User:Artemis gryllaki/GradPrototyping/Overview

Sisters in Systems
'Systers' originates from the combination of the words systems and sisters. Already in 1987, a mailing list called "Systers" was founded by Anita Borg to support women in computer science and related fields.

Members of feminist hacker communities, aka "systers", work towards reversing the phenomenon of social exclusions (gender-based among others), in technological circles, hackerspaces and the geekdom. Their practices create safe spaces for excluded individuals to gain agency with technological matters; encourage collective knowledge production and Do-It-Together practices; build and maintain technical infrastructures that support feminist and activist work.

Together with Angeliki Diakrousi, Greek media artist and researcher, we got involved with two feminist hacker projects:

• /ETC: an annual international event, where feminists gather to critically study, use, discuss, share and improve everyday information technologies in the context of the free software and open hardware movements.
  
• SysterServer, a feminist server, run and maintained by women. It hosts online services for feminist projects and acts as a place to learn administration skills.
  
  

Inspired by these projects, we decided to initiate a local feminist initiative in Rotterdam, a series of "hack meetings". The meetings are hosted in Varia, a coworking space and centre that explores everyday technology. Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the meetings have to switch to online; there is an urgency to explore how this can happen.

I consider this initiative as contributional research to the practices of feminist hacker communities, raising two questions:
"Who counts as hacker, and what counts as hacking".
The aim is to explore these questions, through diverse activities, that include: tech skill-sharing, sociopolitical discussions around technology and artistic experiments.

My role in this project is to support:
the organisation of various thematic gatherings;
the research/suggestion of tools to document these gatherings and find ways to publish them. In my current project prototype, I suggest:
To set up a Wiki, where participants of the feminist hack meetings can collectively upload and edit documentation material. Curated documentation of the events, personal experiences, embarrassments, frustrations will be visualised in a website (form still being explored - Currently I'm working on the idea of a ~spellbook~. Probably it will be published using the same Wiki)

• Events Documentation (in progress)
  
• Wiki prototype
  
• Click to read Thesis Introduction