Step 2

What are Safe Spaces?

A common understanding of safe spaces are that they share common values, whether explicit, through a community agreement, or implicit through the sharing of values and enable members of a group to flourish, empower themselves and create community. The concept of safe spaces as embodied in second wave feminism in the western world was “explicitly committed to safety for individuals or communities that are targets of oppression” (Newman 2011, 138)1. Safe spaces are known to have provided a safe speaking and awareness raising environment for women involved in the women's liberation movement in the 60s and 70s in many countries where women could discuss about their experience in a patriarchal environment. Safe spaces are also about pushing boundaries and confronting certain difficult issues among a group of people such as: Who can be part of a women's only group? Who can be define as a woman? As these are important questions to be addressed, they need reflection, trust and the understanding of where our own assumptions come. We will come back to those questions later on in the manual.

Safe Space strategies have been used recently during the USA Occupy movements where many women, queer and trans did not feel safe to camp in the squares and parks. Some resorted to women-only tents, or women of color-only affinity groups while others mostly transwomen, opted for an online presence has putting their bodies on the line were deemed too dangerous. In Tahrir Square in Egypt, Operation Anti Sexual Harassment (OpAntiSH) was set up to react to a hostile environment and as a way to protect women and/or confront harassers and support survivors of sexual abuse and harassment. In Kenya, the women-only Umoja village was created for women survivors of rape and sexual assaults where they could feel safe and secure, raise their kids, earn a living collectively, heal and reclaim their dignity.

1) Newman, E. (2011). “Safer Spaces of Decolonize/Occupy Oakland: Some Reflections on Mental Health and Anti-Oppression Work in Revolutionary Times.” Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, 3(2), 138-141.

Safe Space Online?

Digital spaces are unique in multiple ways. Many women have reported experiencing the internet as a safe space for resisting gender oppression that they encounter in their every-day life. Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone talks about the internet as Wings of Freedom for Iranian women. Scholar Saskia Sassen argues that the internet allows women to be involved in new forms of contestations, build global community and potentially transform local women’s conditions. While these emancipatory experiences exist, and cannot be undervalued, women can also experience cyberspace in very different ways. Anita Sarkeesian who is behind the Feminist Frequency web platform was in 2012 the target of an online harassment campaign following the launch of her Kickstarter project called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. She was harassed online and still is because she highlights sexism in video games. This story is not a unique case, it happens over and over.

Using safe spaces tactics and strategies is a good way to start inhabiting online and offline spaces according to the boundaries we want to set for ourselves and for our friends. This manual intends to do just that. To provide you with concrete suggestions on how to create safe spaces online and offline. It is divided in three core parts. First, a set of tools will be highlighted to move forward with starting to build safe spaces for you and your collectives/organizations through online communication such as mailing list, pads, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), etc. Second, it will focus on how to build safe spaces in “hostile” environments such as howto organize Wikipedia storming, how to install bots against trolls, how to do feminist counter-speech and finally, how to build safe spaces off line such as through women-only/feminist-only space to learn and Do-it-Together.

Building Online Safe Space for you and your collectives/organizations

We often assume that online communities such as the ones we take part in through social media, email discussion lists, phones and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels are inherently democratic, horizontal, participatory and relatively safe. It is true that technologies enable participation, a sense of emancipation and reach that was unimaginable two decades ago, but to be able to really harness the power of these tools and create spaces that are safe for us and our collectives we need to think and reflect on our tactics and strategies.

We can start by thinking about the type of spaces and the type of behaviors we want to foster online and make those visible and explicit. The term "safe spaces" has emerged over the years as a strategy for groups marginalized in societies and communities to create spaces to share common values, whether explicit, through a community agreement, or implicit through the sharing of values and enable members of a group to flourish, empower themselves and create community. The idea of safe space online has also been informed by the ideas around "netiquette" which emerged in the 90s as a shared code of conduct for early Internet users.

Since online and offline spaces and communities often reproduce hierarchies, privileges and power relations that exist in society we need to think through ways to mitigate and limit these downsides to get the best out of our spaces. This is about caring for ourselves and for the communities we are part of. Making explicit and visible these issues is about agency, social justice and feminism, and it will help better shape the spaces we care about, we organize in and in which we grow.

Using safe spaces tactics and strategies is a good way to start inhabiting online and offline spaces according to the boundaries we want to set for ourselves and for our friends. This manual intends to do just that. To provide you with concrete suggestions on how to create safe spaces online and offline. It is divided into three core parts. First, a set of tools will be highlighted to move forward with starting to build safe spaces for you and your collectives/organizations through online communication such as mailing list, pads, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), etc. Second, it will focus on strategies of resistance in public spaces which are not inherently safe, such as Twitter and Wikipedia. Finally it will loop back to the offline and discuss ways to build safe spaces offline such as through women-only/feminist-only space to learn and Do-it-Together.

How to set up a Safe Space Mailing list

Mailing lists are one of the oldest forms of social networks. They allow you to discuss, organise, share information, exchange video, audio and pictures. The below section will help you in the steps to setting up a safe space mailing list.

Choosing a mailing list

You have decided that you need a communication channel for your collective and you do not want to use corporate services. There are in fact many alternative services to choose from that are recommended for use by human rights defenders. They are free but they still prioritise security and user privacy. For example: Riseup, Aktivix or Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective).

Riseup is a tech collective which provides secure communication tools for people working on liberatory social change. They have many feminists and queer oriented lists and therefore are a great collective to host your mailing list. To see some of the existing public mailing lists go to: https://lists.riseup.net/www/ . Riseup also provides email addresses based on a trust system. You can either get two invite codes from friends who already have Riseup accounts or wait for Riseup to approve your detailed request (which can take a long time). For more info visit: https://user.riseup.net/forms/new_user/first

Other tech collectives also offer activists’ mailing-lists and email addresses. Autistici/Inventati (A/I Collective) and Aktivix are two other great examples, and the former also offers a dedicated newsletter service for groups that want to send regular news to a high number of recipients. To read about their services visit: http://www.autistici.org/en/services/lists.html and/or https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo

Open or closed list?

Once you are ready to create your mailing list you need to decide whether it will be an open or closed list. An open list allows anyone to subscribe and participate in the list. A closed list is limited to the subscribed email addresses that will have been approved by you or your collective. In deciding what is best, you should remember that the archives of open lists are available to anyone on the web and will eventually end up on search engines (such as Google). Closed lists on the other hand are only accessible to those who have the subscription password. If you intend to talk about sensitive issues (talking about feminism 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. If you do choose an open list, it is important to inform everyone subscribed to the list that it is open and publicly accessible.

Public or Private list?

A list is public when it is advertised to the world and anyone can request subscription. For example the mailing list run by FemTechNet. A private list on the other hand, is one which is run on a need-to-know basis. In other words, it is not advertised publicly, it is rather on invitation-only. You could have for instance a public list which is closed i.e. a list that people know about (literally everyone!), but which require approval as mentioned above.

Who should I invite?

Once you have your list set up, start inviting people you know to your mailing list. If friends are suggesting to add more people to the list, ask them to explain to the list the reasons why such and such person should be added. If you get a green light from your collective, add this person to your mailing list. Working through the web of trust is a good practice to follow when setting up a mailing list. Also, make sure you have a discussion on who can be part of this list. If you set up a feminist list, who can be part of this list? Do you for instance allow feminist men to be part of the list? If so, will you be setting up a policy for your list on the acceptable behavior? (See below for how to set up a policy) These are important questions that you need to discuss with your group. But don’t be too harsh on yourself and your group and know that you can always revisit these decisions if at some point you and your collective feel you want to change your collective mailing list agreement.

Who will administer the list?

Who will be administering the list? One person can be responsible for doing it, but depending on her/their time, availability and interest having only one administrator can be quite demanding. You can also choose to have more than one administrator of the list. It is really up to you and your collective to decide the ways in which you want it to be managed. A list can also be collectively managed. As a case in point, the Spoon Collective, a discussion list active in the 90s, had decided upon a strategy of central collective "ownership". This meant everyone had access to the administering of the list. In other words, the list was “owned” by all involved in the collective. The ways in which The Spoon Collective decided to operate was that all the people on the list would be responsible to manage it on the basis of a weekly rotation (adding new member, etc.). This is a strategy that can be best used when you are part of a close knit collective. It also requires trust that all members will care enough for the list to manage it collectively.

Before trying to figure out what best suits you, you should think about internet access and expectations from list members. Depending on where you are located, some people on the list might not have regular access to the internet and this needs to be factored in when taking the decision. Some tensions will inevitably arise from the collective administering process and therefore you and your collective need to think carefully about the ways in which you will handle these tensions. Are we ready to wait for a few days to have new members added to the list? If each message needs admin approval, are we ready to accept waiting for the message to be approved for a few days, a week, more? Since administering a list is a great way to learn is it only those who are tech savvy that might manage it or should we rather allow for learning to happen? If your expectations are clear the possibility for tensions and conflicts to emerge will be minimized.

Mailing list policies

Now that you have a mailing list and you are slowly getting started with it you might want to reflect about having a policy. Making visible your policy and the ways in which to report violation to the policy, even if it is a closed list, might be helpful in creating the online safe space you want everyone to enjoy. Having a visible and explicit policy will send a strong signal of the importance of creating a safe space on a mailing list. The geekfeminism wiki as a great example of a women-only policy for online communities (http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Statement_of_purpose/Women-only_communities). They also have a similar policy or agreement for online communities that includes men. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Statement_of_purpose:_communities_including_men Check them out and adapt it to your needs, belief and desires.

To make your policy visible and remind everyone of its existence, Ada Initiative (https://adainitiative.org/) mailing list is an instructive example. They have decided to add to each email sent on the list a reminder that a policy is in place. Below is what you see at the end of each email message being received on the list.

Policies for behavior on this list: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Statement_of_purpose/Women-only_communities http://sf.adacamp.org/attendee-information/policies/#ahp Contact Adacamp-alumni-owner@lists.adainitiative.org to report violations Please avoid gendered assumptions and language about the list as a whole (eg "XX", "ovaries", "ladies") To unsubscribe, go to: http://lists.adainitiative.org/listinfo.cgi/adacamp-alumni-adainitiative.org

Dos and don’ts on mailing list

Mailing lists have a particular set of features. Since they are text-based, they are susceptible to interpretation. When you receive a message on a list, make sure you read carefully what is presented to you. Sometimes we read too fast and don’t fully understand what somebody is saying, especially if the list have members whose mother tongue is not the language(s) of the list. What do you do if after carefully reading a message you disagree with what someone has said on a mailing list? Disagreeing on statements and points of view is fine and can be a good learning experience for all provided it is done in a respectful manner. Starting your email on a positive note and highlighting something positive about what was said will be a great opening for a constructive criticism that will follow.

If you are experimenting more stress than usual, you might be more sensitive to the ways in which a mail is worded. Try to recognize this in you. If you have read an email that affects you emotionally, instead of replying right away you might want to try to come back to it later as to calm down. With the ubiquity of the instantaneity and immediacy afforded by social media, we have a tendency to want to reply right way even to a mailing list. Having said that as feminists we acknowledge that emotions and affect are important and ought to be made visible, so the suggestion to wait depend of course on the situation. You are the best judge of the practice you want to embrace and of the situation that you experiencing.

What are Pads?

Pads are a great way to collaborate in real-time on documents. They are a good alternative to replace google docs or replacing the confusion that might arise from sending each other documents through emails or mailing lists. Pads can be used to collectively draft a mailing list policy, a statement that you want to release or else. A list of pads that are secure to use through encrypted connections via SSL can be found at: https://github.com/ether/etherpad-lite/wiki/Sites-that-run-Etherpad-Lite Riseup is a great and secure provider of pads, but you have to know that they will be deleted after 30 days of inactivity. If you want your pad to last longer you can use other pads.

When you create a pad you decide on the name of the URL. It is usually a good practice to use a long name for your pad. Having https://pad.riseup.net/p/feminists might not be the most secure name. You want to use a more complicated URL such as https://pad.riseup.net/p/FeministsRockAndTheyWillBeDoingGreatThingsToghether. Once the pad is created you can send the URL to your friends and colleagues to start collaborating on a document. Avoid sharing the URL of pads in the public sphere such as on social media.

Pads allow you and your collective to be either anonymous, use a moniker or decide to use your real name. There is a color-based system (you can decide on the color you use) that differentiate the contributions of each participants on the pad, so being anonymous will not bring too much confusion while writing. If you want a more secure pad that is not open you can use a password protected pad. If you want to avoid your pad to be vandalized by trolls resorting to a password protected pad might be a good option. For this check out: https://www.protectedtext.com/

What is Internet Relay Chat (IRC)?

IRC can be defined as a text-based social media that requires very little bandwidth. It’s like a multi-user chat and you have the option to encrypt if you want. But, you can’t embed video, audio or pictures, but you can link to them.

IRC can be used for multiple purposes. It can be used to facilitate collaboration in addition to decision-making processes. If you are thinking about starting a campaign or want to launch a project, IRC might be a good way to start discussing about these projects in a collaborative manner. IRC allows for real-time collaboration provided of course that you have all easy access to the Internet. If access to the Internet is an issue you might want to consider using your mailing for better decision making process as it allows for asynchronous (delayed-time) communication.

Also, when planning an international IRC session between many participants this means determining who would get up early and who would stay up late. This is an important issue for those of you who might have kids and older members of the family to take care of, or have to deal with power outages occurring at certain times, or other impediments that prevent you from being online at certain hours. This is why it is important to think about asynchronous (delayed-time conversation) and synchronous (same-time conversation) means of communication. You might want to ask yourself how same-time (synchronous) and delayed-time (asynchronous) communication technologies affect collaboration and decision-making. Internet is such a great medium since it allows you the opportunity to structure your interactions and practices as you wish and thus harnessing the affordances that the internet give you might be very empowering and allow to counter access barriers, language barriers, among others.

When you suggest to use IRC you should be mindful of the aforementioned. It is not because it is the tool used by many that it is the best tool for you. If you still decide to use IRC, be mindful that people in your collective might need time to understand this technology and to understand how to best collaborator on such platform. Depending on your skills, using IRC might appear to be fairly “easy” or a bit more difficult, but what is less tangible is the ways in which one develops interpersonal relationships and communicate socio-emotional content on IRC.

How it works?

There are several options of chatting through an IRC network. Among them there are Freenode (https://freenode.net), Indymedia’s IRC network (http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Sysadmin/IrcHowTo) and Mufhd0, a network run by several autonomous servers including A/I (https://www.autistici.org/en/stuff/man_irc). The latter two also allow us to anonymize our connections through Tor.

IRC networks can be accessed through several clients like Xchat for GNULinux and Windows and XChat Aqua/Azure for Mac OS, but there are many other options. For more information on IRC chat clients, we suggest you look at the Prism-Break web platform, a site that has been developed after the Snowden revelations which supports you in opt-outing of mass surveillance programs: https://prism-break.org/en/categories/os-x/#irc . If it's your first time on IRC and just want to try it, we suggest to use a web browser application mentioned above such as Freenodes or Indymedia. You can instantly create a nickname and select a channel that your friends and colleagues will have shared with you, but keep in mind that using a web application is less secure than using a client.

Once you start your meeting it is useful to appoint a facilitator that will keep track of time and topics to be discussed and which might ask participants to re-focus if the discussion goes off track. When you start a conversation take time to say hi and greet people. It is particularly important to talk to new comers. If a group of you know each other over IRC, you might have a tendency to chat to one another and/or give more importance to what your friends say. In order to create a welcoming environment and a safe space acknowledging and valuing the voice of everyone will be key on IRC.

While carrying on the discussion, let's remind ourselves that writing is not easy for everyone and/or that many might not be using their mother tongue. IRC can also go very fast, particularly if you are many in the discussion, so allowing everyone to slow down and let people read all the inputs might be important to have an empowering discussion. Deciding for instance of speaking turns might facilitate the meeting and allow for everyone to have their voices heard. Each people in the IRC meeting could be speaking in alphabetical order of nicknames (or any order you want to give) on all the points addressed. This will give more structure to the conversation and help diminish the possibilities of the domination of one or few people in the conversation. Also ending your intervention with “over” or “finish” or "done" might be a good practice. Make those methodologies visible and explicit, probably in the email where you will be asking people for an IRC meeting. Finally, IRC meeting can be very tiring so setting a time-limitation might be useful not to ware people out.

Crabgrass: a social network for managing groups

One of the most versatile tools for managing groups and collective projects is by all means https://we.riseup.net, a social network tailored specifically to meet the needs of bottom up grassroots organising that is based on the software libre web application Crabgrass and is hosted by the grassroots autonomous server Riseup.

Riseup’s Crabgrass platform offers both a secure HTTPS connection and encrypted data storage, and users and groups are free to choose what information they reveal about themselves. The offered tools include an email like messaging system for personal messages, public or private forums, wikis, task lists, decision making tools, a system for uploading and managing images, audio, and documents, and a customized home page where a group can list their event calendar, blog postings, and other public content.

Besides creating a common network among users, Crabgrass also allows group networking, as well as the possibility of creating subgroups and committees that correspond to the group’s organizational structure.

To learn more about the numerous possibilities offered by Crabgrass, visit the project’s page: https://we.riseup.net/crabgrass/about and read this howto: https://info.securityinabox.org/default/communities/01/crabgrass-online-collaboration

Crafting strategies for public space and mixed environment: Moving from protection to resistance =

The Internet can feel as an unsafe space sometimes. However, there are ways to counter uneasy environment and create collective responses to enable speaking up, agency and resistance. Organising online collective actions can be a very powerful exercise to resist what can be an uneasy environment. They can also bring attention and visibility to certain issues and in turn help bring about transformation. Storming wikipedia collectively, using feminist counterspeech on Twitter and swarming together can all be important acts that have an impact at the discursive (written), psychological and material levels. And they are fun too ! Mostly because they are creative, bring about individual and collective agency and the feeling that you are not alone.

Feminist Counterspeech

Responses from online attacks and harrassment have involved practices such as organized public shaming, the creation safer spaces, advocacy and lobbying for public policies and feminist counterspeech. Feminist counterspeech can be an effective tactic to trigger a new narrative online and make visible the effectiveness of collective feminist actions online. Feminist counterspeech is a form of discursive resistance that allow you to call out misogyny and sexism online in a humoristic way. Counterspeech important as it makes visible both weak and strong feminist networks online.

Despite the unprecedented speed and immediacy afforded to digital tools, and the affective responses it can engender in us for the better and for the worse, it is important to recognize that feminist counterspeech has no doubt impressive potentialities, but that there are also limitations particularly with its temporal aspect. As feminists we must always consider the extent to which our actions aim at reshaping the relationship between gender, intersectionality violence and power online and off.

Wikipedia?

Feminists have criticised the way in which knowledge is produced, made and constructed on Wikipedia. The fact that Wikipedia’s contributors are mostly male (about 10% are women though this can vary between countries) in their twenties and thirties and disproportionately Western are important factors that influence content. Women who have played a significant role in history are often missing from Wikipedia and, at times, feminist, queer and trans content are not always easily accepted on the online encyclopedia. A notable example relates to an entry about Chelsea Manning, the United States Army soldier who was convicted in July 2013 of violations of the USA Espionage Act after releasing the largest set of classified documents to WikiLeaks. When Manning formally announced her gender transition, the English Wikipedia entry under her name was quickly amended to reflect this change. A week after intense discussions regarding this amendment took place, where a majority of Wikipedians disregarded experts on transgendered issues, the article was reverted back to Bradley Manning. The article has since then returned to Chelsea Manning (at least in the English language).

What does it mean to Storm Wikipedia?

“Storming Wikipedia” is a response to the lack of women, feminist, queer and trans content on wikipedia and as mentioned above the low percentage of women contributing to Wikipedia. Wikistroming, Storming Wikipedia or Edit-a-Thon focus on learning collectively how to edit Wikipedia. Women might have the impression that the barriers to entry to edit wikipedia are high. Therefore, editing and creating pages about women and feminist work, among others, is a great way to confront fears, add feminist, queer and trans content on the online encyclopedia and Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) in a safe space.

How to organise a Wikistorming?

There are always great reasons to organise a wikistorming on any day! However, if you are looking for broader impact and be connected to others such gatherings wikistorming often happen on these two days: Ada Lovelace Day on October 14 and March 8 International Women's Day. Once you have decided on a date, gather a group of friends and friends of friends who want to learn or already know how to edit wikipedia and identify a safe space where to hold the event. It can be held in someone’s home, in a community center, at an art center or a community organisation. Make sure you find a place that is accessible and ideally that already has a feminist base. Wikistorming may last for a day or half-a-day. Before the wikistorming or as part of it, decide which wikipedia entry you want create or which existing page you want to edit. Be realistic in your goals and don't put too much edits on your plate! To edit wikipedia carefully it takes time. If you want to organise a wikistorming visit: http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/wikistorming/

Installing Bots Against Trolls And Swarming Toghether

If you use Twitter, 4chan or any online forums where comments are allowed, you might have noticed that they tend to not be very safe spaces. Kathy Siera says there is a “koolaid point” for women and queers who start to gather a following and be listened online. At this point, a certain group of people may decide that you have too much influence, and make it their mission to silence you or discredit you. We have seen this in numerous high profile cases but also in constant reports from women and queer writers, activists and organisers.This is called trolling.

What is a troll?

A troll was once just a mountain-dwelling monster in kids stories. Then a troll became the word for early internet users who intentionally sowed discord on IRC and chat forums, often targeting and singling out new users. But now the word is used more broadly to describe people who target and harass others online. This can include anything from constant derogatory and belittling messages to doctored images and even threats. Most often the subjects of this kind of abuse are marginalised groups like women, queers and people of colour. In recent years there have been more and more cases of women speaking out about how they are harassed. Steph Guthrie in a talk on TedX Toronto makes a good point that labelling people who are intentionally abusing women online, “trolls” ignores deep-seated problem of misogyny online.

How should you deal with trolls?

There are two key ways you can deal with trolls: one is to block them and report them to the platform you are using or to engage with them. This decision depends on what you want to achieve. Blocking them can definitely work and you can continue with your work unimpeded. A project like “Block Together” was developed to help people who are harassed share their blocklists with each other. Historically platforms like Twitter and Facebook have not handled reports of intimidation and violence very well however this is changing, as they recognise how severe this problem is and how it deters people with important voices from using their services. When blocking doesn't help is when users are really committed to trolling and create numerous different profiles (called “sock puppet accounts”) to continue the harassment. Then your blocking has to keep up with their new account generation and it becomes tedious. You might consider the alternative of engaging trolls. There are a few tactics for engaging trolls. One is to try and enter into rational arguments with them and interrogate their views. Another way is to try to shame them or use humor to deflate them.

Effective engagement with trolls can actually help to generate a debate and public interest around the act of harassment and involve others online in talking about safe spaces, violence, sexism and online behavior. It can also be a source of empowerment for the subjects of trolling: seeing others laugh at your harasser can be very uplifting.

Swarming

The method of swarming can be used to drown out 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 in order to quickly make the negative, violent content disappear into online history.

Do I have to use my own account?

If you want to engage with trolls, and even if you consider using the “swarming” method, 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 when it is linked to your main identity. And it is more performative, you can create any kind of identity you want and style it with avatar etc.

Automation

While battling the trolls the old-fashioned human way can be fun and eye-opening, it can be a time waster. Another option to consider is automation. For this you need someone who can do some coding to start from scratch or work with what is already freely available code already uploaded on Github.

What's a bot?

A bot is a software application that runs an automated task over the internet. Bots perfom tasks at a greater velocity than humans can. There are many different breeds of bots: for example the spambot which harvests email addresses and contact information from or the attentionbot which fakes clicks on Youtube videos to make them look more popular than they actually are. They can post content, harvest information and click on things. Twitter is filled with bots which use algorithms to gather information and tweet things on Twitter. Many of these are humorous and random: like @twoheadlines which randomly grabs news headlines and combines them to create funny combinations. The below steps address Twitter mainly however some of these ideas can be used across other platforms too.

How can a bot battle a troll?=

A bot can be programed to document trolls' activities or or talk to them, so that you don't have to. There are a few ways of doing this: the autotweet bot and a silent data-gathering bot in combination with the talking bot(s). The examples below speak specifcally about what is possible on Twitter however the ideas could be applied to other platforms.

1. The data-gathering bot

The data-gathering bot, quietly scans the Twitter API gathering tweets, usernames and any other available information you program it to, and places this in a .csv file for you to analyze or use for further purposes outlined below. This first kind of bot can be useful just for understanding what kind of content is out there and maybe doing a first stage analysis of abuse.

2. The simple tweeting bot

If you follow the #gamergate hashtag on Twitter, you will see a bot called @every ethics which tweets different humorous reasons for the #gamergate trolling, riffing off the claim that 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 to make fun of the trolls.

3. The retweet bot

The retweet bot is programmed to scan the Twitter API for a list of words, phrases or hashtags defined by you, and to retweet those. This would be a strategy to document and publicise Twitter abuse.

Here's an example: https://lilithlela.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=17418

4. The autotweet bot

The “autotweet” bot is similar except that every time it finds a tweet with one of the words, phrases or hashtags you have programed it to to look for, it will tweet a prewritten tweet at that user. There are a number of examples of this in Twitter history: @stealthmountain which corrects any Twitter user who spells “sneak peek” wrong. These bots get shut down much quicker now as was shown by @fembot which responded to racists and sexist tweets that it spotted and was blocked after making only 75 tweets.

unfortunately Twitter does not make it so easy to do this anymore.

5. The tweeting bot in combination with the data-gathering bot

You can use a data-gathering bot to find the users tweeting violent things, compile them in a spreadsheet for you to read over and 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 decide is useful information, to those users.

Things to watch out for

1. Language is slippery

If you want to tackle violence against women online, you will have to be very careful about what kind of language you search for. For example, every time someone used the word “bitch” on Twitter to intimidate or harass a woman, there are probably at least five other people using it to tell their friend how much they love them or talk about the latest celebrity affair. The best way to figure out which language is used to harm women is to crowdsource it from people who have been harassed and then do a number of tests, pulling tweets from the Twitter API and then analyzing it yourself.

2. Twitter is smart (and strict)

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 not encounter any problems. However if you want to tweet @ other Twitter users, you have to take into account Twitter's policy against spam. See Twitter's guide to Automation Rules and Best Practices.

Evading Twitter's spam filters

There are a few things to keep in mind when trying to bypass Twitter's spam filters:

1. Safety in numbers The more bots you have to distribute the work amongst, the more successful you will be. The group Peng! Collective did such an action in 2015 which they called “Zero Trollerance”. They ran a silent data-gathering bot to identify trolls through a long list of keyword combinations, hashtags and phrases. They then ran 160 bots which tweeted at the database of 3000 trolls, sending them new messages daily for an entire week. They were for the most part able to avoid being blocked by Twitter or users because they had so many bots and they rotated the tweeting across the bots.

2. Rate Limit

Twitter monitors each account's activity and has a “rate limit” that limits your number of tweets, to ensure that no one floods the content stream. This is also the way that they figure out which accounts might be spambots. If the frequency of tweeting looks like it doesn't come from a human, Twitter will block the account. If you try to tweet the same tweet, many times right after each other, you will receive a message telling you that your tweet looks like spam and that Twitter is blocking you in order to protect their users. At the time of writing, tests were done with tweeting 15 times with 8 minute intervals and this passed under the radar.

3. Content

If you are tweeting the exact same tweet over and over again, this is also a red flag to Twitter's spam filters. How to avoid this is to pad every tweet with a random word from a readable language that is not the same as the language you are tweeting in. The easiest way to do this is a compile a long list of these words, and program your script to draw from this list randomly for every tweet.

4. Location of the tweets

Use a VPN which gives you a new IP address every time you reconnect to fool Twitter into thinking that the accounts are being managed from different locations.

How to set up a Twitter account to be used as a bot

You still need someone to write the script for you or to configure a script already created by someone else and downloaded from Github. But what is easy to do and what even volunteers might like to do is to help you set up all the Twitter accounts so that they can easily be controlled by the script.

1. Create a new account as you would normally and make sure to give it a photo, follow some people and do some tweeting (recently registered, faceless accounts with 0 followers will get blocked very quickly). 2. In order to function as a bot the account needs to be verified with a valid phone number. To do this you can use your own phone number, volunteers numbers or buy a bulk of cheap sim cards. Don't use the same phone number for numerous accounts – again this will be a quick sign to Twitter that the accounts dodgy. 3. Now you need to register an application with the Twitter API which will allow your bot to make “calls” to the API, ie retrieve or send data. Go to https://apps.twitter.com/app/new and create a new application. You can provide any dummy content in the fields there and then you can set your permissions to “read and write” and generate the keys you will need.

More on these steps and some simple bots to download and test out at Cyber Guerilla.

Dos and don'ts supporting people subject to online violence

When you or your friends are under attack online there are a few steps to follow to support you or them.

Try to be quick in bringing support. Though remember that knowing what to do and how to do it in such situation needs a lot of practice to become good at it. But as a general rule, you should tell yourself that gender-based violence and harassment online is unacceptable. This should be your main message if you don't have a lot of practice in dealing with such phenomenon.

If you are close to the person under attack offer immediate assistance. In the event of Doxxing, where confidential info has been released on the internet about the person, you might want to offer a safe space (a home) if the person does not feel safe to stay where she/they lives.

If you do not know (well) the person, you can speak out. Since collective actions are often more effective than individual actions, make sure you gather a group of friends, and the friends of your friends for a Twitter storming for instance. Make visible the issue! This will show to the person under attack that you and others care and that such acts are not OK.

Depending on the nature and context of the attack, you might want to speak out to the media and highlight the gendered nature of online attacks. Using the media to bring light to a situation can be an important way to bring about visibility to such issue. As a best practice though, we recommend that you consult the persons under attack before speaking to the mainstream media. If you do not know her/they go through the web of trust. Also, we recommend you to contact a friendly and/or feminist media or journalist. Prior to doing so, we recommend that you form a group of people in opposition to such violence, draft a press release and explain what is gender-based violence and harassment online and why it exist. This will bring visibility to the issue and concentrate less on the person who has been or who is under attack. Thinking about the harm and added stress that the person can go through if she is made visible in the mainstream media is a feminist issue that you should carefully assess.

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 online. If it's a person from your organisation who has been under attack, make sure she/they read the solidarity statement before it is being released. The person will feel that her teammates care and respect her/they wishes. It will also allow the person to have agency over what is written. What is even better is to have an organisational policy on what to do when someone is under attack. If you have a policy and specific steps to follow when such situation occurs, chances are you will do less harm and be more effective in your strategy.

As an ally, that is someone who want to support a disadvantage group, but who is not part of that group (e.g. men are allies when it women to women's rights issues), you ought to speak out and say “NO” to online harassment and violence. Speaking out ought to happen in the public spaces. This is very important. Do it all the time that you witness online violence! The culture of impunity to online harassment will continue.

What are some of the current platforms which document online violence?

Documenting instances of online violence and harassment is key to showing the extent of the problem and is very powerful as it make visible the structural aspect of violence in societies. A few initiative have started to document this process. We highlight a few examples below.

APC's Take back the Tech has collected more than 500 stories of women who have experienced violence online. These stories were collected using the open source platform called Ushahidi. The data visualisation can be see here: https://www.takebackthetech.net/mapit/ The overall results of those who have participated in this exercise show that women between 18 and 30 who are using Facebook are most likely to be under online threat. To read about the story visit: http://www.genderit.org/articles/mapping-strategy-disclose-online-violence-against-women

HarassMap was born as a response to the persistent problem of sexual harassment on the streets of Egypt. Since the crowdsourcing platform based on Ushahidi is anonymous, Harasmap allows to document instances of sexual harassment whether you are the victim or a witness (http://harassmap.org/en/). To read about the effectiveness of crowdsourced data visit: http://harassmap.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Towards-A-Safer-City_full-report_EN-.pdf Similar to HarrassMap is Hollaback an initiative that aims at stopping street harassment using technology all over the world (http://www.ihollaback.org/).

HeartMob is a platform that aims at providing real-time support to individuals experiencing online harassment and empowers bystanders to act. This platform is being built and you should stay abreast of its development. It is an initiative of Hollaback. Visit their Kickstarter project to know more about the initiative: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4096561/heartmob/description

Building safe spaces offline

The most difficult thing about building 'safe spaces' offline for women is that there is so little agreement about what a safe space might look like and whether, indeed, it's a useful concept for women in tech anyway. I'm drawing on discussions and issues which have arisen in women's tech conferences and skills workshops I have been involved in, including Flossie.org, Fossbox, Autonomous Tech Fetish (ATF), and Eclectic Tech Carnival (ETC) to explore some of these differences, how to facilitate discussion of them, and how to arrive at a shared idea of an appropriate space for women to engage with tech.

Every group has to work out its own idea of an appropriate space for women. Once you have arrived at a shared ideal, it's time to look at the practicalities of implementing these ideas in material, offline, spaces. This will include thinking about how much formality you want, what kind of formalities, how you will accommodate diversity, how you will facilitate participation for all the women attending both in terms of your practical arrangements and in the way you formalise the social space.

You are a woman in tech and want to build an offline 'safe space'? Here is how you do it?

The difficulties in defining what a 'safe space' should look like arise from the enormous diversity among women themselves and the many different ways of articulating a feminist identity. Women's idea of what might be experienced as politically, socially or personally threatening varies and women may face very different levels of threat from state agencies or socio-economic environments which also affect how shared spaces should be organised. There are other pragmatic considerations. Taking into account all of these competing narrations of feminism, contexts, practical issues and potential consequences it is no small task to create a safe space for women to engage with technology!

Perhaps the first thing I would like to make as clear as I can is that it can never be possible to create a space which will be experienced the same way by everyone because everyone brings their own contexts and histories with them. It is important to be aware of the danger that in struggling to perfect a feminist 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 a woman is.

So, overall, the most important thing to remember is that every woman is different, every woman has her own experience, history, context and needs. Emotions themselves are often not safe, there is always risk and vulnerability in opening yourself to new experience. The more diverse the environment, the more emotional risk we open ourselves to as ideas and ways of being may be fundamentally challenged. So we are not aiming for the avoidance of any kind of conflict or emotional risk but, instead, to provide buffers, understanding, reciprocation, support, love, and care for each other and for our shared endeavour. We must take every possible step to ensure that practical needs are met (protecting anonymity, respecting diversity, dealing with harassment, providing appropriate living space etc), and on collaboration, facilitation and mediation.

Women only?

This question can be one of the most divisive as it will often touch on women's strongly held sense of their political, personal, sexual and social identities. It can raise up issues of sexual orientation and gender identity as well as mobilising all kinds of other loyalties. Some will prefer a women-only environment, some will feel that this opens up an opportunity for external attacks on the whole project by anti-feminist tech men whilst some will feel that male friends and colleagues will be unfairly excluded and resentful. Discussion can sometimes divide along lines of sexual orientation or of feminist conviction - or just between women who regularly work alongside men in the tech industry and women who would like to learn tech but find learning alongside men challenging. These divisions will also never be clearly defined - individuals don't take neat 'sides' as they probably have multiple modes of identification.

Declaring an event women-only will often also raise a bitterly divisive question on the status of transgendered women. Some will not accept transitioned identities as 'authentic' whilst others will argue that there is no such thing as an authentic gender identity and it is up to women to decide for themselves how they identify their own gender. In my experience it's best to be flexible on all these questions as rigidity can easily disrupt collectives or cause individual women to become distressed and even leave the group.

At Eclectic Tech, it was decided that the Carnivals would be women-only and this would include all women who identify themselves as women. Flossie.org began on the same basis but changed its policy to women-only as speakers or facilitators whilst sympathetic men could attend as participants. Fossbox varies its gender policy according to the aims and contexts of each individual workshop whilst ATF welcomes all women, trans, queers and sympathisers.

These variations take into account all kinds of issues including the balance of positions within feminism represented among the group, aims and objectives, and practical issues. Some of the things to consider are:

• Think about boundaries for the debate -- agreed framework, rules of engagement? How do we define 'woman'? How do we define 'safe'?
• Who do we want to include or influence, specifically women or also potential sympathisers?
• What is the balance of positions within feminism present in the group, is there a prevalent 'flow' of opinion?
• How important versus how contentious? Is it worth alienating some women from the group? How can we frame the debate to avoid alienating women who don't agree with the decision?
• How will the decision affect the actual experience of women within the space?
• Do we have all the skills we need to deliver this project among our feminist networks or will we need specific additional skills, where will we get them?
• How will the space be formalised to promote equal participation, especially if men are included?

Take your time to decide these questions, it's probably a good idea to record them somewhere so they can be referred to in future. If you use chat channels (IRC, pads, etc.) you can probably take a log of the discussion, if not, some form of minutes will be useful. You can then use this record as a basis for any formal codes of conduct or policies you want to draft later and to avoid getting stuck in endless arguments by having something clear to refer back to and for new participants to catch up.

What are you trying to do?

For some groups, discussion and reflection is a key activity which renders the whole group activity meaningful. For others, discussion is a source of vexation and obstruction from practical objectives. Again, this is a somewhat false divide as everyone needs to reflect and everyone needs to be practical. Nevertheless, there may be important differences in emphasis and these may be based on what you are actually trying to do. It's all too easy to become engrossed in the feminist politics and to neglect to make sure there's enough discussion on the specific aims of the project itself and on the experience of diverse participants.

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. Being clear about what you're trying to do can also shift debate through less painful channels and provide very clear, practical arguments for specific choices, making the discussion feel less emotive.

The first thing which must be considered is exactly what the event is intended to achieve. Women and tech events can probably be categorised something like this (again, this abstract division may not reflect the 'messiness' of practical activism):

• Advocacy: How do we change the culture of tech sectors to be more amenable for women, and/or let the world know that women are great at tech, and/or get more women involved?
• Skills: How can we learn to do xyz?
• Support, networking and boundary-crossing: What does it mean to be a woman 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 in tech?

I think you can see right away how these different types of event might develop different gender policies even if the same group of women were organising them? For example, it's difficult advocating change in the male culture of tech sectors if you haven't invited men to hear what you want to say - but you might prefer to discuss *how* to do this in a women-only environment first. Or are you advocating engagement with technology to women and mainly want free, frank and mutually supportive discussion or skills-sharing? In this case, a women-only environment suggests itself.

With skills workshops, research generally shows that women learn tech skills best in women-only environments so these workshops have a very clear and communicable reason for being women-only. But you may still hear male allies grumbling that they also wanted to learn that skill and it isn't fair. So, in that case, we can either explain the benefits of women-only learning environments and recommend that a man step forward to run an open workshop, or we might consider compromising with women-only as facilitators but inviting open participation. Or, at Fossbox, we sometimes run the workshop twice, once for women-only and once for open participation - this way we can maximise women's learning spaces but avoid resentment. As a side-effect, it also gives male supporters a chance to experience the benefits of tech workshops run by women as 'safe spaces'. Men often feed back that they have changed their own practice because they found the experience so positive - which brings an advocacy as well as skills outcome!

It's also 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.

The Brick and Motar of an offline Safe Space

Once you have settled the basic questions about what your event is *for* and who you want to invite, it's time to think about formalities - but let's not start by re-inventing the wheel. There are many different ways of organising different kinds of spaces, I'm not going to go over all of them here but just outline a few of those most popular with FLOSS communities.

• Temporary Autonomous Zone: An alternative to traditional models of revolution, the T.A.Z is an uprising that creates free, ephemeral enclaves of autonomy in the here-and-now. [| Beautiful Trouble]

• Un-Conference: creating a space that helps people make connections, share knowledge, collaborate and create brainchildren. To take part, attendees are encouraged to give a presentation, create a discussion, or even chair a debate [| Lanyrd on running an unconference] and [| Open Space]. Pros: relatively egalitarian (watch out for tyranny of structurelessness) and relatively easy to organise (no messing about with programmes, scheduling and advanced prep). Cons: can be extremely intimidating and therefore exclusionary towards less experienced or skilled women and 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 thousands upon thousands of workshop methodologies so selecting a workshop format is very much about being clear about what you want to achieve. Workshops are a good format for building skills or for maker and design activities.

• Makerspace: makerspaces are community spaces with tools [| Makerspace Community] - great for women to 'get their hands dirty', you can mess about with anything from taking computers apart to making music with bananas or even building a WWII PoW radio out of razorblades and copper wire!

• Sprint: A sprint is a get-together of people involved in a project to further a focused development of some aspect of the project such as working on sections of code, writing manuals or books etc. [| Wikipedia on sprints] and | Flossmanuals Booksprints]. These are effective at getting a lot done quickly for code and manuals (less so for other forms of writing) but very exhausting and emotionally demanding - make sure you keep food and drink coming!

• Hackathon: "programming till someone drops from exhaustion" [| Global Voices on how to run a hackathon]. Hack events can also mix different groups like NGOs with hackers to come up with new approaches to building tech for that group.

• Seminar: bringing together small groups for recurring meetings focusing on a particular subject, in which everyone present actively participates, or offering information or training on specific topics [| Wikipedia on Seminars]. Pros: structured activity supports women with less experience or confidence, planning for tech/resource support is easier, people know what to expect. Cons: can be overly structured and lacking spontaneity for more experience women, more 'carnivalised' or 'top-down', more organisational effort in advance.

Your choice of format is going to be about:

• what you're trying to do - ask yourself which format will support this activity best?
• participants' needs, existing skills, experience and preferences
• practical considerations - what physical spaces are available, what will they allow you to do, what resources do you have etc?
• Your organisational resources - how much can you take on?

Choice of workshop or seminar format is obvious for skills sharing, it can get more difficult to decide for advocacy and networking events. Advocacy events can be some of the most challenging as it's easy to spend the entire day 're-inventing the wheel' with male participants who're new to the questions. If inviting men to advocacy events it's probably best to go with a more structured format. This also applies to any very culturally mixed environment (eg background, sector, educational level, gender, generation, etc rather than culture of national or linguistic origin) - unconferencing and hacking works best with activists or experienced practitioners who are used to a high level of self-determination and with a shared understanding of implied rules and structures. Having said that, it can work well to try more open formats anyway but be prepared for some skilled facilitating to make it safe and fun for less experienced participants as well as the more experienced.

It's perfectly fine to mix and match approaches to suit what you're trying to do and whom you're doing it with - so go ahead and experiment. All the groups I work with mish-mash different formats together - whatever works!

Formalising the space

It's important, especially in mixed environments, to think about what's acceptable behaviour in the space and what isn't. In order for this to have any practical effect, you also have 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]

It should be obvious if your event will bring together women from diverse backgrounds that practical issues such as dietary requirements will need to be addressed at offline events. However, there may be other significant considerations which are more difficult to foresee. Keep an open mind and to avoid escalating conflicts unnecessarily. It's important to remember that "one woman's wine is another woman's poison" and your policy should be about preventing aggressive behaviour and not about trying to 'police' how women identify, communicate or present themselves as long as this is not creating a serious threat to other women.

It's also worth remembering that women who are struggling in a culturally unfamiliar environment can become confrontational more easily than they usually would. Some cultures are also more comfortable with confrontation than others. There's probably a higher representation of women with aspergers in tech environments who will have difficulty in coping with social or other aspects of the environment. There may be many reasons why a woman might be struggling to communicate positively at any given moment. It's key to remain calm and to give women space to experience their emotions and express even negative feelings of anger or frustration without being judged or escalated. We are different, let's celebrate it, even when it's difficult to do!

Respecting Privacy

• 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 and used 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.

• Refer to Infrastructure sections to understand how to set up secure networks

Case Studies

I'm going to look at two women-and-tech spaces to see how their aims, participants and context influenced their format.

Eclectic Tech Carnival (ETC)

ETC was organised on an 'unconference' model using a combination of university spaces, art centres and community centres. It is relatively well-funded and so is able to bring women in from all over the world. It is located in a different city each time and organised by a group from that city in collaboration with the core ETC collective. It provides 'full board' space for participants and also partners with additional arts events located in the host city.

ETC made the decision to be for women-only: "Imagine you are alone and traveling in a country where you don't know the language and cultural intricacies. Do you remember how it felt when you bumped into someone just like yourself?". It was also generally agreed that women should decide their own gender and sexual orientation.

Participants are culturally diverse but mostly from arts, academic, non-profit and related tech backgrounds. This means that they have a lot of experience in self-organising and thrive in a relatively unstructured environment. The code of conduct tends to be implicit rather than stated.

Eclectic Tech Carnival spawned [| Transhack 2014] and also Flossie.org. ETC and Transhack's relatively coherent culture has fostered the development of a strong focus on reflection and feminist practice. It has been an influential and much-loved space for more than a decade.

Flossie

Flossie runs a conference and also skills workshops and was based on the ETC format. It is intended to combine advocacy, boundary-crossing, support and skills-sharing bringing together women involved in digital arts with coders, artists, and makers. There are various problems with trying to bring the ETC format to the UK which has an extremely marketised academic/arts/non-profit sector and is outside of the Schengen area making it very difficult for non-EU women to attend in person. Eventually, we decided to do something a little different. We had a small amount of funding from Google which didn't cover 'full board' and, in any case, it's impossible to find spaces such as the schools used in ETC in Austria in the marketised UK public sector. We were able to make video links for women outside of EU to contribute and London is a highly diverse city in any case. We weren't able to stream the whole event publicly because of bandwidth problems at the university which hosted us.

In the end the biggest difference came from involving more women from pure tech and engineering sectors. We had worked with Ubuntu Women and the Women's and Open Source Groups at the British Computer Society to involve women from purely technological backgrounds as well as digital artists, activists and makers in order to foster wider skills sharing and open up access to high-level computer skills for women. This was very popular but also opened out all kinds of communication difficulties as the groups had quite different cultures and backgrounds.

The first issue raised by this was that many of the students who joined the collective wanted a more structured environment as they didn't feel confident in self-organising and more experienced organisers also felt the unconference structure could be a problem given the diversity of backgrounds and interests. The second was that a reflective approach became more difficult. In the first year, we held a panel to consider how we should go about building a positive representation of women in technology. This quickly became very dislocated and adversarial because, as we began to realise, there were many different models of feminism *and* of technology between women who were primarily tech/engineering, academics, and women who were primarily activists or artists. We decided to focus on the basic value we all shared - supporting more women to make better use of open technology and to move from being consumers to being producers. We had to deprioritise feminist reflection or debates about practice. This proved very effective in holding together these very different groups and building lasting networks with a positive and collaborative atmosphere.

What is a Feminist Hackerspace?

Building a feminist hackerspace is another way of creating a safe space offline for women in tech in addition to reach out to women activists and artists who might not be drawn to traditional hackerspaces.

But first what is a hackerspace? Hackerspaces are often volunteer-run spaces based on the concept of openness, where in theory, anyone who is interested in learning about and playing with technology (software, hardware, etc.) can go. However, throughout the world women have remained underrepresented in these spaces despite the attempts to proposed remedial strategies in certain space, such as women-only hack nights and the adoption of codes of conduct. The women-only hack night particularly has been met with controversy in many spaces since it is deemed to go against the principle of openness.

Other reasons have been highlighted to explain the emergence of feminist hackerspaces such as the difficulties in recognizing and acknowledging privileges along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity and class in addition to the patriarchal behaviors that many women recognise as prevalent in hackerspaces. To change the aforementioned state of affair, feminist geeks, makers, artists and hackers have decided to start feminist hackerspaces. This shows that women are interested in technology, want to learn, improve their skills, look for a like-minded community and want to share their skills with others. And it is fun too!

Feminist hackerspaces are not all the same. They vary in form, shape and size. What seems to unite them though is a set of boundaries that they decide 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 envrionment.

To know more about feminist hackerspaces you might want to visit the website of: the Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna (http://www.mzbaltazarslaboratory.org/), The Mothership Hackermoms in Berkley (http://mothership.hackermoms.org/), Double Union in San Francisco (https://www.doubleunion.org/) and FemHack in Montreal (http://foufem.wiki.orangeseeds.org/).

Which Criteria Do I Use to Assess Whether a Space is Safe or Not?

As a summary and check-list, you will find below the criteria (or rather questions) by which to assess whether a space is safe or not. These questions will be useful when you are assessing whether a space can be considered a safe space.

- What is the history of the space? Why was it decided to start this space and who started it? How many women are/were involved? Documenting yourself about a space is very important. Asking questions is always relevant.

- Who has left the space since the beginning and for which reasons? Is it mostly women who have left the space?

- Does the space has policies? If so, what kind? Go and read it.

- Are the policies regularly put in practice? Ask members in the space, particularly women.

- How do they welcome new comers? The first time you went to the space did you get a tour? Did people say hello? Were the people in the space friendly?

- Are there regular meetings (assemblies) that you can attend to raise issues of concerns, to suggest collective projects, to suggest the organisation of workshops, to discuss the space (its cleanliness, etc.), to present yourself, etc.?

- 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 how the space looks like.

- Who can go in the space and under which condition? This should be made explicit on the website, otherwise ask.

- 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.

- Is it an accessible space? In which part of town it is located? Are there bathrooms? What are the opening hours? Who has access to the keys of the space?

- How much does it cost to become a members? Is there a sliding scale policy?

No space is a perfect space, even a safe space is not perfect. But safe spaces should at least provide an environment and a set of boundaries to talk, meet, address and raise difficult issues, among others. If you feel the space has potential and you want to get involved, don't be shy!