Author Archives for hdluxe

Radical Pedagogy

Theory: Seeing the connections between participant’s senses of Self-ownership, Responsibility to the project/process, and Horizontal Power

–       need systems that reinforce everyone’s power within the system: including people who think they “don’t know how to use the system”

–       Horizontal power is reinforced where there is leadership on the process and people who are resources, but no one owner

–       Ex: Google Forms instead of web forms, everyone had to learn to make them themselves [and that was a challenge for some folks], but now have power over shutting form down, control of info in form, access to applicants instantly, etc.

Collaborative Technology Reasoning: Beg, Borrow, Buy

Why collaborate with a specific technology? Why not just get our work done some other way and all hand it in? For starts, in a collective–or any horizontal project–there’s no manager to hand it in to, no boss, no one to organize the work for you but you. Getting organized is a systems-level problem that best be addressed as soon as possible.

And for projects that have principles that base around justice, equality, accessibility, and collective or direct-democratic decision making, the choice of platforms is a political decision.

For the 2012 Femme Conference, we needed to set up a system where 14 core organizers and 30 subcommittee members can work together — both in terms of accessibility and capacity. Systems we chose thus had to be not overly hard to learn or use, but still must allow for organization and effectiveness.

We looked at possibly using:

I tried to get people to use Crabgrass [open source!] or Basecamp [more useful!], but the request from the majority of the other organizers was that most people had existing Gmail accounts and were familiar with the interface, so we went with G-docs

  • Theory: Choosing the achievability of agility and accessibility over principles, choosing to fight battles later with other technologies. For example, I decided to force WP participation rather than “force” the use of a platform that no one would use.

In an ideal build we’d have Crabgrass or Open Atrium sitting on a Drupal site, but in an ideal world we’d be paying someone to build this. Better to pick that which will actually happen and — most importantly, that which people are willing to interact with.

  •  Theory: I like to occassionally remind people that Gmail is a “begged” resource that datamines our every word typed in, just to raise awareness of the issues in using “free” software that’s not Free/Libre software.

Community Participation:

The Femme Conference project has a built-in, existing community of 14 core organizers and about 35 total organizers who would be interacting with this media, either by creating blog posts, content for the web pages, or using the social media to let people know about the conference.

There is an additional community of several hundred people who will be visiting the site for information on participating in the the conference at performers, workshop presenters and attendees.

Theory: We had to pick a technology that community members would be familiar with and comfortable using that also allowed for the needed organization and dissemination of data.

Theory bonus: Organization and Dissemination are two of the three aspects of power-shifting digital technology, the other being production

Three similar conference sites

Other conferences also have web presences, and three that are relevant in terms of community to outreach to, size of conference, and media justice analysis are:

Allied Media Conference [annual, this would be an example of full-development ideal]

  • http://alliedmedia.org
  • made by http://theworkdept.com/#agility  in Drupal … of course.
  • In an ideal full build we’d have a drupal site that was mad fancy but it would take so much development and user-assistance admin that it’s not worth it for an all-volunteer event

Butch Voices [bi-annual, an example of agile or mid-range development]

Queer Yo Mind Conference [37signals-agile development example]

Problem Statement: Develop Collaborative Technology for a Conference

This project’s goal is to create an internal communications system as well as a public social media and web presence for an LGBTQ conference which can be maintained by many, and which is manageable by an asynchronous, all-volunteer organizing collective.

A major goal of this project is to create a collaborative and horizontal web presence which is decentralized and which many people have access to and control[s] over, instigates interactivity and buy-in, while maintaining the safety of personal data [email addresses, server logins] as needed. For political reasons, it is important to create a space where many types of users feel welcomed to post on the blog, and for other users to find accessibility information on the site.

For marketing and registration purposes, we wanted to create a site that attracts people to the conference itself .

Lastly, members have requested a rideboard and housing-share board for the site. Questions about need for monitoring and safety have come up, so these boards should avoid spam and lurking, while remaining easy-to-use for a range of users.