[hs-equality] People at Metalab have taken issue with some incidents at 29c3

[stoupin at riseup.net]

Hi all,

I’d like to bring an example to further the discussion. My example is not
related to the hacker community, but I think it can help us envisage other
ways in which we could approach the issue we are facing. The example I
want to bring is from Occupy Wall Street.

As early as October 2011, many (self-identify) women, queer, non-cis
gender folks and LGBTQI, among others, did not feel safe in Zuccotti park.
Some did not feel their voices were being heard, while others experienced
all sorts of violence (sexual violence, racism, homophobia, transphobia,
etc.) Unfortunately, all these forms of violence were pushing people out.

To attempt to tackle such issue, the safer spaces working group decided to
establish community guidelines. The guidelines were a way to find answers
to the question:  How can we work together and have everyone included in
this space?

The answer was quite simple at face value: What if all together we could
up with a community agreement.

So the safer spaces working group embarked on a 5 months process of
facilitating a community agreement. Making a space safer for everyone also
entailed the recognition that feeling safe differed for different people,
so they needed to make that clear. Their idea was that everyone (meaning
every working groups, caucuses and committees) needed to contribute to the
community agreement to have buy-in. The agreement could have been written
by a few “leaders”, but in that case the agreement would have 1) looked
very differently and 2) buy-in would also have been more difficult.  The
process took 5 months. It took such a long time because they wanted people
to be accountable to the document, to feel as if they “owned” the
document.

Moreover, underneath that whole 5 months process of writing the community
agreement, there was an educational process going on of explaining why we
needed to talk about racism, why people committing violence was excluding
certain people, etc. That was an educational process to discuss these
different forms of intersecting oppressions.

All and all, the community agreement did not solve all the issues, but
according to many it was a transformative experience.

I thought this example could inspire you, as it inspired me.  To read the
community agreement visit:
http://www.nycga.net/groups/safer-spaces-committee/docs/occupy-wall-street-community-agreement-proposed-by-safer-spaces

Sophie