from the response and ownership of those situations. Civic media is an exceptional example of how technology has helped to close that detachment rather than deepen it. I see the same reclamation of involvement at the heart of the maker movement also at the heart of digital humanitarian work. No, this is not something we can leave up to some organization that we don’t know about, that isn’t accountable to us, and that doesn’t have mechanisms for listening to the very people it claims to serve. This is something we must do ourselves, calling upon the institutional knowledge and resources of those large organizations as needed. The things we create, which work, including processes, need to be codified. Sometimes into consensual hierarchies, sometimes into bureaucracy (both of which can be useful, as painful as that might seem). These assumptions of interaction allow us to operate at the next higher level, just as a language allows us to converse more easily, and a shared word set (for a discipline, say) allows us to have even more specific and deep conversation.

rhythmic tapping solves everything

So response hackathons are a great place for the amplification of human intent and desire to assist the rest of humanity. That’s great. Now – how do you make those intentions deployable? IE, now that you’ve had the cancer walk, who’s doing the research and implementation? That’s a smaller group of people, who are willing to take the risk of plunging into work that doesn’t pay like the rest of the software world. That’s a small group of people who are willing to suffer the heart break and soul crushing that seeing the horrors of the world can cause, in order to see your tiny steps (maybe) make way against that. That’s an even smaller group of people who also understand how to support and care for themselves while they do that work, to find sustained income (sometimes from the people you are wanting to help most – which is still a cognitively sticky bucket for me), so they can keep going. And the fight isn’t just to make things better, it’s also about how that exists in the current world, with policy and with culture.

Response hackathons absolutely have a place in this system of engagement. But it’s one part. Without the continuation programs like Geeks Without Bounds and SocialCoding4Good, we all just pat ourselves on the back and go home. We start to wonder if it’s even worth going to the next one. But accomplishment takes hard work, and sometimes working on the fiddly bits. And that means deep learning and conversations with the user. That means advance work, and continued work. Which I believe you can do. Don’t just create in response to things going pear-shaped. Build things to better understand them. Create to make the world better. Make with purpose. The disasters and obstacles we face in the near future are unpredictably complicated and massive. We have no way to train for them. But we also have massive untapped resources in the sharing of our brains and hearts, brought out when we create, and share, and build.

It is with all this in mind that I am excited about how Geeks Without Bounds is starting to look at how we will interact with OpenHatch, in an effort to contribute to (and learn from) the open source community. It is with all this in mind that I am excited about DataWind, and AppsToEmpower, and shipping low-cost tablets into developing area pre-loaded with useful tools. It is with these things in mind that I am excited about the continuation of EveryoneHacks, and how it creates space for new creators.

Grandma Irene Murphy died yesterday. She’s been ready to go for years, but some subset of her ten children weren’t. Which means she hung on, being revived when she slipped too far, living in the same house she had for 30 years, with a rotation of those children and their spouses taking shifts to care for her. We moved her bed down into the same room Mammy (her own mother, who was married to Pappy, and whose actual names I will never remember) had lived out her final days some twenty years previous, with notably less joy than Grandma. It was the third house Irene had taken the kids to, after the farm, the farm being after the house on Spear Street.

The house on Spear Street is now my Uncle Bill’s. Decades earlier, they had left it for the farm when my Grandmother had packed all the kids in the house out to it, fleeing her abusive husband Charlie. My grandfather Charlie, who taught me that assholes can be assholes to anyone, not just their own kids, and not always behind closed doors. Charlie who used to sit at the kitchen table drinking Budweiser and smoking while basketball blared on the living room TV, taking up all the space in the house he could. Charlie who used to “take his kids out for the day,” leaving them to play in the car while he sat in the bar and drank. Charlie who could also be genuinely gentle in the strangest of moments, making it easy to forget. Charlie whose children not only fought to protect each other and their mother from, but also their own children.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned about these aspects of my grandfather, of the deep reasons behind the strange giddiness Irene’s children experienced upon his death. This amazing woman, their mother, my grandmother, was finally free to play and make space for herself in more than passing moments. I had always assumed the move to the farm, and later the move to their final house had been of choice or necessity, not of flight. Their last house, where they both lived out their lives, was two away from Peggy, proximity to family some sort of safety, at least a place for the kids to escape to. The house separating Peggy and Irene was later purchased by my parents, where they still live, and where I grew up, the house undergoing slow remodels around me as my own body and brain changed. But always, always, grandma next door. A door that was never locked, and a motorized easy chair, and saccharine pinwheel cookies, and electronic poker games.

Eight of their ten adult children live in my home town, scattered in a radius around her home. The ninth lives beyond city limits, and the final is in California, buying grandma’s house from afar so she had income and so it would stay in the family. Peggy’s kids live within a few hours’ drive, and Mary’s four children live in the state, and Theresa’s fourteen children have scattered across the country but stayed away from the coasts. In short, it was incredibly difficult to throw a party as a teenager. But grandma would sometimes look at me with this glint in her eye, and her laugh sounded like getting away with it.

She loved murder mysteries. We used to watch Columbo together – there was no TV in my parents’ house, but I was allowed an hour of television over at grandma’s on rare occasion. She was convinced John Edwards was legit, and that angels watched over us. She made curtains before her hands got bad, and would let me sketch child thought-scapes with chalk on scrap fabric, and examine how her sewing machines worked, and hunt for dropped pins with magnets. She liked my blue hair, and objectified my boyfriends, and missed my mohawk (but was glad I had grown it out). She told me I needed to give her a motorcycle ride, and if I wasn’t willing to take her, it wasn’t safe enough for me, either. She chose Baltimore when my parents offered to take her anywhere at all in the world. She laughed at herself when she had no idea what was going on, and she didn’t mind at all that she had heard the joke before but forgotten the punchline. As she slipped deeper into dementia, she cracked jokes that no one else got, that no one else had context for, and she still laughed like she was getting away with it. She aged with incredible good grace and humor. And when her children had finally gotten to see a mother they had only seen glimpses of while growing up, when they were at last ready to let her go, she gratefully and quietly died.

I just got off a plane to Indiana for the wake. A wake where so many Irish-Catholic family members will attend we simply call people a generation older “aunt” or “uncle,” anyone younger “niece” or “nephew,” and anyone your own age “cousin.” My Uncle Mike (not even a full year younger than my father) will point out the faint four-poke scar he claims is from my grandmother stabbing him with a fork when he wouldn’t shut up at the dinner table. (Mike who also once told my cousin RD that a lion had bitten his leg, rather than explain Vietnam and mines and what it is to have a toe tag replaced by a purple heart, so that’s the sort of trustworthy he is.) Her great-great-grandkids will still be in diapers, unless my sense of time is completely off. We’ll bring out albums and stories and track mud into the home we exhausted the local framing store for in a vain attempt to keep up with the propagation of this family. The hodgepodge collection of folding chairs will be brought from every nearby house, nearly enough but why not pick up another mismatched set. Everyone will bring a casserole, spilling off the kitchen table and onto the nearby counters. Someone will turn on the TV, and someone else will mute it. Aunt Suzy will wonder why I insist on wearing a tie, and an endless line of nieces and nephews will insist on airplane and piggy-back rides. We will play with blocks and marbles and race matchbox cars. (And I, for the first time in years, will not hide myself away in front of the recently-emerged fireplace in my parents’ home with glass of Bailey’s, furious with myself for anxieties.)

As the night wears on, and the children go home, we’ll drink cheap beer and reminisce about a woman who brought so much joy despite everything in her path. We’ll remember sitting in our shared yards as night fell, lightning bugs flashing and the smell of a recent rain. We’ll remember how she protected as best she could with the beliefs she had. How she left Charlie’s presence but never his side. How she made what was never enough food or money or hours sustain as many as she could. How each of her children coped with that upbringing. How some, my father included, got themselves out – and how that meant leaving others behind. The ties of family, and of love, and of dreams, and responsibilities. What it is to protect your family from your family, and see those patterns repeat. What love is, no matter what, even if you don’t want it. Love without the need to understand. Love that sometimes lacks care, and the kind of love that combats that. In the morning, we’ll shine our shoes and go to church for her, albeit less begrudgingly and a little bit more hungover, one last time.

In short, it will be business as usual. Celebration of life, celebration of death, and the ever overwhelming presence of family.

The whole thing was streamed as a phone call (that, and other notes, will be available at http://www.fema.gov/fema-think-tank within a week or two. The chat was live-tweeted as well via the hashtag #femathinktank – some interesting stuff there.

img by Scotty! Thanks for indulging Galit and myself.

After the mics were off, we did a round-table on connecting the formal to the informal – honest discussion about some tough ideas on moving forward. I was asked to be one of the four people to lead us out. Here’s a summation of what I was getting at:

We’re talking about connecting the formal and informal. Somewhat obviously, I’m from the informal

Individual voice (sometimes represented through social media) is important in response because it gives high resolution and granularity to our understanding of what is going on. Instead of dropping in one massive block of resources, we can figure out where tiny bits go. How communities can help themselves and help each other. In short, mutual aid. This is couple with wanting to respond at the pace our technology has made us accustomed to.

I look at this a bit like the record industry in the age of the internet. FEMA right now can become kickstarter or some other platform on which people can connect directly, and have a way of interacting and supporting each other. Through providing those connections, you can bring your institutional knowledge and directive of assistance to bear on interaction. Or you can be like the record industry and become not only obsolete but also unliked. (I like you all.)

How do we create space for innovation in tech and in policy while allowing paths for systematizing? The things that work can’t just be ad hoc all the time. Challenges are bigger than we can plan or train for – have to give people space and support to figure it out on their own.

The tools exist, as we’ve shown, and we can make more. What is needed is an assumption and platform for us working together.

Be transparent about what you do, how to be in touch. It’s already chaotic, help make it less so. The populations we aim to help can be included in that knowledge. We need your bigger abilities and institutional knowledge. We as individuals also have to learn to support you as our government. So many of these things happen out of directed conversations and open minds.

Ialsomaybetookapictureofatinyoccupytentwhileinthewhitehouse. And slid down the railings. ([x] World Bank [x] White House [ ] NASA). I wonder if they’ll ever let me back.

That night, Emilie and I walked down the hill to a new restaurant/bar, recently opened. My own friendliness matched by one of the owners, Em asking if we already knew each other, given our laughing and kissing on cheeks (no hugging here), comrades in awareness and intent. He wants the area to be the Castro of Port-au-Prince, helping others to open shops and bars nearby, seeing the cultural shift rather than the competition. I feel the beginnings of something big – possibly struggle and tragedy, but more hopefully the expansion of the safe space we experience in their courtyard out into the streets. The weather had cooled, and the open floor plan with beautifully graffiti’d walls reminded me of Berlin. Brazilian pop played, and we capped our beers and talked for long hours. The same kind switch to English, accented by French and Creole here rather than German, so that I might participate.

Lit by oil lanterns, I feel the sort of quiet happiness you only get from stolen moments, the knowledge that you have participated in safe space when which is rare outside your bubble. But too often we long to use these spaces as sanctuaries of permanence, rather than celebration. Mecca is where we go to understand the world we strive for on a daily basis, to remind us to look up and see, rather than feel like we taking incrementally smaller steps, like some role in a philosophical mathematical proof. To be only around like-minded people is easy and wonderful, we can dive deeply into our shared interests and create esoteric structures of understanding. But those structures are fragile, not shored up by webs of links to other aspects of the world. And it is selfish to hoard those understandings, to not challenge ourselves and other people. As I recently read on the twitters, “design like you’re right, listen like you’re wrong.”

And yesterday, I found myself amongst a group of hackers who gave up their weekends to fly continents away. They learned to interact at a different pace, waiting for translations. They learned just as much as the students and call center staff who came to talk. A day spent in a hot room, wind drifting through, my own tie and vest and dress shirt too much. My eventually exposed shoulders disrespectful but for my own profuse apologies and broken english allowances. One founder saying “the heat is a violence against you,” me not knowing possibly how to respond.

A sudden rush to get out the gate before the street is repaired, who knows where the means to do so came from. Despite our attempt to collect our equipment and pack into bags and into the truck, we are left watching as 7 Haitian men spread a small hill of asphalt via wheelbarrows and shovels. Rather than hover, we walk up the steep hill to drink beer from a shop made out of plywood, held together by a nail gun, and hand painted in more of this language I fail to grasp. The sun sets over the ocean, reminding us that we’re on a tropical island. Well, that and the mosquitos. We finally see some cars come up from the road we came from, and we head back to our Van of Privilege.

On the way to dinner we stop in a gas station supermarket to change money and get local rum. Again, children giggle at my hair (and the now showing tattoos) and stern adults walk them away. The numbers etched on my skin having an extra layer of indiscerability here. The harsh florescence and my own exhaustion make this a less welcoming place. Blocks away, our dinner includes goat, and taro root, and a very polite cat who holds the chair at the head of the table. The cat’s body language renders understandable, though I’ve struggled at times to understand the social cues here. I’ve realized how much of my interaction is based on wit, and compassion, and a deep understanding and care of what people expect and can handle. Here, I have none of the same leeway (because I have not built it, because I do not understand). It is atrociously good for me.

We return back to the hotel. Expats around tables, snow-marked (not pixelated) Alan Rickman and Bruce Willis on same small screen which showed Se7en the night before. We talk about making safe space for people in taking leadership roles (or at the very least being heard) who might not otherwise, and what it is to learn new things, and what tomorrow looks like.

This morning, I forgot to think about if I was being proper or not, and joked about my stick figures, and heard about cocreation. We played Bear-Ninja-Cowboy in the courtyard, and everyone laughed and cheered. Today they have a lot of work ahead of them – not the kind of work you plow through on your own, but the kind where you ensure the people around you are on the same page. Today is about building consensus, buy-in, and understanding. I am excited.

I’m here for a gender-based-violence hackathon put on by Digital Democracy – Schuyler linked us up. The call center which Kovaviv has going for victims of gender-based violence, to get them medical and psychosocial and legal help, is in need of some scaling and shoring up. (We’ll be using #HaitiHack for the event.) We’ve called together an international team and a local team to get the work done, housed out of a university with a charming leader obsessed with perrier. I drank coffee out of a tiny cup while we explored the space we’ll have access to, and ran into some folk from NetHope – the social singularities continue even here.

Everything is bright, and covered in hand-painted advertisements, and it is hot. High ceilings and open windows allow heat to pass through, vast empty rooms cooler than the crowded outside. I feel unhappy but grateful for the luxuries of the hotel they have put me up in – A/C (should I want it), hot water (should I want it), and wifi (definitely want that). There is teasing about my wilted demeanor in the heat, and I tell them about Seattle and the overcast and how people wear all greys and blacks and drink a lot of coffee. The traffic is chaotic but predictable, reminding me of driving in New York, but more so. Taps on the horn for communication, not anger. People walk and ride with assurance tempered with awareness.

Flocks of children recently released from schools, far enough from origin to have their uniforms mix together, some bands still holding strong. We talk about how a school uniform means if a student is found but the parents can’t for the moment, the school is a place to return to for safety and waiting. Marco is incredibly patient with me while I try to ask how attendance is determined – based on the ability to pay, not location. Cognitive leaps I barely get away with among native English speakers will not do here.

Guards with shotguns watch soccer alongside students, everyone piled into the cafeteria, ignoring the vista to cheer their team. It seems all the infrastructure (not just architectural, but also social, and network, etc) are either under repair or being built afresh. I wonder if this leads to a predictability which can be assumed, or means nothing is so stable as to built upon (hearts, dreams, and mortar). I imagine I will be in awe either way.

In a few hours, we’ll go to a restaurant-bar quietly owned by the same folk behind an LGBT advocacy group here. While not a “gay bar” (the backlash here would still be too great and violent), it is a safe space and a welcome meeting place. My utter lack in the language and many of the social cues prevent me from interacting much beyond planned meetings, but those few are with people who express mild curiosity and quick smiles. Tomorrow the rest of the crew arrives, but today I’m still trying to get some kegs picked up in San Francisco and my belongings shipped from Seattle to Boston. It is an interesting world.

From January’s OpenITP meetup in San Francisco. Nick from the EFF gave an overview of how to submit a FOIA request.