Category Archives: Civic

Forbidden Research liveblog: Sexual deviance: can technology protect our children?

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liveblog by Alexis, Sam Klein, Natalie, and myself

Ethan Zuckerman, Director, MIT Center for Civic Media moderates.

Conducting research on adults who have sex with children is virtually impossible due to ethical and legal restrictions. The advancement of technologies like robots and virtual reality has opened the door to exploring questions that were previously not possible. But while a U.S. court case has held that virtual child pornography is legal, the law in this area is controversial and emotionally charged. Legal uncertainties and vast stigma make actual research difficult. At the same time, a better understanding of this deviant behavior has the potential to significantly change lives.

Lead to paraphilia. We’re not showing explicit imagery. It may be triggering. Going to try to deal with this very difficult topic. Lots of real world ramification. 1300 people are serving time for sex crimes just in MA. X are in indefinite civil confinement – finished sentence, but not released into the general public because of fear of recidivism. Research on the statistics. 10% to 50% which suggests that there isn’t a ton of research. We know very little indeed. Most people who are afflicted with pedophilia are actively trying to fight these urges. When talking with therapists, they’re trying very hard not to act on these urges they’re suffering from. There are some existing efforts to develop support programs. Whether there are ways of treating with VR, intimate robotics, etc.. It’s a challenging topic with a lovely set of folk willing to take it on.

Kate Darling, MIT Media Lab, IP Theory, Policy, and Robot Ethics, Fellow at Harvard Berkman Center is looking at the NOW of robot-human interaction. Leads us off. Human robot interaction, how we behave around robots. People treat them as though they’re alive. We know they’re just machines, but subconsciously when we interact, we treat them as if they’re alive. Not just about people getting used to a new technology but instead something which is biological. Our brains might project intent and life on moving things which seem autonomous. How strongly we respond to the cues these machines give us. Gives us a chance to study human psychology. People who have low empathic concern for others treat robots differently than those who have high empathetic concern —this is part of a research study Kate has been conducting with Palash Nandy, a researcher at the Media Lab in the Personal Robotics group. Those who treat robots like a living thing makes them a potentially great tool for

When child-size robots come to market, will they be used to address desires and protect children, or to normalize it and put more children at risk? There’s no way for us to know. These urges are not a moral failing, they are a psychological issue. Nearly impossible to self-report as you’ll get booked. If we really care about children, we might need to be preemptive about this.

Courts don’t know what to do with these robots, since no child has been harmed in making them.
While high quality sex robots are not coming as quickly as some might think (or like), but they are coming at a pace that’s faster than society is willing to talk about.

Child porn doesn’t exist for at least two reasons: because we think it’s not ok, but also because a child was harmed in its creation. 3D modeling etc would shift that. Do any international courts handle this differently? Need intent as well as harm to have broken a criminal law in the US. In the US in ’96 we had an act forbidding pornographic CGI depicting children. In ’02 the supreme court decided there was a free speech issue that overruled, and struck down parts of that act. Since then, a new act “Protect” has been passed, which prohibits “obscene” cartoons. They’ve shifted the child piece towards obscenity, which is not well defined and depends on community standards. Ex: some media showing young girls performing fellatio was targeted b/c it was aimed at an audience of young girls to teach them improper behavior, not because it included images of young girls.

Back to the question of legal status, but what is exploitative and what is put into legal frameworks because it is uncomfortable?

Ron Arkin, Roboethicist and Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech. Robots and robot ethics. Sex, laws, and violence. Robot deception, killer robots, but today we’re talking about sex.

There’s plenty of money to be made in lethal autonomous weapon systems. The USG doesn’t do? that, but some people do. And I do work in robot deception (how and when robots lie?) but that’s not what we’re discussing today. Outbranch from Genevive Bell. Intimate Robotics. Most concerned with lethal autonomous systems, but also concerned about something else that is happening now. I work with Sony, and the Aibo. we know how to make people fall in love with these things. What if we start crossing from teh social space into the sexual space? the questions we ask are around if human-robot intimacy is acceptable? Do you become a deviant if you have sex with a robot? [What about one indistinguishable from a human?]

Can [sex with a robot] it serve sort of like methadone for [sexual] deviants? These are research questions which need to be explored. Any time past offenders are released back into society, there will be more victims. [as there are already today] We need to be prepared for that.

Thank you for this forum for sharing this discussion with the audience and the public.
Uncanny valley has to do with behavior, temperature, texture, etc. Roxxxy, VR robot. How will the prostetution industry do in light of these dolls etc? Some see it as a way to free prostitutes to do other things (this is a rather paternalistic view). [Examples from non-sex robots, and sex robots, the former already well-funded by governments.]

Article from the Atlantic recently: “Can Child Dolls Keep Pedophiles from Offending?”
VICE: “Canada’s Child Sex Doll Trial Raises Uncomfortable Questions About Pedophilia and the Law” A man ordered one in Canada and gets arrested. Methadone is perscription, maybe we need to do the same here.

Protest: there’s a group called Campaign Against Sex Robots, viewed by the founder as “part of a cultural pattern to legitimate pedophilia more widely”. [This reminds me so much of some of the arguments against prostitutions, not seeing how sex is a basic human need ].

Study from Stanford University — touching a robot’s ‘intimate parts’ makes people uncomfortable. Published in an obscure journal, couldn’t find funding source listed. Study on body comfort zones: differences between Japanese and American adults re: where they normally touched close friends or sexual partners, and where they touched their parents, when they met. Dramatic differences in all cases; which one would take into consideration with any robot designs.

Wanting to establish a research agenda. Will sex robots increase or decrease urges? We have an ethical obligation to do this research.

Christina Couch, Journalist
Written on the question of computer imagery. How our feelings, thoughts, desires shape our our technology is designed.

Working on an article – therapeutic uses of VR : Treating PTSD, depression, phobias, addictions. Patrice Reneaud studying pedophiles right at the point of arousal. Having someone at that point requires a stimuli, which for pedophiles have super valid concerns attached to them.

Dr. Patrice Renaud – “assessing deviant preferences in sexual offenders” using virtual immersion.

Mostly audio, having a hard time getting data. His team published a paper that even when they KNOW a subject is a known pedophile, they couldn’t evoke a response just using audio files. When VR started working, they started building scenarios with [fewer] concerns. The differences are in motor and eye movement. The data we have on recidivism is nebulous because it’s really hard to study this group. Interested that VR is what opened up these possible studies.

Also a shift in how we view pedophiles. Virtuous Pedophiles is a support group of people trying to prevent acting on their impulses. Another group like them is called the Dukelfeld Project. Confidential treatment focused on preventing them from acting out. Accessibility to a population which has been traditionally hard to research PLUS new research tools usually means a huge amount of research coming out, but not so much for this case. Dukelfeld was able to get on their feet because there aren’t reporting issues, it might be covered by insurance.

In the US, Lupron (what people use to chemically castrate themselves) can be gotten under perscription as well. We’d first need a better idea of this as a psychological problem rather than a moral problem. How is the legal system changing? We used to think homosexuality was a moral failing, and then a disease, and is now accepted. How does that transition happen? Popular culture led. TV shows etc. The law came afterwards. Untouchable was a documentary on this. If you throw the word “pedophilia” into any legal debate, all the politicians jump in to vote for it. There’s no nuance. The topic (understandably) raises so many emotions for folk that it’s difficult to have a rational conversation about it. The YouTube videos for NYT articles are saying they need to be slaughtered for saying it might be an illness rather than a moral feeling. European culture just thinks about porn files as any other file. It allows them to approach all of this in different ways.

Q+A

So: you’re a robot ethicist. What’s stopping you from studying this? A: Funding. It can come most easily from foundations, but only a limited amount does. Most governments don’t support it [though as noted elsewhere: in Germany treatment for pedophilia is covered by insurance].

Can people get help with their urges? What are their motivations for doing this work? Is there a trend in what’s going on?
I don’t know that the landscape of research today is big enough to generalize. I know of only 2 researcher using VR for this. Maybe there’s more than that, but it is small.

Q: What are the key research questions in this space (intimate robotics)? As an experimentalist, are there things you’re thinking about studying that will help answer these Q’s?
A: (Kate):- how do our interactions with robots affect our interactions with humans? I think about harm: if our interactions with robots lead to harmful interactions with other humans, than that is a bad thing. But we don’t know if our interactions with robots will lead to any of these negative outcomes, so we have to do the research.
We currently know how to observe and measure behavior with robots, but we don’t know if this changes your behavior with people. That’s hard to study in any arena, and especially with intimate robots, I’m worried we won’t do it at all. If a big name in social robotics can’t get support for such work, how can anyone do that?

Q: In defense of continental Europe and its culture – I have experience with Quaker work in this field; they are some of the frist to visit prisoners, and they work with sex offenders. All these technologies seem to further sequester and isolate offenders from society. That seems to be something they’re trying hard to get over; they want to integrate with society. Do you think it is possible in the US to propose a system where groups voluntarily engage w/ pedophiles, on the basis that they are humans, and shouldn’t be treated even worse than violent criminals?
A: (Christina) A story just came out about a [NJ?] task force that is dedicated to that. I don’t have any way to answer, but people are starting to consider it.
A: (Ron) I don’t think this is a panacea for reintegration; but it should be considered as a possible positive force.
A: (Kate) People being visited are the small percentage who have been convicted of a crime. Most people affected have a hard time coming forward at all. I love that groups are forming to help (convicts), but we need legal changes and maybe tech changes as well if those can help people.

Q: (Willow) You’re talking about a lack of data and other things. This is the most academic panel we’ve had so far. I wonder if by opening up science to more citizen science approaches like other panels have, we might catch more data and discover more things. Are there possibilities to try citizen science approaches to sex studies?
A: (Ron) Yes, and I support anyone who wants to contribute to this, but: this does need strictly controlled science evaluation, with IRB and other controls, to get reliable data. We couldn’t even get accurate recidivism rates, and how hard could that be? Numbers were all over the place, because of the dearth of data. And we need to understand the tech coming down the pike. That might be easier to distribute, rather than the study of sexual deviance.
A: (Christina) VR is also bing used to study and treat victims of sexual trauma. This (type of tech) isn’t a one-way street. When we talk about amplifying research methods, it’s not just for offenders.

Q: You all seem to say that lack of funding and stigma are barriers. What would this look like if those didn’t exist? Get to Ethan’s initial questions: how does culture change, this medium change, over the long term? How does this change the future of dealing with taboo paraphilias?
A: (Ron) Human research interaction work has at present gone almost too far in requiring huge amounts of data. I think we can develop research with small focused sets of data. Then a series of progressive experiments could gather a larger body of data over time.

Q: There are studies that suggest porn has changed standards of sex. If these child robots are rolled out, who gets to decide if you can have such robots as therapy, or as entertainment?
A: (Kate) A lot of research here has been very [basic]. Many studies have questioned if violent/sexual games change behavior. Methods used in those cases can be applied to robotics. The increased realism may have more of an effect, but similar approaches may apply.
A: (Ron) To my mind, courts or physicians would say it is appropriate. But there would have to be quasi-controlled environments for this to work.

Q: (Victoria) I’m interested in areas where sex is considered? inappropriate such as w/disability. Looking at sexual deviance – how much correlation or research has been done to see whether pedophilia is different from other deviances? (anything considered unnatural by any society: bdsm, homosexuality, &c) If we’re talking about changing human behavior, can we cross-examine sth like violence, and the relevant effects of VR? [To inform these questions in a less taboo realm.]A: (Christina) I don’t know if any correlation like this has been done. In 20y of VR research, we find that yes it can influence RL behavior. PTSD can be reduced more quickly… unconscious racial bias can be reduced (in at least one study), though that’s incredibly difficult to break even temporarily. It’s not crazy to think this could influence behavior in pedophiles.
A: (Ron) Changing human behavior happens routinely, with or without robots – a change wrt. views on marriage, bestiality

Willow question: why can’t people consent to sexual research?
Question: how do advanced robots consent to sexual research?
Willow question: why are we talking about fully autonomous systems? Does the debate in self-driving cars and mixed-control systems apply here?

Forbidden Research liveblog: Disobedience: breaking the rules for social good

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Many ideas and norms once considered unthinkable, like test tube babies and gay marriage, have now become everyday norms. It’s impossible to imagine life without them. For society to evolve, however, we must always be challenging our norms as well as the rules and laws that reflect them. Our institutions must lead in a way that harnesses this questioning into a driver for positive change. This session looks at how institutions can become “disobedience robust” — cultivating the ability to question themselves and accept questioning from others.

Moderated by Joi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab with panelists
Liz George, MIT Alum Class of 2008
bunnie huang, Author, Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering
Karrie Karahalios, Assistant Professor, Siebel Center for Computer Science, University of Illinois

All panelists are former MIT students (although Joi says he come in the backdoor:). Before this event, Joi interviewed lots of administrators at MIT including John DiFava. And everyone said that they had never met a student who was a bad person. And DiFava spent his career chasing bad guys with the MA State Police before coming to MIT.

Karrie remembers coming to MIT for rush week her first year. She took an “orange tour” and loved it, and it seemed like it was sanctioned by the university. Her House Master encouraged the students to win the East Campus lockpicking contest. And students were constantly hacking things in the dorms like phones and washing machines.

A discipline committee was set up around 2003. The police stopped arresting people at all, but started picking up more people and sending them to this discipline committee. So people who would have been let off altogether were getting in trouble.

The trouble now is that students have this fear of getting caught.
Should they not?
Then it’s hard to abide by that last point of the hacker ethic: avoid getting caught, but if you are, cooperate fully.
I find in some places if everything is legal, it’s not nearly as interesting. Is that a big part of it or not?
Sure it is. [but that doesn’t mean “risk of imprisonment”]“Just so you know, statue of limitations is 7 years.”

There’s a thing, ‘if you see something broken, report it to Physical Plant’, we would note these things if we were up on the roof and tell them. That almost helped build as sene of community across the groups. I did get caught at the ML, I was picking a lock here, I wanted access to one of the tool rooms? They described me as “tall kid, dark hair, asian” in an email to ML. I could have avoided fessing up, but I did tell someone in my lab. They got reasonably mad at me, saying just ask for permission, it’s not hard, and showing me how. That was a scolding, not disciplinary action. I’m a little cynical about MIT’s stance – Liz said MIT likes to own successes and disavow failures [JI – that’s broadly true you know, in the world] But a university is a good place to catch people when they stumble. Especially when they just did something unfortunate [not hurting others]

The ethics associated with hacking. Breaking the rules mindfully. MIT hacker secret sheet #forbiddenMLpic.twitter.com/V2ctRuvZiV

— andres lombana b. (@vVvA) July 21, 2016

Hacking the xbox led me to discover the problems with the DMCA which led me down this whole long path to where I am today [w today’s announcement]. My advisor Tom Knight introduced me to the general counsel, I was all excited; they met me with a sealed envelope on the table; they said I just want you to know we don’t want to touch this or have anything to do with it; you did this on your own time with your own funding, good luck.
I wanted to know, why is the institute disavowing me? I didn’t even disclose what was going on, I just wanted their help to do disclosure responsibly. They wouldn’t even hep with that. Fortunately Hal A and Tom K helped me find an amicable solution (via the EFF).

Joi: Ethan mentioned TidBit, where we had a student working on a project. It’s funny b/c MIT’s counsel represents MIT. There’s some things they can and can’t do. We ended up setting up a law clinic – I’ll give credit to the GC’s office and Provost for this fully-funded and pro-bono clinic at BU. So any problems a student has can go to a BU clinic; in your case they could have directed you to that. This is recent, within the last several months. One of the problems has been the liability concern that something happens and the inst. gets sued by the parents, and lawyers are lawyers. We’ve been trying to set up ways for people to talk to the admins. Legal support is key. Hoping that will help in the future.

There are certain things the institute should sanction, but there are certain things we can’t. On the research side, there are things that affect the whole institute. Some kids don’t know what the repercussions are. I went to a lot of cases I heard about to hear their side of the story. If some of these things came out, it would hurt privacy of the student. It can be better. But the trust gets developed when you have communication. Need informal communication because formal puts you at risk in other ways. Secret backchannel. So the hackers will often tell the police so they’re not caught off guard. No formal acknowledgement. People based and don’t persist over time. 4 year turnover. Met about what could be done. The policy in the handbook was drafted, students said “given all the things that have happened, you can’t ignore it.” You can’t say “look how amazing this place is” and then not support people when they get in trouble. People had to meet with a lot of people about what could be said legally. What was acceptable to write in there? The trust went up a lot after that.

What are the principals we put into a disobedience prize? Principles, playfulness, creativity, social benefit. Large scale collaboration. Swipe all cards in all doors as a way to add noise into a database. CSAIL and Media Lab run our own networks. Here we retain as little information as possible. No cameras here because it creeps us out, can be taken over. We have a lot of theft here, we know we wouldn’t catch the professionals anyway. Research in how we increase security without sacrificing privacy.
What aren’t you allowed to do? Purposefully destruct something for the sake of being destructive (if you’ve evaluated that it’s necessary, go for it).

Relationship between an institution and those performing civil disobedience is difficult. People who get attacked by people on the other side of the argument. Building an institution where disobedience doesn’t have grave consequences. It doesn’t have to be completely safe, but reasonably safe. Tenure, if you piss off the people in your department you don’t get it. How do you do things which speak truth to power while still being on people’s good side.
Tenure was put in place to allow people to be disobedient during McCarthyism. But maybe you’re past that phase in your life by then, you’re like 45. High school Japanese kids working in a lab, being picked on by grad students. Academia shouldn’t be about that, it should be the new people encouraged to question authority. “Does scientific research advance one funeral at a time?” – Max Planck Spoiler: yes [according to a recent MIT paper (PDF) which you should read].

These people learn most of their things on the internet; but without access to journals, they have a hard time applying it. We can go to first principles and questioning these things. That’s what I want to start with: questioning these things [publishing, bad laws]

Q+A

Q: do you think the administration today is too strict? A: when I was a student, yes. students aren’t doing this for the thrill of the illegal; but curiosity, exploring the inaccessible, doing a great piece of engaging engineering.

Maria Zuber: We now have a list of amazing, disobedient folk… a list we have to protect.
How is our Head of Research about this? I’m so glad we’re great at being self-reflexive. I think it went well. You’re listening to all this and some of it is shocking or discomforting, but the MIT administration talks about this stuff all the time. There’s a whole range of opinions. The administration gets a full spectrum of points of view. The ones we heard here [today] are not in the center of the bell curve on where the campus falls in a lot of matters. If there’s a question of how far we can push something, we can always have a conversation about it at least. Try to find the right balance. Try to explain why when we can’t do something.
One thing we are talking about is: is it OK to take an action that affects a broad population? IRB violations could shut down research across the institution. When things come to me, I have to think about the balance of people wanting to do something that moves their work in a positive direction (for them) but may affect others.
Can I ask a Q about that? ITAR rules for instance prvent you from bringing IR sensors into certain countries. Shoud an institution like MIT be pushing back against these rules with the govt? Saying these are rules that are iportant? MIT as an institution has a lot of clout.
A: on that particular issue, I have in fact been pushing back, personally. I’m a space scientist, so I care a lot also about thse cameras. We do that. but in the meantime we [may?] have to also obey the rules so people can continue to do their work.

Joi friend at Twitter and now White House. Would go to police events and just hand out his business card. So instead of busting things, we’d just have people calling him to fix it first. [This is so reminiscent of disaster response I can’t even]. When it happens in public there are egos on the line, too.
(Cory) The opposite of disobedience isn’t obedience, it’s compliance. it’s if you don’t immediately comply with an order, you risk summary execution.
Need to challenge laws in order to progress the nation.

(Sam) There are simple laws and painful laws. How do we make sure the institute isn’t standing in for excessive response, even when it happens outside that bubble?
(Joi) There are laws which are supported by commercial interests (DRM, CFAA, SoPA, PIPA). The Media Lab has made statements against those, and we have a lot of money from Hollywood (none of which went away). Courage to stand up to those that are backing you. We’re in a privildeged position to do that. Then there are laws that limit academic and scientific progress. There’s a way to try to talk to the authorities. There are broad thinkers there.
(Liz) those of us with power need to take those risks, support our folk when they cause problems.

(Kendra) Institutional trust and these back channels, I feel that insitutional trust is not something everyone has. What is MIT doing to help students know they have support? If you are a young black man, being arrested has different connotations.
(Joi) I’m thinking about this a lot lately, and it’s not just for us. I just try to talk with and connect with as many folk as possible
(Karrie) That you have this clinic is a huge signal that you want to support your students. I’d love a phone number for those students. I’d love to be able to promote this sort of structure at my university. We don’t have access to this sort of clinic.
(Joi) if we can figure it out, I hope others will also follow.

() This has been fantastic and it’s appreciated. What about research that would piss off your liberal collegues? It’s close to an ideological monoculture. Many of these entrenched things are not useful. Can we have another Forbidden Research conference which pokes holes in liberal assumptions?
(Joi) DARPA study on race and bias etc. The Uni had to be sued to release the study.

Steward Brand, claiming the final question
What’s most interest to me is the elegant hack, minmax, lazy hack. So fiendishly clever, subtle and undetectable. And yet has a great big effect. Do you have any examples of that?
(liz): The insription in Lobby 7 says what the institute was founded for: ‘for the furthering of science and technology and agriculture and commerce’ 20yrs ago some hackers made an incredible reproduction, but replaced the last two words with ‘entertainment and hacking’. Anyone passing by thought it was the original; and it was there for a really long time until a tour guide noticed it, and said “Here are the famous founding principals of MIT, and read it outloud.”
Joi: there’s a piece of artwork, metal and black, in front of the Green building. it’s a bunch of pieces of metal. some kids would leave pieces of metal, and people would think it was broken and weld it back on… it’s a good story, don’t know if it’s true.[Willow – I feel like it’s fine for institutions to move slowly. I feel like this whole thing is about an over extention and crimilization of otherwise inconsequential acts.]

Civics in an age of mistrust and decentralization

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I regularly coordinate a salon over at the New England Complex Systems Institute. For the January salon at NECSI, Ethan and Erhardt led a discussion and workshop on civics in a distributed society. We explored how people with influence/power/money try to create change in the world, how those affected by those changes view and respond to those attempts and changes, and also what we would do as people of influence/power/money.

Many thanks to Ethan and Erhardt for their valuable time and attention as well as images used in this blog entry, and to Erhardt especially for designing such a great workshop, and for suggesting edits to the blog itself. Y’all are pretty great. ❤ – w

Many people want to change the world.

Leverage through money or power

Democracy as it tends to be generally practiced is the act of selecting people for positions of power, and then pressuring them through petitions, protests, and letters. Ethan remarks that this is a remarkably impoverished view. We also interact with governance and our social systems based on what we buy (and don’t buy), where we live, how we speak. However, today our trust is low, and not just in government, but in institutions as well; and not just in the US, but all over the world (see Figure 1). (note: The origins of distrust may be traced to the high complexity of society that makes centralized decision making ineffective.) Many of us would like to change the systems we live in to improve the world. What strategies are available to make such change?

Figure 1  

Among those who are trying to make changes are individuals and foundations with large amounts of wealth who strive to act in ways that will improve the world according to their perspectives and understanding. What strategies do they use to exert influence? How successful are they at achieving their objectives? Examples ranging from the Koch brothers to George Soros provide some insight. They might invest in think tanks, in market-based interventions, in campaigns to affect public opinion to place pressure on courts and elected officials.

Regardless of whether an individual came to have influence through an electoral process or through access to wealth, Lawrence Lessig provides a framework in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace on which most (if not all) change is attempted.

Four fulcrums

  • Laws are explicitly stated codes of behavior, created and enforced through governance systems.
  • Norms are often implicit social expectations, enforced through social pressure and assumptions of media and other communications.
  • Markets shape behavior by making some actions more or less expensive financially or time.
  • Architecture/Code are the frameworks that surround us and must be adhered to because we act within them. Today many of these frameworks are technological which might be called: the tyranny of the database, or how interfaces demand obedience.

How do you know if what you’re doing is working?

The enforcement of laws can be tracked. Market costs can be quantified. The use of an architecture implies success of its constraints (though choices of what architecture to use, and innovators, hackers and other reappropriators, provide freedom). Ethan and Erhardt primarily focus on changing norms. These are also arguably the most difficult to characterize and to discover if a hoped-for-change is occurring, as norms are often implicit, rather than explicit, and are distributed across the statements of individuals, groups and media sources. 

At the Center for Civic Media, they think about norms and the attention economy, and one way of seeing shifts in norms in this view is by tracking how the media talks about a topic. They use a tool called Media Cloud for gathering media sources, creating visualizations, and comparing the words used to talk about topics of discourse. For instance, Erhardt analyzed the dynamics of the media conversation around Trayvon Martin through the roles of broadcast and participatory social media.

In short, creating change is hard, even if you’ve got money and/or power.

Here’s the video from our salon:

More on the topic of civics in a distributed society from Ethan’s post about his keynote at Syracuse University’s Humanities annual symposium on Insurrectionist Civics in the Age of Mistrust (highly recommended, and most of the images on this blog comes from the associated slide deck).

How would YOU create change?

With this framing, this question was posited to the salon attendees. Erhardt facilitated an interactive workshop: “So let’s say you have 10 million dollars. What would you do, about climate change? Fund think tanks and organizations? Fund advocacy groups / passing laws? Fund research? Create tech to do things we can’t otherwise do?” The room divided into 4 groups, and then picked one of Lessig’s four means of interventions and brainstormed ideas.

What would you focus on doing, and how would you know if it was working?

Architecture/Code: Attach sensors to cars, trucks, and environments focused on transportation-based discharges of greenhouse gases. The emissions sensors could provide immediate feedback to drivers and city officials when emissions go to high and trigger sanctions.

Markets: Invest in a startup that offered green logistics/delivery services such as bicycles that would compete with truck-based last-mile services such as UPS and FedEx. Gain market share not just by comparative cost but also by being better for the environment.

Norms: Incorporate data about individuals’ carbon emission from how they live into their online social profiles so that their is an opportunity for social sanctions and desire for self-improvement is publicly viewable.

Law: Create policy that forced power suppliers to develop more resilient grids from renewable energy sources. The data would be monitored by the government for compliance.

We were also joined on Twitter:

@willowbl00 @NECSI I think the Great African Tree Wall is a good start; ban Urban commutes by automobile on penalty of stoning; nuke plants.

— Kevin Foobar (@fu9ar) January 13, 2016

@willowbl00 @NECSI Investments in https://t.co/gNtzicIT9q 2.Battery tech 3.Ending animal agriculture (bigger than transportation) — Ben Rupert (@Meowdip) January 14, 2016

To shift the world, even with massive funding and assumed power, is difficult. All of the interventions discussed at the salon were at a speculative pilot/demo level. To know you’re succeeding through an intervention is also difficult. There was a realization that those who have money and power are often not wildly successful at changing the world because of the difficulty of understanding how constructive change can be achieved. Perhaps a few “why don’t you just…” phrases were put to rest. At the same time, as individual citizens, we saw how much of a role we have to play in societal shifts — perhaps more effectively in our distributed and connected networks.

“The exercise of designing a method for evaluating your campaign’s success often forces you to rethink and get more specific about your original intervention idea. When you need to turn your target and goals into dependent and independent variables to study and then worry about the timeline for change — it really complicates your view of how to make change. And I would say each of the groups felt this.

There was also a clear bias amongst participants toward norms-based change even though they were addressing legal fixes, market forces, or technical architectures. We all want to think that people will know what behavior is the right behavior once they have enough information. The fact that such a process takes many years and many interventions and runs up against cognitive biases where information counter to your position can leave people stronger in their problematic ways, is what makes norms-based change so hard. The goal of making sure that everyone in the workshop had a chance to think about laws, markets, and code as well helps concretize the need for many different approaches: carrots and sticks in various guises needed for a movement to make its mark. And $10mil is not a lot of money to start with.” – Erhardt

Land and Water : a long-term perspective

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We will explore themes of reduced access that have developed out of tensions in property-holding, leases, and contracts; forms of control exerted or facilitated by the state, by law, and by other institutions; and exclusions of class, race, and gender. We believe that history has lessons to offer about how change is introduced to society. In taking this long perspective, the conference invites proposals that look backwards in order to look forwards.
Academics will have an opportunity to be inspired by the practical questions of activists acting in the present, as activists talk about their work, their present projects, questions, and concerns. Activists, in turn, will have the opportunity to articulate large structural conceptions such as capitalism, empire, or debt in relation to access to land and water.

I’m here because the organizer, Jo Guldi, has been a dear friend and on-again off-again roommate of mine since my move to Cambridge in 2013. Through her, I have begun to see the underlying fabric of many social justice causes of who has access to what, and how important a long-term view is.

Opening Remarks

The opening did a beautiful job of framing the conference overlap of activists and academics, with author John M Barry speaking about seeing himself as an academic who speaks the truth, and is therefore seen as an activist/environmentalist. As the beginning of what would be ongoing themes of access to information and accountability, he also pointed out that while both legislation and media are pointing at the levees in Louisana being the culprits of land loss, locals know it’s because of the oil industry dredging canals in order to place equipment. The permits for dredging explicitly indicate that backfill must happen within 90 days of the dredging, and yet years later it still hasn’t happened. He states that the oil industry should be paying for fixing the part of the damage which they have caused — no more, and no less.

https://prezi.com/embed/ldwmcufxheyd/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&landing_data=bHVZS2czc0xGc1o4L25iNEY0Z0gxZHVvMTZtbHdGSkM&landing_sign=jJ89GmA5DyjuXabzPcvIOQ_cHqPPoylFIBwL5lxsJ9Y

Technology and Infrastructure

The Technology and Infrastructure panel focused on the interlinking and continuum between these, with a hopeful view of new opportunities, and a historical grounding in past efforts. We heard from:

  • Dorn Cox, of FarmHack, on open-source engineering and the economic support of small holders
  • Mark Healey, University of Connecticut, on dams, territory, and utopian schemes for water governance in Argentina
  • Don Blair, of Public Lab, on the new cheap age of water quality monitoring, solar, and everything else
  • Timothy Gorman, Cornell University, on the politics of water management infrastructure and salinity control in the Mekong River Delta
  • David Kinkela, State University of New York, on the history of plastic waste

I like that this conversation didn’t look for One Silver Bullet to Rule Them All, but rather looked at the systemic issues of externalizing costs and accountability. Represented were both extremes of citizen science in Louisiana holding governments and corporations accountable (or at least proving damage, even if no further steps were taken), as well as communities in Vietnam tearing down government-sanctioned levees so they could continue raising salt water shrimp for higher income than they might get from farming rice. We asked who gets to ask the questions, and to what purpose (a story, a court case, a profit, etc). Another theme was that of externalization of cost, with recycling becoming the responsibility of the consumer, rather than industry needing to produce degradable items. All returned to the topic of the conference – a long term perspective, and who both pays and benefits from which choices.

Command and control, citizen science, regulation and monitoring — who is responsible for what? #landandwater pic.twitter.com/KaKj3AhvCZ

— Willow Brugh (@willowbl00) September 4, 2015

During our breakout session, we talked about failure as both not talked about enough, being the only framing for continued financing of municipalities, and how great the idea of “releases” in software is as a way to establish the mindset of iteration. We also discussed how closed off most data is, and how imperitive it is to share in order to establish a baseline and scientific rigor. 

Utopian Solutions

This panel focused on what utopian ideals have to do with how we approach land and water access issues. We heard from:

  • Christopher England, Georgetown University, on Henry George and why the rent is so damn high.
  • Paul Graham Raven, University of Sheffield, UK, on how meta systemic infrastructure reifies the post-Enlightenment dichotomy between society and nature, and the potential for more sustainable infrastructures.
  • Thomas Summerhill, Michigan State University, on the historical successes and failures of democratic rural movements in New York and what they can tell us about the age of fracking.
  • Tess Brown-Lavoie, of Young Farmer Network and Sidewalk Ends Farms, on the future of farming.
  • Jim Hafner of Land for Good on the role of land tenure, reform and forms of “management” as environmental/land enclosure.

This conversation focused on the disconnect between those who work the land, and those who have equity in the land. Tess focuses on working the land (and organizing others who do the same), Jim on how to ensure farmers have ongoing access to their land, Thomas on historical manifestations of these tensions, Christopher on why land use is so tied to rent levels, and Paul on the overall idea of utopia. We walked away understanding that democracy isn’t enough to combat corporatism, and that we need to organize ACROSS borders in order to combat (inter)national corporations/capitalism

So far as the ideals of utopias, rather than blueprints to “just deliver on,” can we try out different “solutions” in a way which still celebrates free will? Utopia is a horizon, but we should expect (or even wish) to reach.

Closing

Laura Gottesdiener on Water, Housing, and Land: The Battle for American Cities

https://prezi.com/embed/0mpa0jujegwv/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&landing_data=bHVZS2czc0xRekxmajVuczVyZ0pvTHV5NkhHd0xuR28&landing_sign=Vk-SI6EmofF9DzAJFXs_4AB-RutH9TWC2c80Xagb9ys

Embed after dinner:
detroit water crisis video
taking over, taking back on vimeo

What is Death in a Networked Age?

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Early this year, yet another friend of mine up and died. There was of course a mess of things that had to be figured out. It wasn’t just the traditional things of cleaning out her house (I wasn’t around for that part) or figuring out the funeral (Viking in variety). It was new and interesting technical and moral turmoil of getting into her hard drive, questions of “should we even?”- her prolific music and authoring contributions rivaled by her extreme privacy. It was seeking the edges of her far-flung pockets of internet community to notify them personally, racing the deluge of social media notifications, not wanting them to find out about her the same way I found out aboutmy grandmother – before the familial phone tree had reached me, a peripheral friend calling me based on a facebook post from my sister. A morbid seismic wave.

While I don’t have any control over how others plan for (or don’t) their demise, I have a say over my own. I can show my care for people dear to me my own compulsive, facilitating way by being sure they find each other as they find out, and in making sure information and knowledge I have to offer continues to be released under open access, even if I’m not there to do it. From doing humanitarian and disaster response (and just a general “awareness of the abyss,” as my mother used to tell my vast and angry younger self), I have had to face the looming possibility of my own death head-on. The networked reality that brought those strange new questions and moral quandaries for my friends’ deaths can instead be used to carry forward care and knowledge. This is a sort of guide for the bits of postmortem planning the internet and most lawyers have missed. It’s not complete – I’ve run into some interesting blocks and quirks, around which I’m eager to collaborate with others.

It’s called NetworkedMortality, and it needs your help with continuing to build it out. It includes some methods of Shared Secret for passwords, storing instructions in password vaults, and mailing lists for notifications of far-flung internet social groups. But it still needs to be fleshed out around how to best shut down accounts while archiving meta data for posterity and research, how to donate a body to open access science, and more diverity in threat and failure models.

Teachable Moments (español)

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https://player.vimeo.com/video/100307526

Mariel (@faeriedevilish) provided this translation, for which we are immensely grateful.

Un panel en la conferencia de Medios Cívicos de MIT y Knight trató sobre la segunda oportunidad de la open web (red abierta), y los problemas a los que nos enfrentamos con el crecimiento de este movimiento. Los panelistas fueron Mark Surman, Director Ejecutivo de la Fundación Mozilla, y Seamus Kraft, Director Ejecutivo de la OpenGov Foundation. Mark comenzó con la historia de la open web, cómo nació Mozilla en 1997 y dónde ve el movimiento hoy. Luego la conversación se dirigió a Seamus, quien hizo su primer login hace 17 años cuando Mozilla fue fundado.

Seamus entró a Internet al final de los noventa por dos razones principales. No como activista, o como desarrollador, sino como un adolescente joven interesado en intercambiar grabaciones en vivo de conciertos de Grateful Dead y Phish… y en conocer y chatear con su género preferido en el Mensajero Instantáneo de AOL. Nos saltamos al día de hoy: Seamus comenzó a luchar por la open web en 2011 cuando, como trabajador (conservador) del Congreso, vio la amenaza de SOPA y PIPA, entonces leyes inminentes, en contra de la Internet que él había aprendido a amar durante varios años. Él es alguien enamorado con lo que Internet le ha permitido hacer, intercambiando música y conocimiento, y conectándose con otros… y ha dedicado su vida a protegerla. Una historia bella – en general, necesitamos más activistas, y, entre más diversos seamos en nuestros orígenes, tendremos más vectores para comprender las problemáticas. Así que fue genial que llegara a hablar de este ideal compartido a una conferencia que es diversa en algunas maneras pero no en otras. Esto me encanta – nuestras ideas adquieren una mayor dimensión cuando se sostienen bajo objetos y fuentes distintos a los que estamos acostumbrados a ver.

Pero la historia del descubrimiento que Seamus hizo de la web no fue contada así. La frase “conectarse para conseguir chicas” se repitió varias veces en en panel. La indignación empezó a hervir en conversaciones paralelas, y luego se convirtió en enojo. Cuando Seamus bajó del escenario, él vio la tormenta en Twitter, entró en shock y terror ante la interpretación, y pasó el resto del día reconociendo su error y ofreciendo disculpas personalmente en Twitter… desde lejos de la conferencia. Yo habría hecho lo mismo. Estoy sorprendida y honrada de que regresó al día siguiente, y más aún de que está dispuesto a escribir esto conmigo.

Seamus dice:

“Cuando me senté fuera de la conferencia a leer cada tuit y comentario, caí en cuenta de cómo mi lenguaje no incluyente había hecho sentir mal a personas, fue como sentir un golpe en el estómago… dado por mí mismo. Fue brutal, abrasador y vergonzoso a la vez. ¿Cómo pude haber sido tan ciego con mi lenguaje? ¿Me había convertido en el chico tecnólogo idiota? Debí haber sabido desde antes, y usar el lenguaje que celebramos como activistas de la open web, en vez del que encontramos en los rincones más oscuros de la Internet. Al leer el hashtag de la conferencia y los tuits dirigidos a mí, sentí que había insultado de manera irreparable a todas las personas que ahí estaban, a todos quienes veían el webcast y a todas las personas que luchan por el Internet abierto.”

“Al contar la historia de cómo me conecté como adolescente, me permití usar el lenguaje de un adolescente. Y al tratar de compartir mi pasión por el creciente movimiento open web, logré precisamente lo contrario. Regresar a la conferencia al día siguiente fue una de las cosas más difíciles que he hecho, pero también estoy agradecido por todas las personas amables e increíbles que dejaron a un lado su enojo justificado, se sentaron conmigo, y literalmente me ayudaron a convertirme en una persona más fuerte, más consciente y –espero– lingüísticamente más incluyente. Me dieron otra oportunidad, una lección de oportunidad y unos abrazos muy necesarios que nunca, nunca voy a olvidar.”

Ahora Willow, en un ejercicio de empatía: 

Me recuerda una vez que estuve en Nueva Orleans, tratando de decir que no era una experta – que la gente que vive en la zona es experta en su propia experiencia. Dije: “Claramente, no soy de aquí. Véanme”, como tratando de decir que vieran qué tan quemada por el sol estaba, pues no paso mucho tiempo afuera, y no sé cuidarme cuando lo hago. Pero imaginen cómo fue percibido, y cómo supe inmediatamente que fue percibido. Me mortificó. Lo mejor que se me ocurrió en ese momento fue enrojecerme más y decir: “Bueno, eso sonó mal”.

Pero nadie me dijo nada. No hubo discusión. Y creo que eso es peor. Lo que tenemos en este momento de la conferencia de Medios Cívicos es una oportunidad para aprender y enseñar.

Estoy más inconforme con la reacción de mi comunidad al hecho que con los comentarios de Seamus. Los comentarios fueron inconscientes y torpes, sí. Está bien (y es necesario, diría yo) poner en evidencia esas cosas. Honestamente, creo que si hubiera estado hablando directamente con el público (no en un panel), habría visto esa respuesta inmediatamente. Me molesta que el otro panelista y el moderador no hablaron del tema con tacto cuando sucedió. De hecho, podrían haberlo condonado, o incluso amplificado. Me molesta que una comunidad que se considera abierta llegó al frenesí con comentarios de cierto tipo – y de haber sido culpable de ellos yo también.

Uhhh. Alguien que trabaja en gobierno abierto para “conseguir chicas”. CLARO que suena como algo en lo que estaría cómoda participando. #civicmedia

Es un gran momento para aprender – y no sólo para Seamus. Ésta es la pregunta: Si alguien con buenas intenciones usa lenguaje que causa una reacción de una comunidad cuyas normas aún no se han diseminado, ¿Cómo puede informársele de tal manera que asuma su buena fe y alianza? No sé de ninguna disciplina o acercamiento (incluyendo el feminismo) donde piense que “no regreses hasta que estés a nuestro nivel” es una respuesta apropiada para personas que lo intentan aunque caigan. Especialmente, dadas las intersecciones, y que los valores feministas llegan a nuevos terrenos (¡yuju!) y las personas en ellos no comprenden esos matices aún. ¿Cómo podrían hacerlo?

Me recuerda cómo entrené ballet y gimnasia durante casi una década, y aun así tenía un equilibrio pésimo. No tenía músculos estabilizadores porque, si un movimiento no era perfecto, tenía que rendirme. Con el parkour, practiqué para lograr quedarme sobre una superficie sin importar los movimientos de brazos que fueran necesarios. Las imperfecciones de mantenerse en pie eran más importantes que la perfección de la forma. Y la cosa es que, con este entrenamiento, gané suficiente control muscular para empezar a lograr todo de manera casi perfecta.

Ser un aliadx es DIFÍCIL. Para mí, lo más importante no es nunca equivocarse… lo cual me parece imposible. Incluso los lingüísticamente más precisos cambian de contextos (de manera intencional o a través de colapso de contextos). Lo importante es regresar a una conversación después de un mal paso. Y depende de mí, la persona con quien se alió alguien, asegurar que es seguro tener esas conversaciones después de un error cuando pienso que serán útiles (y tengo los recursos para tenerlas, etc etc). No estoy sugiriendo ni remotamente que no hay que enojarse por algo que es horrible, pues el enojo es por supuesto una emoción humana con mérito, etc. Pero después del enojo… ¿Entonces qué?

Si el punto es la comprensión, y el respeto y la igualdad que vienen de esa comprensión, eso significa que aprendizaje. Y aunque hay excelentes recursos sobre feminismo, igualdad, comportamiento, etc, asumo que todos sabemos que hay una diferencia entre leer un libro sobre cómo hacer algo y hacerlo. Aunque no se trata necesariamente de que nosotras (las mujeres) le enseñemos a los hombres qué pasa, la gente tiene que aprender en algún lado. Si los hombres quieren aprender, y nosotras (las de tipo femenino) no enseñamos, ellos van a aprender de otros hombres. Lo cual está genial, pero quiero estar abierta a preguntas y revisiones (“¿Lo estamos haciendo bien?”) porque sabemos que la cámara al vacío no ha funcionado bien hasta ahora. Y este tipo de intercambios conllevan errores. Y tenemos que saber cómo lidiar con ellos de tal manera que se promueva el crecimiento de la otra persona en el proceso. De eso se trata el aprendizaje. Es mi elección si quiero formar parte de esas conversaciones, pero aquí defiendo que vale la pena y es una responsabilidad hacerlo (aunque no una obligación).

¿Entonces cómo lo hacemos? ¿Cómo podemos decir estas cosas de manera que no puedan ser ignoradas y que se pueda retomar rápidamente (o mostrar que no lo será)? ¿Cómo te gusta que se muestre tus errores sociales? En mi caso, me gustaría que la gente me dijera “¡HEY! ¿En serio?” en el momento, asumiendo buena fe. Yo dejaría todo a un lado para tener esa conversación, o guardarla para más adelante, dependiendo en el nivel de urgencia y transgresión.

Seamus dice:

“En retrospectiva, me habría encantado que se pusiera en evidencia el lenguaje del panel mientras estábamos en el escenario; y, como consecuencia, la oportunidad de tener esa conversación y ajustar en tiempo real. Un “Disculpa, ¿Pero podrías ampliar sobre tu último comentario? Suena un poco sexista” me habría hecho rectificar instantáneamente, así como lo habría hecho la habilidad de poder ver la acción en el hashtag de la conferencia mientras estábamos en frente. 

No sé exactamente cómo podemos traducir a la vida real la respuesta lingüística inmediata que se vuelve posible con la open web y las redes sociales. Pero creo que sí es posible. Para mí, la definición de “aliadx” debería incluir la confianza en nuestra comunidad para poner en evidencia el lenguaje no incluyente desde el público, asegurarse de que la gente en el escenario de verdad escucha y entiende, y ayudar a la persona que se equivoca –como yo lo hice– a rectificar sus palabras erróneas y fortalecerse a partir de una experiencia que puede ser dolorosa de una manera positiva para todas las personas involucradas.”

Teachable Moments in #CivicMedia

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https://player.vimeo.com/video/100307526

A panel at the MIT-Knight Civic Media conference was about the Open Web’s Second Chance, and the problems we are facing with growing the open web movement.  The panelists were Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation and Seamus Kraft, Executive Director of The OpenGov Foundation.  Mark kicked things off with the story of the open web, how Mozilla was born in 1997 and where he sees the movement today.  Then the conversation turned to Seamus, who was first logging online 17 years ago when Mozilla was founded.

Seamus first went on the Internet in the late ’90’s for two main reasons.  Not as an activist, or as a software developer, but as a young teenage boy both hoping to trade live Grateful Dead and Phish concert recordings…and looking to meet and chat up his preferred gender on AOL Instant Messenger.  Fast forward to today: Seamus became a fighter for the open web in 2011 when he, as a conservative Congressional staffer, saw the impending SOPA and PIPA laws threatening the everyday Internet he had grown to love over the intervening years.  He is someone who dearly loves what the Internet has enabled him to do, exchanging music and knowledge, and connecting with others…and he has dedicated his life to protecting it.  A beautiful story – we need more activists generally, and the more diverse we are in our origins the more vectors we can understand these issues along. So it was pretty rad that he showed up to a conference that is diverse in some ways but not in others to talk about this shared ideal. I love this – it gives us more dimensionality to our ideas when they hold up under different objectives and sources as well as the ones we’re more used to. 

But Seamus’ story of discovering the web wasn’t told that way.  The phrase “going online to get girls” kept cropping up during the panel discussion. Indignation bubbled up on the back channel, and then turned into outrage. When Seamus left the stage, he saw the Twitter Storm, was shocked and aghast at the interpretation, and spent the rest of the day owning up to his mistake and personally apologizing on Twitter…all far away from the conference. I would have done the same. I am amazed and honored that he returned the next day, and even more so that he’s willing to write this with me.

Seamus here:

“As I sat outside the conference, reading every single Tweet and comment, and soaking in how my non-inclusive language made people feel, it was like getting punched in the stomach…by myself.  It was brutal, searing and embarrassing, all at once.  How could I be so blind with my language?  Had I actually become the Idiot Tech Guy?  I should have known better, and used the language we celebrate as open web activists, instead of what you’ll too often find in the darker corners of the Internet.  Reading the civic media hashtag and all the tweets directed at me, I felt like I had irreparably insulted everyone in the room, everyone watching the webcast and everyone fighting for the open Internet.”

“In telling the story of how I logged on as a young teenage boy, I had allowed myself to use the language of a young teenage boy.  And in trying to share my passion for growing the open web movement, I had accomplished precisely the opposite.  Showing up the next day was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I am so thankful for the kind and amazing people who put aside their justifiable anger, sat down with me on the conference sidelines, and literally helped me become a stronger, more aware and – I pray – more linguistically inclusive person moving forward.  You gave me another chance, a lesson in humility, and some sorely needed hugs that I will never, ever forget.”

Now Willow here, with an exercise in empathy:

I’m reminded of being in New Orleans, and trying to make a point about NOT being an expert – the people who live in the area are experts in their own experience. I said “I’m clearly not from around here, look at me.” As in look at how sunburned I am, I don’t spend time outside or know how to take care of myself when I do. But guess how it was perceived, and how I immediately knew it must have been perceived. I was mortified. The best I could think to do in that moment was turn even redder and say “well, that came out wrong.”  

But no one called me out. There was no discussion. And that, I think, sucks even more. What we have in this moment from the Civic Media conference is a chance to learn and teach.

I was more upset about how my community reacted to this than I am at Seamus’ comments. The comments were unwitting, and bumbling, yes. It’s good (I would argue necessary) to call those things out. I honestly feel that if he’d been speaking directly to the audience (not on a panel) he would have seen that immediate feedback from the audience. I’m upset the other panelist and the moderator didn’t call him out on it, gracefully, in the moment. In fact, they may have cued, or at least amplified, it. And I am upset that a community that considers itself open worked itself into a frenzy over such comments — and that I was a part of that.

Uhhh. Someone working on open gov to “get girls.” TOTALLY sounds like something I’d be comfortable participating in. #civicmedia

— Willow Brugh (@willowbl00) June 23, 2014

This is an amazing moment to learn – and certainly not just for Seamus. Here’s the question: If someone well-meaning uses language that triggers response from a community whose norms are not yet widespread, how can we inform them in a way that assumes their good faith and alliance? I don’t know of any discipline or approach (including feminism) where I think “don’t come back until you can meet us at our level” is an appropriate response to people who are trying but might stumble. Especially given intersectionality, and that as feminist values start showing up in new arenas (yay!) the people already there don’t understand those nuances yet. How could they?

I’m reminded of how I trained ballet and gymnastics for the better part of a decade and yet had terrible balance. I had no stabilizing muscles because if a movement wasn’t perfect, I was supposed to bail. With parkour, I practiced to fight to stay on a ledge, by whatever wiggling and arm-waving necessary. The imperfections of maintaining footing trumped perfection of form. The thing was, in doing this, I gained enough minor muscle control to start landing things near-perfectly.

Being an ally is HARD. To me, the important thing is not never messing…which I see as impossible. Even the most linguistically precise shift contexts (intentionally or through context collapse). The important thing is returning to a conversation after a misstep. And it’s on me, as the one being allied with, to make it safe to have those post messup-talks when I think they’ll be useful (and I have the bandwidth, and etc etc). I’m not remotely suggesting not to get mad about something that is horrible, as anger is of course merited a human emotion etc etc. But after anger… then what?

If the point is the understanding, and the respect and equality that comes of that understanding, that means learning. And while there are some great resources out there on feminism, equality, behavior, etc, I assume we all know that there’s a difference between reading a book on how to do something and doing it. While it’s not necessarily on us (women) to teach men what’s going on, people are going to have to learn somewhere. If it’s up to men to learn, and we’re (feminine types) not the ones teaching, it’s probably going to be other men. Which is awesome, but I want to be open to questions and check-ins – “are we doing this right?” because we know the vacuum chamber hasn’t exactly worked out well so far. And this sort of exchange means there will be faux-pas. And we need to know how to handle those in a way that encourages the growth of the other person in the process. That is what learning is, after all. It is my prerogative if I want to be a part of those conversations, but I am advocating here that it is worth it and a responsibility, but not an obligation.

So how do we do this? How do we call out information in a way that it cannot be ignored which can be quickly addressed or shown that it won’t be? How do you like to have your social faux-pas pointed out? For me, I’d like people to say “HEY! Seriously?” in the moment, assuming good faith, and I’ll either drop everything for that conversation, or sidebar it for later, depending on level of urgency and transgression.

Seamus here:

“Looking back, I would have loved to have had the panel’s language called out while we were still on stage; and as a result, the opportunity to engage in a meaningful conversation and adjust was was being said in real time.  An ‘Excuse me, but could you elaborate on that last comment?  It comes across as rather sexist.’ would have instantly set me straight, as would the ability to have seen the action on the conference hashtag while we were in front of the room.  

“I’m not sure exactly how we can translate into real life the instant linguistic feedback loops made possible by the open web and social media.  But I do believe it’s possible.  To me, the definition of ‘ally’ should include having the confidence within our community to call out non-inclusive language from the audience, ensure those on stage truly listen and understand, and help the person who stepped in it – like I did – right their wrong words and grow stronger from what can be a positively painful experience for everyone involved.”

link to an amazing, similar article from a different space. Thanks, Sasha!

Topic: Revolution and Technology

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Livebloggers: Sasha, Nathan, Erhardt

Today, we’re joined by Stephan “tomate” Urbach from the activist group & think tank Telecomix, which works to circumvent surveillance, and to promote internet freedom and human rights. During the 2011 uprisings in North Africa, Telecomix activists helped to bypass technologies of censorship and communication-interruption. They currently work to shuttle videos and other information safely out of Syria. Urbach is a Telecomix member, and has acted as their de facto spokesperson. He was a member of the Pirate Party in Germany, and worked for the Berlin Pirate Parliamentary group from 2011 until February 2014.

http://prezi.com/embed/kzyc1pmrynri/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&features=undefined&disabled_features=undefined

Vizthink by Willow Brugh

Tomate joined telecomix in 2010, during the uprisings in Egypt and Syria. He worked in parliament for 2 years. He begins with an overview of Telecomix:
Telecomix (read about them here) isn’t a formal organization, it’s a network of activists who convene and disperse as needed. They’ve done this several times over the last few years. In 2006 in Sweden, there was a telecommunications bill, people gathered and formed Telecomix. After the telecom package was stopped in Sweden, they fought the data retention directive across the EU. At this stage, many people joined to do research and activism work. When the Egyptian uprising kicked off, Telecomix was galvanized into action: specifically, when Mubarak shut off the internet. They decided to figure out how to get access to folks in Egypt even in that context. They set up phone lines that people could use for dial up access. They set up around 300 lines for people to connect to the Internet. Weeks after the net went back up, tomate got an email from a young man in Egypt thanking them for providing access to be able to share their thoughts. This is the kind of thing Telecomix loves.

They see censorship, and internet blocking, as a crime.

Some people have asked them whether the regime might have used their lines. That’s possible, but they don’t know that. Back at the time, Telecomix talked about technology as neutral, although today tomate doesn’t believe that anymore. Then Syria happened. They found that internet surveillance in Syria was planned since 1999. They also found that Blue Coat, Siemens, and other companies were involved in providing surveillance technology. When they released this information, Western countries were publicly enraged. Telecomix suggested export controls, but no one was willing to go that far. The US department of commerce did investigate Blue Coat and their affiliates for selling to Syria after the trade embargo. ComputerLink a middleman company was fined $2.8 million by the department of commerce.

Telecomix found that every message, on every network, was monitored, and every phone call was recorded, both mobile and land line. They also found that people went missing after writing posts on SNS. Telecomix was in touch with Syrian activists on the ground. At the time, they felt clear about who was ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ now it is much less clear. They provided secure networks, software, and servers for activists on the ground. They made comms “as secure as possible,” but never promised 100% security: “whoever says this is a jerk,” tomate tells us. Some Anonymous people apparently promised full security, and local activists believed them. That’s a problem. Phone lines were then blocked in Syria. Calls to tomate’s personal number were blocked (listed online), calls to other Telecomix numbers were also blocked. When Telecomix released the Blue Coat files, revealing how it worked, the blockade system became better: Iranian telcos joined the Syrian telcos.

Around this time, Tomate received a call from German intelligence warning him to watch out for Syrian activities in Berlin. They found that the surveillance toolbox was installed in Syria, Egypt, Beirut, and Kazakhstan. But it was not always correctly configured. Telecomix has evidence, although not enough to publish, that Western companies are selling to dictatorships. They think that’s wrong, and want to generate a public outcry.

Throughout this process, Telecomix has learned a lot. Access blocking, traffic monitoring, deep packet inspection, laws that forbid certain kinds of speech on the internet. These are things that dictatorships are known for doing, not “free” countries. They also learned that hacking the backbone in Syria was great and everyone loved it. But if someone from Africa hacks the EU backbone they’re a ‘terrorist.’ So it depends on your point of view.

Telecomix also learned that the surveillance methods used in the West are the same tools dictators use. Everything from everyone is monitored. In Germany, they started to scan mail at the post office: front and back side. Started to scan postcards, and not sure what they’re doing with the scans. In EU, there’s a fight against data retention, and we won, since a court said data retention can’t be performed like that. It’s not a full victory: the court said data retention is OK, just has to be bounded in certain ways. In Europe, public is not ‘public.’ For example, Tomate thinks if he posts on his FB wall, it’s public. But many think that publicity is platform bounded.

Germany has one of the hardest privacy and data laws, the EU is potentially adopting this. It may be good for users, but not so much for companies providing services. For example, when Google did Street View, many houses are blurred based on people saying ‘not mmy house!’ But the same houses are available on Bing, and on other services. So Google now isn’t updating street view Germany, and the images are several years old. So Europeans think about data as ‘mine,’ even when it’s been posted publicly. We have a database of people’s personal information including salary, and we deleted it because of privacy concerns.

Snowden documents revealed that the ‘conspiracy’ of surveillance was actually true. For example, in 1998 we knew that the Echelon program might exist. Hackers knew it existed, but were called conspiracy theorists. Now there’s a public outcry for EU action against the NSA. tomate doesn’t think it makes sense: what should we do? Embargo trade with the USA? There’s an initiative to ban intelligence services from. In Germany this was specificaly because of an national intelligence failure to capture (neo)Nazis.

German intelligence, The exterior intelligence, supports the NSA, then gets internal surveillance on Germany, which they are not allowed to collect domestically. These exchange programs exist all over the world in contravenience with privacy laws. The only proposal they can think of against surveillance is to make it more expensive. The more encryption people use, the more expensive it will be, for example. One idea is to create as much spoof data as possible, such that intelligence agencies will spend all their time processing the spoofs. Another idea is to rebuild networks with new hardware and new protocols that will be less amenable to surveillance.

But as in all places, no one wants to pay for something. If you get paid as an activist, no one will consider you a proper activist, which means that activists have to work for free. If you look at what the NSA, Brits, French, Germans, and everyone else are doing, it’s the same as what the dictatorships are doing. What makes a democracy? People can say they don’t want this surveillance, but the government does not listen. Tomate is focused on the European debate about surveillance, not so much the NSA debates in the US. But he hopes that some day we can ban intelligence surveillance in democracies.

Slides: http://files.herrurbach.de/doc/framing.pdf

Q&A

Ethan: Tell us about how Telecomix thinks of itself differently than other organizations in the space. During the blackout in Tahrir Square, lots of organizations got involved like Tactical Tech, also based in Berlin. Telecomix has always had a certain amount of secrecy around it. How did this come about and how does Telecomix see itself fitting amongst other organizations in the space?

tomate: Telecomix does not see itself fitting into anything. This is important. It is a space for exploring things. At the point, people can join Telecomix. The aura of secrecy is wrong; it’s one of the most open/transparent groups I’ve worked with. The problem is that many journalists struggle to understand Telecomix—they group us in with Anonymous, which is wrong. They builders and rebuilders, rather than attackers—they don’t take sites down using DDOS. One characterizing is the Yin to Anonymous’ Yang. We also do a lot of theoretical work in the space, differing us from other activist organizations. We are also not people that work in public wearing masks. We do try to secure our members who are not in a position to go into the public because of the work they do, and others take the role of the public face of the organization.

Sasha: How do you make decisions as an organization? Like who represents the organization to the public?

Tomate: We do not use formal consensus-building processes because they don’t work. We run an IRC do-ocracy. Admins do have too much power.

Willow: Can you tell us about Cameron?

Tomate: We have a bot named Cameron. We can ask her questions and get responses. We sometimes make her the public face for interviews, including a few that were published in Swedish newspapers. They asked for a photo and we sent a picture of the old mac that she was running on. She is crypto-sleep because we forgot the password to the harddisk. But now we have no one to ask what we should do. She was a symbol for us for a long time.

Cameron Kerry :http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Kerry (former General Counsel, US Dept f Commerce) I was encouraged by the data of a “Data Schengen” but over a month ago, the EU parliament voted that the European Commission should come up with a protocol for keeping EU data within national borders? How do you change that strong sentiment?

Tomate: Currently, Deutsche Telecom markets itself as keeping your data in Germany, which is false, it doesn’t. The idea of keeping the data national is nice, but it doesn’t solve the problem anyway. The privacy activists in Germany and Europe believe that if a law says something like this then it works, but that’s not right. They always ask the state to handle it, but they can’t. We are working on new protocols and projects ourselves to handle privacy. We rely on infrastructure form the 70s and we can’t rely on it much longer. We hear in Europe that the US created the internet and they can control it.

Ethan: In response to surveillance people are looking for many paths. But HTTPS (Heartbleed) was broken for years, and it was open source code. Tell me why you are optimistic that we are going to solve this problem with better network design.

Tomate: People in Germany are being paid to do open source code audits. They are funded through donations right now to work on this issue. We need to do more audits and pay people to do them, multiple audits for software are needed.

Sasha:

Tomate: We need export controls on technology that can be used as a weapon. We also need to rebuild our networks with the state. But these are two different things, building the network and sending out products to dangerous people.

Ethan: Who would you want to enforce those export controls? I think the export sanctions push is a really messy one. We’ve seen a lot of cases for export controls are taking really useful tools out of people’s hands.

Tomate: I don’t have solution for that question. For instance, my country is selling tanks to dictators. So I wouldn’t trust them to sell any hardware to countries.

Eleanor: The only reason we have strong crypto is because we regulate code as speech and thus it can’t be sanctioned under export controls. The only way we got PGP out there was a loophole in ITAR rules using a free speech definition. I would rather use a limited liability laws rather than export controls.

Sands: Is there a lot of discussion at Telecomix about mesh networks for activists?

Tomate: As I said, Telecomix is not really active right now. I live in Berlin, which is the main city for mesh networks. There are discussions for how to activate local networks and then bring them online later.

Dalia: I think the public is missing in this discussion. What I’m not hearing is how we can have people change things. I’m hearing that it’s happening in IRC channels. But many people aren’t adopting the necessary technology or talking about it.

Tomate: In Europe, we have many crypto parties currently. It’s amazing how many people are coming. People get the tool as well as the explanation for why we need to do this right now. We show them how they affected by the surveillance. It helps that we now have the evidence of this, so people are listening.

Yu: After hearing about the decision-making process, how do you manage your brand?

Tomate: Don’t break anything. If you break down communications it is not a Telecomix thing. We don’t try to manage it, but we explain what we do to new people in the IRC channel, explain it is we try to do, the same we respond to the media. Anyone can use the logo, and people do, but it hasn’t failed yet.

Serious Games with International Red Cross Climate Group

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Pablo is a force to be reckoned with. That crazy energy that seeps possibility into the most jaded of souls. He doesn’t just pull you out of yourself – he gives you somewhere to go. And even more incredibly is that he seeks to make the things he has made possible thrive beyond himself – how can he support others in making change? How can the things he’s instigated be documented and live on? A reminder of how much good facilitation matters in events and life.

We played a game of being Red Cross employees, responsibile for entire areas (my quandrants were dubbed after Lord of the Rings. The other was simply CMYK) and you “win” with the most resources put into long-term endeavors (HIV/AIDS education, infrastructure, education, etc) and with the fewest catastrophies (when you didn’t have the resources to respond to flooding in time). I could go on and on about the mechanics of the game, but really you should just play a round yourself. What matters are that we suddenly had a much better understanding of probability and consequence based on tangible interaction. I encourage you to read more at the multitudes of documentation on their specific branch fo the topic, often with recent MIT Conversation guest Colleen.

The main takeaway specfic to my tech-in-response-space and facilitator double-heart (+10 geek points if you get the reference) was the unapologetic conviction with which Pablo addressed uncertainty and unfairness in the game setup. Don’t understand? Oh well! 5.. 4.. 3.. Just like life. As someone who is constantly struggling to find balance between building capacity in dealing with chaos, and the ease of interaction that clear guidelines bring, this was beautifully blunt. Because the point of the game isn’t just optimizing for resource management, it’s in dealing with the unclear rules, political agendas, donor whims, and the other players that you have to worry about. The math can be gamed, graphed. The social interaction is far more fascinating and flexible.

This clearly wasn’t just about me – we were joined by an incredible group of people. For examples, Jason and Matt. Jason, from the Game Lab and a cohort of mine at the Media Lab, brought his long experience in improv, facilitation, and gaming to the.. table (I couldn’t help it! Pun!). From him, we had an examination of game structure regardless of content, of technical levels, and of on- versus offline-games. We were also joined by Matt from MetaLab and the MaleriaAction game – using human pattern-recognition abilities to cut down massively on computational modeling time. From him, we examined the continuum between what great work for people to play, to understand their systems, and what is great for modeling, and how that better understanding might feed back into tabletop games.

We also explored the brain-overloading awesome that somehow lets me into its structure on a regular basis : the MIT Media Lab. Specfically, we visited CityScope in Changing Places, LuminAR in Fluid Interfaces, and Paula Dawson‘s holograms in Object-Based Media. With City Scope, we examined how using city and environmental models in play – moving LEGOs around to try out different plans and structures – can lead to a similar base understanding as the tactile interaction the games brought. With LuminAR, how can we display the probability functions we had gotten a solid sense for via the games (rather than numbers or an undeciferable graph, a set of dice – one covered and one exposed) to people who actually need to know there are ways of optimizing their response and funding structures? How about projecting calculations based on the beans and dice they’ve laid out? And from the holograms, how can we see one aspect of a problem from one side of a table, but a very different perspective from the other side?

And always, for me, the Center for Civic Media idea of how this brings voice and understanding and storytelling to more people. And this is where game structure becomes so intersting. By having a clear game infrastructure with modules, you can build whatever game you like co-creatively. What are the major things to pay attention to? What would the costs and risks and win conditions be? By working with a group to discover what is important to them, you also understand what the complications are. AND it shows that systems are malleable. My favorite.

Epic thanks to everyone who made the day possible. I’m excited to see where we can take the enthusiasm, intentions, and heart as we forge ahead into a future that might just suck less. In no small part because we don’t just have scientific and mathematical inputs – but we understand what they mean, and how to use them.

Liveblog for Rightscon USABILITY AND DIGITAL RIGHTS TOOLS: PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS FROM THE FIELD

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Liveblog from the Usability panel at RightsCon. It covered the Countersurveillance hackathon we had just wrapped up, a SF event headed by OpenITP but also linked to the recent Countersurveillance DiscoTechs. I typed this live and published right after the sessions for the day – please forgive typos etc.

Usability as a huge issue. Doesn’t matter how much we train if the software isn’t usable.

OpenITP has done two events around crypto and usability now – DC in January, and SF in March. OpenITP tools brought to be worked on. Not hard to do a hackathon on usability. Can get people in to improve documentation. User testing is a thing that can happen in a day. Making wireframes. We’ll do a report back on challenges faced, what people are doing usability-wise. What they’re doing to correct those things.

Barbara with Benetech
Martus – about 10 years old, end-to-end encryption for folk in the field doing human work. This is using old software and design patterns. We were super security-focused, but maybe did it wrong. Example of protecting against key logging by clicking with the mouse to put in a password. To avoid pattern recognition, we’ll randomize the screen every time. But people don’t use that.


You can get really detached from what the users want/will use. Even if we had protected the password, the rest of it would have been key logged. Usability is a security feature. The people who need security the most are usually those who understand it the least. And human rights documentarians are targets. Usability can protect them.
Used the DREAD model to make specific threat models and user stories as a way to bring together engineers and designers. Out of that, one of the ways we made the conversations easier was creating a shared language. DREAD is broad, so we clearly defined what we meant by things in simple language.

Bex
Codesign facilitator and community organizer at Center for Civic Media MIT Media Lab. Shared values, common language. We design with the users, but we also see everyone as a designer. Everyone makes a decision together about how technology works and what it does, means it’s more likely to work for people.
Discovering Technology – getting together to share about technology, learn. Very hands on – at the Boston event, used face paint to thwart facial recognition software. Surveillance camera walking tour as a way of calling attention to the social implications. In Bangalore, they did DNA spoofing. So, as far as UX being about how people relate to tools, the DiscoTechs talk to that, and how tech is used to build power.

Projects
Commotion Project
Our goal at Commotion is to make it really easy for anyone to make their own wireless network. There’s a lot of complicated technology under the hood. Want to make the technology interface as simple as possible, but on the other side we have a construction kit that is a visual documentation set anywhere from installing to engaging your community.
As much as we can explain it to ourselves and our colleagues, that is not our audience. This is a hard problem – community organizing to wireless interference. A number of volunteers approached us – which is inspiring – you are so valuable. We don’t know where the mistakes are, we don’t know what doesn’t make sense. Had a number of folk go through documentation, gave them a big red pen. Circled things, this doesn’t make sense, etc. also went over our website. where do you find it, if it exists at all? Someone going through and gave a long feedback form. Also some folk translated.

Serval Project
Having people come in and say our selves, our family and friends at home need this. Make the user interface accessible to them. Take a situation that is incredibly difficult, choose disaster response – don’t know who is alive, where things are. And we’re saying “hey! here is new technology to learn so you can organize!” and your brain isn’t in a place to learn that. We are painfully aware that. It does the job but it’s not the most elegant. The codesign process has been great in getting us to that.
Group from Venezuela where gov is either turning off net or making it go very slowly. Controlling media. Where do you get toilet paper, communicate to people? This is a direct need – they’re talking about their families.
Ok, so if this is for Venezuela, can we get this to work there? They asked for a Twitter without the connectivity – like storyful.

Guardian Project – InformaCam
Collecting digital evidence in encrypted and verifiable media by journalists and migrant farm workers. We went through all these use cases to identify the data visualization needs of these different groups. InformaCam collects a bunch of metadata, which is useful for lots of people (so it’s also sensitive, needs to be protected). Range of uses means collecting and displaying the data needs to be useful to the folk collecting the data. We got a bunch of good suggestions about how to improve the interface by making it more configurable on the backend so when admins come into the system, they can customize the display for the users to either aggregate records based on locations or teh submitter. Also raised a lot of suggestions around additional features, how to
improve the system when there’s low or no internet. Messaging systems other folk worked on.

Guardian Project – Bazaar
Extend the Fdroid market for peer-to-peer, so if there is an app I want to share to friends when bandwidth is super low or down. We went in with a prototype around sharing apps between the phones. Bluetooth, NFC, SD card, etc- how do we distill all these different means into a flow handled by non technical users. “Do both of our phones have bluetooth?”
Worked on distilling the best method to learn those things. Also came to understand how some of the terminology we were using didn’t translate. Repositories, packages.. these words mean nothing to people who just have a few apps they want to share. “Share,” and “Swap.” Above the technical mumbo jumbo.

Small World News – StoryMaker
Anyone can learn to make a better story out of multimedia. We’re building a secure camera that we can also guide people at the point of production. A guiding principal is to put the trainer in the phone. People pay the most attention when they’re doing what they want to accomplish. This weekend we had an initial exercise of value-based design with outsiders – what is the value of story makers. You should feel more capable of doing what they do. Implicit understanding that people are capable, convince others of that. What are different ways to guide them through production process – pay attention to sound, you’re shooting vertically, etc. We started building out the UI with things like level of notification based on triggers (tiny icon if you’re tilted, animated arrow to rotate if you need to 90*). as we work on the variables, it will become magic. Oh, I am a great storyteller! Don’t have to worry about craft.

Questions!
Having people in the room that weren’t on the tech teams was super useful.
User stories, field experience, etc. Started you thinking about how to make your tool more useful. What can we do to make that more possible?

Most Users are Abroad – How do you Engage with Them?
Skype screenshare etc for instant feedback?
OpenITP is looking into this. Operational Security – if we do remote testing, it’s really video heavy. If you’re directly interacting with activists you might put them at risk. Work more with trainers.
Oktavia was suggesting a (non F/OSS) tool to mark up a page about things like “this button is places strangely,” or “I don’t know what that means.”
Shuttleworth Foundation has an F/OSS tool for this! Annotate
Community outreach – groups should be able to do this without us, which requires intervention at a different stage. Carl Vogel on OS projects – not just about the code being open, but the developers being open to questions as well. Having an open IRC channel, but always looking for more ways to show openness.
Training as a multi-week process. Not just fly-in, fly-out. What format do we need for the trainings?

Open Source vs Free/Libre
Free Software was about software respecting the rights of the people using it. Open Source doesn’t do the same. Think about free, don’t get distracted by open source.
In the field, people aren’t aware of whether it’s open source or free. They use what is usable – Facebook and Google. We have to take the bandwidth and financing to make our tools usable, too.

Goal is to not use Google Play
App stores are censored, closed webs.
Not about how to be fun, design for addictiveness. But Google and Apple have realized that you can identify what you need in an app store to be successful, how can we riff on that and make use of the space carved into brains around us. Interface side of things.
Fdroid is just one way of doing this.

Analytics,  Tracking Where Trouble is Happening
No one knows how to track their web logs any more.
Having tools that aren’t cloud or invasive. Guidelines for data collection on your users that are safe? Does that exist? When we track users or deploy elsewhere, is there a list of what to not do?
Benetech has gone through a process of collecting even less data. I get where you’re coming from, but if you get 5 people in a room to talk about a project, it’ll get you 80% understanding. Tracking gives you specifics but not real usability understanding.
Printed things out, people went around with post-it-notes, basically gave us user analytics without logging. People don’t print out paper. Just accept that you’ll do that, have every tiny step involved.
No data without explicit permission. We do everything distributed – we don’t have a way to get anything back
When you have specific steps of opting in, not just a block of ToS. Difference in what permissions you’re giving on different options.
Hearing from users is not anecdotal, it’s data.
Go places, talk to people.
As  a trainer, I’m a filter. The organizations are filters for other  people. Anecdotal is good. It can be enough for the 200 members of teh  organization.

Localizing Our Software
How can we do that without compromising the privacy of the users.
This is where codesign comes in.

Marketing
Lots of people build software, but who is marketing it?
In funding, it’s difficult to support marketing. Usabilty is a sort of marketing. When people like it, they want to tell other people. Usability is easier to finance.
People will push it through their community if they like it.

Example of User-Centered Design that has Been Widely Adopted?
Firefox browser is a F/OSS developed by the users.
Cryptocat. Started with user in mind, had great success for that.
Guardian Project. Seen Informacam iterate through, seen a lot of improvements.

Idea for a Tool, Gets Developed, then Users Asked to Evaluate
This is a part of the funding process. How do you come up with the tools that you build? Do you go out and ask people what they need? When the ideas are codesigned, not just the build, stopgapping after.
Worked for a human rights org called Witness before Guardian. In working with people there, found out that people needed their faces blurred out of photos. Brought this to a hackathon, cobbled together a prototype. Should strive for that more.
Working with migrant farm workers where we made something and it didn’t work, wasn’t understood, drained battery. So we scrapped, rebuilt… but the guts were the same.
Sometimes groups that are already organized will come to us, ask us to engage in that process with them. We’re collaborating from teh beginning. Guardian is partnering with MA ACLU and MIT to reshape something that already exists. You can write for funding together, or the community groups wil have written for funding.
Commotion writes into grants that the community interaction is first. Digital Stewards – we teach them, they teach us how to do it better. Every network tells a story – take cutouts of parts of a network, let them build the network they want.

Impression of Tech in Western World
DRC, trying to make Medicat, merge medical evidence and documentation of medical evidence with ability of camera culture to end goal of prosecuting. Piloted in field SUPER early, revamping based on what we learned. Has to be reframed. Environmental factors, how limited the resources are.

User’s Rights / Non User’s Rights
How do we protect the data from our platforms for use in other places? In SF, it’s not about documentation, it’s about follow-through. Institutionalized problems. What are we going to do with keeping records?