 Hello everybody, welcome to this brown-backed talk at the Wikimedia Foundation. My name is Jan Gerlach. I'm a public policy manager here, and I'm beyond excited today to welcome my friend, Gisela Pérez-Acha, to talk to us about online gendered violence and feminist projects in Latin America that aim to change that. Gisela is an attorney, a journalist, and a digital rights activist at Derechos Digitales in Mexico. Derechos Digitales is a group out of Chile that works on all sorts of policy and digital rights issues all across Latin America, a region which is really important for us as well. As many of you will know, we have strong chapters and user groups all across the region. So, without further ado, I'll give the floor to Gisela, who is going to talk to you for roughly 40 minutes and then we'll have time for a Q&A. We will have the opportunity to ask questions. Also via IRC, the Wikimedia office channel will be watched by a colleague of ours here, and we'll get like 10 or 15 minutes of Q&A towards the end. Thank you. Well, hi. Thank you very much. I'm super excited to be here. I love Wikimedia. Recently on the International Women's Day, I wanted to tell you about it before I start this. We had a huge editatona where we had around 150 women editing Wikipedia, including gender standards, and these amazing soccer players, female soccer players and luchadoras, like in lucha libre, like professional wrestlers. And it was just amazing. So I really thank you all for your wonderful work. I know that sometimes you're behind the computer and it doesn't really feel like you are actually contributing to knowledge and change, but I really wanted to tell you that I feel very much like that regarding Wikimedia and Wikipedia. Let me get my clicker. Okay, so I'm going to try to make it a little bit shorter so that we're not sitting here for 40 minutes, and we have more time to discuss. If at any time something that I'm saying is strange or weird, sometimes I get lost in translation with English and sometimes I am super lawyer-y, so just go ahead and interrupt me and tell me to stop with con confianza, like we say in Spanish. So the question that we've been asking ourselves in feminist movements in Latin America, technical feminist movements in Latin America, is how can we have longer term strategies to counter digital gender violence? Why do we say digital? We don't say online gender violence because we have documented cases where ICTs are used in a violent way against women, for example, indigenous women that are not online, and that also counts as digital gender violence. So we're trying to push this term rather than online, but also see it, yeah. Information and communication technologies. Good, thank you very much. You see? We assume things and it's not necessarily the truth. So I'll tell you about our part of my reflection, analyzing these movements and also as a part of this movement, how do we see the problem and what is our diagnosis about it? So let's start very basically with gender. I know that probably some, most of you know what I will be saying and talking about right now, but I still want us all to be on the same page. So there's a basic semantic difference that I always like to make between sex and gender. It's not the same to say man and woman than masculinity and femininity, because sex is the biological threat, whether you're born with in very rough terms, because it's obviously not that binary, with a penis or a vagina, and then gender is what is socially considered appropriate for penises and vaginas, although it's not black and white. There's a lot of grace and that's what the queer movement is about. So let's see, what is... I love these GIFs. They were made by The Huffington Post in a campaign that said 40 things that are said to men that are bad for everyone, because that's what gender is. Gender is about the roles, the attributes, the colors, the topics of conversation that are deemed socially appropriate for men and women. So when we think about online gendered violence, this is exactly the same. We have to think about it as a continuum. Offline and online are exactly the same thing. I always say that I feel very much like a cyborg, quoting Donna Haraway. I cannot stop touching my phone. I can't. I am technologically intervened, for example, by birth control since I was 16 years old. I stopped now, but I was on birth control for 10 years, and that is technology. So we intervene in technology, and technology intervenes us as well. So when we take these gender standards into the online environment, then we have topics of conversation that we are not allowed to touch, as women, which means feminities are not allowed to talk about, for example, politics or sports, or even technology. I did a tweet on Google last week, and it got viral, and I got so trolled by guys, obviously, or at least people, avatars that look like guys. So what are we allowed to talk about as girls on social media? What can you think about? Like babies, what? Fashion, exactly. Fashion is a big one. Design, what else? What else can you think about? What can we talk? Cooking, no? Or brides, or decorating, exactly. Decoration is a big one. But online gender violence is, for dissident women, when we step out of those things that are deemed appropriate, and we start talking about sports, politics, or technology, online gender violence is the social sanction to keep us dissident women at bay. So that's why it's super important to push and transcend, what online gender violence causes is self-censorship. I'm going to show you a video. We made this with sports anchor women from Fox at another NGO that I collaborate at. It's in Spanish, so I will try to simultaneously translate, and I am sorry for the bad words. Sorry, Jan. Jimena, you're a whore. Fucking prostitute. Shut up, prostitute. I'm going to get my dick out so it knows, so you know it. You're not a doctor, an engineer. You just show your boobs on TV. You're no one. That's a good outfit for a whore. You look super yummy in that dress. The only bad thing about the soccer match is this girl feeling that she's an expert, so just go back to the kitchen. Stop talking about sports. Go back to washing bathrooms in the kitchen. And well, that's a rape threat. That's them before going on air. So that's the initiative. I know it's kind of, it's very depressing. It's very sad. I'm not going to get a tutorial debate on whether to include the images that we get or not, but we decided it was just better to do it because how can you create awareness if you don't know what's going on? We also have to take into consideration that, where are we? Yeah, we also have to take into consideration that Mexico is an extremely violent place and that violence is also translating online and then with genderized violence. It gets worse. We get a lot of, for example, narco imagery. We get a lot of death and rape threats with AK-47s that have posted with my name or just like, I don't know, like a lot of money and a lot of cocaine saying that they will come and they know where I live and things like that. And it's very hard not to lose perspective and know when it's actually going to transcend into my physicality or not. But these threats are real. One thing that we struggle with a lot with police, for example, is that when we denounce it, trying to get legal processes to work, they're like, oh, no, but it's virtual. It doesn't matter. Like, why don't you close your Twitter account? That's what we got. Like, these girls have three million followers. They are sports anchors. Like, they love sports and they're beautiful, but like, is it wrong to be beautiful and love sports? And they get called horse all the time, whereas political commentators get called lesbians and like, you need to fuck more because it's obvious that you don't fuck and that's why you're talking about politics. But it's the exact same type of violence. So this slide is about their short-term reactions that feminists have put together to counter online gender violence, public shaming, for example. This is a campaign in Colombia that is called Alerta Machitrol. It's like the macho troll where you kind of like seek to expose these people, these people that are doing these attacks and trying to like publicly shame them and see where it goes. I did it last time with what I, the tweet that I put, it was like, are you idiot or are you high on drugs? Like, that's it. Like, it might not have been a perfect tweet, but that's the response I get. And that's also genderized. Would a guy get the same type of violence? And that's the thing, guys also get a lot of violence online, especially in Mexico because it's a violent place. But the thing is that it's disproportionate compared to the violence that we as women receive. And that is partly explained because of gender. So another example, I've been thinking a really long time about this. I'm actually writing a paper because if you Google me, you'll find me naked. I protested topless like five years ago, six years ago. And still, no matter what I write, no matter how many things I publish, no matter what I do, my topless body will always be on top of the search results. Why? Is there a programming bias embedded in Google's algorithm? Is it the cultural bias because people will obviously want to click more on my tits than on my long PDFs analyzing malware in the region, right? But then I only consented to be femurously naked in a specific environment in a public place like the street. Google is not public. It's a private platform. And I am not ready to concede that it is public. So that's another, a whole other thing. But what I also wanted, like where I want to go at this, you've probably seen a lot of debate around the Google's autocomplete as well. In English, you used to search why do women, why are women, why are Jews, why are Muslims. And the autocomplete just said terrible racist and misogynistic things. They have changed it in English. But in Spanish, we haven't had that conversation. The autocomplete right now it's doing is just validating stereotypes and completely ridiculous cliche like why do women get wet? Why are women always late? Why do women love assholes? Why do women get abortions? Why do women get their periods? Why are women jealous? And things like this. So it's not trivial to say, I really like this quote by the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. They were an indigenous rebel army that their uprising was in 1994 against NAFTA. And in 2013, they published this poem asking if we could resist in a different way. Can we still resist using these platforms as feminists, for example, as anarchists, indigenous anarchists like the Zapatistas, or do we have to create a whole other different thing and a whole other different structure for this to make sense? So by saying this, let's, I've been really nerding out on infrastructure at the ITF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, where all the protocols get created and it's a lot of dudes, way too many dudes. And you know, they're also old. Don't kill me, ITF people. Don't kill my papers. But it's like the average age is just really old. So that's also another, there's a generational thing there. It's an amazing space, by the way. I really encourage you to engage on it. We need more cool people. So this quote is, we shape our tools and our tools shape us. Technology, you've heard it, it's not neutral. The Internet itself is not neutral. It's created by people, or it's programmed by people, either by machine learning or somebody that manually puts the inputs. And in that way, it reflects the ideologies of the people that are behind it. So that's also a very, in terms of policy, that's also a cliche that we need to start breaking. It is not neutral. There are ideologies embedded in it. So the definition of infrastructure that I like the most is by my friend and co-author at ITF, Nielsen-Uver. He says that technology is the, sorry, technology. Infrastructure is the assemblage that makes things run from cables to meetings, from servers to protocols, people mailing lists and code. And the interesting thing about infrastructure is that it's invisible. So imagine the pipes of a house that you never notice until they break. Because as an end user especially, you never see the protocols, you never see the code, you never see, we just interact with interfaces themselves, and interfaces themselves also have a whole set of infrastructure behind it. So getting to the point, the basic premise of the report that we made about Latin American and Glimpse is this one. Today because of gender norms, infrastructure is a male space. And it's also a space dominated by guys in the global north. I have a problem with this premise. I don't think we have to necessarily get it all like this because in the history of technology, there's a lot of women and a lot of diverse people that have contributed. So making this the official version of infrastructure and technology, it's also a problem itself from my perspective. So let's talk about a myth. This is the performance artist Guillermo Gómez Peña. And Guillermo Gómez Peña wrote in 1998, he has a beautiful quote saying, the mythology goes like this, we Latinos do not make high technology. We are merely manual beings, artisans, whose understanding of the world is metaphysical, but not technological. And when we dare to create technology, we just merely copy what Europeans are doing. 1998. I think this is amazing because it's a part of a myth that goes on about how Latinos cannot make technology. And you can also apply it for women, right? It's not only about Latinos, but because of gender structures, you can also say, you know what, women are highly emotionally rational beings. Hashtag, do you remember the Google memo? Well, they are vulnerable, and they are unstable and neurotic, and that's not technology. Technology is structured. Technology is super ABC, right? So it can also, it doesn't only apply for race standards or ethnicity, but it also applies for gender. What I really like about Gómez Peña, and I'm much more in his line than on others, is that he says, we Latinos often feed this mythology by overstating our romantic and metaphysical nature and portraying ourselves as colonial victims of technology. So all this ongoing discourse about digital colonialism, I think we have to be careful with it, because we risk it, we risk falling into a category where we ourselves are portraying ourselves as victims of colonial technology and not stepping out of these cultural stereotypes that allow us to do differently. Although it is true that most of the web speaks English, even though at a worldwide level not everybody speaks English, online content created by the Global South is super low, we'll see some graphs on that. And from Latin America, we're dealing with a lot of trade treaties that are pushing copyright laws from the United States to control technologies and overall control emerging technologies. So there's a couple of graphs here, I really like them, because they illustrate how content is mostly created in the Global North. So this is what used to be Freebase, that's the geographic knowledge. As you can see, there's a lot of density in Europe and the United States and Canada and lower density on the other countries. India also has a lot of density. So that's the top ten languages on the internet in terms of millions of users. English is the most widely spoken. And that's the Wikipedia, I'm sure you've probably seen this. I thought it was interesting to add it because there are more Wikipedia articles inside of this circle than outside of it in the entire world. Nonetheless, this is 2012. So I bet things have changed a lot, but it would be really interesting to map that now and try to have this conversation on Wikipedia itself. That's the IPv4 activity during day and night. And look how densely populated, again, we see it here. And here, look at this big black hole, that's the Amazon. And this is 2015, so this is a little bit more recent and it's still very much like that. The African continent also has big black holes over here. So when we put this together with the fact that around the world, guys are more connected than girls, than women. Women are 50% less likely to be connected than guys in the same age group and the same economic standards. But then we also ask, what is access? It goes way beyond connectivity. You have to actually have content in your language that is relevant to you, mostly zero-rating Facebook data or WhatsApp data, that's not enough. It's actually empowering access that allows you to incorporate it into your daily life. I got this from Wikipedia. This is another map of the percentage of population that is connected in each country and we still always have more in the global north. By talking about all of this, I hope I didn't bore you. Now I'm getting into the feminist infrastructure projects. We need structural solutions to encounter online gendered violence. It's not enough to be partying codes and partying platforms. So what can we do to go beyond that? You know this, right? Ella. So I don't know if you heard, but there was a problem with Ella when they first launched it because there was no button for muting or blocking people because it was guys who started it and guys didn't think that you could get harassed and you needed to block people. Whereas it's a standard for social media now. And I want to say something, like when I say guys, I don't mean to blame the guys that are in this room or the guys that are watching us online. I only want to think about the gender structure that is making us think like that and that is making these inequalities very present. Another example that I really like about this structural change and structural design, it's about how can we design things differently. Do you think, for example, that getting more women in designing tech would make a difference per se? That has been a long conversation because then not only because you're a girl, you're going to have progressive standards embedded in your technology, right? Or not only because you're a guy, it means that you are coding in a way that makes us feel excluded. No, it's way more complex than this because it's structural. I really like this tweet. I mean, I always assume everybody knows Bumble, but yesterday I was having a conversation with someone that didn't. I love Bumble. I use Bumble all the time. This girl worked at Tinder and then she quit Tinder because of discrimination and harassment. Now Tinder is suing Bumble because of the swipe left, swipe right trademark. Bumble, the thing is that guys cannot talk to you. I got so many dick pics on Tinder, so many of them. I felt relieved when Bumble came into the market because I get to talk first. And that's also changing the gender relationship. And it's diminishing harassment. So the CEO is amazing. She has zero tolerance for harassment. They're banning gone pictures, which is great because the worst thing I can see on Bumble is hashtag masculinity. So fragile holding an AK-47 in Mexico City. It's like, no, just block reports. Like, why? No. And I get these beautiful notifications that are cooler than my matches. They're like, just love yourself. You know, like you're having a hard day and then just Bumble gives you a really self-care notification post. And I want to give these two examples to make a point about we can design technology in a different way than what has been predominant until today. And that's where feminism comes in. So there's also, I think, overall in Mexico and in Latin America, we have a lot of conversations about what feminism really means. They call us feminazis. That's like the most typical insult. I don't know why, because obviously wanting gender equality is the same as invading Poland. But I think for me and for us at Derecho Digitales, and that's why we made this report of the feminist initiatives that are trying to change the internet structure and the internet infrastructure. Feminism is one of the very many ideologies that can offer solutions, structural solutions for this that also take into account race, for example, ethnicity and class inequalities. So let's do a little bit of Beyoncé to be the basic one-on-one feminism, just social, political and economical equality between the sexes. That's it. It's super simple. Like, there's a big discussion, can guys be feminists? Yeah, if you believe in this, welcome. Why not? I use this gift a lot, because I think it's super clear. It's super. You don't have to go into a lot of gender theory. It's just that. And when we think about feminist infrastructure, we're defining it in terms of hardware, software applications, but also participatory design, safe spaces, and social solidalities. And I will talk a little bit more later about that. So I'm saying that feminism is one of the ideologies that can best encounter this, because feminism has worked over the years, and academically and non-academically, with principles that we can start incorporating into technology, for example, the principle of consent, which has been under a lot of fire because of the recent discussions. And because of that, I'm going to play another video because I love videos. This one is really short. Wait, where is it? No. Brandon fixes everything. Oh, there it is. It's just the mouse. Awesome. If you're still struggling with consent, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you're making them a cup of tea. You say, hey, would you like a cup of tea? And they go, oh my god, I would love a cup of tea. Thank you. Then you know they want a cup of tea. If you say, hey, would you like a cup of tea? And they're like, you know, I'm not really sure. Then you can make them a cup of tea or not, but be aware that they might not drink it. And if they don't drink it, then, and this is the important bit, don't make them drink it. Just because you made it doesn't mean you're entitled to watch them drink it. And if they say, no thank you, then don't make them tea at all. Just don't make them tea. Don't make them drink tea. Don't get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don't want tea, OK? They might say, yes please, that's kind of you. And then when the tea arrives, they actually don't want the tea at all. Sure, that's kind of annoying as you've gone to all the effort of making the tea, but they remain under no obligation to drink the tea. They did want tea, now they don't. Some people change their mind in the time it takes to boil the kettle, brew the tea, and add the milk. And it's OK for people to change their mind, and you are still not entitled to watch them drink it. And if they're unconscious, don't make them tea. Unconscious people don't want tea, and they can't answer the question, do you want tea? Because they're unconscious. OK, maybe they were conscious when you asked them if they wanted tea, and they said yes, but in the time it took you to boil the kettle or brew the tea and add the milk, they are now unconscious. You should just put the tea down, make sure the unconscious person is safe, and this is the important part again. Don't make them drink the tea. They said yes then, sure, but unconscious people don't want tea. If someone said yes to tea, started drinking it, and then passed out before they'd finished it, don't keep on pouring it down their throat. Take the tea away, make sure they are safe, because unconscious people don't want tea. Trust me on this. If someone said yes to tea around your house last Saturday, that doesn't mean they want you to make them tea all the time. They don't want you to come around to their place unexpectedly and make them tea and force them to drink it, going, but you wanted tea last week, or to wake up to find you pouring tea down their throat, going, but you wanted tea last night. If you can understand how completely ludicrous it is to force people to have tea when they don't want tea, and you are able to understand when people don't want tea, then how hard is it to understand when it comes to sex? Whether it's tea or sex, consent is everything. And on that note, I'm going to make myself a cup of tea. I love that view. You can find it on YouTube, tea and consent. I just think that rather than having a whole lecture about consent, it's just like everyone should be watching this. So, I've been thinking a lot about this term coming from feminism and feminist theory and gender studies. What if we apply the basic principles of consent, for example, to data protection or to our own technology. All this Cambridge Analytica Facebook leaks, it's basically narrowed down to consent. Like how are Facebook users supposed to have this info? Another principle that coming from feminism I really like is this concept of bodily autonomy. So, thinking about this term of autonomous infrastructure and autonomous technology is very common amongst activists, digital rights activists. But what if we think about autonomy from a gendered and feminist perspective as well? Just the right to dispose of our own bodies has been a subject in the past, I don't know, like 100 years probably with abortion and just not legislating over our own bodies. But how would it look like if we take this into technology itself? So, that's where the concept of just how shaping autonomy within our own technologies with a gender perspective, self-organization, and it's basically autonomy defined as a need for freedom for self-valorization, which is an interesting concept, and mutual aid. So, it's building communitarian things rather than scalable things. You might be a little bit lost right now, but I wanted to pass all this big, theoretical things so that we can understand the feminist projects that are working currently in Latin America a little bit better. I love that. So, that's they basically do That's not in English, sorry. I'm just like putting this... All this... It's a hack space for black women in Brazil. Because under this premise of self-care and mutual aid, what Preta Lab is trying to think is how to learn about technologies in a non-hierarchical and non-maridocratic way. I'm going to tell you a little story. I tried... I tried to learn Java last year, and there was no, like, exclusively female hack spaces in Mexico City. I enrolled myself in the Public Engineering Faculty. It was 50 guys and me. And they learned how to code with Pokemon metaphors. That because I was playing with dolls when I was little, I missed on all the Pokemon fun. You know, I didn't choose my dolls. They gave them to me. It's the worst. They're like plastic. They're super creepy. They're like plastic. And they have this, like, big round mouth where girls just put, like, the food in. It's insane. They program us to just feed babies since we're that age. It's totally unfair. Anyways, because I missed on the Lego and Pokemon fun, I could not understand the geeky nerdy metaphors that they used to learn. And in the end, of course, I was super demotivated. I decided to go another path and watch videos or whatever. So imagine if I felt like that. I am a lawyer. I work in digital rights. I have the privilege to be here and interact with people that can explain to me or I have the confidence to go up and say I didn't understand. Can you imagine indigenous women, for example? Can you imagine these black women from Brazil? What they say in this video is really beautiful because technology is way more than a technological knowledge. It's about intervening your world. It's about speaking out. It's about living, moving, deconstructing, sharing and communicating. Technology is everything. I mean, then there's another discussion. How do you define technology itself? But I do believe that we're intrinsically caught by technology in all its levels. So now feminist infrastructure itself. We've been through the feminist principles. We've been through the problems with the structural design of the internet platforms and the problems with the structural design of getting into tech as well. Which is also funny. Right now it's very trendy to talk about... I lost my clicker. There it is. It's very trendy to talk about men in tech, the problem with men in tech. But one of the first people to ever program a computer was Ada Lovelace in 1842. Whatever happened after that, it's gender. It's that little doll that everybody's giving to my cousin and it's the Legos that they're giving to my other cousin, that is a guy. I wish it was the other way. It works better in Spanish. So what exactly is feminist infrastructure? What the feminist infrastructure projects in Latin America are trying to attack right now, not attack, but counter an approach is... For example, can we have feminist servers? Servers that work in a community, just in a community. Servers that allow people that have pro-abortion sites to just be there and not charge anything. I don't think this clicker is going to work anymore. That's okay. I can just manually do it. I got excited. Just try to think about technology from a different perspective. And not only about technology itself, about infrastructure. We need the servers to connect. So who's running their own servers? Who's running their own infrastructure? It's not only about software. It's about hardware as well. It's about the way that different women come together in these projects and learn about it. Queer trans, non-binary people in general. How do we welcome them to access a server? How do we welcome them to have autonomy and to be able to touch the things that are making us connect without necessarily depending on these huge companies that are making all of these decisions despite us and using us. And we need them to connect and stay communicated. So the principle of bodily autonomy is 100% applied here. If we think as this infrastructure and this technology and these applications and these platforms as our body, we should be able to dispose of them however we want. And neither copyright law or the proprietary and capitalist ideology that all technology is based upon today allows us to do that. This is Vedetas from Brazil. It's vedetas.org. And I really like this because they promote the hack in language of instead of saying servidor, which is mail, just saying servidora. And that already in a group of programmers makes them all laugh. I was like, why don't we use the feminist servidor a vedetas? Literally, I was in a room because we were coordinating an earthquake. We were verifying fake news after the earthquake in September and this is ridiculous. They used Bitly to... How do you pronounce that? Bitly? They used Bitly to shorten certain URLs. We had to call Bitly, Silicon Valley, in the middle of an emergency because we needed to change the original link without losing the interface link. I don't know how to call it. Whereas if you administer your own URL shortener, you don't have that problem. You don't have that centralized technology in the middle of an earthquake. So they also provide link shorteners and I love the name and the history of that. Vedeta was the name of these little house structures in Brazil in the 19th century where a black slave called Maria Felipe basically killed 12 colonial men. They had this fortress in the beach in Brazil and that was a vedeta. So now they call that vedeta and they give free service to activists around the world and they also provide documentation of violence cases. I'm almost done. And this is my favorite project ever in life. Ever. So this is Kefir. It's an autonomous feminist tech co-op in Latin America and what I really like about them, I have this Dutch friend that was like, I'll tell you the Dutch friend joke at the end. Let me tell you first about this. So this is their manifesto. They embody all this diversity and just try to approach servers and infrastructure in a different way. Infrastructure all the way from administering it to making the rules within a community. Maybe they don't have electricity in the community where they're working. Maybe they don't have Wi-Fi or internet access. So how do you provide all the wires all the tubes and everything that they need so that they can autonomously configure it within a community? It's very interesting because scalability is inherently capitalist. They don't want to scale. They work in this project where it's just a little community and they are okay with that. And what it's really interesting is that most of this autonomous infrastructures that activists put up and they managed it themselves so now the joke about my Dutch friend he was like, but what are they doing? They're just running servers. I run like 10 and in their manifesto what they exactly say it's like, yes it's not the same to be a cis guy in Amsterdam than to be an indigenous woman with two jobs and seven kids. Having free time is a privilege and women normally have less free time. It's actually one of the reasons why women have less access to the internet because of lack of free time because we tend to do double jobs especially when we're moms or we have kids, I'm not but if women are moms and they have kids, they have household chores and plus they have they're in the labor labor market so it's a double job and domestic work is not paid, it's not recognized it's not unionized and it's civilized. So the point I mean my Dutch friend has his own bias it's also unconscious bias that we constantly replicate I have them myself but they are also trying to think how are we going to learn differently how are we going to approach this indigenous woman that wants to learn how to run her own service in an autonomous way in a rural town outside of Mexico how are we going to teach her or for example the violence that they see as violence the manufacturing process in in fábricas how do you say fábricas? factories thank you the manufacturing process in factories they see it as violence as well because it cuts through race and it cuts through class as well and through an exploitation system in all our computers, batteries phones etc so it's hardware yes it's important but it's also software but it's also this mutual aid and solidarity and community building that we're trying to do and this is the URL shortener so you just go in and it's how we look after each other read our care policy for all beings and multi-species so the way you design the way you communicate the way you interact the interface itself the way we come together and have meetings so I wish we used this during the earthquake they laughed at me I was like why didn't we use the servidora and they were like you don't call it servidora it's like you can why not that's already dissenting that's already hacking patricky so I like to think that the long-term strategy has to do with breaking cliches of course we have to keep on developing self-defense strategies now I'm developing a bot so that when I get bot networks attacking me with rape threats maybe I can like get bot networks back hopefully twitter won't censor my bots and they will censor theirs but why are we supposed to just cross our arms and do nothing but that's only reactive right so how to make it differently in the structural way so breaking cliches and to sum up first if my body is a battleground if I get to decide who I slip with where and when I'm naked not on google forever but on the street because of a certain political protest in a context if I get to decide what I wear what I not wear when I have an abortion, when I don't my intimacy, my consent my body is a battleground then the internet is a battleground as well because I see the internet and technology as an inherent part of my body and I think more and more in the future if it's going to be better or for better or for worse more intertwined um the second and this has been it's a little thing but for me it's just been groundbreaking we women can be creators we can we can code we can play with hardware I just learned how to solder last week and I felt super I burned a little bit my fingers but you know like I had never done it I had never done it but with my grandmother telling me that I was a princess and that if I shut up I look more beautiful there's a saying in Spanish that goes like that calladita te ves mas bonita it's insane so what happens if all of us here start re-educating ourselves and overall future technologies so that we conceive ourselves as creators girls can be creators of technology, girls can be coders girls can be hackers and it's fine, it's perfect as soon as I realized also when I started to learn how to program that I had this own like interiorized frustration about I can't do this, I can't do this I'm bad at math, I'm bad at math I'm bad at math no girls are not bad at math people are bad at math sometimes it doesn't have to do anything on whether you have a vagina or a penis it's all socially constructed and it's all these silly stereotypes that if we get rid of them from scratch of line we might do a little bit better closely the digital gender gap, I really like this infographic by the World Wide Web well the World Wide Web Foundation the World Foundation it's about content access is just cool content, I have these friends that are making this really cool project on Google.net because we were trying to Google information about policies in general there's nothing there's nothing that can speak to you in a cool graphic way and say like I don't even remember what we were specifically looking for but the lack of information about female vaginas online is insane so content has to do with access, access to infrastructure to be able to touch it to be able to tinker with it manage it, administer it within our own communities education of course we need more women in STEM in general and that gap in Mexico only 10% of engineers in the engineering field are women only 10% that's nothing and then we ask ourselves how this technology and why is technology being created like this and finally well of course if we want more women in technology we have to counter gender violence but then we go in a circle again and lastly and that's the thing that these projects are starting to push how would a feminist internet look like because it's not only internet created by women because then we start genderizing the women that are creating it as well like oh because women are just nicer and they have more self-care so more self-care will be embedded in technology no it's a feminist internet there's a little bit of a difference and just summarizing everything the internet is technology and infrastructure is public and political talking about consent and intimacy the video of the tea that we saw let's start to think about how to apply it to technology it's really well-developed theory why can we not take it and just land it there autonomous collective management situated knowledge and narratives that it's internet in our context at Wikipedia there's a big debate about this in Mexico at least the Wikimedia Foundation is trying to make content in Mayan for example and solidarity and self-care which the preta lav girls are doing amazingly in Brazil how to get black women to identify with other black women that are doing technology thinking about technology differently and that's it thank you very much that's our webpage you can download the whole thingy thanks Gisela are there any questions in the room I'm happy to pass the mic around so hello hello so many times in international development you have primarily white organizations making things or having programs or services for let's say countries that they don't look anything like or their context are nothing alike too and that reflecting the people you serve has always been a nice to have there has been nothing done much about this disparity and I guess my question to you is much of what you've talked about has made me think about how much we need to reflect the very people we are working with because otherwise they are we're just in viewing our own bias on what we think they need rather than knowing what they need and building for them in their context and allowing that participation so my question to you is how do you convince somebody to share that power to maybe completely open those doors so that it's no longer a nice to have but a need to have that we need to reflect the very people working for thank you for the question I think it's a very good question it happens a lot overall for example now that I'm after the earthquake I'm thinking a lot about humanitarian relief technologies and how for example in Latin America and the Caribbean we are highly affected by earthquakes and hurricanes all the beautiful paradisiac Caribbean islands are just going to be wiped away by cyclones so there's a lot of humanitarian relief tools developed here in the US in Europe that are trying to be implemented in for example I don't know like this Martinique or all these all these islands that were really badly hit by Irma and Maria and it's really funny because like they had all this deployment of technology and then obviously when a hurricane comes in it just wipes all your electricity infrastructure so they don't even they didn't even have electricity and these guys were like ready to go with their super cool software you know to like so I think that I mean it might be a very exaggerated example but I think it illustrates exactly what you're talking about like oh yeah this software for hurricane relief and then no electricity so for me this is like this efforts are first step towards deconstructing I know we have a really long way to go but we need to start taking these little first steps and it's also like what I tell my my my fellow coder friends don't feel bad because of things you do you're doing great you know just keep on doing it keep on developing but maybe if a girl comes into your hack space approach her talk to her be a little bit nicer don't assume she knows all the pokemon jokes no so I think by starting with this ideas we might be able to get somewhere but I don't have the answer to this is the product that we need to be developing right here right now but if we enable communities and empower communities to have their own products I think it can be done in a very interdisciplinary way like it's not about us just stepping outside but maybe going to indigenous communities and like hanging out with them for a really long time and just working together I don't know if that answers your question a little bit thank you other questions we have one question on IRC do you think languages with a lot of masculine and feminine grammatical gender are a barrier to gender equality if so how do we as a society begin to address this that's a very good question also so in Spanish some people are doing excess instead of like servidor o servidora or like nosotros people just put like nosotras which I think is ridiculous and looks horrible to be honest but that's like a grammatical discussion I would say like what I've been my approach has been addressing everything in feminine so then the guys feel excluded and it's like that's how I feel whenever because in Spanish Portuguese and Italian when you say except for French maybe I don't know when you do the plural you do the plural in masculine and it encompasses everyone so I just started doing pluralities in feminine and it's at least it creates a conversation and I think one very important thing for me has been figuring out how to not do it aggressively but just kind of like throw these little rocks to spark conversations but not do it from a defensive point of view or just yelling like goodbye old white man because that's not like people just stop listening so I think and it's not the white man's problem it's a whole patriarchal society structural economical, social and political paradigm so it's not like individuals so I guess I would say that for these languages you're not going to change the entire language not for now but just sparking these little conversations with a lot of love and a lot of mutual respect and mutual aid and self-care I think it can get us into better places Any other questions? Thank you so much for your presentation I have two questions actually the first one and I guess that you're preaching to the choir here but like you spoke a lot about content and a lot about like relevant content that's missing and I think that within our like the Wikimedia communities they're all about like trying to figure this out and what their role is in Mexico I'm sure you're aware of all the amazing work that Wikimedia Mexico is putting out there trying to like fill in that gap bringing more women in but what do you think would be our role in general here not just the foundation but in the Wikimedia movement to try to really address that content gap that you're seeing in content not just about women but for women and mainly what is the men's role in that as well right and I think that that relates a little bit to my second question which is and maybe I'm speaking from personal experience but as a Colombian man being in Bogota and like trying to approach a perspective where you're trying to show yourself supportive of these causes sometimes is rejected even by women themselves right they're like you're like too much or for this or whatever right then like oh no but I'm a gay man oh okay but so it's because you're gay so then it's fine right like there's all like all the stereotypes that are tied into how men should participate or should be partaking to this different causes so maybe related to the second question it would be what is your advice or what are your thoughts around how men should participate into this conversations and sometimes how should they respond to even women that are not perfectly fine with the idea of men participating oh that's a great topic I I recently had a conversation with a guy that was calling me feminazi feminazi feminazi and he was just like kept saying it and saying it and saying it and I was not disturbed I love being a feminazi like that's why I have no identity issues you know so the less I felt disturbed the more he was pushing the term on me and then I looked at him and I told him okay what do you hate about feminazis so feminists no and he said well that they say that all men are rapists I was like okay so you hate that because you are a guy and you're not a rapist right he said yes and then I said okay so I am a feminist and I don't think all guys are rapists because just as gender is a way of not telling women how to live how to express themselves what sexual orientation they can have how they can think that's gender feminism is also about that there's as many feminisms as women in the world so I think my first approach is always not generalize the feminist movement as a one entire single thing with capital letter like kind of like the truth you know and of course within every single movement there's people that are a little bit angrier and a little bit more radical and that's okay because I think we're at a point we're at a pivotal point where like you can't ask a girl that has lived through horrible violence to watch her tone and not be angry you know but what it is wrong is to generalize and say that all of us feminists are the same like between feminisms we disagree a lot we have great debates because we're not always on the same page so I think that would be my answer like just first to not generalize all these feminist movements like how can you participate just there was a great boss fit article I'll send it to Jan so he can circulate it about a hundred ways of how men can participate in the feminist cause it was super funny but it was also very true like listen talk less when there's a feminist conversation going on just listen more and talk less don't try to be the protagonist don't try to be like the one in front of the protest you know they're protesting feminists and there's this guy that was just in the middle like I am a feminist dude it's not your turn you can support but go in the back you know and feminists were super angry at him they were like just move you're taking up all the space take up all the space and I think it's just man spread a little bit less that's what that's what boss fit said it was really funny it was like just just being self-conscious about these little things they go a huge way and I think we need to know how to have better conversations and more peaceful conversations about it regarding your first question super quickly I think you guys are doing a great job keep it up let's go on the infrastructure let's go into access connectivity I mean from this office or any Wikimedia office really it's hard to be able to create all the content that we need online and I think just by being conscious and all the campaigns that you're doing like it's let's not put too much on the Wikimedia's shoulders because the progress that you've been all doing in this realm is already so let's start thinking about the infrastructure the invisible tubes that are breaking and we haven't seen them yet because they're only leaking let's go and fix that let's try to get our mindset on that side that's that's what I would say like just the invisible power structures rather than these interfaces and the wonderful Wikimedia Wikimedia services thanks so much I just have five comments divided into 10 sub points here I'm kidding more than a question I have five comments in bullets exactly if you could anyway thanks so much for talking to us today we're unfortunately out of time I think this was really engaging and also eye-opening thank you so much for joining us for watching online we have recorded this and we will put the YouTube video up later and I'll circulate a link thanks so much for joining us here today