 I'm Nikki. This is 100 ways to be an ally. This is a lightning talk. The talk that was after this talk got canceled, so they asked if I would do a lightning talk that was actually an hour long. That is the opposite of a lightning talk. So what I figure we'll do, I know a lot of you have plans for that second half hour block, so I'm still gonna give this talk in 25, 26 minutes, and then we'll stay, we'll chat if you have questions about anything, you want to spend time talking about anything, we can do that together, or we can all just have a quiet half an hour. Fair enough? Cool. I'm Nikki. I'm on Twitter as Dr. Nikki. You may also know that I founded the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Working Group that's been downstairs, so if you see the little hearts on people's badges or the pictures going around, the group that I started is doing that. What is an ally? You can read the slide. Yep, I'm going to, I'm just gonna give people a minute to read it themselves and then I was gonna read it. But thank you for that tip. A good reminder when presenting to think about people who read more slowly or can't see the slide itself. But an ally is someone who advocates for and supports members of a community other than their own, reaching across differences to achieve mutual goals. The main part of this is that it's someone who verbs, it's someone who advocates for and supports among other things. Many of these things that I'm about to share with you are specifically for white people. On Twitter, this is a common abbreviation. If you haven't seen it, YTPPL. It means white people. White, white people. White people. So please keep that in mind. As a white person, I can only speak from my own perspective. And so a lot of these things are things that I've learned to do as a white person from a North American, Western European perspective. Many people have said this, but Laverne Cox said it recently and I reminded me of it, which is that each and every one of us has the capacity to be an oppressor. A friendlier way to say that is each and every one of us has the capacity to be not an ally or to be actively in the way of other people's well-being. So that's something else good to keep in mind. All of us are going to mess up, including me. So if there's anything in this deck that you don't like, let me know. We'll update the notes and then we'll talk about it, yeah? So I have a good news. The good news is every single person in this room, in this building, in this conference, in the Dribble community can be an ally. Bad news. Being an ally is work. The good news, being an ally is good work. This is work that is good to do. The bad news is being an ally is hard work. The good news is being an ally is hard work, but you all already know how to work hard. You're here, you're learning. We all are already good at working hard. The bad news is this is a new kind of hard work for some people. We're used to working hard in technical ways or in physical ways or in some other way. Some of us are not used to working hard in this way. But the good news is that this is work that matters, yeah? So this is going to be a fast talk since the lightning one and I literally do have over 100 slides. So if any of the text is too fast or too small, the deck will be online probably before Monday. So number one, acknowledge your own privilege. If the word privilege is a trigger for you, you got to figure out why. Number two, understand your own privilege. If that's a problem for you, you got to figure out why. Like I said, all of this is work. You will leave here with homework, which is cool. I love homework. I love being in school. Number three, you got to work intersectionally. That means when you think about the privilege that someone has. So for example, I have white privilege. I have American privilege. I have able bodied privilege. I have any number of other privileges. I also have other things. But those things combine and I'm more than just a woman or a white person or an American or a developer or a person in a black hoodie, right? All of us are more than any one part of our dimension. And so we need to remember that other people are also a woman named Kimberly Williams Crenshaw came up with the idea of intersectionality. And she said specifically when feminism does not oppose racism, when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose, right? So when feminists aren't actively anti-racist, when anti-racists are not actively opposed to the patriarchy, everybody is losing. When one is oppressed, we are all oppressed. That is the foundation of everything that we are talking about here today. And if a lot of this language is unfamiliar to you, cool. There's so much good stuff for you to learn. So if any of this you're like, oh my gosh, so many new words. That's great because it's not, now you have so many things. There's so many ways, so many directions you can turn where you're going to find good answers and good new information. So number four, acknowledge systemic racism, acknowledge systemic sexism, acknowledge systemic ableism. Each of those is separate, which is why they get their own points. Understanding, you can acknowledge that systemic racism exists, for example, and still not understand its impact. Same with sexism, same with classism, same with ableism. So taking time to understand, come in, sit down, people who just walked in. If you want to, there are seats. Or you can stand in the back. Understanding how they impact the people who they affect is pretty crucial. Number 11, white fragility is real. It is a real thing that people experience. Again, I try to only speak for myself and the people that I interact with can speak for themselves. But I feel like a lot of people get their feelings really hurt when someone calls them a racist, for example, or they get their feelings really hurt when someone calls them a sexist. But being called a sexist is not as bad as experiencing sexism, right? I've never experienced racism, but I would assume that the same parallel applies for any ism that you want to insert there. So getting a grip on white fragility is super important. This is my favorite white fragility meme. So when we think about oppression, we want to look at the intersections of oppression. How does the patriarchy and the oppression that people feel under patriarchy affect and intersect with the oppression that people feel under racism, under capitalism, under ableism? I don't know how you feel about capitalism. Many people feel that it is also a system of oppression and that there are people at the intersections of those who are suffering because of it. Read a book. A great one is called The New Jim Crow. Watch a movie if you don't like to read books. One of them is called 13th. It's on Netflix. While you're there, think about the school to prison pipeline and how it affects people. Develop a new litmus test. And this one I found has been really helpful when you read a news article and it has a generalization like, for example, black people are more likely to use drugs. Swap out the race and put in sexual orientation. And then read gay people are more likely to use drugs and say, does that make sense? And a lot of times it won't. We get so used to hearing messages about groups in certain ways. This is the foundation in some ways for stop and frisk. Black people are more likely to be carrying weapons in New York City, which has been proven to be false. So take out black people and put in gay people. Gay people are more likely to be carrying weapons in New York City. Doesn't that sound dumb? I mean, I think it sounds dumb. So you take out race, you put in sexual orientation, you take out race, you take out disability, you put in race. These are ways to examine the messages that you're being told about groups of people. Michael Eric Dyson, who's a writer about race in America, talks about putting your body on the line. If you believe in being an activist and you believe in caring for the people around you, one of the ways to do that is to physically show up for them and to literally put your body in a space where you can help other people. While we're on Michael Eric Dyson, he also talks about white innocence narratives. And one example of that is this quote. The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism, the founding of a state based on the ideology of white supremacy, the widespread practice of African slavery, and a policy of genocide and land theft. If this quote feels like a big quote because there's a lot in there, it should. Read the book that this came from, which is an Indigenous People's History of the United States. And in there, we can also, there are a lot of stories about white innocence narratives. People who tell themselves, oh, well, this thing's happening over there and I'm okay over here. The ability to separate what's happening over here in my same country at this time from what's happening here in my life is part of the white innocence narrative. And white people in general seem to be really good at telling us, telling ourselves those narratives. Number 20, here's an easy one because that one's kind of complicated. Follow people of color on Twitter. Super simple. Diversify the information that you're getting. If you cite people, retweeting counts as citing, but especially if you cite academic work, cite people of color, cite LGBTQIA people, cite non-binary people. Number 22, talk to your inner circle. When I think about inner circle, I think about this awesome diagram. I think it's called the silk ring theory. And this came up when people are thinking about crisis, where someone has cancer is actually where this came from, where the person in the center is the person with cancer. Outside of that is the person caring for those people. Outside of that are the people caring for the caretakers, right? Going farther and farther out from the person who is at the center of the experience. So what you want to do is help the people in the inner circle and you want to dump to the people on the outside of the circle. And you can think about this with privilege also or some sort of oppression experience. You don't want to try to get comfort from people who are having a harder time than you. You don't want to get educated by a people who are having a harder time than you. An easy one, if you're an extrovert, say hi to the new people. Conferences are a great way to do that. And to look them in the eye, if you've ever had the experience of being in a place where no one will look you in the face, you know how important it is to have people just look at you and acknowledge that you exist. For example, I once traveled across the Midwest looking how I look. They did not want me there. And it was pretty clear because literally no one would look at me or acknowledge me or use my credit card when I tried to get gas, right? So just look at those two people. Number 24, think honestly about the kind of person you are and whether or not that means you're the kind of person who laughs at racist jokes, who listens to racist comedy, who watches shitty movies, where people get abused. Is that the kind of thing that you like? If it is, think about why. Number 25, stop objectifying people. Number 26, this is a hard One, call out your peers when they do something shitty. When your peers tell a joke about filling the blank and you know that it's kind of off color, you can just mention it to them. This takes bravery. I know that it does. But the more often you do it, the easier it will become. Here's a meme about this. It says, you're the racist for making this an issue of race. But that's not true. America is actually racist. Number 27, mentor someone. Tomorrow's a great day for that. If you've never been a sprint mentor, it's a great thing to do. If you've never been mentored by a sprint mentor, go and get mentored. It's still great. Number 28, look at the storyteller. When we tell stories in movies, in books to each other, think about who is actually telling the story. Have you ever been on vacation with someone and something really funny happened and you're at dinner and that other person tells the story but you wanted to tell it? Have you ever had that experience? You're like, no, that was my story. I'm the person who had that thing happen at airport security. We do this on a grander scale with whole groups of people. This is an example of a movie that came out recently. I have not seen the movie. But it's about a white woman and a man from Africa who goes back to his country to become king. The story, the preview is shot from this white woman's perspective. You can think about, well, what about that guy's perspective? What about his village's perspective? What about his country's perspective? We're hearing it from this white woman's perspective. A familiar example of this is we hear it from the perspective of the little girl who just went exploring. Not the house that got broken into and the bears who had all their shit stolen. People have. But if you hear the perspective of the baby bear who came in and his whole life was destroyed by this invader, it's a different story, right? And in the media, this is what's happening. So look at the stories that you're hearing and think about who has agency in this story. If you read books, some people don't, that's okay. But if you read books, read books written by people who are not like you. And if you're thinking, oh, well, black people don't write books like whatever. That's a lie. Whatever kind of book you want to read, there is a book that has been written by someone not like you. I can guarantee it. And if you can't find it, hit me up on Twitter and we will find it. Studies have been shown that people are less likely to buy books if a woman's name is the author. So men, go buy books written by women, go buy books written by people of color, go buy books written by trans people, go buy books written by people who are not like you, you will like it. Watch movies written and directed by people not like you. Consume comedy made by people not like you, whatever that means to you. I have so many of my friends tell me that female, and certainly more female comedian, is just not funny. This person, she's just not funny. And I'm like, well, millions of people seem to think she's funny. Why don't men think she's funny? Try watching many female, many of them aren't. Just like many male comedians aren't funny. But, but try it out. Comedy is a really crucial place where bias is encoded. It's really easy for us to joke about things that we would normally have a problem with, but we, we, spoonful of sugar, right? We wrap it in some funny, and we take the bias down with it. Examine your own oppression, almost every single one of us, I, I, you know what? Pricing a one of us is oppressed in some way by some systemic, you can come and sit down to people, by some systemic piece of bullshit. So it's important to also think about how you're oppressed, get super angry about it, and then also put it into context. So that you're not sitting there thinking like, oh, well I'm not oppressed, just all of these other people are. We're all oppressed together in different ways. Number 34, break away from your savior complex. If you're being an ally, that's great. You should be, obviously I'm here talking about it, you don't get cotton candy for it. You don't get a reward for being a decent human being for the people around you. But, but, it's tempting to think that you do, because the thing that you're doing might feel so scary for you, that you're like, well where's my reward? I just did something really scary. I should get a reward for this. And everyone else is like, no, no, no, you're just, you're just finally with us now. We've all been doing this for years. Number 35, tell yourself, my words and my actions make a difference, because they do. Number 36, when you mess up, learn how to apologize. And I'll tell you, I'm up here right now giving this talk about 100 ways to be an ally, and this morning someone came up to me and was like, yo, you fucked up yesterday. And I was like, what? And he did, I did. So and I'm not saying that to be like, oh look, even I mess up, but also like we're all messing up all the time and it's okay. The point is, we're out here trying to do the best that we can. Remember that it's a verb. Do not police oppression. When someone tells you that they have been, they've experienced some things systemic, just believe them. It's also a lot easier to just believe the things that people tell you, rather than try to litigate that experience with them, like chill out, let them have their thing. Also don't disqualify it or qualify it. Because you don't have to understand the details of what's happening to respect that they're having that experience. Here's a couple of quick ones. Don't fat shame people. Don't slut shame people. Don't kink shame people. Don't hobby shame people. That includes some hobbies that you might think are dumb. Be nice. Be nice of the things that people like. A common way to phrase this is don't yuck on my yum. Right? If someone likes it, let them like it. Say something. And this goes along with calling out your peers, but this is kind of a broad in any context. Choose to err on the side of saying something when you think it's going to be beneficial. But also, don't say something and amplify someone else's voice when you can. Right? If you have the option between throwing your own hat into the ring and handing the mic to someone whose voice doesn't get heard as often, hand the mic over. It's also easier. Some of these ways to be an ally are also much easier in life. Right? Amplify other people's voices. See gender, race, ability, sexual orientation, any number of other things, and celebrate those things. Being colorblind, genderblind, raceblind, ability blind, blah, blah, does not help anybody. Just erases parts of who people are. Number 48, take responsibility for your own education. It is not my job, even though I'm up here. But I'm speaking for me because I can't speak for anybody else. But for example, right? It's not my job to educate you on the experiences of gay youth in America. You can go read books for that. And this is related to don't tokenize. Don't ask the one person of X in your group what X means about their culture. Right? Go read a book. Don't use the accessible bathroom. That's an easy one. Even if you need to cry, by the way, sometimes the stalls are bigger and you need like a crying space, I get it. Try to cry in a smaller stall. Number 51, don't ask invasive questions about someone's culture, their body, their history, their language. But number 52, ask people questions if you think that you're going to be able to have a more respectful interaction with them. One example is pronouns. You can listen for the pronouns that people want used. A lot of times they'll cue them to you. But if you're afraid of messing up, sometimes you can just ask. Right? Contextual, contextual clues. But number 53, respect the words that people want to be used about them, which is huge. I cannot tell you how many times people misgender my dog. This is her. I had to shove her in somewhere. But my dog doesn't really, my dog doesn't care. But people are more worried about misgendering my dog than they are about another human being. They fall all over themselves, calling her a boy. And then, oh my God, I'm so sorry. So if we could extend that same respect up to people, we would be in great shape. Stop mansplaining. Stop whitesplaining. Stop ablesplaining. They're all different but related. And this is related to telling people what their experience is when you don't have it. So having a man explain to me what it's like to be a woman presenting a Drupal con, not helpful. Also, more work for him because he doesn't know what it's like. 57, related to not objectifying people, refer to people cautiously. A lot of times we default to being like, oh yeah, it's the person over there. It's the Asian in the corner. It's the white person over there. We can just say that's the person in the blue shirt. It's the person wearing the badge. We can refer to people in ways that are not objectifying. Tim Plunkett, who's actually here, called this knowledge multi-level marketing yesterday. And all it means is when you learn something, tell it to one other person. And then let that one other person tell it to one other person. And in that way, you're creating an allyship pyramid scheme. That's what I'm trying to do on a bigger scale. So Tim gets credit for that. Donate your money. A lot of this is soft stuff. Here's a real way. Take money out of your bank account and put it into the bank account of organizations doing work that you like. There are so many for whatever way being an ally is most important to you. Give them money even if it's only $10 a month. And a lot of it's tax-deductible. Donate your time. As you know, nonprofits need help. Donate your services. We can probably all in here help a nonprofit with a website. They would probably be really thankful. In whatever way you make websites, programming, design, strategy, copy-editing, hosting, help them. 62, there's an easy one. Don't ever out anybody. There's no reason. Support gender-neutral restrooms. Don't offer tips or compliments. And this falls under the category of microaggressions, but it's worth saying you're so pretty except you would look more like a woman if you would be better at this if only. Those things help nobody. Stop cultural appropriation. I don't know if any of you have seen this ad, but one example of it is Halloween costumes that mock someone's culture. Go to Mayo is a great example. If you want to see cultural appropriation on display, Halloween, Coachella is a big place. So learn about microaggressions. There's some examples on here that I don't really want to read because I think they're pretty shitty to say out loud. But if you don't know what the word microaggression means, go Google it, hooray for homework. Listen and follow the model of others. If you see someone who seems like they know what they're doing in an activist space and they're using certain kinds of language, write down those words and use those same words. It's easy. It's like I'm all about advocating cheating to get on board with this. Number 68, no inspiration porn. If you've seen those memes going around where it's like high school jock took friend in wheelchair to prom, isn't that amazing? What the fuck is that? The fuck. And this comes in all forms, right? But that's one example of like, well, you could unpack that in so many ways and it's problematic on so many levels. So no more inspiration porn. Number 69, assume nothing about a person's life. A lot of people have a lot going on that you don't know about and you look at them and you think, oh, they have, they're just ex. You don't know. If you make websites, educate your clients about the importance of accessible websites. Make your website. And then number two, also make your websites accessible. Make your events accessible. Part of this is about the systemic ableism, right? The fact that architects can build entire buildings and not even think about a person using a wheelchair being able to get in is systemic ableism. So make sure that your events are also accessible. But also don't police disability. If someone tells you they're disabled, believe them. It's easier. Let them be, let them identify how they want to. And remember that disability isn't always visible. And right on board with this is avoiding ableist language, including words like crazy. So including mental illness language. And something that is hard, I think, for me, I grew up on the West Coast. We used a lot. When I was growing up, we used gay as an insult, like, it's so gay. So it takes time to work those words out of your vocabulary when it's just something to be mindful of. Here's a quote I'm going to read to you. What many label as political correctness is in fact a minimally difficult effort at using language that shows respect and engagement with communities that are not the predominant wielders of power in the United States, right? And I would say effort, emphasis on minimally difficult effort. Go ahead, go ahead, take a picture, go ahead. I saw you. Number 76, don't offer advice to solve other people's problems. I have a friend who has type 1 diabetes, and I have been in the room a lot of times, and people are like, hey, if you did X, your diabetes would go away. Right? Yeah, it's so common. When I was diagnosed with Graves' disease a couple of years ago, which is an autoimmune disease that affects your thyroid. I don't have a thyroid anymore. But when I was diagnosed, everyone was like, you know what? If you do a seven-day juice cleanse, it'll take care of everything. And even now that I take thyroid hormone every day, which I have to, otherwise I would die. People are like, you know what? If you just went organic, you could cut your dose of hormones. And these are just tiny examples, right? You can blow these up. It's easier not to. I forgot to number this one. And this is related. Don't add your perspective to other people's experience. We want to say, oh, you have Graves' disease. My cousin's mother also had Graves' disease and she started eating only steak and it really helped her. People don't need it. Number 77, understand cross-racial identification. Really common cross-racial identification is very poor because we don't look at people's faces who are not of our same race. That's a thing that people do. How shitty is that? This means that algorithms include existing bias. This means that facial recognition software is not great at identifying brown and black faces. But there's nothing wrong with brown and black faces, so why don't the machines identify? Because we made the machines. People with existing bias who don't look at faces not like theirs made machines who don't look at faces not like theirs, right? That's a perfect example of the bias of the engineer going into the hardware, into the software, and out into the real world. This happens all the time with all the software we write. Sometimes it's very chill. Sometimes you look at someone's code and you're like, I know who wrote that. I can see their style, right? Just in the code and the way that it flows. It's very innocent and sometimes it's very not innocent and it has this huge impact on people's lives. Locate yourself on the ally spectrum. If you don't know what that is, it's something that kind of looks like this. Around one end you have active allies. People who are putting their bodies on the line donating time, donating money, being of service the best that they can, reading and apologizing and fucking up. And on the other end you have people who are active opponents who are like, no, no, no. Let's keep America. How it always has been. Number 80, understand your own limits. Figure out ways that you can be an ally that feel sustainable to you and then blow past them when possible. Because those limits are established by your existing comfort zone and it's impossible to kind of keep moving past them. Especially for people who are just now becoming allies. Those first couple of steps are really scary. I get it. Call your congresspeople. You can automate it a lot of times now too. I put it on a slide because I think it's really important to continue to acknowledge the bravery that it takes to deprogram yourself, especially if you grew up in America as a white person. There's a ton of cultural programming that you have to overcome. Stop saying we're all immigrants. We're not. Native people have been here since before all of us. Got here and ruined it. Don't get defensive. This is a meme with a guy who's like, I'm doing my best, okay? Sometimes your best isn't good enough and that's okay too, yeah? But you have to honor your own story and understand that you are on your own path because it also means that you're going to honor other people's stories. Don't speak for people. I can only speak about the experience that I have with the identities that I have. I absolutely can't speak for someone who has, so as a gay person, I can't speak for a gay person over here because we're going to have different experiences. I can only do my best. Number 88, foster cross domain empathy. This is my new favorite phrase. I don't know if I made it up, but I love it. A lot of us have empathy for animals and cages. We don't have empathy for people in prisons. A lot of us have empathy for crying women, but not empathy for crying men. So if we can take the empathy that we feel and allow it to extend into another domain, we're going to be a lot farther ahead than we are now. Be flexible with your worldview. That's a huge part of all of this. You think you know the America that you live in. Again, speaking from an American perspective, be flexible with the fact that maybe the information you have is not the whole story. This list just keeps going. It's like, read Bell Hooks and Angela Davis and Michael Foucault and Judith Butler and Simi Linton, read all of these people and more. Remember that gender is not enough as a marker of diversity. We focus a lot on, there's 20% women here. Cool. There are so many other things that we need to do. We need to look at people of color. We need to look at international attendees. We need to look at ability access. Number 92, use yourself as a shield. A lot of people have been really great about this lately, putting themselves out there on Twitter, being allies. Is Twitter the only place you can be an ally? Nope. Is it the best place? Nope. But it's still important to think about the experience that you might have on Twitter as a white man and someone else might have on Twitter as a woman of color. And to amplify ideas and to take the heat for some of these things and not let the people who are oppressed do the bulk of the work. Number 93, don't mock the activists around you. If you can't do the work, at least support the people who are doing the work. It's really easy to fall back on like stupid SJWs, stupid social justice warriors, whatever. Those are the people who are actually trying to make the change. Help others move across that ally spectrum once you've found yourself with some inertia. Grab some people by the hands and take them with you. Kind of like knowledge, multi-level marketing. Talk about your feelings. It's really important. A lot of this is feelings work. It's not scalable, y'all. This shit does not scale. You have to do it one at a time, one person at a time, one room at a time, one situation at a time. And so it's exhausting and you need to acknowledge that and help other people through it. Examine your own blank phobia. There are so many we could fill 100 with the number of phobias that there are. So think about them. I'm just throwing this out there. Consider your relationship with capitalism as an impressive source. Some people might love capitalism and still be allies. That's cool. I'm not just tossing it out there. Look at the margins. When you look at a space and you're like, wow, there's a lot of blanks here. There's not a lot of whatever. There's a margin and then there's people outside of those and outside of those and outside of those. And I'm gonna say because I need to believe this that Republicans can be allies. You can fill any number of things. But if we believed, for example, that Republicans couldn't be allies, we would be so screwed. There's a lot of Republicans. If we believed that white men couldn't be allies, we need white men. We need men. We need women. We need white women. We need brown-haired people. We need people who wear glasses, right? Whatever your primary label is, we have to say, yes, you can be an ally, too. Come onto the spectrum. Let's help you get there. And I'm sorry we're four minutes over. Join the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Working Group where we're working on this stuff specifically in the community. Although you can apply all of these things outside of the community. Go to Sprints tomorrow and give feedback on the session and that is it. Thank you very much. This talk that was supposed to be in here got canceled. So we're in here together if you wanna stay and ask questions or brainstorm or do whatever, you're also free to go. So that's it. I'll be here if you wanna chat. Okay, cool, come on up, let's chat. It's not a question. I just wanted to say that was super awesome. Oh, thank you. Thank you. One point I wanted to make about the slide we said to call people out. Yeah. That can get confrontational. Yeah, it's true. And the person Jessica Ramsey, who does a whole bunch of videos about related topics for MTV Decoded and stuff had a suggestion to call people in. So instead of like in the middle of a group, somebody says something, instead of calling them out in front of everybody to talk with them privately afterwards or somewhere where it's quieter and you're not going to get possibly negative reactions to what you say and things like that. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, we always say just in leadership in general, right, praise in public, criticize in private. And it's, yeah, and when you're in a big group and someone says something shitty, yeah, it's weird, right? Sometimes if you can pull them aside, sometimes depending on the context, this person's been doing it over and over and over and you want to take a stand and show other people that as a group you don't tolerate it. But I would always default to doing it in private if you can. Sometimes you just snap though it happens. So I really love that you gave a lot of reading, by the way. There's more y'all, there's so much more. There's so much more. I had to cut a bunch of reading. And that's why I'm coming up because I have an excellent book that was triggered by one of your slides. It's called Weapons of Math Destruction and it's by Kathy O'Neill, who is a woman. And she writes about how we systematically program bias into our data and how it's very self-supporting bias and how a lot of the data ends up going circular because we build our own bias and then those algorithms support our bias so then we therefore say they're true. And it makes you think a lot about things and I would recommend that. So I just want to comment. Thanks, Eunzee. Hi, thanks for giving this talk. Sorry. I had a question about, I think it was slide 58. Good memory. Yeah, it was the call out the margins or observe the margins. And it was, I think you said like, wow, there's a lot of blank in this room. Is that more to say or look at the margins? And 98, sorry. I'm not mad at you, that was amazing. Is that to just say out, observe and say it out loud or is there a follow-up? Do you do something about it immediately or? Again, this stuff isn't scalable, right? I think whenever I think about the margins, I think about a friend of mine who does homeless advocacy and she started calling them houseless instead of homeless because homeless has such a stigma to it. And in Hawaii, the houseless are being persecuted and they're being moved from place to place and there's all this stuff. And when you think about houseless people and then houseless people with mental illness of color with disability and children, right? These people are so far on the margins and that's kind of what I was thinking. I was like looking around and saying, okay, well there's a lot of, I always do. Wow, there's a lot of white people here. This is weird. It depends on what your goal is. For me, I was just saying like, let's start looking at the makeup of our spaces and then also look at the people who seem to be, who seem to have the lowest access to resources. Okay, thank you. I don't know if that was helpful. Yeah. So first off, thank you. There's tons of great stuff in here to just take and start to think about. But I know as me, as someone who is a white guy, the information, stuff like. Welcome to Bein' An Allied White Guy, cool. Oftentimes like, and also being as someone with a Coder background. Yeah. Social skills are sometimes not that great. Totally. I would love to get ideas about how, when I see something that's going on, how can I comment on a situation without making it worse? Yeah, it's hard, social stuff is hard, right? It's hard being in a group of people and seeing something. So I'll give you an example. A friend of mine was at the first time, attendee social, is a woman, is a director of engineering. And three men were standing with her. And one man said, whoa, director of engineering. That's a big title for such a little girl. So I don't know how the other two men felt. That to me feels like a small enough group where you want to say, yo, bro, not cool. I bet she's qualified, something like that, right? It depends on your rapport with you. Maybe they were all strangers, I don't know. And I always encourage people to start really small. It's really overwhelming. Like if I were up here and I said something really shitty, it would take a lot of bravery to come to the mic and call that out in front of everybody in a small conversation, kind of starting there. And what I've also found, and people have told me is helpful, is, for example, when you tell yourself, I'm someone who recycles. I always recycle as long as I can, whenever it's possible. Then when you see a trash can and a recycling bin, you just throw it in the bin. You don't even have to think about it, because you already know I'm a person who recycles. So just starting to tell yourself, I'm a person who stands up when I can, is already going to kind of lubricate your pathways to seeing opportunities to stand up when you can. So I think that's part of it. And then part of it is, it sounds kind of hokey, but just self-knowledge, knowing like, okay, if I do this in public, I'm probably going to feel really anxious and really awkward. How can I do it in a way that's meaningful? And that might be taking the heat for people on Twitter. It might mean blog posts. It might mean being on a forum that you're a member of and standing up there. Like, that's still really important. That's still, you know, being on Reddit. With the dumpster fire that is Reddit. Me, it's a reasonable voices, you know? It does. It needs people who can do that in a place that feels safe for them. So I guess I'm saying I empathize because it's hard. And starting small. The most important thing is to start. Hi. Hi. Thank you for this excellent discussion. Yeah. The irony of me standing at a microphone to relate in front of the crowd the experience that I'm about to relate is not lost on me. Okay. But hopefully it will be valuable anyway. Last year at the boff that you co-hosted. Yes, you. Okay. But one of the things on your slides that I have always had a huge problem with is not giving my opinion whenever, because I do have that aunt who had Graves disease. And, you know, society has always told me, society has told me that as a white man, my opinion is always welcome. And so like last year after the boff I came up and I was like, oh, I have this idea of how I could change my behavior to make that less assumptive. And you were like, or you could just change your behavior to not do it at all. And I actually, it has been difficult, but I have been trying and there have been zero times that anybody was like, man, if only somebody had told me about their aunt who had Graves disease, we could have avoided this whole thing. So, so if anybody else is having problems with that one, it can, you can make incremental progress and be proud of yourself for the, for the progress that you can make. Yay. Something came up in our diversity boff where a white guy was like, you know what? This is scary. Sharing is scary. Being a voice is scary. I don't know what to do. And then another white guy was like, yeah, man, it's hard, but it's also really important. And they kind of had a moment and shared. And white guy testimony is so important for other white guys. It's so important because we hear, you know, if I want to, most people listen to the messages from the people that they identify with, right? And so most men are gonna identify more with him than with me because they have more common life experiences. And so it's so important for white guys who are allies to, to stand up and be like, yeah, this is okay. You can be an ally and you still have fun. You know, life isn't just a miserable run of like race in America books and protests. Everything's okay. Yes, Peter, go ahead. Thanks, this was fun. Quick question. First, you talked a lot about nonprofits, but what about actual political organizing, campaigning, you know, how important do you feel that is? I mean, for me, I often feel that's sometimes the more direct way to change society, but, and then a more pragmatic question, you know, like our meetups tend to be mostly men and usually majority white. And, you know, do you have any thoughts on how both to reach out and make sure that they are welcoming? Yeah, two good questions. One, I didn't talk about politics specifically because I wanted to make it as politically agnostic as possible, but I do think if one way to look at it is absolutely political organizing is important. Planned Parenthood is important, right? The ACLU is important. The Southern Poverty Law Center is important. Transgender equity is important. And advocating for either lobby groups that support your beliefs or the candidates themselves is important, 100%. You can also say, how are you gonna make change in a system that's already broken, right? And so, for some people, it feels better to just work outside the system and make the change that they can see immediately in their communities. And that's something that you, everyone has to decide from themselves. But obviously I'm someone who's like, yes, set everything on fire, protest everything. And then as far as your meetup goes, I think a lot of people in here have opinions on that. And so I don't wanna certainly say that I'm the expert on getting people to attend meetups, but some of it's childcare, some of it's timing, some of it's time off work, some of it's childcare, elder care, family care, right, familial house tasks. Some of it is that they, people don't have time, right? They have other things going on. And so even if you get those people in the door, are those people gonna feel welcome there? Probably not, right? Three women in a group of 20 men, probably it's not gonna feel like the best space. So, I don't know. I don't know what's happening in New Jersey but it's also trans, it's a problem. And commute times a problem can be. I know that in my local meetup, they made a specific effort to get more women in, but gender is not the only marker of diversity. So that's already kind of problematic. It's saying, well, we just need more women. Then you just have a room full of white people. So you wanna get all kinds of people in. And I think, yeah, I think I don't know. It's really, yeah, yeah, yeah, come tell us. Come talk. So if you look around your meetup and you notice that, wow, my meetup is kind of all the, then you can say, well, who do I know who'd be willing to come talk at a meetup and present on something cool who's not like all the other people in the room? But it's someone who's comfortable and has been doing this before. So if your meetup is like all dudes, think of like who's a woman that I know that knows cool stuff, who could present at a triple meetup and I can just ask them to come present. And then you have a presenter there who's it's not like, oh, hey, token woman person, come be a token woman and sit in this room. It's come and teach people things. And then that's the first, it's a little first step. It's not gonna solve the problem, right? Your meetup's still gonna be a bunch of dudes. And you can do that with anything, right? Like there's a lot of people who know a lot of cool stuff. And if you look around at this conference, you can be like, hey, I saw this person giving this talk that was really amazing and asked them to share about it at a meetup. That's the thing. And if they're like in your region, great. Think about like being like, hey, can I pay for a plane ticket for you to come to my camp and talk at my camp? It's a little thing, but it helps. Yeah, and I saw someone on Twitter recently who had come up, I saw someone on Twitter recently who was like, I'm not gonna be your token woman on a panel unless you pay me. You know? And so that's something to think because that woman is doing you a service in addition to sharing her knowledge, the woman is doing you a service to pave the way for your future community. I'd like to say that my meetup group was having this exact same trouble. I run a thousand person board game meetup group in Arlington, Virginia, and we were having the same trouble. We had a very white audience of people who were showing up, mostly men, I would prefer a greater mix of both. What we did to diversify was cross collaborate with other meetup groups. Instead of asking your friends who are already too busy and already too, already in their own space and may not have the capacity to take on another role, the people who are already organized meetup groups are looking for other people too. They want to diversify and reach out. So reach out to other people who are already interested in something that you can cross collaborate on and having a co-joint group and then you can find common interests amongst people. Cool, thank you so much. Anything else? Free everyone. Go to closing session, go to Sprint's tomorrow. That's it.