 Yn i. Here is our speaker, he promises to be short and provocative. Right, although he's tall. So there you are. Hello and welcome to my talk. My name is Amran. A bit of background about me. I was involved with London Hack Space a few years ago now, I think. I was one of the core participants there. Then I moved on to Amsterdam and helped to find the Hack Space there called TechInc, as well as being involved in the EMF organisation for 2012 this year, ac byddwch i'r Fhack-maeg gynnal y Gweithloedd. Rwy'n ardal i'r perddig iawn i'r ffogolau byddwn i'r gwaith gweithio. Fe wnaeth amgylchedd mwy ffogol, a rydyn nhw'n fwy ffogol yng Nghymru ac nesaf i'w ddefnyddio'r awdurdod a'r fan yw i'ch gweithio dwi'n gweithio i Saidro fi o wneud o siaradau o fewn i'r berthynas. Ond weig i gyd gilydd eich gweithio, ond mae eich Llywodraeth eich gweithio iawn. Y Llywodraeth eich harvieteidio am 50 hy sphereau ac yn cynnangb ac yn gweld yn ni roedd. Rydym ni'n gweld maes ei gweithio – y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth – pan oedd y cybl sydd gydag am ent os ym Llywodraeth. Mae mae'n hefyd yn y gweithio ar gyfer peolwyr yllwanneu, ac mae'n gyfer cyflwr y Prifysgol, gennym ni'n hefyd i hyffordd y bydd ymyst yn y Llywodraeth. Mae'r cyffredin acysbysg, roedden nhw'n gweithio'n ymwneud o'r cychwyn, a'r cyffredin ar y cyfridgau ar y cyfridgau 60-rhyw sydd yn gweithio ar y cyfridgau a'r cyfridgau. Mae'n fawr i'r ffordd maen nhw, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n cyfridgau ar y Cyfridg Europea, ac o'ch ddigwyddio'n gweithio ar y cyfridgau sydd sydd yn gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio ar y cyfridg worldaidd. mae'r cyfnodd, mae'r cyfnodd, mae'r cyfnodd, ychydig arfer o'i gweld. So mae'n cael ei fod yn ein gweithio. Mae'n rhoi'r cyfnodd ysgrifethau gyda'r feddwl yng Nghymru. Mae'n gyfnodd yn ymgau, yn gweithio'r cyfnodd. Mae'r cyfnodd yn gweithio, a'i gweithio'n cyffredinol i'r cyfnodd y gwaith a'r cyfrifau. Fe wnaeth eich gweithio'n gweithio o'r cyfrifau a'r cyfnodd wedi'u gweithio. .. Alors there are two aspects that most people can agree on. Firstly it's a shared resource for all the people who are members of the hackerspace. Things like tools, a physical place to have workshops. And the second aspect is skills and knowledge sharing. You go there and you meet people from different backgrounds who do different things, whether it's in electronics or radio or programming or woodworking, metal working. Felly, felly, oherwydd, y cyfnod i gael i ddechrau'r gweithloeth Lundiddor, y gallai 1,000 gweithio, mae'n gwych chi'n meddwl ystod. A, yn fany, rydych yn gweithio'n gweithio'r cyfnod ac mae'n gallu ffyrdd i gael ei gweithio'r gweithio ac yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. correcting this days is more of a privilege than anything else. The hake scene is possibly less diverse in the tech sector, which has we know is very male orientated It's a bit of achievement in itself and I have wondered for a long time why that is and what kind of aspect of a hacka space or the general movement as a whole is causing that. If you look to other countries outside of Europe, places like India tend to have a high proportion of female engineers as students than places like the UK or America. For me that suggests there's a possible cultural problem here with the scene itself, both in the tech scene and the hacker scene. The real tricky bit is we have hacker spaces and we advertise them openly to everybody. Why shouldn't they appeal to everybody but why isn't everybody turning up? I think it is down to cultural problems. There's a few and this is not all of them and this is not even some of them. They vary from place to place. You're going to find different problems with different people. A lot of it is personal, some of it is political. One of the main ones that gets shoved in the corner is harassment. I'm not talking about the sexual harassment where a female member comes in with a burrito and some kind of offhand joke is made about it. That's kind of obvious, right? That's a bit of a dick thing to do. But there's a lot of subtle harassment where for instance I've been targeted by an individual over a year, maybe more. Everything I've said, everything I've suggested has been kind of taken down or brought down a level just because they have a particular problem with me that they're not willing to kind of solve. But it's not just interpersonal as well. It can spread to a group and a group can kind of affect a whole community within the hackerspace in that sense. One of the good examples of that is the Women's Only Knights at Tech Inc was a kind of a victim of that. I'm sure there's lots of other examples in other hackerspaces but I'm not going to talk about hackerspaces that I wasn't involved in. The non-obvious harassment is really tricky to deal with, not only to identify as a problem but also to solve. I'm not going to try and suggest too many solutions here. Today I just want to talk about how we can recognise the problems that we have. There's also a level of entitlement that comes with certain sectors of community in a hackerspace. You have the people who volunteer quite readily. They do a lot of infrastructure work maybe. People who don't want to get involved with the messiness will give them a bit of a pass if they get into a bit of trouble because of that person they always help out. They always do something so it's kind of okay. They're not doing any kind of harm. In fact they've done a little bit of good but harassment can affect people quite personally at a very deep level without you even realising it. Especially with hackerspaces attracting people who are not necessarily how to phrase this. People who are kind of sensitive or maybe having some mild mental health difficulties. I'm sure we all know people like that within the space that we kind of frequent. And this kind of entitlement kind of leans into another aspect which is the tyranny of the structuralist which is an essay written about the feminist movement back in the 60s I think it was. Where you have power structures because people have a knowledge which isn't shared or they're in charge of a process which isn't written down. And they are the gatekeepers and suddenly you have a cabal of people who if you get on their bad side or if you annoy them a tiny little bit suddenly you begin to become ostracised from being able to have access to those particular things that these people are in charge of. And the people in charge can also develop some bad habits like using confrontation to establish their hierarchy. It happens a lot in the wider community certainly people like Jake Appelbaum who's almost famous for doing that standing up in the middle of a lecture and insulting and harassing and accusing people who are talking about whatever his project is at the time. And there's also a massive sense of elitism as well which is when you go into a space and you want to learn about Linux say and you want to put on your computer suddenly there's like a whole room argument about which a distribution is the best. And there's like three or four people who are kind of going well this is the best this is the best this is the best and you don't know enough about this and I do and that's my power I know more than you technically. It's the privilege of knowing something and it's exploited again and again and again whether it be electronics will it be software. And it creates a barrier to entry because if you're not if you're not considered on their level who do you go to help for who do you kind of learn from where does the skill sharing come from from that. And this that elitism can be in itself exclusionary to and it wouldn't be surprised me if there were people who went to a hackerspace and felt that and then decided well this is not a place for me I should probably go somewhere else. Whereas I think that kind of elitism should be put aside slightly in favor of the skill and the knowledge sharing hackerspace should essentially be education centers. Maybe not formalized but certainly informally it's a place where we all go to learn. So I've come up with my own little bit of solutionism for recognizing the problems. They only identify the issue they're not going to solve it to solve it you need to get behind whatever particular part of this of this solution is. You can have a code of conduct for example and that's really great because you're saying OK we realize that harassment is a problem we realize all these little things are a problem. But unless you have people willing to execute on the code of conduct to set up a process to deal with whatever comes up and give out the punishments that you've set you're not really going to solve anything all you're going to do is put the paper over the crack so. I've come up with a simple interfaces because I wanted to take the concept of the design patterns we had. We have hackerspaces now the design patterns don't really work anymore because they were they were meant for hackerspaces that are starting. A lot of them are established now you've been around for two to four years maybe even more especially in Europe they've been around 10 maybe more. And you're kind of stuck in this rut and you can't a lot of guessing a lot of you want to fix it but you don't know how you don't know how to begin. And so these are some of my ideas and how to do it. You got the code of conduct. I love the one for EMF camp. I think it's it's general but also very specific. It covers a lot. And if you have a grievance process on alongside with that you get to deal with whatever problems come your way in a in a kind of fair mediated way. The other things are things like the no asshole zone taken from the hacker school. I think it's in New York. I like to have little signs of the wall saying. Don't do the well actually thing. You know when you come with the raspberry pine it's well actually there's this other thing which is so much better because you know Richard Stallman and a whole bunch of other stuff. Don't do it. It's not. It's just not going to help anybody. It's certainly not helping the person you're talking to. It's not going to help you. The my problem with the hacker school is they they they screen people before they let them in. And they screen people for they call it being a jerk is American term. Don't know what it means. And that's great. But if you're not being inclusive then you have to kind of assess what are you doing. What is your community is a hacker space if you're not being inclusive. But I think that no asshole rule set is interesting. And again you have to enforce it when people do these things they might not realize they're doing it. Then they might need to kind of sit down and be told that they're doing it to kind of learn not to do it. And you should give each other permission to do that. The final thing I would say is you also need to negate part of the rules you're having a space. Things like doocracy don't really work because what you're doing is you're setting up a little fascist cult for whatever particular task you're doing. To decide what function that kitchen is going to be used for and how it's going to be used. And that might not necessarily reflect the needs of the community in the space. So you need to have a more kind of I want to say democratic but it's a dirty word. You need to have a more kind of inclusive way of doing these things. And it's a difficult thing and things end up taking six months or a year to do. But the outcome at the end of it is much much better. So that's my very quick talk about the problems. If you want to come and find me to talk about them more please do. You can find me on Twitter. Go away, talk about it between yourselves. You need to recognize a problem as a few of them. Make a stop. Thank you. Just an offer of another observation. One key thing to the hackspace culture is this notion of individual agency. Where the ideal is to create a space where individuals are empowered to take matters into their own hands. And set up things for themselves. And that works really well in a space where everybody has the confidence to do that. And feels welcome enough to do that. And then we create sort of behavioral patterns around that. For example, strategic ignorance or strategic not listening to others. Sort of to blur out the noise while you're focused on this task. Which can empower you to work more efficiently and so on. But on the other hand it also creates these kinds of barriers that you describe. So as soon as I started noticing that I also started wondering to what extent to some key hackerspace values actually stand in conflict with notions of openness and diversity. Because some of the ways in which we organize ourselves are actually opposed to inclusiveness. And are focused on individual agency. No, I agree. And I think some of the design patterns we have that were stated about maybe 10 years ago, is it now. They were useful then for the culture that existed then. I think the hackers scene has kind of grown exponentially over the last few years. And we've kind of lost the old culture in that kind of dilution. It's not been passed on quick enough. And so there was a lot of assumed knowledge and in the end I think the hackerspace patterns have done as much damage as they have done good. So yeah, we all need to sit down and kind of talk about it between ourselves and come up with either a new framework or a new options of frameworks for our existing spaces and ways to change them. But change is very hard and especially cultural change. And I suspect it will take years. So. Hello? Ah, awesome. So I like the idea of the no-ass holes. I know that pre-screening people seems a little tough based on their previous behavior, but if they've established patterns you know there's this noise bridge has been using this principle of inclusivity through exclusivity. That if you include people who are toxic then it makes it actually more exclusive for a lot of people who are like a lot more people who may be more adapted to working in a community. But I was wondering what the most successful one you've seen is because maybe it is about policing the behavior that like well actually saying don't do that instead of you're an asshole stay out and giving people more of a chance. To comment on the exclusion, I completely agree with you. But I'm very scared of saying where is the line? Who gets excluded and who doesn't and for what reasons and what criteria? It can be a little bit dangerous and people might not realise it but it can strengthen the exclusion of minorities too. So if you do do that you need to include the people who are represented normally in your space. You might have to go outside your community to do that. The best space I've seen for diversity is probably one called Frac in Leoward. I like it, it's a nice little space and a nice little city in the very far north of the Netherlands. And there's quite a few women there and the atmosphere is good and the people get along and I can't figure out what it is maybe it's something in the water. Sorry. A scale would be really good. Again, I don't really have the answers to this. I'm just kind of popping up the question. It's straight to this. Something that lots of groups have hit before. Perhaps it's natural, we're all humans so there's been groups of people collecting together for thousands of years and certainly I've come from sort of party scene and sort of anarchist collectives and it's almost a standing joke when you look back at the 60s about endless meetings to solve problems. So it's not necessarily a new problem so maybe there are lessons we can learn from previous groups but do you think there's something different about hackspaces from previous, what should we call this community groups or hobby groups because there are certainly people who have come together on shared hobbies before or shared social interests so there's something different going on with hackspaces as opposed to these other groups which have been going on for tens of years or hundreds of years and people coming together around a shared interest. I do, I'm completely naive in that view. I think there is something ever so slightly different that tips the balance towards possible change and possible moments of self-reflection within the community. I don't know how to achieve that though, I wish I did. I'm up for the conversation. And with the London Hackspace we have a thousand members and for me this is certainly a question of scale. Having observed the growth of our community I think fundamentally humans are quite bad at dealing with large groups and we stop feeling like we belong or we stop feeling like it's our space we stop feeling connected with people as we grow. One thing we did in the London Hackspace to address other issues for example we started having maintenance issues and so on and information flow problems and so on one thing we started doing is fostering stronger organizational models around subgroups where we have subgroups for particular activities who own particular materials and who have a schedule, who have contact people who have organizers and so on and I think that works really well it's also a great approach to introducing people to the organization because right from the beginning they have people to get in touch with to ask questions to feel welcomed and so on. With the historic presidents one thing I noticed in the UK that's quite different to European Hackspaces is that for me as a European it seems like there's virtually no political awareness in UK Hackspaces no political history and even an unwillingness to engage in political discussions. In London for the longest time people said we don't engage in politics politics just detracts from making which I think is a silly statement and it's also not true in a number of ways but it's also something where this is a question of culture and it's also a question of awareness politics does not have to mean party politics politics also means an awareness of power structures an awareness of organizational structures and these kinds of things. Hello, I'm from Edinburgh Hack Lab and the issue of scale is interesting because we doubled in size in 18 months or something like that so we're now about three or four years old and we started from 20 people and as soon as we moved to a new space we had loads more room and we got more than double the number of members in not much time and the community definitely changed because at the start there was 20 people and that was a good amount of people going out for a curry or something like that you can book a table for that size when you get to 40-something people you can't really do that it just doesn't work and it sort of starts to fragment I kind of thought that was a terrible thing that it was just fragmenting and it's not the same as it was but it's like actually who cares it's not the same as it was as long as it's still good so the patterns don't have to stay the same I agree with what you were saying the patterns that we started with don't work when you scale up and that's not a bad thing we just have different patterns and that's okay the problem that we face I think we have a pretty inclusive bunch of people it's good we've got gay members we've got a few female members we've got a lot of foreign members and that kind of reflects Edinburgh because there's loads of foreign students and things like that in town but it still feels like a very white, male, middle class outfit and it's a real shame that it's not more diverse I think our problem is getting people in through the door in the first place to our open nights and things like that because you just don't seem to get that many more diverse people through it seems to be the white, male, middle class people coming through the doors so I wondered if you had any ideas on that initial step of getting people in marketing it or whatever and this talk about doing special events that appeal to certain types of people but I'm not keen on that so much two things first of all I personally think the magic number for change of scale in a hacker space is around 50 members I saw it coming at tech Inc and I introduced things like subgroups early and no one understood it and now they're like, oh yeah we get it we're 100 people big, works and I really do think some insight needs to be done on different sized hacker spaces and the rules they have to answer your question there's only one way to do it and that isn't saying oh we've got an open night coming through our door they're not going to come through your door they don't want your culture they're not part of your culture they don't fit in there you have to go and get them you have to go out you have to find the people you have to convince them to come in and you have to be inclusive and don't be a dick don't use your elitism of knowledge of technical skills don't be an asshole have a code of conduct so they know it's a safe place they know if there's a trouble they have a way of dealing with it and that's the only way you have to go and grab them by the arm is that the reason why it doesn't happen very often because it's a massive effort look at London London Hack Space is in East London you'd think there'd be quite a diverse representation given the area it is in and it's like five quid a month no tech ink, same thing it's in an area which is very ethnically diverse we have a similar payment system it's all white hello I'm from the Arsenal Hackerspace and it's a very small Hackerspace and we've had actually I disagree with the point of scale here we have a very small Hackerspace in the centre of town and some really open doors and a lot of people coming in from the street and most of those people are dodgy and not really interested in hacking at all really and I think it was a very good point you made that we should go out and find people to come in because we I also believe in the principle of inclusion and exclusion as in you need to include the right people to foster community spirit and I was wondering how in a small Hackerspace like ours can we avoid having people do stuff and then ending up deciding everything about it like avoiding the micro flashes that you were talking about the micro flashes how many members do you have? you have 20 that's like a decent number I thought it might be like 5 or 10 in small groups it's hard because the personal relationships also reflect quite strongly on how the space is organised and what's done you need to take a step back and do a bit of self-reflection and ask yourselves how you want to be organised and it's going to cause arguments so you can go one route which is to formalise everything formalise your processes, formalise your rules branch out into a bit of voting maybe we play with liquid democracy at tech Inc nothing official I kind of like that idea for certain spaces and certain groups which is where you specify your preference for a thing and then when someone submits a vote for something your preference is used rather than you ask for a vote which bypasses the whole participation thing because people just don't want to participate in votes that's an idea it's not the answer try it experiment Hackerspace is great for experimentation I've experimented in everyone that had been involved in openly just did it final question I think I've worked in technology for about 25 years I've lived most of my life in housing co-operatives and I've worked in food co-operatives before as well the smallest co-operative I was in housing co-operatives was 15 people and the largest was 200 people with a budget of 20 million pounds I can't think of a single co-operative that I've worked in and I can't think of a single co-operative that I've worked in I can't think of a single co-operative that I was in that wasn't diverse all ethnicities but all genders all sorts of people in these co-ops I know that they've all got something in common and that is that those people want to be housed or they want to be fed or something like that there are technical aspects to this as well we've had women financial officers I was the maintenance officer at that 20 million pound co-op I was in charge of actually getting stuff fixed and loads and loads of women would sort of come on board and the only I mean you're talking about organisational structure well the co-operative structure is very very very simple to be a registered co-op you agree a bunch of policies you get those ratified and that's what you work of and every year you have an election for committee you can actually make up whatever positions on the committee you want you can have whatever you like but it's a very very simple thing and it's very easy for people to get involved with and we found that it didn't matter if you were a co-op of 15 or 200 and what size your budget was because the process was so incredibly simple people tended to pitch in especially when there was a crisis now you do get a lot of people sort of sitting back and letting a few people take on board and do things so we found that what we do is you could engineer a small crisis now then and say well we've got a problem we have to come because we might dissolve people turn up, they get involved and it sort of renews itself so Tekink is essentially co-operative it's called the Varanaking in Dutch and it's an association and a lot of all the other Dutch hackerspaces foundations or limited companies like hackerspaces in the UK and they all laughed at us like you're mad it's not going to work I like it a lot there's a whole bunch of rule lawyring by all the hackers and they come along to the AGM type things and we spent six hours I think the longest one was like maybe eight which is our fault there are better ways to do it and I could talk about that if you want but yeah I agree no that doesn't work either because they'll write four page policy documents and argue for three hours that it's correct so next question about how to get more diverse people in and I think the excluding people excluding the jerks is great but I think a lot of the problem comes from people who are for the most part think of themselves as good people but we all have biases and if we don't try and examine ourselves then we behave in ways that might end up being excluding so I would recommend start reading blogs by women in tech following people on Twitter who come from marginalised areas try and start examining your own biases and then that will hopefully lead you to putting on the right sorts of events that will attract the right sort of people so one thing another thing I tried to start at Tech Inc but failed was a dispute resolution group I think they have one now by the members, for the members it doesn't involve board members at all and I kind of like that because to a grievance procedure you can sit down with a couple of people who are having differences whether personal or for whatever bias and this is assuming you have the right people who are aware of these kind of cultural and society and systemic biases you can kind of try and aim that but it's a lot of work it's a lot of effort, it's a time sink ok, thank you for coming you've been great