Complete manual

From Gender and Tech Resources

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Introduction

This manual came out of the Gender and Technology Institute [1], organised by Tactical Technology Collective and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) at the end of 2014. The event brought together almost 80 participants and facilitators, mostly from the Global South, to focus on some of the issues faced daily by women and trans* persons on the internet, to share strategies and tools for better protecting our privacy and security online, as well as for how to spread knowledge and skills in our communities and organisations.

Since then, the network has expanded, with the result that this manual has involved the input and review of a wide range of people, and is informed by the stories and creative practices of grassroots activists and people making technology as well as digital security trainers, and privacy advocates.

The guide is also informed by the advocacy of groups like the APC and others to reframe internet rights as human rights. This involves broadening the focus of policy discussions from girls/women's access to, and use of, technology to include technology-related violence as a new form of gender violence. Phenomena such as cyber stalking, hate speech and blackmail violates our rights to privacy, work, public participation, freedom from violence and freedom of expression and opinion. It also causes us to censor ourselves or refrain from speaking up all together. This ultimately hinders our momentum in the various movements and communities we are part of.

Logically in such a complex environment, it is very easy to end up anxious or find yourself withdrawing from your activities all together. How can we then as women and trans* persons develop trust when using technology and creating content and interacting with others online, and grow our trusted networks, to create safe space among us?

This manual seeks to present some of the behaviours that you can adopt and change, both individually and collectively, to develop that trust so that you can continue to safely enjoy the freedoms and empowerment that the internet offers. It is written both for those individuals and groups who want to improve their own security and privacy practices as well those who are training others and doing advocacy on the issues.

The first part of the manual looks at the information traces you as an individual leave behind on the internet, and offers various strategies and tools available for taking control of these traces. It presents digital shadows are, and why these matter; how you can minimise, create and manage new online identities; and what are the risks and potentials involved in using different types of identities such as anonymity, pseudonyms, collective names and real names.

The second part focuses on safe spaces. It starts with the online world and discusses how safe spaces can be created for community-building, organising and support. Then, it looks at some creative tactics for addressing exclusion and harassment of women and trans* people online. Finally it discusses different methods for creating safe space in the physical world where women and trans* persons can learn about privacy, digital security and technologies in order to be empowered and further contribute to those fields.

While you're reading this manual (and putting some of what's in it into practice), it's important to keep some things in mind. Including gender into privacy and security requires us to take an intersectional approach - one that engages with a diversity of culture, social status, gender identification, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and other power structures that create inequality for individuals and communities with regard to their access to security tools and practices. It also requires us to look at privacy and security with a gender perspective, by having a broad view on technology, including how it is manufactured and the laws used to govern the internet. This includes:

  • Acknowledging that gender gaps, discrimination and gender-based violence are structural, and influence the conditions of women and trans* persons in relation to their experience of and with ICTs.
  • Understanding how different women and trans* persons in different conditions find ways of accessing technologies, and how they can protect themselves and others in the process.
  • Sharing skills and knowledge on the ground so that women and trans* persons can strengthen their freedom of opinion and expression.
  • Remembering it is important to make women and trans* experiences in the management and development of technologies visible (not just the digital ones, but also appropriated ones like health and self-care technologies for instance).
  • Working to enable a greater participation of women and trans* persons in institutions which contribute to the governance of internet, as well as inside companies and organisations delivering services which support our networking and online identity.
  • Imagining liberating technologies where everybody is truly welcomed and respected is not work for women and trans* persons only, it is the responsibility of anybody involved in creating an inclusive,accessible, decentralised and neutral internet.

With these points in mind, we should ask ourselves when choosing to use a specific technology, if it is a liberating or alienating one for other groups and individuals. Liberating technologies can be defined as those that do not harm and are fairly produced and distributed; that are rooted in free and open-source software and free culture principles; and that are designed by default against gender based violence, surveillance, opacity and programmed obsolescence [4].

Many of these issues are addressed in the Feminist Principles on the Internet [2] developed by the APC in 2014, when they gathered a group of woman human rights defenders and feminist activists to a Global Meeting on Gender, Sexuality and the Internet. The principles look at the ways in which the internet can be a transformative public and political space for women, trans* and feminists. They place tech-related violence on the continuum of gender-based violence, making clear the structural aspect of violence, linking expanding and/or mirroring online attitudes with offline prejudices.

As valentina pelizzer hvale from One World Platform explains, the principles “should be part of the agenda of any feminist activists, individuals, group or organizations and should consistently and by default be part of Women's Human Rights Defenders strategy, because the feminism we advocate is an extension, reflection and continuum of our movements and resistance in other spaces, public and private...A space of agitation and construction of political practices so that the internet facilitates new forms of citizenship that enable individuals to claim, construct, and express our selves, genders and sexualities.”

How to use this manual

The first most important thing to remember when using this manual, is that we have used the concept of “zen” in the title to highlight the importance of embracing technology with the calm acceptance that it won't always work perfectly. Sometimes you might need to spend days pondering technology and the significance of it in your life, in your community and in the world, And other times you might need to take a break and come back to it.

Taking zen as the starting point then, we have written the manual in such a way that it collects the learnings and advice of women and trans* activists as well as to answer the questions, we have not been able to find answers to out there. It also aims to raise questions in your mind and inspire you, not to give you step-by-step configuration advice on X tool (but it gives you links where you can find that!). For this reason you might notice that it is not written with one specific reader in mind; it acknowledges and creates space for a diversity of readers while avoiding the trap of dividing people into categories like beginner and advanced, profane and expert. It invites you to dip in and out according to what you are interested in experimenting with or what you think you need at the point of reading.

The manual does however assume a certain base level of knowledge like how the internet works and how data travels and is stored as well as certain security practices such as strong passwords, safe connections and encryption technologies. See what's recommended in the security disclaimer of this manual.

The manual is broken into a shorter printed (and online) version and a more extensive wiki. The wiki goes in depth, explaining how to manage identities online and build safe spaces, in addition to giving examples and instructions on how to turn abstract concepts into practice. The wiki will continue to be added to by the community from the Gender and Tech Institute. We intend it to be a repository of critical resources for women's human rights defenders and activists from the global south and the global north.

[1] https://tacticaltech.org/gender-tech-institute

[2] The Feminists principles of the internet can be consulted hereː http://www.genderit.org/articles/feminist-principles-internet

[3] Valentina complete text link (building a specific section/form in the wiki, will be online next weeks)

[4] A longer version of the methodological aspects of this introduction can be found hereː https://gendersec.tacticaltech.org/wiki/index.php/Introduction

Security Advice Disclaimer

If you feel like there are some holes in your digital security and privacy knowledge, this is a good place to start. Below you will find a set of collected recommendations from the contributors of the manual.

1. Read up and educate yourself about your country's internet laws and policies. Some security technologies such as encryption are illegal in some countries, for example.

2. Inform yourself about your country's laws and policies in relation to freedom of expression, right to privacy and against online and offline harassment. Those laws do not exist in all countries, and when they exist they are not framed and applied in the same way. You can learn and read more for instance about related rights in relation to blackmail, cyberstalking and hate speech here: https://www.takebackthetech.net/be-safe/blackmail-related-rights https://www.takebackthetech.net/be-safe/cyberstalking-related-rights https://www.takebackthetech.net/be-safe/hate-speech-related-rights

3. Keep your computer and devices clean and healthy: Updating your software, running a firewall, and protecting yourself from virus infection are fundamental to the security of your data (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/malware)

4. Map your data: What kind of data do you produce and/or manage? With whom? Where is this data stored? Which devices or online platforms hold your data? Most importantly, how sensitive is your data and what would happen if this particular data suddenly disappeared or was seen and copied by a third party? To learn more about mapping your data, read: https://gendersec.tacticaltech.org/wiki/index.php/Step_0#Mapping_your_data

5. Secure your data: Especially where our data is stored online, it is crucial to choose strong passwords, or better passphrases, and to use a different one for each of our accounts. For more information on the importance of strong passwords, how to create them and how to store them, read Security in a Box's (SIAB) chapter on passwords (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/passwords) and the EFF's howto (https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/creating-strong-passwords). If you are storing information on your computer and other devices, you can use encryption to prevent others from accessing your files. For more information on what tools you can use to do this, see the SIAB chapter on secure file storage (https://www.securityinabox.org/en/guide/secure-file-storage).

6. Connect safely to the internet: When going online, especially if you are transmitting personal data and passwords, it is crucial to always use a secure SSL connection, which ensures that your data cannot be seen by anyone as it travels from your computer to the website you are visiting or to the service you are using. To make sure that you always connect securely to websites when this option is offered, you can install HTTPS Everywhere, a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that encrypts your communications with many major websites: https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

7. Anonymise your connections: There are always good reasons to hide your physical location and your internet activities from service providers and intelligence agencies alike. An easy tool to anonymise your connections when browsing the internet is Torbrowser. It conceals both the location of your connection and what you do on the internet by routing communications through a distributed network of servers run by volunteers all over the world. By consistently using Tor, no one can link your IP address to you, not even the mail server you use. For more information on Torbrowser and instructions for Windows users, visit: https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/anonymity-and-circumvention. For instructions for Mac OSX users, visit: https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-tor-mac-os-x

8. Secure your communications: while some advice is covered in this manual, you might want to consider tools you can use and ways you can change your behaviour to increase your security when using mobile phones (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/mobile-phones) and smart phones (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/smartphones) as well as options for email and instant messaging (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/secure-communication)

We recommend you strongly to take some time for reading the complete manual Security in a Box from Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line Defenders which is available in 15 languages (https://securityinabox.org/en). You can complement it with another manual designed by the Safehub collective called A DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity for taking control of your digital spaces (https://tech.safehubcollective.org/cybersecurity/).

9. Practice self-care: Nothing is secure if we only think about technology and we neglect our wellbeing. If you are exhausted, stressed or burnt out, you might make mistakes that impair your security. Read more about this in the Tactical Technology Collective's manual on holistic security (https://holisticsecurity.org) and this essay on The Psychological Underpinnings of Security Training (https://www.level-up.cc/resources-for-trainers/holistic/psychological-underpinnings-security-training).

Chapter 1: Digital traces and identities online

Digital shadows

How much data exists about you? What kind of traces do you leave behind about your identity, your networks, and your habits when you use digital services? How does this connect to who you are online and who you are offline? What can someone who wants to harm you or investigate you, actually find out?

Your digital shadow is the story that data tell about you. It is created by trillions of traces, or bits of data, left behind in the digital world every time you go online, or when your mobile phone or any other object around you sends information to the internet. These bits of data can include your name, location, contacts, photos, messages, tweets and likes, but also the brand of your computer, length of your phone calls and information about which websites you visit.

These traces are created by you actively publishing information about yourself and people sharing information about you by tagging you in pictures, mentioning you in tweets or simply by communicating with you. There are also traces which are passively created, without you necessarily realising it, or consenting to it. For example, your browsing habits and IP address are shared amongst websites you visit and services you use in order to track your behaviour and try to sell you products through advertising.

In order to understand the concept of digital shadows, it is useful to break it down into what the data is that is being collected and who is collecting it.

What is data?

When we think about digital traces, we are talking about three types of data: content, metadata and noise.

Content: is what you actively produce: your messages, blogs, tweets, phone calls and online purchases; the pictures and videos you take to remember.

Metadata: is data about your data, information that is needed for the technological infrastructure to work. It enables your email to be delivered, files on your computer to be found and mobile communication to work. If you take the example of an email that you send, the metadata includes the sender's email, the recipient's email, the time the email was sent, the type of device the email was sent from, and the location it was sent from.

Noise: is the data that is created by either the manufacturing process or by the workings of the technological infrastructure. For example, every camera with a SD card to record and store pictures has unique scratches which are produced by the machines that manufacture them. These make small changes to the data that are not visible to the eye but can be recognised by computers. What this means is that every image or file can be traced back to the SD card it has been stored on.


Who collects data?

You might wonder about the importance of one picture, one message, or one call. You might think there is so much data out there that nobody knows what to do with it, or cares that much about it.

However, there are in reality a number of parties interested in it - including companies, governments and individuals - and data collection and data analysis is by now very sophisticated. The data traces you leave behind online are constantly being collected, analysed and sorted by various parties to create profiles on you; and every time a new piece of data is aggregated, it can be identified and added to your profile. These profiles are ever-expanding, and give those who create them or who have access to them an immense insight into who you are.

Data is collected for a variety of purposes. Profiles can be bought and sold; data can be used to control, suppress or silence; or it can be used to create harassment strategies by people who want to harm your reputation or attack you for your views or beliefs. All of the aforementioned actors can have access to your digital shadow. They might access it in different ways: through surveillance of your activities, through data-sharing between applications, or through researching publicly available pieces of data about you and patching these all together.

Depending on who you are and what you do, you will probably have different concerns about who can access your digital shadows and how this makes you vulnerable.

Relevant links:

  • Trackography: (https://trackography.org/) an interactive map exploring how the global tracking industry is recording your online behaviour.
  • In Limbo: (http://inlimbo.tv/en/) is a documentary about internet privacy, digital identity, and online communications in which you can enter your own data enabling to see your digital self being peppered throughout the film.

Further Readingsː

Exploring

You can't know exactly what is happening to your digital shadow or who might have to access to it, and that itself is a problem. Although this situation might seem dire, the idea is not to get paralyzed by paranoia but to try to demystify it for yourself and try out different methods for controlling and minimising your shadows. Some examples include reducing the amount of data you give away; consciously stripping valuable information from content and metadata; exercising the art of self-doxing; and thinking about ways to play with and break up your online identity.

The strategies and tools detailed below can increase your privacy, and help you to be more secure, both online and offline - without being less vocal or reducing your activity online. To move towards getting some control over your digital shadow, a good place to start is to see what it looks like (as far as is possible) and explore the size, depth and characteristics of your digital shadow. Below are some tools to help you do that:

  • Trace My Shadowː (https://myshadow.org/trace-my-shadow) is a tool produced by Tactical Tech that allows you to see some of the traces you are leaving online, and it offers a lot of tips on how to protect your privacy.
  • What is My IP Address?: (http://whatismyipaddress.com/w3c-geolocation) The W3C consortium enable you to test and understand how geolocalisation happens when you connect to internet.
  • Google location history: (https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0) is a good complement to understand how much information about your movements Google holds.
  • Digital Shadowː (https://digitalshadow.com) is a Facebook app developed by Ubisoft which illustrates what third parties can know about you through your Facebook profile.
  • Panopticlickː (https://panopticlick.eff.org/) tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. By using this application, your browser will be given a uniqueness score, letting you see how easily identifiable you might be as you surf the web.
  • Lightbeam: (https://myshadow.org/lightbeam) is a browser add-on that visualises the relationships between the sites you visit and the third party sites that are active on those pages.
  • Immersion: (https://immersion.media.mit.edu/) is an invitation to dive into the history of your email life in a platform that offers you the safety of knowing that you can always delete your data.
  • OpenPaths.ccː (https://openpaths.cc/) is a tool that allows you to track your location history over time with your smartphone. You can then visualise this data and see what kind of story it tells about you.

Relevant links:

Self-doxing: Another strategy for exploring your visible traces and what is already out there about you on the internet is to dox yourself. Doxing describes tracing or gathering information about someone using sources that are freely available on the internet. This method depends on the ability of the attacker to recognise valuable information about their target, and to use this information for their own ends. Doxing is premised on the idea that the more you know about your target, the easier it will be to find their flaws. This technique is used sometimes by activists and investigative journalists to profile subjects of interest. It is also used as a strategy of harassment online. "Self-doxing", or researching yourself, is a technique that can help you to make informed decisions about what you share online, and how. Of course, these same instruments can also be used to learn more about someone we have met online before we give them our full trust.

Methods used for doxing include exploring archives, images, phone directories and other publicly available information; querying common search engines like Google or DuckDuckGo (https://duckduckgo.com); looking for a person's profile in specific services; searching for information in public forums and mailing lists. But it can also simply consist in looking up the public information on the owner of a website, through a simple "whois search" (through websites such as: http://www.whois-search.com/ or similar).

Remember, even while you are exploring yourself, other people can be exploring you too. So when you are using these web services and looking for your digital shadow, a good idea is to use anonymisation tools like Torbrowser(https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en).

Further Readings:

Mapping

While we have explained what steps you might take to explore your personal digital shadow and traces you leave online, you will also need to enlarge this exploration to the people you interact with online.

Everyone belongs to several social domains - your work or advocacy networks, your family networks, friends, sports teams, whatever. Some networks may feel safer than others. For example, you may be more vigilant about what you share and how you share it in your work or advocacy activities, but less so for interacting with friends on a social networking platform.

If you use a single identity in all your domains, or if you always use your real name online, it becomes easier to gather information about you and to identify your vulnerabilities. For example, if you reveal in an online dating site that you like a particular kind of person, an attacker who wants to ruin your work or advocacy activities might trick you into sharing personal information with a fake profile and then blackmail you.

This is only possible, however, if your work identity and your online dating profile can be connected to the same person; and this is why separating your social domains can be useful. To separate your social domains, it's helpful to first map them out and identify which ones could expose you most.

You can do this by thinking about your different activities and networks, and reflecting how sensitive each of these is in order to better separate the domains that are sensitive from those that are not. You can do this by considering the data that you handle in the different realms of your life and ask yourself: what would happen if this particular data suddenly disappeared or if it was seen, copied and distributed by a third actor party?

Example: Polish computer security researcher Joanna Rutkowska developed a Linux distribution based on the concept of “security by isolation” called Qubes OS. In this system, each social domain is isolated in a separate virtual machine. The three basic domains Rutkowska identifies for herself are:

  • The work domain, including her work email, work PGP keys, reports, slides, papers, etc. She also has a less-trusted “work-pub” domain for things like accepting LinkedIn invites or downloading pictures for her presentations.
  • The personal domain includes personal email and calendar, holiday photos, videos, etc. She adds to this with a special domain called “very-personal”, which she uses for the encrypted communication with her partner.
  • The red domain includes the totally untrusted areas which don’t require her to provide any sensitive information.

This might be a technical example, but it illustrates the concept of security by isolation very well as it recognises that security measures can always be vulnerable and that harm can be reduced by stopping possible attackers from accessing the whole system that needs to be secured. This example can be applied in other ways to your own social domains.

Further readingsː

Controlling

Finding out what data exists out there and can be accessed by others is an empowering first step. There are also measures you can take to control what content and metadata you give away. When you publish content on the internet, it is always a good idea to ask yourself if what you are posting is public or personal and who could have access to it. Even if the information is connected to a public event and not to your personal life, the names you mention or the images you upload may contribute to a picture about who you are, what you are doing, where you are doing it and so on. This could be used by people who wish to target you.

This does not mean that you should silence yourself – by taking some basic steps, you can limit your risks. You can think of these as increasing the amount of effort someone who wants to surveill or attack you or your contacts would need to take.

Controlling your content when connecting to the internet

  • When giving personal information to a web service, make sure the service provides an encrypted connection for you to access it from (the url should begin with https://). You can use the browser add-on Https Everywhere for Firefox, Chrome and Opera browsers, provided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help you force https connections with websites that have them (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere).

Controlling your content when publishing online

  • When sharing personal details about your life, you can use private profiles that can only be accessed by selected contacts. When using those on commercial social networking platforms, you should be aware of the regular changes to the privacy policies of that platform. There have been cases where privacy settings have been changed, exposing pictures, content and conversations of private groups.
  • When writing or posting images about public events online, you should ask yourself if the information you spread about single individuals, places and other details could be used to identify and/or attack someone. It is always a good idea to ask for permission to write about individuals and perhaps also to discuss shared agreements about posting information on public events.

Controlling your content by reducing your metadata:

  • You can switch off the GPS tracker in your phone or camera. You can also set permission of data location, access to address book and pictures in your phone settings and install alternative tools for mobile communication such as Text Secure for text messaging (https://whispersystems.org/#) and Ostel (https://ostel.co/) phone calls for instance.
  • When registering a device or software such as Microsoft Office, Libre Office, Adobe Acrobat and others, you don't need to use your real name. This prevents the metadata created when using this device or software from being connected to you.
  • When publishing contents online you can change files from ones that contain a lot of metadata (such as .doc and .jpeg) to ones that don’t (such as .txt and .png), or you can use plain text.
  • You can use tools to remove metadata from certain files. For images there is Metanull for Windows (https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-africa/metanull/windows). For PDFs, Windows or MAC OS users can use programs such as Adobe Acrobat XI Pro (for which a trial version is available). GNU/Linux users can use PDF MOD, a free and open source tool. (Note: this tool doesn’t remove the creation or modification timestamp, and it also doesn’t remove the information about the type of device used to create the PDF.) For a full guide toremoving metadata from different file formats, see Tactical Tech's resource: https://securityinabox.org/en/lgbti-mena/remove-metadata.

Controlling your content by blocking content and deleting accounts

One method of controlling your shadow is reducing the number of platforms and services you can be found on. Some tools to help you check your mail and data integrity and delete existing accounts include:

  • Have I been pwned?: (https://haveibeenpwned.com/) is a free resource for anyone to quickly assess if they may have been put at risk due to an online account of theirs having been compromised or "pwned" in a data breach
  • JustDelete Meː (http://justdelete.me) is a directory of direct links to delete accounts from web services.

Separating identities online

Once you have identified your different social domains and the digital activities and contacts that go with them, what you need to do is decide if you want to differentiate your identities accordingly, or if you'd rather stick to your official name and true face for each of them.

You may want to keep your work connected to your legal or "real" identity, or think that your activism should be anonymous, but these are decisions that need to be thought about carefully. For example, a journalist who finds it convenient to use her real identity for her writing may decide to stay in contact with her personal domain through a nickname, so that nobody can connect the two spheres together.

On the other hand, if an activist decides that she wants to use a pseudonym for her online activities, she should consider that she will be showing her face in all her connected activities in the real world, such as speaking at conferences or participating in demonstrations. Her online pseudonym will therefore be linked to her face; but her face could also be linked to her real name on social media, and her online activism identity unmasked.

In assessing which identity to use in a given context, it's helpful to consider for each specific situation the following questions:

  • Would my safety, job or livelihood be at risk if my real identity were known?
  • Would my mental health or stability be affected if my participation in X were known?
  • Would my family or other loved ones be harmed in any way if my real identity became known?
  • Am I able and willing to maintain separate identities safely?

These questions are part of a basic risk assessment which can you use at many different points when thinking about your digital security and privacy. Once you have assessed your risk, you can then consider different strategies for separating your identities online. These range from full transparency to full anonymity.

Relevant links:

"Real" names

Author Kate Harding talks about her decision to start writing under her real name, dismissing the recommendations that are generally given to bloggers to follow practices like “writing under a pseudonym, making that pseudonym male or gender-neutral if you’re one of them lady bloggers... masking one’s personal information, being circumspect about publishing identifying details, and not writing anything that might inflame the crazies”. Instead of putting responsibility on women, Harding says, problems of harassment should be handled by society as a whole, including men. However, she also acknowledges that the decision can be a dangerous one.

For instance the project Geek Wiki Feminism reveals how certain groups of people are disadvantaged by policies which require individuals to use their real or legal names. These include women, queers, trans* persons, differently-abled persons, children and parents. The costs to these groups when having a public profile attached to their real name can range from discrimination in employment or provision of services to arrest,imprisonment or execution in some jurisdictions. For a comprehensive list of which groups of people are affected and how they are affected see Geek Wiki Feminism (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy%3F)

Further readings:

Anonymity

On anonymity, Vani, a human rights activist, writes: “I am a regular social network user. I voice my opinions on a range of topics. But I remain faceless and nameless” (http://internetdemocracy.in/media/women-bloggers-seek-safety-in-anonymity%20speaks%20of%20their%20participation%20on%20social%20networks%20anonymously).

Anonymity may be a good choice in settings where you don't need to gain other people's trust, when there are few or no people you can trust, or when you don't want to expose others in your life to risks. When you are researching or participating in message boards about health issues, or when sharing sensitive information for instance, you may wish to set up a one-time account, using a pseudonym, to comment on a blog or news site, or a one-time email account or chat session to discuss sensitive information with others.

But total anonymity can be difficult to maintain and also be dangerous in some countries, where it can signal to the state police that the author thinks they are doing something wrong. This strategy can also be lonely as anonymity can further isolates you, as a blogger underlines: “Can you have a network to protect you and also be anonymous at the same time? Would visibility be a better strategy for you?”

When you adopt anonymity as a strategy you may use pseudonyms, but these should not be used across different networks or social domains, and some may only be used once and then discarded. Because of this, anonymity differs from persistent pseudonymity.

Further Readings:

Persistent Pseudonymity

Persistent pseudonymity involves a fictitious name used consistently over a period of time. In the age of the internet, a pseudonym may also be referred to as a "nickname" or "handle". There are myriad reasons why you might want to use a name other than the one you were born with such as to hide your gender or protect your privacy.

A pseudonym can be name-shaped (e.g., "Jane Doe") or not. At the time of writing, some websites - including Facebook - require that users use their "authentic identity" which typically means using your legal name or the name by which you are commonly known. This policy has caused many users to lose their Facebook accounts among which we find feminists groups, trans* persons and drag kings and queens known for their pseudonymous rather than their legal name. If you choose to use a pseudonym on social networks, it is important to understand that you can be reported for using a "fake name" and possibly have your account deleted. A strategy for avoiding that is using a name-shaped pseudonym.

Persistent pseudonymity also offers visibility, which allows to network with others, and by pinning your voice to a particular name you can develop an online reputation. This depends on others to decide whether you are worthy of trust, and is therefore a crucial aspect in trust-based online communities. Reputation can be developed by consistently using a nickname or pseudonym that can either be connected to your legal identity, or not. The choice to connect your online reputation to your "real" name should be taken individually, according to needs and context.

Further readings:

Collective Identity

Another way to be anonymous is through collective participation. For centuries groups and like-minded people have participated anonymously in historic protest movements, or have created ground-breaking and provoking artworks or pranks under a collective pseudonym. Besides hiding the identities of the individuals involved, these collective personas have shrouded their feats in an aura of myth and almost magical power. Anonymity through collective identity can translate in a number of things, from a private group or mailing list that puts out collective statements, to a shared Twitter account. While the same security concerns apply, working from behind a collective identity means having the power of the crowd behind you, and can be a good option if you don't wish to reveal your identity.

Some examples of collective identities:

Captain Swing: the identity used by farm workers in their letters of protest during the English Swing Riots in 1830 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Swing)

Luther Blisset: a name originally belonging to an Italian footballer which was adopted and used by many artists and activists for various actions and projects (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Blissett_%28nom_de_plume%29)

Guerrilla Girls: an anonymous group of feminist and female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world (http://guerrillagirls.com/)

Netochka Nezvanovaː might be a collective name or it might be one women only. Netochka is the human face of a software tool kit used for digital video in real time. Netochka used to give the interviews to promote the software. However when she showed up in person, she was frequently embodied by different women (http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/)

Anonymous: is a loosely associated international network of activist and hacktivist entities. The group became known for a series of well-publicized publicity stunts and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on government, religious, and corporate websites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29)

Kolena lailaː was started by a group of young women bloggers in Egypt in 2006. the initiative devotes one day a year to mobilize all Arab woman bloggers to speak out on different forms of oppressions they face under one banner; Kolena Laila means we are all Laila, the protagonist of “The Open Door” (Latifa El Zayyat)(http://yfa.awid.org/2010/04/blogging-initiative-amplifies-voices-of-young-arab-women/)

Comparing strategies

Whatever choice you make, what is important is that you keep your domains effectively separated. No matter how many domains you identify in your digital life, and how many corresponding identities you create, on the internet every identity - even the one bearing your real or legal name - becomes a “virtual” persona and should be managed carefully.

The pros and cons of the various identity options:

Risk Reputation Effort
Real Name "+" "+" "-"
Total Anonymity "-" "-" "+"
Persistent Pseudonimity "-" "+" "+"
Collective Identity "-" "+" "+"


Real name

  • Risk: Using your "real world" identity online means you are easily identifiable by family members, colleagues, and others, and your activities can be linked back to your identity.
  • Reputation: Others can easily identify you, thus gaining reputation and trust is easier.
  • Effort: It requires little effort.

Total anonymity

  • Risk: It can be beneficial at times, but also be very difficult to maintain. Choose this option carefully.
  • Reputation: There are few opportunities to network with others thus to gain trust and reputation.
  • Effort: Intensive as it requires contacts caution. It might also require the use of anonymisation tools (for example Tor or TAILS)

Persistent pseudonymity

  • Risk: Pseudonyms could be linked to your real world identity.
  • Reputation: A persistent pseudonym that others can use to identify you across platforms is a good way to gain reputation and trust.
  • Effort: Maintenance requires some effort, particularly if you are also using your real name elsewhere.

Collective Identity

  • Risk: Possible exposure of your real world identity by other people's actions in the group.
  • Reputation: While not a way to gain individual reputation, you can still benefit from the reputation of the collective.
  • Effort: Although secure communications are still important, it requires less effort than total anonymity.

Creating a new online identity

Once something is on the internet it will stay on the internet, as the internet does not forget. You may think that deleting certain sensitive data from social networking platforms and web services is enough to protect yourself, but remember that metadata cannot be deleted as easily. And using just one identity through your whole life - in all your work and personal domains - creates a bulk of information that makes it easier to profile you.

One option to avoid this is to leave an old identity behind and create a new one, or several new ones for each of your social domains. You might also choose to use your real identity in some areas, and your new alternative identities in others.

Even if you don't feel an explicit need right now to have more than one identity, it is worth familiarising yourself with the process. Then in the future if you get trolled or harassed online and you need to create one, it will be easier to do. As with all security and privacy tools, you will learn better when you are not facing a direct threat. The effect of distress and fatigue affects activists' ability to engage with 'rational' processes of risk analysis, security planning and skill building. Besides all of this, a good enough reason to experiment with creating new online identities is that it is fun and an essential part of how the internet started out: as a vast and endless new playground to reinvent ourselves and be who ever we dream of being. Once you have decided that you want to experiment with multiple identities and have chosen what kind of identity you want to create, you might want to take into account the following recommendations:

  • You should select the contacts for each one carefully, and avoid sharing contacts with other identities you use for different activities. This effectively creates separate social domains, with separate accounts, mail addresses, browser profiles, apps, and if possible, even devices.
  • Your various identities should not linked to each other, or to your real identity. Remember that some of these connections can be tenuous as for example when signing up for a new pseudonymous Gmail account using your real phone number, or using a persistent pseudonymous when creating a one time use disposable email.
  • Creating disposable extra identities can be useful, as they can be discarded easily if compromised. Those can also can be created for new acquaintances when appropriate as introductory profiles to get to know somebody before you include them in your more trusted network.

Further reading:

What’s in a name ?

Many platforms have "real name" policies so if you want to use commercial social networking platforms, it is better to use a credible name and surname rather than more imaginative ones.

Once you have decided on a name, a surname, and a username for your virtual persona, you should do thorough research - perhaps also using doxing tools and techniques - to find out if someone else is already using that name. After all, if you wish to develop your own reputation, you don’t want to be confused with someone else, especially if they don’t share your views of the world or if your activities might put them at risk!

Then you need to create a story for this virtual persona because if it comes with a story it makes it a lot easier to maintain the role. You can invent a new story if you feel particularly inspired or base your story on a “known” person’s story, a superhero, a fictional character from your favourite novel, or adopt a “collective identity” like Anonymous/Anonymiss or the Guerrilla Girls. In any case when you create an identity you should conceive a whole virtual persona, an avatar that needs to be nurtured and developed in order to become credible.

Relevant links:

  • Fakena.me: (https://fakena.me) is a privacy-oriented '"fake name generator" that will give you all the fake info you need to set up an account (fake name, birth date, US only address, username and password) as well as a link to an associated guerillamail mailbox.
  • Instant Internet Decoy: (https://decoys.me) creates convincing but entirely fictional people who have birthdays, locations in several countries, families and even answers to common security questions.

Further reading:

Tips for building your online credibility: (https://gigaom.com/2008/10/30/building-your-online-credibility/)

Credible persona

A virtual persona or identity can't be just a name with a mail address and a series of web accounts. If you keep all your normal identifying traits - such as your gender, job, attitude or the way you write - it might be possible for someone to connect the dots and link your pseudonymous personas with your real identity.

  • Work: Your persona should have a job that is different from yours, but not so different that you don’t know anything about that field: for example, they shouldn’t be a surgeon if you don’t know anything about anatomy!
  • Skills and interests: Similar considerations should be made to select your persona's skills and the main topics they focus on and write about.
  • Psychological attitude: A good way to give your persona depth is by creating some "weak spots" which are not the same as your own. So when the persona gets attacked, you can laugh about it and not experience harm. For example if you have a good sense of humour, try impersonating a humourless person!
  • Linguistic fingerprint: This could be identified through a "stylometric analysis" that makes it possible to identify the author of a particular text. To change this, you can start by using a spell-checker in your word processor to check for consistent typos and you could also think about adopting a different writing attitude. You could adopt one simple rule for each persona, making them shout by only using capital letters, or be a low-talker with a lower-case style, or very excitable, with a lot of exclamation marks.

In any case, you should always remember that on the internet, each one of your identities - even the one connected to your real name - is a “virtual” identity, and it is always better to decide what character traits you want to expose in each of them. Creating a somewhat fictional character can be a good idea even for your “real” online identity.

Relevant links:

Managing several identities

Maintaining multiple identities is some work, but like most of these practices, it just requires some curiosity, patience and attention. The main point is to keep your identities separated otherwise they will very quickly begin to mix with one another. As a start, you can keep notes on your identities to help you to avoid any awkward situations where you confuse one with the other (but do think carefully about where you host or keep those notes!) There are also technical things you can do:

  • Create different browser profiles so that your browsing habits are captured under different identities, on Firefox (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Multiple_Firefox_Profiles) or Google Chrome (https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824)
  • When creating a new email account or social media account for your identity, it is a good idea to connect to the server’s website with Torbrowser and, if a contact email address is required, to think about using a disposable email address instead.
  • If you have the resources and motivation you can separate your identities per device or operating system. This can include using virtual machines for instance, as explained below.

Disposable email addresses

For some activities and social domains you need to manage rounded personas, in order to gain a strong reputation and trust from other members of the community. In other cases, though, all you need is a disposable email address that you only need to use for opening an account in an untrusted platform. This will reduce the number of traces connected to the email address you use for your work or personal life and minimise the amount of spam in your life. Below are some services which can help you set up these disposable accounts and addresses:

  • Anonbox:(https://anonbox.net) is a service provided by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) gives you a mailbox for a day.
  • Guerilla Mail: (https://www.guerrillamail.com) lets you choose your email id and holds any mail you receive to it in a mailbox for one hour.
  • BugMeNot: (http://bugmenot.com) allows people to share their email logins and passwords created for platforms with free registration, for anyone to use.
  • Fakena.me: (https://fakena.me) is a privacy-oriented '"fake name generator" that will give you all the fake info you need to set up an account (fake name, birth date, US only address, username and password) as well as a link to an associated guerillamail mailbox.
  • Instant Internet Decoy: (https://decoys.me) creates convincing but entirely fictional people who have birthdays, locations in several countries, families and even answers to common security questions.

Another option is to set up a mail alias - a different email address that is connected to your main mailbox. The advantages of this approach are that this email account will not expire, and if it gets compromised you can just dispose of it and create a new one. But beware that is very easy to check what the source email address, so don't use this method when you really need to disguise your identity.

While not every mail service allows users to create mail aliases, this service is offered to every mail user of Riseup (https://we.riseup.net) and Autistici/Inventati (https://www.autistici.org).

Relevant links:

Commercial social networking platforms

Before choosing to use any social networking platform there are some basic security and privacy questions you should ask, regardless of which identity you plan on using:

  • Does it provide an encrypted connection (https) for all uses of the site, rather than just during login? Are there any problems related to encryption (e.g. related to encryption certificates)?
  • According to the platform's End User Licence Agreement, Privacy Policy and/or Data Use Policy, how is your content and personal data treated? With whom are they shared?
  • What privacy options are provided for users? For example, can you choose to share your videos securely with a small number of individuals, or are they all public by default?
  • Is the geographical location of the servers known? Under which territorial jurisdiction do they fall? Where is the company registered? How does this information relate to the privacy and security of your activity and information?

Now when you think about crafting a separate identity and letting it out on commercial social networking platforms, there are additional precautions to take:

  • When creating a social networking account for a new persona, use the browser profile you have created for that persona. Make sure to check the privacy settings so that you know what you are making public, who can see what you post, who can contact you, who can look you up and what your contacts can do (can they tag you in pictures? can they write on your "wall"?)
  • Have fun with the profile information you provide but remember that this information is publicly available, so think about the message you want to convey with it.
  • Make sure your contacts do not overlap with your other identities, and your different identities don't "follow" one another. It is particularly not a good idea to follow your pseudonymous personas with your real identity. If someone is looking to unmask one of these personas, the first thing they will look for is who the account follows, and who follows the account. For the same reason, we should avoid reposting posts or other content published by one account with another account.
  • To make your identities look like different people, you can publish from your various accounts at different times of the day. Some social networking platforms, like Facebook, allow users to schedule the publication time of their posts.
  • It can be a good idea to follow, from your pseudonymous profiles, other people who might reasonably be considered the real owners of that profile. To further distance your real identity from your pseudonymous identities, you can also write (and hashtag on Twitter) posts under your pseudonymous profiles about events that you are not attending, especially if they are taking place far away from you. It can also be fun to publish and then delete posts that look like you have exposed your identity, so as to further confuse anyone who may try to unmask you.
  • If you are using a GPS-enabled phone, most social networking platforms will display your location where they can. This function is generally provided when you interact with the platform using a GPS-enabled phone, but the network your computer is connected to may also provide location data. It's always a good idea to double-check your settings - particularly on photo and video sharing sites.
  • If you access social networking platforms via mobile apps, it is better to use a different app for each separate account, so as not to post something to the wrong account by mistake. There are several apps which can be used to manage your social networking platforms - it is, however, a good idea to use a different one for each identity, to reduce the risk of giving away your real identity.

Relevant links:

A different machine for each identity

There are three approaches to digital security: the first one is security by obscurity, which is based on encryption, strong passwords and similar measures and acts as a first line of defence, as a deterrent that will discourage random attacks but is not likely to stop someone who is directly targeting you; then there is security by correctness, whereby software developers try to get rid of bugs that make their code vulnerable. But modern software is very complex, and it is almost impossible to do this job perfectly. Therefore, one of the most realistic approaches is security by isolation, which gives for granted that security measures can be vulnerable and focuses on harm reduction by stopping possible attackers from accessing the whole system that needs to be secured.

If you use the same operating system for your several identities, no matter how carefully you separate your profiles you can still make a human mistake by, for example, connecting to a pseudonymous account through the browser profile you have assigned to your "real" identity, or get infected by a malware that allows your attacker to monitor everything you do online, with all your identities.

To mitigate these risks, you could set up a different device for each of your domains but most of us don't have that kind of resources. A more feasible option is to set up a different operating system by using a GNU/Linux live distribution like Tails or by using virtual machines. A virtual machine (VM) can be described as a simulated computer with its own operating system, which runs as software on your physical computer. You can think of a VM as a computer within a computer. This strategy can be useful for anonymisation but also for sharing machines with others or for example for opening untrusted attachments in isolation in order to avoid a malware infection of your entire system.

The three tools proposed here – Tails, Whonix and Qubes OS – provide you with separate operating systems for managing your alternate identities, and can be quite useful to make sure that you don’t reveal your true identity while you use the anonymous one(s). Take into account that all the solutions detailed below are free and open-source Linux distributions and that they have been designed to maximise the privacy and security of its users.

Tails, or The Amnesic Incognito Live System: (https://tails.boum.org/) is a live operating system designed to help you use the internet anonymously and evade censorship. It can be run on almost any computer directly from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card and then shut down again without leaving a trace. It forces all the computers outgoing connections to go through Tor, blocking direct, non-anonymous connections. Using Tails is pretty easy, and if what you want to do with your virtual identity needs anonymisation, then it may be worthwhile to overcome the initial obstacle of installing it on a USB stick and launching it. Tails is a good option also if you have few resources, if you don’t have a computer of your own, or if you often use computers at internet cafes and want to be safer. If you want to keep the files you have created on the system or save your actions, you need to enable this option when you start it. Tails is an established, respected project that has been developed for many years and is used by a wide community of people.

Whonix: (https://www.whonix.org) is an operating system created to run in a virtual machine that is designed to protect your anonymity, privacy and security by helping you to use your applications anonymously. A web browser, IRC client, word processor and more come pre-configured with security in mind. Whonix is a relatively recent project and the community using it is still rather small.

Qubes: (https://www.qubes-os.org) keeps the things you do on your computer securely isolated in different virtual machines so that if one VM gets compromised, nothing else will be affected. This way, you can do everything on a single physical computer without having to worry that one successful cyberattack harms your whole system, potentially revealing all the connections among your several identities. Qubes OS is a good choice if you want to keep all your activities inside your own computer without having to install anything else and if what you are trying to do is to effectively separate your identities rather than anonymise your activities online.

  • System requirements: Qubes requires a very powerful computer (http://qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/SystemRequirements) – this can be a hindrance, but if you feel that you really need to protect yourself against possible digital attacks, the investment may be worth its while.

To sum up, none of these tools protect you from every threat, and you shouldn’t look at them as a magic potion that will make you invulnerable. Nevertheless, by using any of them, according to your needs and resources, you will raise the level of effort that an attacker will need to harm you, thus making an attack less likely.

Relevant links:

Synthesis

This section of the manual has looked at how to include gender into individual security and privacy practices by focusing on the question of identity, exploring what digital shadows mean for each of us alone, and collectively as women and trans* persons. It also covered practical steps you can take to control and play with your identity/ies. However most of you will also want to communicate and organise with others. So, how do you create and maintain pockets of comfort and safety in digital space for discussion, support and presence between those who share common goals, views or mandates, whether it be within your organisation or more broadly in your communities. And what are the strategies for increasing visibility and resistance in inhospitable spaces, which exclude or harm us. The second section of the manual looks beyond the choices and practices available to the individual, and delves into the management of space, looking at strategies for building safe spaces both online and offline.

Chapter 2: Safe spaces

Safe Spaces

Safe spaces can be understood as spaces that are created though explicit community agreement, or through implicit sharing of values. They enable members of a group to flourish, empower themselves and create community. Safe environments for discussion and awareness-raising have played a key role in many women's liberation movements.

As explained by integrated security trainer, Sandra Ljubinkovic, safe spaces are important for any integrated approach to security because they enable an environment that support people to express their emotions without fearing any judgment: “Creating a safe space is crucial for creating a sense of physical safety as well as a sense of confidence in a group. It is important for participants who usually have no time to relax to feel comfortable and enjoy simple things­. And if they live in a country where their lives are in danger it is even more crucial to make sure that they feel physically safe. Safe space in a group means a space to feel comfortable and speak openly and freely about feelings, challenges, and emotions as they may arise. In the workshops where issues personally affect people (whether those are physical, emotional, or spiritual threats and challenges), participants may have strong emotions as they do their own inner work facing their own oppression, privilege, anger, hurt, pain and suffering”.

Safe spaces can be temporary and take place during a one time event or training, they can also become permanent spaces where collectives or organisations embed the basic principles of safeness, support, respect and inclusiveness in their own space management. Whatever format or style is used, a safe space should allow allow women and trans* persons to access and learn about technology and related fields without having to fear sexist language and attitudes, being challenged, mocked or mansplained. There are many possible event formats and styles which can support the creation of safe spaces, both online and offline, to allow women, trans* and other groups to communicate and exchange in a nurturing and welcoming environment.

You might assume that the online communities you create or take part in through social media, discussion lists and chat channels are inherently democratic, non-hierarchical, participatory and relatively safe. However online spaces often reproduce the same hierarchies, privileges and power relations that exist in society, in the offline world. It's important to be mindful of this and to think through ways to mitigate and limit these downsides in order to get the best out of our spaces. Using such strategies is about caring for ourselves and for the communities we are part of. Making these issues explicit and visible is also about agency, social justice and feminism, helping us to better shape the spaces we care about, we organise in and within which we grow.

This section, will first look at building safe spaces online for enabling a better and safer collaboration among us through the use of mailing lists, chat, and other collaborative tools such as forums, wikis, pads, blogs and alternative social networking platforms. It will also look at how to use these tools tactically, in a way that supports the creation and maintenance of safe space. The tools that have been highlighted in this section have been included because they are free and open source, and are designed and administered with increased privacy and security in mind, minimising the amount of traces we leave online.

Second, the section will focus on strategies of resistance in public spaces which are not inherently safe - for instance Twitter and Wikipedia. Those examples are designed to give us insight into how we can create safety online collectively by developing feminist counterspeech, storming and swarming together in order to protect and support each other.

Finally it will loop back to the offline world and discuss ways to build safe spaces offline in the physical world, such as through women and trans* only or mixed spaces, to learn and Do-it-Together.

Further Readingsː

Collaboration

Mailing lists

Mailing lists are one of the oldest forms of social networks, allowing a group to discuss and organise, to exchange information, video, audio and images. A mailing list is a list of addresses to which the same information is sent simultaneously. The most common types of mailing lists are announcement lists and discussion lists.

If you have decided within your group that you need a secure communication channel and that you do not want to use corporate services, there are some good alternative services to choose from, often recommended for human rights defenders. Riseup, Aktivix and Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) are all free services that prioritise security and user privacy. Riseup in particular has many feminist- and queer-oriented lists and is therefore a great place to host your mailing list. On their website you can also have a look at the lists that already exist.

Riseup lists: https://lists.riseup.net/www/

Aktivix lists: https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo

Autistici lists: http://www.autistici.org/en/services/lists.html

If you or your organisation has your own server you can also install your own software for managing mailing list and ensure that all your communications remains hosted and safe in your own machine and can not be intercepted by unintended third parties. More information at: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_mailing_list_software).

Encrypted lists: If you want a high level of security, there is also the possibility of encrypting mailing lists. However, it is important to understand that this requires every participants to the list to already use encryption software like PGP or GPG. This type of list, based on software called Schleuder (http://schleuder2.nadir.org/) and developed by Nadir.org, is designed to serve as a tool for group communication, but this time with a strong emphasis on security.

Open or closed?

Once you are ready to create your mailing list you need to decide whether it will be open or closed.

Open: An open list allows anyone to subscribe, and then once they have joined the list, to receive announcements or participate in the discussion. Subscription can either be automatic, or it can be approved by a moderator. This type of mailing list is good for reaching out to your potential allies, contributors and followers and keeping them update about your activities. You can set an open list by checking out the configuration or admin options of the list when you are creating it.

Closed: Another option is to keep your mailing list closed. In a closed list, membership is limited, and all subscribers require approval before they can join the list. It's possible to have a list that is publicised - ie that everyone knows about - but still closed. This type of list is useful when you want to discuss sensitive or personal topics and be sure that all members in the conversation are trustworthy.

Note that sometimes the archives of a list can be made public to anyone on the web, and will also therefore end up on search engines (like Google). Check if keeping a list open to new subscriptions automatically implies that the archives of the list will be made publicly available, or if they will only be accessible to those who have the subscription password. Sometimes you can choose whether you keep the archives public or not.

If you intend to talk about sensitive issues (and talking about gender related topics is often a sensitive issue!) or if trust within the group is important for creating your safe space, you might want to set up a closed list and to keep your archives closed. If you do choose to leave your archives accessible, it is important to inform everyone subscribed to the list that any delicate topic or personal detail that pops up in your discussions will be potentially visible to anybody.

Relevant links:

Policies

Agreeing on a mailing list policy - a set of do's and don'ts for the list - from the start will save you a lot of time and possibly difficult conversations. Even on a closed list, publishing your policy - which should include the ways in which moderation takes place and how to report violations of the policy - can be helpful in creating the online safe space you want everyone to feel comfortable in. Your policy can address tensions like the fact that being free to express emotion is an important feminist principle, but losing your temper and attacking someone you don't agree with on the list is not ok. In the end any good mailing list policy will set its own rules for achieving a correct balance between freedom of expression and opinion and impeding flames and racist, sexist, or homophobic attacks for instance to take place within the list.

Having a visible and explicit policy sends a strong message about the value of maintaining the mailing list as a safe space. It can also help you to decide who can be added to your list and who not. To make sure that the policy does not get forgotten, you can regularly remind subscribers about it, with a link at the end of each mail you send out.

Relevant links:

Administration

Administrating a list: involves handling subscriptions and moderating content. You can choose how many administrators you want your list to have. Be aware that if your list suddenly becomes very chatty, this might be too demanding for just one person. Besides that, any communication tool including many members should not rely on only one person for administration duties. Take into account that this person could have problems, disappear or simply become abusive because of their power. A list can also be collectively managed and you can distribute those responsibilities among members of the list.

Moderating a list: as a general rule, moderation has two main goals. A well-moderated community will be more efficient in producing and redistributing useful information to its subscribers. Besides, good moderation will increase the accessibility and openness of online communities by enabling respectful dialogue among its members.

Remember that any online safe space will apply the basic principles of net etiquette and that any good administrator, moderator and mailing list policy should review, adapt and include those principles in their core social norms and values and ask members of the list to discuss, understand and accept those. In a nutshell net etiquette requires users to: remember to be nice as we all experiment feelings when communicating, keep messages brief, do not shout, protect personal information, help others, and to not send mails if feeling angry! For more information see: (http://www.networketiquette.net/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology)

Mailing list examples

Before setting up your own mailing lists, you might want to engage with some of the established mailing lists focused on gender and technology. For example:

Open Mailing lists:

Take Back the Tech!: the mailing list associated with the collaborative campaign to reclaim information and communication technologies to end violence against women. To register: https://lists.takebackthetech.net/mailman/listinfo/takebackthetech

FemTechNet: is a network of scholars, students, and artists who work ontechnology, science, and feminism in a variety of fields including Science and Technology Studies, Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer, and Ethnic Studies. To register: http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/mailman/listinfo/femtechnet

Queer Feminism Geek: is a network of feminist, queer and trans* hackers, makers, geeks and artists who organise activities and assemblies at the Computer Chaos Camp and Congress. To register: https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/queerfeministgeeks

Subscription after endorsement by others on the list:

Fembot: is a network of scholars and students who focus on gender, media & technology. To register: https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/fembot

Femmehack: is a list created to organise a Global Feminist Hackathon that took place past 23th of May 2015 in loving memory of Sabeen Mahmud, a Woman Human Right Defender shot to death in Pakistan: https://f3mhack.org

TransHackFeminist: is a list created after the first THF convergence in 2014 where intersectional feminists, queer and trans* people of all genders met to better understand, use and ultimately develop free and liberating technologies for social dissent: http://transhackfeminist.noblogs.org/files/2015/01/THF_report_Eng.pdf

Closed mailing lists:

Gender and Technology Institute Participants: is a closed list of people who participated in the Gender and Technology Institute that took place past December 2014, inasmuch as it is opened to people trained by Tactical Technology Collective to privacy and digital security from a gender perspective.

Ada camp: is a closed list composed of the people who participated in Ada Camps and is dedicated to speaking about issues related to women in open source: https://adacamp.org/

Chat with IRC

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a chat service which can be hosted on different servers and accessed through different user clients. It provides the ability to set up channels or chatrooms which allow many people to contribute to a discussion in real time. IRC also gives you the option to encrypt your communication. You can’t embed video, audio or pictures, but you can link to them.

While IRC can be a great tool for facilitating collaboration, there are things to bear in mind if you decide to use it. First, IRC can take a little time to get used to, depending on the skills in your group. Second, developing relationships across a purely text-based channel such as IRC can be challenging. Writing is not easy for everyone; and some in the group might not be using their mother tongue.

Accessing IRC through your browser: There are several ways to chat through an IRC network. The easiest way to start out is to access an IRC network directly through your browser, such as one from Indymedia (https://irc.indymedia.nl/) or Freenode (https://webchat.freenode.net/). You can get set up immediately by creating a nickname and a channel, which you can then give to your colleagues to connect with you.

Accessing IRC through a chat client: Connecting to an IRC network through your browser is, however, not the most secure option out there. If you are a more advanced user, or if you have already tested out IRC out and think it will work for your group, it can be better to access your chosen IRC network from a chat client.

There are a few different chat clients which you can choose from, including Jitsi and Pidgin. You can read more about these clients and how to use them on Tactical Tech's Security in-a-Box: Jitsi (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/jitsi/windows) ; Pidgin (https://securityinabox.org/en/guide/pidgin/windows).

How to use a network: Advice and instructions on using an IRC network can be found on Freenode (https://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml), Autistici (https://www.autistici.org/en/stuff/man_irc), and Indymedia (http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/IrcHowTo) The last two also allow us to anonymise our connections through Tor.

Facilitating a meeting: Once you start an IRC meeting, it is useful to appoint a facilitator to keep track of time. This person might also be in charge of making sure the discussion sticks to the topics at hand. In order to create a welcoming environment and a safe space, acknowledging and valuing the voice of everyone is key on IRC. When you start a conversation, take time to greet people - in particular newcomers.

When facilitating a conversation:

  • Set a time limit and stick to it because IRC meetings can be very tiring.
  • You might decide that people should be given turns to speak in order to ensure that everyone has space to express themselves. You can simply assign turns in alphabetical order of nicknames (or any order you want to give) for each of the points addressed. This can help structure the conversation and stop one person or a small group of people dominating the conversation.
  • IRC can go very fast, particularly if there are many people involved in the discussion. Getting everyone to slow down and read all the inputs can decrease frustration.
  • It can be useful to end your input with “over” or "done", so everyone knows when you have stopped speaking.

Whatever the facilitation methods you choose, communicate them explicitly to all the participants beforehand, for example in the email where you invite people to join the meeting.

Forums, Wikis and Etherpads

Chat services and mailing lists can be extremely useful, but they will only take you so far. When it comes to managing collaboration between people living in different places, you will probably find yourself looking for something with more functionality.

Internet forums: One of the oldest tools used for public discussions online are internet forums, where discussions can be hosted over time and are at least temporarily archived. What really distinguishes a forum from a mailing list or IRC chat is that it has a tree-like structure and can contain a number of sub discussions, each with a different topic.

Wikis: If you are looking for a tool to collaboratively write a text with many sections, or even to create the initial structure and content for a website, a wiki can be a useful tool. A wiki is a web application that allows for hierarchical structuring of content and tracks the edits and additions of the users, easily allowing you to revert changes, and move and delete content.

Both forums and wikis need to be hosted on a server, so you'll need to know how to set one up and manage it.

Etherpads: For collaborating in real-time on documents, Etherpads are a great resource. They are also a good alternative to corporate services like Google Docs, and are far more effective for co-editing text than, for example, sending mails back and forth. The main thing you need to check for in an etherpad is that it is hosted with an encrypted connection (via SSL). A list of such etherpads can be found here: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Etherpad-Lite.

  • To create a new etherpad (ie, a new document that you are going to collaborate on), you need to decide on the name of the URL. Because each pad is open to anyone who has the URL, you should give each pad a long and inventive name, so that it can't be easily guessed. For example: https://pad.riseup.net/p/feminists is not secure. A more complicated URL such as https://pad.riseup.net/p/FeministsRockAndTheyWillBeDoingGreatThingsToghether is much more secure. Once the etherpad has been created you can send the URL to your friends and colleagues to start collaborating on a document.
  • If you are worried about your etherpad being found by others, you can also consider a password-protected pad. For more on this, see: https://www.protectedtext.com/
  • Etherpads allow you be anonymous, use a pseudonym or use your real name. There is a colour-based system that differentiates the contributions of each participants on the Etherpad, so you can always see who is contributing what.

Blogs and websites

If you are part of an organisation or group, you might want to publish information about yourselves, your work or write opinion pieces. A blog is a good vehicle for this and can be as easy as signing up to a blogging platform and choosing a name and a "theme" or visual template. There are several blogging platforms that are both user-friendly and free:

Wordpress: (https://wordpress.org) very popular and easy to use, open-source.

Noblogs: (http://noblogs.org) security-oriented blogging platform based on Wordpress with some tweaks for additional user privacy, managed autonomous servers, Autistici/Inventati.

BlackBlogs: (http://blackblogs.org) similar to Noblogs, managed by German tech collective, Nadir.

If you want a complex graphic layout or need to install particular tools that are not offered by Wordpress and its plugins, you can create your own website. For this you need to get some space in a server through a webhosting service. There are many services out there, but since they generally aren’t free, the options to stay completely anonymous are reduced to creating a website with Austistici/Inventati, which by default does not connect the users of its services with real identities. To learn more about Autistici/Inventati’s webhosting service, visit: (https://www.autistici.org/en/services/website.html)

If you want to use your own domain name, bypassing payments and identifications may get difficult unless you use Bitcoin or another anonymous payment system. The personal data you will provide will not only be stored in the registrar’s internal archives, but by default will also be recorded in a database that can be easily queried by anybody through a simple command in a search engine (whois) or on several websites (e.g: https://www.gandi.net/whois). To avoid this, you can register your domain with the data of an association and use a prepaid credit card that is not connected to your own data (if available in your country). Alternatively, you can use a registrar like Gandi (https://www.gandi.net) that offers private domain registration for individuals whenever possible.

Alternative social networking platforms

Mainstream commercial social networking platforms can be extremely useful if your intention is to publicise as widely as possible an event you are organizing or a project you are launching. You can think of them as a megaphone - a great tool for getting attention and drawing a crowd but not ideal for communicating anything sensitive or private. There are numerous reasons why they are not considered security or privacy conscious. To begin they have very strict terms of service that could justify their decision to close your accounts if they find that your contents go against their rules. They also profile the users and send the information to advertisers. If you add to this the ever-changing terms of service and the interactions with other apps and features that make it very difficult to understand clearly what actually happens to your data.

So be strategic. Limit the use of commercial social networking platforms to specific projects you want to publicise to a wide audience. For other purposes, there are alternative social networking platforms that give much more freedom to their users and don't profile them. These are community-based, distributed rather than centralized, based on free and open-source software and privacy-friendly. Examples include:

Diaspora: (https://joindiaspora.com) offers a community driven micro-tweeting platform

Friendica: (https://friendica.com) enables users to integrate their contacts from different social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Diaspora, GNU social, App.net, Pump.io, etc)

N-1: (https://n-1.cc/) offers a wide range of tools such as wiki, pads, mailing lists and has a clear anti-sexist terms of service however the maintenance of the platform is unclear.

Crabgrass: (https://we.riseup.net) has been around for more than ten years and constitute a solid and sustainable social networking alternative.

Relevant links:

Safe spaces in the public sphere

There are many spaces which will feel inherently unsafe either because they explicitly or implicitly exclude women and trans* people, or because they harbour bigots. There are a number of ways to counter the vulnerability and intimidation we might feel online. One is through caring for our personal and collective safety, through using security -and privacy- enabling tools and techniques and managing safely our online identities. Another is shaping with others methods to reclaim and stay safe in the public sphere. Organising collective actions can be a powerful act of resistance, bringing attention and visibility to the situation and in turn helping to bring about transformation.

Feminist counterspeech

Creating counter-narratives online, or "talking back" - is one strategy for making sexism visible and for responding to online attacks and harassment. It can be an effective tactic to create a sense of belonging and make visible the effectiveness of collective feminist actions online. There are many examples of feminist counterspeech in action - many of which you have probably seen and appreciatedː

Feminist counterspeech can also include tactics to enable the inclusion and visibility of women's and trans* persons contributions inside universal free knowledge platforms such as the Wikipedia.

Storming Wikipedia

There have been many studies that have criticised the way in which knowledge is produced on Wikipedia. A 2010 survey (https://web.archive.org/web/20100414165445/http://wikipediasurvey.org/docs/Wikipedia_Overview_15March2010-FINAL.pdf) conducted by the United Nations University found that only 13% of Wikipedia contributors identified as female. The fact that Wikipedia’s contributors are mostly men in their twenties and thirties, and disproportionately western, are important factors that influence content.

Women who have played a significant role in history are also often missing from Wikipedia, and feminist, queer and trans* content is often challenged. For instance the case of changing the name of whistle blower Bradley Manning into Chelsea Manning in the Wikipedia became a very complex issue as the following article explains (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/24/chelsea-manning-name-row-wikipedia-editors-banned-from-trans-pages).

The lack of gender and cultural diversity in the content on Wikipedia demands creative responses. Because of this partnerships, research, community organizing, socio-cultural and technical interventions should all be considered as pointed at by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Storming Wikipedia or organising Edit-a-thons are two possible interventions. These enable participants to learn collectively how to edit and change content to better reflect their communities and histories. Learning how to edit Wikipedia can seem daunting, so collectively editing and creating pages is a great way to confront fears; to Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) in a safe space. Besides you will learn about the Wikipedia community values and principles and how such a large community-driven effort has, through the development of bottom-up social rules, become the most important encyclopedia in the world. All together, Wikipedia remains an important space worth investigating and reclaiming! Organising a wikistorming involves gathering a group of friends (and friends of friends) who want to learn or already know how to edit Wikipedia, and identify a safe space in which to hold the event. It can be held in someone’s home, in a community centre, at an art centre or at a community organisation. Wikistorming can (and should) of course be organised for any day, but Ada Lovelace Day in mid-October and International Women's Day on March 8 are two specific days on which such gatherings often happen. A wikistorming can last for half to a whole day. Before the wikistorming or as part of it, decide which Wikipedia entries you want create or which existing page you want to edit. Be realistic in your goals and don't put too many edits on your agenda because to edit Wikipedia carefully takes time.

Relevant links:

We Can Edit.jpg

Dealing with Trolls

Women and trans* persons who begin to grow a following and have influence online might experience what Kathy Siera describes as a “koolaid point” (http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point/). This is a point at which a certain group of people decide that you have too much influence, and make it their mission to silence you or discredit you. This is commonly referred to as 'trolling' - although it is more often than not targeted, discriminatory in nature and hate-based. A troll's tactics can include anything from sending constant derogatory and belittling messages, to editing and distributing images, and even making threats.

Block or engage?

If you are not planning to ignore the trolls, then there are two key ways you can deal with trolls. One is to block them and then report them to the platform you are using. The other is to engage with them. The decision on which way to go depends on what you want to achieve.

Blocking trolls can sometimes be effective, and can allow you to continue with your work unimpeded. Projects like Block Together (https://blocktogether.org/) and Block Bot (http://www.theblockbot.com/sign_up) were developed to help people who are harassed share their blocklists with each other.

When trolls are really committed to harassing you, however, blocking doesn't really help. A determined troll can create numerous different profiles (called “sock puppet accounts”) to continue the harassment, and this means your blocking has to keep up with their new account generation. This quickly becomes very tedious.

Historically, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have not handled reports of intimidation and violence very well. However, this is beginning to change, as they recognise the severity of problem and see how it deters people with important voices from using their services.

You might consider the alternative - engaging the trolls who are harassing you. One way to do this is to try and enter into rational arguments with them and interrogate their views. Another way is to try to shame them, or to use humour to deflate their egos. Effective engagement with trolls can actually help to generate debate and public interest around the act of harassment, and can involve others online in discussions about safe spaces, violence, sexism and online behaviour. It can also be a source of empowerment for the subjects of trolling: seeing others laugh at your harasser can be very uplifting.

Swarming can be another way to drown out the voices of the harassers. This can be done in retro style by creating communities of support with your allies in social media spaces where you are likely to encounter harassment. When someone is being targeted, others can quickly be alerted and bombard the harasser with messages. The content of that message is up to you: it could be scolding, educational, or loving. Another option is: instead of directing messages towards the harasser, the swarm can fill the victim's content stream with lots of new content in order to quickly make the negative, violent content disappear into online history.

If you want to engage with trolls, or try “swarming”, you might prefer to stay anonymous to avoid having your real identity trolled. Setting up a network of second accounts to do your troll-response work can be a good idea for your organisation or your community of friends. It might be easier too, psychologically, to say some of the things you want to trolls, than you would if the comments were linked to your main identity. And it is more performative: you can create any kind of identity you want and style it with an avatar, a funny name, a character etc.

However, while battling the trolls in the old-fashioned human way can be fun and eye-opening, it can also be a time waster. Another option to consider is automation using bots. For this you need to do some coding, or you can work with freely available code that someone has already uploaded on a software repository such as Github.

Further readings:

Bots against trolls

A bot is a piece of software that runs an automated task over the internet, performing tasks much faster than we can.

There are many different types of bots. There's the spambot, for example, which harvests email addresses and contact information; and there are also the 1800 approved bots on the English Wikipedia, which help to semi-automate the editing of Wikipedia pages. Bots can post content, gather information and click on things. Twitter is also filled with bots which use algorithms to harvest information and tweet. Many of these are humorous and random - for example @twoheadlines, which grabs random news headlines and combines them to create funny combinations.

A bot can be programmed to document trolls' activities, or talk to them, so that you don't have to. The possibilities outlined below apply mainly to Twitter; however some of these ideas can be used across other platforms as well.

The data-gathering bot: quietly scans Twitter and gathers up tweets, usernames and any other available information you have programmed it to collect. It places this information in a file for you. This bot can be useful for understanding what kind of content is out there, and for doing a first-stage analysis of abuse. Foxxydoxing is such an example; it is intended to help you analyse who your harassers are (https://github.com/DeepLab/FoxyDoxxing).

The simple talking bot: if you follow the #gamergate hashtag on Twitter, you will see a bot called @everyethics which tweets different humorous reasons for the #gamergate trolling, ridiculing the claim that the major trolling which has been called "Gamergate" was not about attacking women in gaming but about “ethics in game journalism”. While this bot could be seen as spam, it was actually clearly a strategy to undermine and make fun of the trolls.

The retweet bot: is programmed to scan Twitter for a list (created by you) of specific words, phrases or hashtags, and to retweet those. This would be a strategy for documenting and publicising Twitter abuse. Here's an example of such a bot you can download and install yourself (https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=17418).

The autotweet bot: is similar to the retweet bot except that every time it finds a tweet with one of the words, phrases or hashtags you have programmed it to look for, it will tweet a pre-written tweet directed at that user. These bots get shut down much faster now, as was shown by @fembot, which was programmed to automatically respond to racist and sexist tweets. @fembot was blocked after only 75 tweets.

The data-gathering bot in combination with the talking bot: in this example the data-gathering bot finds the users according to your search terms, and compiles them for you to read over, check for accuracy and remove any false positives. Alongside the data-gathering bot, you can have a talking bot or a team of talking bots which can tweet whatever you want to those users. The campaign Zero Trollerance (https://zerotrollerance.guru) used this method, employing 160 talking bots which enrolled 3000 identified trolls in a self-help program and then sent them humorous motivational messages and video clips over a period of one week.

If you are considering creating bots to work for you to fight online bigotry and harassment, there are some things you need to watch out for. Twitter is not against bots and if you just want to create a bot that scans information from Twitter for you to analyse, or a bot that just tweets out to no one in particular, you will likely not encounter any problems. However if you want to tweet @ other Twitter users, you have to take into account Twitter's policy against spam.

Also keep in mind that language is slippery and if you want to tackle violence against women and trans* persons online, you will have to be very careful about what kind of language you search for. For example, every time someone uses the word “bitch” on Twitter to intimidate or harass a someone, there are probably at least five other people using it to tell their friend how much they love them. The best way to figure out which language is being used for harm is to crowdsource it from people who have been harassed and then do a number of tests, pulling tweets from Twitter and then analysing the results yourself. Read more of this section, including how to set up Twitter accounts to be bots for you. Read more of this section, including how to set up Twitter accounts to be bots for you.

Relevant links:

Further readings:

Supporting others

It can feel daunting to know what to do when you see someone experiencing online violence, and sometimes in trying to help you can inadvertently worsen the situation. Knowing how to act in the best possible way is our individual and collective responsibility in helping to create a safe space online for everyone. If you are someone who wants to support a disadvantaged group but is not part of that group (men are allies when it comes to women's rights issues), it's important to speak out and say “NO”, in a public space, to online harassment and violence. Otherwise, the culture of impunity to online harassment will continue. Now when your friends or allies are being harassed and/or attacked online, there are some best practices you can follow.

Offer quick support: When someone is being attacked or harassed, try to be quick in bringing in support. If you are close to the person under attack, offer immediate assistance. Bear in mind that this person might feel overwhelmed and might not have a clear set of instructions in mind about how to best supported. Remain quiet, attentive and patient and try to not create any extra pressure or stress. In the event of doxing - where confidential info has been released on the internet about that person - you might want to offer a safe space (a home) if the person does not feel safe in their own home. You can also offer to moderate your friend's Twitter feed or blog comments to allow her/them to take a break from it. Finally, you can also review local and national law and policies for dealing with online and offline harassment and translate your knowledge into concrete actions to support the person being attacked.

Speak out: If you do not know the person well, you can at least speak out against what is happening. It's not enough to simply send a private email or a tweet to the person who is under attack telling them that you think this kind of behaviour is unacceptable (sometimes, if the person under attack is being flooded with tweets and mails, it's even better not to write at all). Instead, speak out about it in your networks and raise your voice against such behaviour. You can, for instance, commend publicly the work that the person under attack has been doing. Don't be silent, especially if you are a colleague or a team-mate. Make your voice resonate online - particularly if you are a man! Here is a great example of Jay Smooth calling on men to challenge anti-feminist internet trolls: (https://vimeo.com/44117178)

Organise collectively: If you want to have more impact, think about crafting a "collective action" as those are often more effective than individual actions. Gather a group of friends, and friends of friends, for a Twitter storming, for instance. This will show to the person under attack that you and others care and that such acts are not OK.

Write a solidarity statement: If you are part of an organisation or network, you can write a solidarity statement that explicitly says you condemn online gender-based violence and harassment. Having feminists review the statement of solidarity is a best practice. If it's a person from your organisation who has been under attack, make sure she/they read the solidarity statement before it is released. You can also prepare an organisational policy in advance on what to do if someone is under attack. If you have a policy and specific steps to follow when such a situation occurs, chances are you will do less harm and be more effective in your response. See for instance the Tor solidarity statement against online harassment: (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/solidarity-against-online-harassment).

Talk to the media: Depending on the nature and context of the situation, you might want to speak out through the media and highlight the gendered and sexist nature of online attacks. It's always best practice to consult the persons targeted before speaking to the mainstream media. If you do not know the person personally, go through the web of trust - your trusted online network. Thinking about the harm and added stress that the person can go through if they are made visible in the mainstream media is something that you should carefully assess. Consider especially that this is not about you: this is about fighting sexism online and supporting others!

Relevant linksː

  • Crash override network: (http://www.crashoverridenetwork.com/) a support network and assistance group for victims and targets of unique forms of online harassment, composed entirely of experienced survivors. They work preventively and reactively with survivors during episodes of harassment to keep them safe and provide them with the means to reduce harm and rebuild, as well as disempower their harassers.
  • The Online Abuse Prevention Initiative (OAPI): is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing and mitigating online abuse through the study and analysis of abuse patterns, the creation of anti-harassment tools and resources and collaboration with key tech companies seeking to better support their communities. It works in collaboration with the Crash Overide network (http://onlineabuseprevention.org/)
  • HeartMobː is a platform for real-time support to individuals experiencing online harassment and empowers bystanders to act. Visit their Kickstarter project to know more about the initiative (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4096561/heartmob).

Documenting violence

Besides directly supporting and showing solidarity with people subjected to violence, you can also populate and contribute to the documentation of instances of online violence and harassment. Those initiatives are key in order to show the extent of the problem and to make visible some of the structural aspects of violence in societies.

Resources for documentation:

  • GenderIT.org: emerged from APC's Women’s Rights Programme’s advocacy work in information and communications technologies. The need to have examples of national policy, gender-sensitive language, tools for lobbying, and an understanding of the impact of poor or positive policy all within easy access has been expressed by ICT advocates and policy makers alike (http://www.genderit.org/).
  • Breaking the circle is an international campaign to raise awareness on the fact that gender violence is a problem that concerns both men and women, which focus on the role of men and include them as agents of change. They have developed a series of tools and information that will help us spread the message and raise awareness (http://en.breakingthecircle.org/).
  • Crowdmaps in Indiaː After the Delhi Gang Rape there was a lot of interest in how tech could be used to address the issue of sexual violence against women in offline spaces. These initiatives emerged from spaces where tech meets gender in order to see how tech can be used to tackle gender based violence gender problems. See for instance Harassmap in Bombay (www.akshara.crowdmap.com ) and the Safecity -Pin the creep (www.safecity.in) and the 'Safetipin' app for safely auditing public spaces.
  • Macholandː This french platform wants to voice actions, embedded in the public, media and political speech, driven by citizens who refuse to see sexism spread massively without reacting. Each user can participate and propose an action that pin with humor brands, organizations and public figures (http://macholand.fr/)
  • Feminist Frequencyː This project includes the video series Tropes vs. Women, created by Anita Sarkeesian with Bitch magazine to examine common tropes in depictions of women in film, television and video games, with a particular focus on science fiction. Videos produced in this series include “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, “Women in Refrigerators” and “The Smurfette Principle” (http://feministfrequency.com/)

Safe spaces offline

Many of the principles of creating and maintaining safe spaces online can also be applied offline. As noted in the introduction of this chapter, safe spaces can either be temporary and take place during a one time event or training or can also become permanent spaces where collectives or organisations embed the basic principles of safety, support, respect and inclusiveness in their own space management.

In the case of security and privacy training, you also need to consider how participants can best learn skills to protect themselves when the topics themselves can be frightening or overwhelming. The environment also has to be suited to the participants share stories about threats they have been facing online and offline. Those stories can be very traumatic and personal and should be handled carefully, but at the same time they are a very important part of the process of developing security and privacy strategies.

The difficulties in defining what a "safe space" should look like are inherent in the fact that you are bringing a diversity of people together, who might be considered to be part of the same community but who all have different histories, contexts and needs. What one person might find politically, socially or personally threatening might mean very little to another. And everyone will of course also come with different experiences and levels of knowledge and skills with regard to technology.

It is important to be aware that, in struggling to perfect a safe space, one always runs the risk of creating instead yet another form of social control and pressure to conform to a particular image of what, for example, a woman or trans* person is or should be.

Boundaries

When trying to create a safe space, you might encounter the issue of who is included and who is excluded from it. It can very divisive, as it will often touch on people's strongly held sense of their political, personal, sexual and social identities. Issues of sexual orientation and gender identity will likely come up. Some will prefer a women and trans* only environment, some will feel that this opens up an opportunity for external attacks on the whole project by adversarial forces, while some will feel that cis-men friends and colleagues are being unfairly excluded, and feel resentful. If you are having a debate about this, some things to consider are:

  • Is there an agreed framework and rules of engagement? How do we define "woman" and "trans*"? How do we define "safe"?
  • Who do we want to include, influence or support? Specifically women and trans* persons, or also potential allies?
  • How important versus how contentious? Is it worth alienating some people from the group? How can we frame the debate to avoid alienating people who don't agree with the decision?
  • How will the decision affect the actual experience of people within the space?
  • Do we have all the skills we need to deliver this project among our networks, or will we need specific additional skills? Where will we get them?
  • How will the space be organised to promote equal participation, especially if cis-men are included?

It's important to remember that building offline spaces is resource- and labour-intensive, and often many compromises have to be made. It may be a good idea to try to identify as early as possible which values are shared, important, and relevant to the event, so that you can constantly remember to prioritise those and de-prioritise less important or potentially divisive issues.

Building offline spaces is easiest and most successful when you're clear about what you're trying to do and how you plan to go about it. The second thing which must be considered is exactly what the event is intended to achieve. For example:

  • Skills: How can we learn to do xyz?
  • Advocacy: How do we change the culture of tech sectors to be more amenable for women and trans* persons, and/or let the world know that they are great at tech?
  • Support, networking and boundary-crossing: What does it mean to be a woman or trans* person in tech? How can women from different places or sectors come together to spark off new ideas and practices? How can we support each other as women and trans* persons in tech?

Different aims will inform different safe space policies. For instance, it's difficult advocating for change in the male-dominated tech sector if you haven't invited cis-men to hear what you want to say - but you might prefer to discuss *how* to do this in a women and trans*-only environment first. If, on the other hand, you are advocating for engagement with technology to women and trans* persons and mainly want free, honest and mutually supportive discussions or skills-sharing, then in this case, a women and trans* only environment suggests itself.

With skills workshops, there is research to suggest that women and trans* persons learn tech skills best with each other, so these workshops have a very clear and communicable reason for being exclusive. Another possibility is to run an event twice, once for women and trans* participants and once for open participation. This can have the positive side-effect of enabling others to experience a safe space methodology and thereby change their own practices in the spaces they organise, but it will be clearly more time consuming.

Choosing a format that fits

Once you have settled the basic questions on what your event is for and who you want to invite, it's time to think about the format of your event. Deciding which format to use can be helped by your answers to some key questions:

  • What are you trying to do? Which format will support this activity best?
  • What are the participants' needs, existing skills, experience and preferences?
  • What physical spaces are available, what will they allow you to do, and what resources do you have?
  • What are your human and organisational resources - how much can you take on?

There are many different ways of organising events. Some of the most popular in FLOSS and tech-related communities are:

  • Un-Conference: helps people to make connections, share knowledge, collaborate and inspire each other. To take part, participants are encouraged to give a presentation, create a discussion, or even chair a debate (http://lanyrd.com/blog/2012/unconference-howto/ ; http://openspaceworld.org/wp2/what-is/). This format can be relatively egalitarian and relatively easy to organise (no messing about with programmes, scheduling and advanced prep) but you should watch out for the tyranny of structurelessness. Thy can also be extremely intimidating and therefore exclusionary towards less experienced or skilled participants; and can be stressful if you need to organise tech or other resources for specific activities in advance.
  • Workshop: transferring skills or knowledge in an interactive session. There are many possible workshop methodologies. Selecting a workshop format is very much about being clear about what you want to achieve. Workshops can be a good format for building skills or for maker and design activities. For instance in Pakistan Hamara Internet is a campaign by Digital Rights Foundation that seeks to raise awareness about violence against women online through various workshops. It literally means ‘Our Internet’ in English and works to impart digital security tips and training to women and bridge the gender digital divide in Pakistan (http://hamarainternet.org/).
  • Hackathon: With its general motto "programming till someone drops from exhaustion", hack events can mix different groups - like NGOs with hackers - to come up with new approaches to building technology for that group. For instance IGNITE (Women Fueling Science and Technology from the Global Fund for Women International) organised a global Hackathon called #hackgirlsrights. This 24-hour, multi-country coding event, targeted girl coders which collaborate to develop a website or application that address specific challenge facing girls and young women (http://ignite.globalfundforwomen.org/gallery/ignite-international-girls-hackathon). On the past 23th of April 2015, another global feminist hackaton called femhack was organised around the world in loving memory of Woman Human Rights Defender Sabeen Mahmud (https://f3mhack.org). You can read more about how to run a hackathon here: (http://globalvoicesonline.org/2012/11/23/hackathons-in-droves-how-is-a-hackathon-organised/)
  • Sprint: A sprint is a gathering of people involved in a specific project to further the focused development of some aspect of the project, such as working on sections of code, writing manuals or books, etc. These are effective at getting a lot done quickly for code and manuals (less so for other forms of writing), but can be exhausting and emotionally demanding - make sure you keep food and drink coming! To read more about sprints, visit wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(software_development) and Flossmanuals: (http://www.flossmanuals.org/service/booksprints). To note for instance that this manual was edited during an editorial sprintǃ
  • Seminar: A seminar brings together a small group for recurring meetings which focus on a particular subject. In a seminar, everyone actively participates, or offers information or training on specific topics. On the one hand, this kind of structured activity supports people with less experience or confidence; planning for tech/resource support is fairly straightforward; and people know what to expect. On the other hand, the event can be experienced as overly structured and lacking spontaneity for more experienced participants; more 'top-down'; and requires more organisational effort in advance. Check out for instance The documentation of the Feminist Server Summit which consisted in a feminist review of mesh- cloud- autonomous- and D.I.Y. servers (http://vj14.constantvzw.org/r/about).

More stable kinds of safe spaces for experimenting and learning technology include:

  • Hacklab, hackerspace or makerspaceː These are community spaces with hardware and/or tools - great for people to "get their hands dirty" and play around with anything - from taking computers apart to installing Linux to making music with bananas or building a radio out of razorblades and wire. Read more about hacklabs and hackerspaces here: "Hacklabs and Hackerspaces: Shared Machine Workshops":(http://www.coredem.info/IMG/pdf/pass11_an-2.pdf). You can also visit the following portalsː (http://makerspace.com/) (http://hackerspaces.org/)
  • Feminist hackerspace: Those vary in shape, form, and size. What often unites them is a set of boundaries that are decided on collectively (who can be a member, who can be a guest, what are the policies, etc.) and an explicit belief in feminist principles. Feminist hackerspaces provide a place to work on individual and collective projects in a supportive environment. To know more about feminist hackerspaces you might want to visit the website Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna (http://www.mzbaltazarslaboratory.org/), The Mothership Hackermoms in Berkeley (http://mothership.hackermoms.org/), Double Union in San Francisco (https://www.doubleunion.org/) and FemHack in Montreal (http://foufem.wiki.orangeseeds.org/).

For sharing skills, setting up a feminist hackerspace, or choosing an unconference, workshop or seminar format makes a lot of sense. For advocacy and networking events, the choice is not so obvious. Advocacy events can be some of the most challenging as it's easy to spend the entire day "re-inventing the wheel" with people who are new to the questions. If you have participants from diverse backgrounds in your advocacy event, it could be best to go with a more structured format. Unconferences and hackathons work best with activists or experienced practitioners who are used to a high level of self-determination, and who have a shared understanding of the implicit rules and structures of the space. Having said that, it can work well to try more open formats anyway, but be prepared for some skilled facilitating to make it a safe and fun space for both experienced and less experienced participants. Sometimes a mixed approach is what's needed - and some experimentation!

Fixing gender gap in tech

In order to get some inspiration we list below a selection of initiatives specially oriented at getting more women in ICT and technological related fields.

  • Asikana Network (Zambia)ː is a group of females aiming to empower women in ICT related fields by changing mindsets and eliminating negative stereotypes attached to girls and women in ICT (http://asikananetwork.org/).
  • Akirachix (Kenya)ː is an african wide network of women in technology to make tech and to inspire and mentor other women to be technologists (akirachix.com).
  • Donestech (Spain)ː is a cyberfeminist and activist research group which develops also workshops and audiovisual productions in relation to gender and ICT access, uses of and desires. Lelacoders project is about studying and making visible the presence of women in the development of computer sciences, free software and hacker cultures (www.donestech.net) (https://n-1.cc/g/donestech+lelacoders).
  • Feminist Approach to Technology (India)ː mission is to empower women by enhancing women’s awareness, interest and participation in technology (http://fat-net.org/).
  • Flossie (UK)ː runs a conference and also skills workshops and it is intended to combine advocacy, boundary-crossing, support and skills-sharing bringing together women involved in digital arts with coders, artists, and makers (http://www.flossie.org/).
  • Speakerinnenn (Germany)ː aim is to increase the visibility of women in the field of public speaking. With the help of our list it will be easier for organisers to find female experts to speak at their events (http://speakerinnen.org/).
  • The Ada initiative (Global)ː organises AdaCamp, a series of conferences dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture: open source software, Wikipedia and other wiki-related projects, open knowledge and education, open government and open data, open hardware and appropriate technology (https://adacamp.org/).

Codes of conduct

It's important, especially in mixed environments, to think about what's acceptable conduct in the space and what isn't. In order for this to have any practical effect, it's also important to think about what you'll do if individuals breach this - or when things go wrong generally. You can find plenty of information and example policies on the Geek Feminism Conference anti-harassment/Adoption page (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Adoption)

Make sure your participants understand the policy and how it relates to their own conduct. It can be useful to make time in your schedule at the beginning of the event to share your policy, and reach consensus with the group on how to maintain a safe space over the days of the event.

Your code of conduct should be about preventing aggressive behaviour and not about trying to police how people identify, communicate or present themselves. It's also worth remembering that people who are struggling in a culturally unfamiliar environment can become confrontational more easily than they usually would. There may be many reasons why a participant might be struggling to communicate positively at any given moment. It's key to remain calm and to provide a non-judgmental space for the expression of emotions like anger or frustration. Because of this, a code of conduct should also include some people that will be assigned to receive feedback if any problem takes place. They should be good facilitators or moderators and be calm and patient. We are different, let's celebrate it, even when it's difficult to do!

Last not least, your code of conduct should include an agreement about how participants will respect other participants' right to privacy. Some general guidelines could include the following:

  • Don't take or circulate sound, video or photos without permission. If anyone present faces significant external risk then don't take photos at all unless participants have given express permission and an opportunity to cover their identity.
  • If you wish to record the event, prepare formal consent forms telling people exactly what audio-visual records are being made and how they will be stored, used, licensed and ask for clear consent with a signature.
  • Don't share details of anyone's participation, speech or actions on social media without their express permission.

How safe is the space?

As a check-list, here are some questions that can help you assess whether a space is safe or not.

  • Background: What is the history of the space? Who started it and why? How many women and trans* persons have been involved?
  • Participation: Who has stopped participating in the space since it was founded, and why? Is it mostly women who have left?
  • Policies: Does the space have policies? If so, what kind? Are the policies regularly put in practice? Ask members in the space, particularly women.
  • New people: How does the space welcome newcomers? The first time you went to the space, did you get a tour? Did people say hello? Were the people in the space friendly?
  • Regular assemblies: Are there regular meetings (assemblies) that offer possibilities to raise concerns, to suggest collective projects, to suggest the organisation of workshops, to discuss the space (its cleanliness, etc.), to present yourself, etc.?
  • Language: Is the language and vocabulary used on the website and in the space explicitly feminist? Read the website carefully, or go and see for yourself what the space looks like.
  • Trust: Do you know people who you trust in the space or do you know friends of friends? The web of trust can be very useful here.
  • Access: Who can go into the space and under which conditions? This should be made explicit on the website, otherwise ask.
  • Accessibility: Is the space itself easily accessible? In which part of town is it located? Are there bathrooms? What are the opening hours? Who has access to the keys of the space?
  • Cost: How much does it cost to become a member? Is there a sliding scale policy?

No space is perfect; a safe space should always, however, at least provide an environment and a set of boundaries in which to meet up, talk, and address and raise difficult issues. If you feel the space has potential and you want to get involved, don't be shy!

Relevant links:

* Integrated Security Manual: (http://www.integratedsecuritymanual.org/) a resource for planning, convening, and hosting your workshop which prioritize your participants' emotional and physical well-being.

* Level Up: (https://www.level-up.cc/resources-for-trainers) resources for digital security trainers and organisers of these trainings too.

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