User:Artemis gryllaki/GradPrototyping/Overview
Systers Constellations
'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.
Feminist hacker communities 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; encourages 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 initiatives:
- /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.
After our participation in these projects, we decided to initiate a series of Feminist Hack meetings in Rotterdam. 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, that put in the centre of their practices two questions: "Who counts as a hacker, and what counts as hacking".
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 such as images/texts/audio.
Curated documentation or the events, personal experiences, embarrassments, frustrations can be afterwards visualised in a website, in the form of a digital timeline.
