Onderwerp : [Etc-br] artigo sobre o etc na austria!

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/derieg/en

Things Can Break
Tech Women Crashing Computers and Preconceptions

Aileen Derieg

“We encourage women to crash computers and to put it all back together again.
Preferably with an improved installation.”[1]

 
Free Space, Free Access, Free Software

Sometime around the mid-1990s electronic communication was discovered as a 
useful tool for activism and organizing among leftist, progressive, 
alternative groups. The first hurdle was to gain access to this useful tool, 
but at the same time there was also a strong awareness of a need to maintain 
control, as concerns were voiced in various discussions about the danger of 
electronic communication being monitored. For people with academic 
affiliations, it was possible to get an email address through a university, 
but that usually meant only being able to read email at the university. With 
the growing popularity of email, this increasingly meant reading email with 
the next person in line breathing down one's neck and reading over one's 
shoulder. Free services like Hotmail initially provided a welcome alternative 
and independence from university facilities, and Internet cafes started 
springing up in cities all over the world. However, this still limited access 
to those who already had some familiarity with email and could afford the 
fees charged by Internet cafes.

ASCII (Amsterdam Subversive Code for Information Interchange) was founded at 
the end of the nineties in a squatted building in Amsterdam explicitly to 
meet a growing need for free access and control over the tools: “ASCII is a 
non-profit internetworkspace running on open source software. We try to show 
that there's more than just M$ Windows and we try to convince our fellow 
activists that using software made by the biggest multi-national corporation 
in the world must be bad. ASCII started in 1999 in a squatted building on the 
Herengracht. Our main goal in that time was to get all the squatters an email 
address. Nowadays, using email and the web is so common that we could choose 
new goals: We provide internet in action camps, host websites for 
organisations that were not welcome elsewhere and try to facilitate the use 
of internet by activists. […] We feel the Internet should be accessible to 
anyone and that censorship sucks. Infringement on free speech, surfers’ 
privacy and over-commercialization of the net are major problems already. At 
this rate the net will soon be one huge billboard where multinational 
companies provide the world with good, clean family fun. Not if we can help 
it! We hope the subversive elements of the world will continue to infiltrate 
the net.”[2] The squatter scene in Amsterdam at that time was clearly in need 
of its own Internet cafe, and ASCII quickly became a popular place to check 
email, meet like-minded people and generally hang out, and – most 
importantly – for learning, developing and practicing useful technical 
skills.

>From the start, ASCII based the provision of free access on the use of Free 
Software and recycled hardware, stressing freedom from multinational 
corporations and consumerism as a political choice. They used the Linux 
operating system, because “information cannot be free, if the software you 
need to see it isn’t!”[3] GNU/Linux is a free and open source operating 
system based on the Linux kernel. Free Software does not necessarily mean 
cost free, but as Richard Stallmann, founder of the Free Software 
Foundation[4], famously explains, it means “free as in speech, not as in 
beer”, a matter of liberty not price. At that time, Linux was generally 
regarded as an arcane field appealing almost exclusively to “geeks”. 
Nevertheless, the idea of shared knowledge and skills at the heart of the 
Free Software/Open Source movement was ideally suited to the aims of ASCII, 
which soon became a gathering place for experienced hackers and 
Linux “newbies”.

Who are the people that made ASCII the important center that it became? By 
self-definition: “ASCII are an international bunch of iconoclasts, geeks, 
tech terrorists, squatters, eco-warriors, anarchists, techno beduins, rasta, 
electro niabinghi etc. who have joined forces. Due to the highly refined 
chaos of its (dis)organization, the collective has an open structure that 
relies on the input of its volunteers.” And in the late nineties, some of 
them were women.

 
HOWTO – or not

What the women who became involved with ASCII had in common was, first of all, 
that most of them were from somewhere else other than the Netherlands. They 
were also all passionately and idealistically dedicated to different 
individual issues and movements to make the world a better place. Although 
not all of them came from a tech background, the usefulness of email and the 
Internet for maintaining contacts around the world and for activist 
networking were immediately obvious to all of them. In addition, Linux and 
the approach of Free Software development based on a collaborative group 
effort corresponded with their experiences in women’s networks and feminist 
contexts and meshed well with the other work they were already doing.

Free Software has been linked with feminist strategies at meetings, on mailing 
lists and in exchanges among women[5], but whereas the percentage of women in 
computing is generally lower than the percentage of men, in Free Software 
women are even more poorly represented, with percentages of female developers 
as low as 0.5 to 1.5%.[6] Why this is the case has frequently been the 
subject of heated and sometimes vitriolic online debates[7] and more 
thoughtfully and seriously considered in conference panel discussions[8]. In 
her frequently cited “HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux”[9], Val Henson 
describes a broad spectrum of attitudes and situations that discourage women 
in computing in general and Linux in particular, ranging from blatant 
misogynist sexism to the abrasiveness of rough competition for status and 
recognition for coding prowess, all the way to lonely desperation: “[…] 
often, the people most anxious for more women in Linux are also the people 
most likely to accidentally drive them away. Frequently, men who want more 
women in Linux solely so they have a better chance of finding a girlfriend 
end up acting in ways that end up driving women away instead!”[10] The “Do’s 
and Don’t’s” section of the HOWTO reflects the experiences of women literally 
all over the world with Linux User Groups (LUGs) and other gatherings of 
programmers and developers, and the experiences of the women who became 
involved in ASCII were similar to the experiences of other women in 
comparable contexts from the late nineties up to the present day. What makes 
experiences like this all the more difficult to deal with is that in a 
context like ASCII with shared goals and ideals and a DIY culture it is not a 
case of “men” (abstract, generalized) vs. “women” (equally abstract and 
generalized). Instead, the people involved may be friends, comrades, lovers, 
competitors, peers in a complex network of relationships and shifting 
constellations.

Because they shared the goals and ideals of ASCII and because these goals and 
ideals were important to them, the women who were becoming frustrated by a 
lack of the kind of encouragement propagated in Henson’s HOWTO did not give 
up and leave, but decided in the spirit of Free Software to modify the 
organization to suit their own needs. They began meeting purposely as women 
in a subgroup to share the skills they had acquired with one another and to 
help and encourage one another to further develop their knowledge and 
technical skills. A special focus from the start was on hardware: “Hardware 
is tangible, real and visible. It's easy to work with, accessible. Everyone 
can do it, you don't need any schooling or experience to take it apart and 
put it back together again. Working with hardware is fun and sparks 
the ‘eureka’ feeling in nearly everyone that has followed one of our Hardware 
Courses! Knowing computer hardware, being able to picture the devices and put 
life into the jargon is essential to continued growth in ICT.”[11] The idea 
caught on and soon started attracting more women, the small group of ASCII 
women developed a kind of group identity, and in November 1999 they gave 
themselves a name: the Gender Changer Academy.

 
Genderchangers

What is a genderchanger? “We did not make up this term, we are re-using it. 
The tech industry created it. Technically and literally a gender changer is a 
computer part […]. It is an adapter that changes the ‘sex’ of a port. Ports 
with pins are said to be male, ports with holes are said to be female. In the 
situation where two pieces of hardware both have the same port, an adapter 
saves the day and makes a connection possible. We are reclaiming the term to 
mean a person interested in the gendered aspects of technology.”[12]

The founding principles of the Gender Changer Academy (GCA) were the same as 
those of ASCII as a whole, an emphasis on recycled hardware, Free Software 
and access for all. However, these basic principles were augmented by the 
focus on women and technology: “By using and teaching others to use 
Free/Libre and Open Source Software we have more freedom and control over our 
work and projects in whatever we do, be it activism, art or technology or a 
combination thereof. […] We believe that to be independent of the experts and 
so called authority figures you need to be autodidactic and DIY. Fixing your 
bicycle, car, computer. In fact women are already very technical. They use 
sewing machines, weave, spin and knit (it was weaving that lead to the first 
computer programs). There will be communication barriers, a good metaphor for 
ICT. We will become Information and Communication Tweakers in order to break 
these barriers.”[13]

The original website of the Gender Changer Academy was modeled on the Unix 
file system with the intention of providing an introduction to the file 
system in a more easily accessible way than reading stacks of dry computer 
manuals. “We built our website's link structure in a way a typical linux 
directory tree is organized. On every page you can read technical information 
(in typewriter letters) about what the directory with the same name is used 
for in the linux directory tree. The content of each page is about and/or 
links to websites of real life groups, happenings and so on. […] In case you 
want to learn more about the directory structure: read the information in 
typewriter font. In case you want to learn more about fine groups you can 
search in /bin and /usr/bin.”[14] Making connections between technical 
knowledge and familiar everyday experiences –  especially women’s 
experiences – in a creative way has always been a hallmark of the way the GCA 
operates.

As the GCA hardware courses and skill-sharing sessions became a regular 
feature, the “Internet boom” around the turn of the millennium led to a rapid 
growth and strengthening of women’s networks at the same time, and the GCA 
soon connected with other groups and organizations, such as 
the “Haecksen”[15], the female members of the Chaos Computer Club, the 
cyberfeminist “Old Boys’ Network”[16], and others. The principles and the 
working methods of the GCA appealed to a number of women with similar 
experiences in other contexts and in other places, so some of these women 
attempted to start local branches of the GCA in different cities such as 
London, Toronto, Philadelphia and the Bay Area, or to initiate similar 
groups.

For the women involved in those endeavors, the reasons why these other groups 
were less sustainable is still – in retrospect and several years later – 
largely an open and somewhat frustrating question. It seems that the specific 
conditions from which the GCA emerged in Amsterdam cannot be purposely 
reproduced. Even in other major European cities, it can be difficult to find 
more than about three or four women who share an interest in both technology 
and women-only spaces. Especially the “women-only” principle has often proved 
to be controversial and sometimes painfully divisive. In addition, even if a 
small group with strong shared convictions can be established, they still 
need a space to meet and work together. The kind of conditions at ASCII, in 
which a relatively cohesive group was able to form on the basis of shared 
experiences and a desire to change the conditions to meet their own needs, 
but which also initially provided this group with a space to develop, appear 
in retrospect to have been crucial.

 
All Across Europe

One of the women who became involved in the early GCA courses was a system 
administrator from Zagreb, who became interested in the idea of organizing 
similar courses in Croatia. Rather than founding a GCA Zagreb chapter, 
through her connections and in cooperation with the Genderchangers in 
Amsterdam, a new form was developed: the Eclectic Tech Carnival[17]. The name 
was taken from the “/etc” section of the Gender Changers website (which is 
why the Eclectic Tech Carnival is abbreviated as “/etc”), described as 
containing “all kinds of socialisation and computer configuration stuff”[18]. 
In the Unix file system the directory /etc contains “all the important 
configuration files for your own computer and networking (hostname, 
hosts,networks), users (group), mail (mail.rc) and the rc.config and the 
directory init.d with the initialization-scripts”[19]. This idea of the 
configuration of both computers and socialization for networking was to be 
the basic principle for a three-day intensive meeting to hold workshops, 
discussions and hacking sessions by and for women, and the first Eclectic 
Tech Carnival took place in Pula, Croatia, in 2002.

With the change of location and the shift from offering courses to actively 
seeking to engage more women, however, certain unconscious presuppositions 
started to become evident. In a prosperous Western European city like 
Amsterdam, choosing to live in the squatter scene and use recycled hardware 
and free software is usually (although not always) exactly that: a choice. 
This choice still exists within the framework of a well functioning urban 
infrastructure and hardware is so frequently discarded not because it is 
defective or no longer functional, but simply to make room for newer, more 
powerful models, that sufficient material is available for all kinds of 
projects. This was not necessarily the case in a region still recovering from 
a brutal war, and enthusiasm for an approach developed specifically within 
the framework of the Amsterdam squatter scene could easily be mistaken for a 
kind of missionizing in a different context under different conditions. The 
diversity of backgrounds and languages spoken with varying degrees of 
proficiency among the Gender Changers from the beginning and then among all 
the different /etc women has always been a source of potential conflicts and 
misunderstandings, but also one of the group’s greatest strengths. The 
intensive three days spent together in Pula were, in any case, inspiring 
enough to motivate two participants from Greece to suggest holding the 
next /etc in Athens in 2003. In this way a pattern was set, which has 
continued up to the present: after Athens in 2003, the /etc 2004 was held in 
Belgrade, Serbia, /etc 2005 in Graz, Austria, /etc 2006 in Timisoara, 
Romania, and /etc 2007 in Linz, Austria, as women taking part somewhere else 
have felt motivated to bring the /etc to where they live and work. Contact, 
discussions and mutual support and encouragement are maintained in between 
carnivals through several mailing lists, web sites and IRC.[20]

Although the basic pattern for the meanwhile five-day carnival remains largely 
the same with hardware crash courses, software workshops and demonstrations 
of Free and Open Source software, the same mixture of serious tech work and 
light-hearted fun, each location has presented a respectively different set 
of challenges to deal with at the same time. For instance, the complete 
absence of existing infrastructure in Timisoara – at one point it was 
questionable whether even electricity would be available – led to a huge 
effort on the part of the international group of organizers in cooperation 
with the small group of local organizers in Romania to ensure that the 
Eclectic Tech Carnival could take place at all. With the /etc in Linz the 
following year, the excellent existing infrastructure and the limited funding 
available raised a completely different set of questions. A frequently voiced 
concern is that the Eclectic Tech Carnival has to be very careful now to 
avoid “festivalization”, a hierarchical situation of invited and paid 
presenters and paying “consumers”, so that the original intention of skill 
sharing and learning together is not lost.

 
Knowledge Can Cross Borders, Women and Equipment Can’t

To prepare the Eclectic Tech Carnival in Linz, an “alliance” was formed among 
women from servus.at[21], the Linz independent art server, from the 
Stadtwerkstatt[22], an independent art and cultural center, and from 
MAIZ[23], an autonomous organization of and for migrant women in the region 
of Upper Austria. Especially the involvement of MAIZ sent out an important 
signal : the aim of the Eclectic Tech Carnival, rooted in the original ideals 
of the Gender Changer Academy, is still the guiding principle, specifically 
the aim of creating a situation in which women can acquire the skills and 
tools they want and need to better realize their goals for social, political 
and economic change, regardless of where they come from or which languages 
they speak,.

Expanding the ideals of a small group of women from a squatted center in 
Amsterdam to an international context, however, means finding solutions not 
only to misunderstandings and conflicting expectations, but also to 
bureaucratic and political obstacles. One of the most frustrating of these 
obstacles are travel restrictions that prevent online collaborators from 
meeting face to face, as when one of the main organizers of the Belgrade /etc 
was not permitted to travel to Madrid for a preparation meeting. Travel 
restrictions that apply to some regions but not others create unequal 
conditions for women specifically seeking to level the playing field, so to 
speak. When announcements were sent out that registration for /etc 2007 in 
Linz was open, over twenty registrations were received from Africa, mostly 
from Ethiopia and Ghana. After it was made clear that, as an all-volunteer 
effort, /etc had no funding whatsoever for travel costs, only two women were 
left who succeeded in obtaining sponsorship for their travel costs, but they 
still had to apply for a visa to enter Austria in the heart of Fortress 
Europe. When the organizers read the “declaration of responsibility” that 
they were required to sign for the visa application and understood the 
implications of it, they found themselves uncomfortably forced into a 
position of having to question the motivations and trustworthiness of a 
potential participant due to the serious legal and financial risk involved – 
a position diametrically opposed to the spirit and intention of the Eclectic 
Tech Carnival and contrary to the personal convictions of the organizers 
themselves. Overcoming these bureaucratic hurdles required extensive, intense 
and cooperative communication among the local and international organizers 
and the potential participants, an effort that was “rewarded” in that exactly 
one woman was able to obtain a visa to take part in the Eclectic Tech 
Carnival. Another woman who wanted to hold a workshop together with a 
colleague was ultimately unable to do so, because in the course of ongoing 
online collaborations all across various borders, it simply did not occur to 
anyone that a woman in Sarajevo working together with another woman in Zagreb 
would need a visa to travel physically from Sarajevo via Zagreb to Linz, and 
by the time this became clear, it was too late.

Discussions took place in Linz in the course of the workshops about hardware 
discarded in some places that would be urgently needed in other places. At 
this point it does not appear that it is any easier for needed equipment to 
cross geopolitical borders than for the women who need the equipment. The 
unbroken flow of communication across all language barriers simply highlights 
the frustrating absurdity of these obstacles.

For the women who were able to take part, however, the aims and ideals of the 
Gender Changer Academy carried on through the Eclectic Tech Carnival were 
most clearly expressed in the end by a woman from MAIZ, who took part in a 
workshop to learn to resize a UTP cable. She had needed a longer cable 
several weeks earlier, but the man she had asked for help told her it 
was “complicated” and he didn’t have time immediately, so she was still 
waiting for the cable. After the workshop she came out holding up in her fist 
the cable she had crimped and announced triumphantly, “I can do it myself: 
now I am powerful!”

 
With respect and thanks to the Gender Changers: Donna, Tali, Sara, Kristina, 
Sisi.

 
Author’s note: Although I take full responsibility for all inferences and 
interpretations of the history and development of the GCA and /etc, of course 
this article could not have been written without the women who have been 
willing to share their stories and reflections. Special thanks for 
discussions, comments and corrections of an earlier version to Amaia Castro, 
Reni Hofmüller, Donna Metzlar, Ivana Pavic, Ushi Reiter, Taliesin Love Smith, 
Jo Walsh.

[1] http://old.genderchangers.org/boot/index.html

[2] http://scii.nl/about/what/

[3] http://scii.nl/projects/linux/

[4] http://www.fsf.org/

[5] Cf. Aileen Derieg, “Kommunikationstechnologien: Nutzen – benutzen – 
ausgenutzt?”, in: Der Apfel. Rundbrief des Österreichischen Frauenforums 
Feministische Theologie, Nr. 47, February 1999, 4-5 
(http://eliot.at/Texts/ICT_for_femtheologians.html); see also developing 
further discussions in conjunction with the European Feminist Forum: 
http://europeanfeministforum.org/spip.php?article96&lang=en

[6] Fernanda Weiden, “Women in Free Software”, Groklaw, September 11, 2005: 
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050911153013536

[7] For some examples see the comment section here: 
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/29/1444223 or here: 
http://www.devchix.com/2007/06/09/let%E2%80%99s
-all-evolve-past-this-the-barriers-women-face-in-tech-communities/. In the 
latter example, abusive, obscene and threatening comments have been removed 
by the author.

[8] For example, the Wizards of OS conference, 14 – 16 September 2006, 
Berlin: “Will the future of free software be non-Western, user-driven and 
female?”: http://www.wizards-of-os.org/programm/panels/rules
_amp_tools_of_freedom/the_future_of_free_software.html

[9] http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

[10] Ibid.: 1.1. Audience: 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/x28.html#AEN36

[11] “Why a hardware course?”: http://genderchangers.org/faq.html

[12] http://genderchangers.org/faq.html

[13] http://www.eclectictechcarnival.org/manifesto.html

[14] http://old.genderchangers.org/

[15] http://www.haecksen.org/

[16] http://www.obn.org/

[17] Cf. Reni Hofmüller, “Do It Together”, in: Anschläge Juli/August 2007; 
http://drupal.eclectictechcarnival.org/node/671

[18] http://old.genderchangers.org/

[19] http://old.genderchangers.org/etc/index.html

[20] Cf. http://www.eclectictechcarnival.org and http://www.genderchangers.org

[21] http://www.servus.at

[22] http://www.stwst.at

[23] http://www.maiz.at