Your code is political
Session outcomes
Gitlab respository for presentation, scripts and supporting material:
- MozFest2019 session on community-based rather than enterprise-based software development methodologies.
- Proposed to pursue healthier web-development projects through code and web literacy in opposition to expert-based full-stack maintenance.
Introductions: throw your paper
This session’s scope and goal (7 min)
Attendees were asked to introduce themselves answering the questions:
- Why did we show up here?
- What do we have in mind?
Each should throw a paper aiming a cookie box, without standing-up. Some did have that box quite near. That was proposed as a way of situating ourselves: even without knowing it, we were randomly situated in a certain kind of privilege EVERY time.
(NOTE: I probably needed to emphasise much more on that explanation; due to location problems not everyone got in time to the session. Thought that broke the ice.)
My thoughts:
I was really thrilled by such a diverse group, but, at the same time, a very strong commitment and ideas related to my proposal. I was really happy to know myh idea was definetely not mine but a community-shared concern. This was solely the set of introductions and we were already on-topic. That was really exciting.
Activity: Brainstorm alert! What is political? (3 min)
My thoughts
: We all built up a very concise approach to begin with. We were all pretty faimiliar with politically-aware tech. So we wrote those brainstromed words at our paper board haveing them handy for the whole session. Rather than a warm-up, this worked as a framework. I was feeling pretty comfortable as a facilitator.
Discussion: Group split, frustrating webdev (5 min)
(5 minutes)
- Proposed trigger: Last or most memorable frustrating web project development or deployment experience. Could be yours as developer, yours as the one needing a website, or someone elses.
- We wrote short ideas around our experiences in cards.
- Then we clustered those cards detecting relations. We came up with a lot of community / social related problems and very few solely technical related problems. Even tech related problems as absurd deadlines that end-up in tons of unmantained code, was all about
My thoughts
: this took around 10 minutes. But it was really fun. Participants came-up with a huge set of ideas. What was really useful was that concepts I was expecting to appear like: “we did have no money”, “we did have no time”, were kind of out of the discussion. Basically because they are so evident and constant, that even those received a different approach from us; we were all talking about people. Problems were about people not-being-considered being developers or part of the beneficted communities. Even everytime we mentioned “methodologies”, the basic aim of this session, thoughts around them were trivialised in favor of conflict-management, lack of developer and community contact, power abuse from project managers etc. Pretty therapeutic.
Explanation: Where Your code is political came from
This session derives from the in-class hard work done by feminist and technologist Irene Soria, who has been done thorough work within academic and activist circles in Mexico, regarding tech, privacy, safety and critical-tech awareness and literacy (i.e. workshops, classes etc.)
We have got beautiful feedback from amazing participants and students through the years. I have worked with Irene in designing courseware and class-plans and so we wrote an essay for guiding MozFest session aims. I grounded and tailored these ideas to build this probably extremely concise session, for gathering thoughts and participation from mozillians around one of Your code is political first possible technical campaign: campaigning for politically-aware developers and strong community-based methodologies for Web projects.
After all those session-coaching sessions, including a movement organization talk, I decided to create an idea and community-thermometer session where we are could share and celebrate our socially-aware tech approach and identity, aiming to build a movement for socially aware webdev methodologies through web-literacy: each project should be a Web masterclass for both communities and developers.
Discussion: design an imaginary project (20 minutes)
- Participants were asked to develop an imaginary web development project in pairs considering it to be:
- Benefecting a non-profit or...
- A community empowering proposal, or...
- A project for culture & arts, or...
- What else?
- We explained our projects to the group, barely but necessarily speaking about a method to develop it.
- After they designed their project, they were asked to press ENTER at my laptop, who was running a simple BASH script picking a random country. So, that previously developed project had to be designed at an specific country.
- Discussion was built around the specifics of developing in that country and what kind of non-colonial, intersectional approach should we have to build that community-based and not developer / paternalistic based.
My thoughts
: it is amazing how many “global south” countries were at the list. We were 8 at the room and only two projects developed in countries from Mercosur, or European Union or any huge economic adscription. Therefore, this let us get through the Deepening face seemlessly.
Deepening: Current methodologies
- We really covered this point at the previous discussion. The outcome was: we don't really have to talk about previous methodologies; being agile or whatever was all about understanding an building the project.
- I only brought the concepts of:
- Current webdev methodologies: based on models of transformation
- Most probably in 3-stages:
1. GET client's needs or whatevers
2. DEV client's needs of whatevers
3. GET client's feedback
4. GOTO 1 (Remember to KILLSIGN / QUIT everything when you feel we can't go on)
Activity: The world upside down
- Providing we did have to begin late (11am session was hard), we did a wider talk rather than an specific activity on this:
- If common 3-staged methodology was not efficient, what would a community based methodology?
- I proposed the world-upside-down strategy: let us put that 1, 2, 3 in reverse order.
- Probably renaming it:
1. IMMERSE into the community to DEVELOP the concept
2. GET opinions and suggestions as feedback
3. CREATE code
4. GOTO 3, community is developing, no further feedback needed. (Still KILLSIGN / QUIT until resources last, or when goal is achieved. Bugtracking was done during the process.)
- Use _Participative observation_ anthropological techniques rather than client's needs.
- Do accompainment not mantainace.
Conclusion: ending quote and comments
> "To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination."
> -- Bell Hooks
> -- _A pedagogy of hope_ (USA, 2013)
Building a movement towards better community-based webdev
TODO