 Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that we're on unceded territory. According to the website nativeland.ca, we are at the intersection of Clackamas, Cowlitz, and Chinook tribal nations and others I learned this morning. And I wanted to call out, there's a documentary film that you can watch about the Chinook Nation's fight for treaty rights. This isn't a past problem, it's an ongoing thing. So I encourage you to check it out, it's at promiseland.com and it's also being screened in November at the University of Oregon. So I should mention I'm a software developer at the American Civil Liberties Union but this talk is not about my work there. My name is Dan Pfeiffer and I'd like to use my time here to tell you about a course I taught this past fall called Data and Social Justice. This is my first time teaching this course and I proposed it because it was a class that I wanted to take. This was in the digital arts department at Bennington College which is a small liberal arts school in Vermont. I think of advocacy and organizing as a central infrastructure for the maintenance of a healthy democracy. I'm preoccupied with the question what new tools and strategies should exist for social justice organizing. So this talk is a brief overview of the course that I taught in four parts. We have weekly readings and discussions and I'll mention some of the highlights. We began by looking at the root of the word data which means given in its Latin form. I don't actually speak Latin but that's what this essay was about. In cases where data is collected without true consent a better word might actually be capta, taken. We read Tara Robertson's keynote at the LIDA forum and she talks about her experience as a former sex worker turned librarian and how it informs her views on the ethics of digitizing collections. I recommend you read the talk. Actually all these readings I recommend. Mimi Onoaha, I'm mangling her name, sorry Mimi. Tara precursor to my class at Bennington and gave an excellent talk at IO on the subjectivity of data collection. You may have heard of her art project called Missing Data Sets and if you haven't I recommend you check that out too. We read the fifth chapter of Kathy O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction on how software systems can mistake living in poverty for criminal activity. And she offers a technical analysis of policing techniques including predpoll and stop and frisk and the book itself in general is good. And we also read the pro-Publica investigation of risk assessment software that's used in criminal sentencing. The article shows two different effects when comparing the software assigned risk scores with actual recidivism rates. So the two effects are that black defendants are disproportionately given high risk scores when they didn't re-offend and conversely that white defendants were given low scores and they did re-offend and the effect is pretty stark. It's in the order of like 25% to 75%. This was an optional reading on the distinction between activism and organizing and in retrospect it was pretty influential on my approach to the class. I wanted my students to focus on creating opportunities for others to help them with their social justice projects and there were a lot of other readings we didn't get to due to time constraints. But the course is on GitHub and there's an issue page where I've been like accumulating other readings and of course I'd be curious to hear what your suggestions are too. So a central premise for the course is that organizing a cohort of collaborators multiplies the capacity of any individual activist. We covered an assortment of issues and I encourage students to pick issues that they felt most passionate about themselves. And in some cases these were things that they were already working on that they brought to the class. So we also covered a wide variety of digital and analog tools for organizing. These are both partialists. It was kind of like a sprawling class that probably should have been pared down a little bit. So as a content learning in the next few slides I'll be discussing gun violence and mass shootings and later slides will include mentions of sexual assault and transphobia. Mother Jones Magazine has been doing an excellent job covering gun violence in America as a topic. They've assembled a comprehensive guide to mass shootings. And have released the underlying data for others to use in their research. Mother Jones' editors maintain a public Google spreadsheet that contains details about all the known mass shootings since 1982. And I should mention that since I've screen grabbed this list it's already out of date there's like a new mass shooting. So several students used this data set to create visualizations showing the epidemic of mass shootings in the US. This is Matt's map which gives a sense for where they occurred and their severity. Cassidy, a student whose friend was wounded in a shooting at Thousand Oaks, California organized an event on campus with a group called Gunsense Vermont. And it's probably worth mentioning. Vermont is a very gun friendly state. Their gun laws are very permissive. Of the digital tools we looked at, Typeform was among the most popular for collecting data. In this case, this is a video, creating support for survivors of on-campus sexual assault. Another student used Typeform in a more storytelling mode and used it to link out to other existing resources. At times I used my role as a faculty member to advocate on my student's behalf. Toby, a transgender student in the course, told us about his traumatic experience of the student mailboxes at Bennington. So student mailboxes have name labels on them and those names on the labels consistently dead named trans students. Every year he would walk over to the mailboxes and stick his own label on top of the incorrect name that the Bennington administrators had provided. Notice that my course roster data export included legal names, but not preferred names. I've omitted the sensitive details here including Toby's legal first name. So first name is one of those database columns you might think is simple and straightforward, but it requires some context. A legal first name is used by the college for financial aid purposes and other things that come into contact with federal government. There's no good reason that my roster should include a legal first name for a trans student. A nickname is like, you can call me Danny. A preferred name is an important aspect of a trans student gender identity and getting it wrong is extremely disrespectful and the systems were consistently getting it wrong. So I filed a bug report with the school's database software vendor, an Idaho-based company called Populi. I made three requests of Populi and the Bennington registrar's office. First, student roster data exports, they had a critical omission and that should be easy to fix. Secondly, this is a data privacy issue. And then finally, there are trans students at all campuses and a lot of colleges use the software, so they should make the change across all the schools and publicly explain why they're making the change. They agreed to my first request. So now, you know, student data exports include the preferred name column. The data model still confuses a preferred name with a nickname, but at least now there's some possibility for administrators to get this right. Previously, there was no way for them to know which of these names was going to be hurtful to a trans student. Toby also used type form to mobilize fellow students around the cause and wrote an online resource guide that explained things like how to get the medical providers to give you the hormones you need. So throughout the semester, I prototyped a new website for organizing groups. I wanted to make an alternative to Facebook groups specifically for political organizers. So even if you, as the group administrator, fully internalize what each of these privacy settings mean, if someone in your group members doesn't understand the model, it could put them at risk or the group at risk. And in a social justice context, the stakes for not understanding the nuances of Facebook privacy settings can be quite significant. So like Facebook, this website, organizer.network, lets you create new groups easily, but it has a uniform privacy model, so everyone kind of understands what the settings are because they don't change. And it was interesting to see how my students used the software. Lots of shitposting, inside jokes, some feature requests. I think this was the first day that I released it. But actual organizing work also happened there. And I should mention that its role as a social space was intentional. I have an ongoing interest in how software can assist discrete sets of people who gather in a room, like this one. So the mechanism for this site is pretty basic. You can send messages to the people who are in the group, and they can send you messages. Membership for each group is invite only, and you can host it on your own server. It's open source software. This is me typing. I figured it was better than doing a live demo. So that link that I just copied there, that's if you have that link, then you can join this group. That's the idea. Each person has a unique link, so you can track how the group grew from which people. Julian, a student organizing to form a student union, registered the domain name bendingting.education, a slightly longer and less official variation on bendingting.edu. He set up an instance of Organizer Network on it and rebranded it as Connect Bendington. And one thing to point out here, which I think is an improvement over my copy, is he points out that the data is unprotected. I mean, it's unencrypted, I guess, is the way to put it. But that's a problem that I haven't yet tried to solve with this software. So I created a group for this talk, and if you have this invite link, you can connect to each other. Of course, there's a Slack team that you can join. There's a lot of ways that we can all connect to each other. But this specific set of people are the people who saw this talk or maybe are watching on the live stream. So thank you, and I think we should have some time for discussion.