Sumana Harihareswara: My name is Sumana Harihareswara and I am the volunteer
development coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the non-profit that
supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge and free culture projects. And when I get
excited about what I’m saying I talk louder and I talk like this. So, just so you know. But
I’m trying to speak quietly because this is a church. But the sound level, you will end up
being like, “Ahhh! She got all loud!” because I got enthusiastic and I forgot myself.
Kjerstin Johnson: So tell me about what you do at your job at Wikimedia.
SH: Wikipedia and all the other Wikimedia projects run on software called MediaWiki,
and MediaWiki is open source so anyone can suggest a contribution to it. My job is to
help coordinate that software development from people who do not work at the
Foundation itself. So there are individuals, there are students, there are people at various
companies and non-profits who have installed MediaWiki and who have suggestions on
how to make it better, to add features or fix problems. So, I help coordinate that.
KJ: Cool.
SH: I encourage people to contribute if they’ve never contributed before, and if they have
already contributed then I help make sure that their contribution experience goes well and
that their code gets the review that it needs and so on.
KJ: Well, my first question was about what changes you’ve seen at Wikimedia ever since
the New York Times article came out in February about the lack of women contributors to
Wikipedia.
SH: I have only been working full-time at the Wikimedia Foundation since mid-May, so
the entire time that I’ve been at the Foundation we’ve already known about this issue and
have been working to address it in various ways. So every month in our metrics meeting,
we have a monthly statistics meeting about how we’re doing on various fronts, and every
department presents. And the gender issue is one that consistently comes up because we
are aware. This is one of our priorities. We have a strategic priorities document about
what we want to achieve in the next five years and it includes a goal of increasing the
number of women contributing to Wikimedia by editing to a certain percentage. And I
feel kind of dumb that I can’t remember it off the top of my head, but we are aiming to
significantly increase the number of female contributors to Wikipedia and other
Wikimedia projects. And we are taking steps towards that with, there’s a mailing list right
now, I believe it’s called Gender Gap, where anyone from the community and from the
Foundation can contribute. And it’s a lively mailing list with a lot of conversation and
ideas. And we’re taking technical steps to make sure its easier for everyone to edit, like
the usability initiatives and the Minus 1 to 100 Initiative, which aims to vastly increase
the number of people who go from not even realizing they can edit to making let’s say
about a hundred edits. That’s sort of a funnel, you know, going from not even realizing
you can edit to realizing it but thinking you can’t, but for other reasons, to realizing
actually I can edit, to actually making that step and maybe making your first edit, to
becoming comfortable with the process and having it become a habit that you do while
reading. So we’re trying to increase, to use sort of technical-sounding terms, throughput
on all of those parts of the process. And although there are issues, in my opinion, of
sexism in various Wikimedia communities such as, for example, English Wikipedia,
which is the best known of them. There are also really big issues that are not about
malicious or ignorant sexism of people so much as it is about the difficulty of certain
tools. For example, in order to edit right now any of the Wikimedia sites one needs to be
able to use our markup language Wiki text. And that’s quite a barrier for any kind of
novice including people whom we want to reach out to such as women, people with
differing levels of education and English knowledge, people have accessibility issues or
issues on mobile devices. And so we are engaged in a large technical project right now to
make it more possible to edit more intuitively and what we call the Visual Editor Project.
All of our usability work is aimed on making things easier to use, and this will help
everyone including people like, so often, women who have not had the technical
background to learn a particular level of skill with computer usage and with web editing.
Of course we do have women who are contributors. I myself edit Wikipedia and I’m a
woman. But if you make things easier then more people can edit and I do believe this will
have a significant impact on the proportion of women contributing.
KJ: Cool. Yeah, one of my questions was going to be what other social justice issues you
saw with Wikipedia, and that was a great example. Are there any other ones?
SH: Oh, certainly. Let me think about that. Oh, and of course I have to say that I am
speaking from my perspective as one person at the Foundation and I don’t think of
myself as an official spokesperson for the Foundation. I can just speak from my own
experience and my own view of what we’re doing. And all of the stuff that I’m talking
about is publicly available in our strategy documents on the web, on our priority
documents, and in our executive director’s reports to the community, and so on because
we try to be a really very transparent and open organization in keeping with the Wiki
model. But you were asking about other social justice issues. The biggest one that comes
to mind is internationalization and localization. Hold on a second… I am holding up my
hoodie that I was given after I had spent a little bit of time at the Wikimedia Foundation
and it has the word “Wikipedia” in dozens of languages because we care about… and this
is where I get out something else. It’s on my business card and I feel very emotional and
sentimental actually about these business cards because they represent that I am now a
strong part of something that I care a lot about. “The Wikimedia Foundation: Imagine a
world in which every single human being can really share in the sum of all knowledge.”
That’s our commitment. And that’s a not just about middle, upper class white male living
in urban areas of the United States. That’s about everyone. That’s about people who look
like you and me. That’s about people with any level of education knowing any language,
being able to speak it, or write it, or read it. That’s about information. It’s about
empowering people wherever they are with the knowledge that they can use to enrich
their lives. And to that end, in the next few years we’re making huge inroads in India and
Brazil and, for example, launching efforts to make our content way better in lots of
individual local languages. Hundreds, hundreds of languages have their own Wikipedias,
not to mention Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikibooks, and other free
knowledge projects. And that’s a huge social justice goal, I think, and one that of course
it’s not just the Foundation doing it. It’s the movement, right. It’s the movement that has
set these priorities and is acting in part through the foundation as a financial arm. We also
have, what is it, thirty, forty Wikimedia chapters in lots of local places. There’s
Wikimedia India, Wikimedia UK, and all these chapters are mostly volunteer
organizations, I believe, working on the ground in these places to reach out to individual
communities in ways that the people there are more suited to. The people in Wikimedia
India know more of the local Indian languages. We are also, as a Foundation, doing
things to aid them programatically through grants or any kind of institutional help that
would make sense. We don’t want to take over things, we want to empower, but we also
have technical things we can do like we are right now hiring multiple people to make
Mediawiki, the software that I help work on, better in lots of different languages, like
Indic languages. Some of them have specific challenges when it comes to making that
content look and feel right and be the most useful to the people who read those
languages. Or right to left languages have some specific needs that people who only ever
read left to right languages might not think of. So there’s a lot of stuff that we’re doing in
terms of getting people information in their own language. Additionally, we’re improving
how we work on mobile devices. As you are probably aware a lot of people in the
developing world, that’s the way they access the Internet if they get to access it at all is
on a small mobile device. And often websites that were originally built to read on
desktops and big screens don’t work as well on phones, sowe have just launched a new
mobile gateway that people can test and look at and that we’re improving on that front.
On a huge scale we have social justice stuff happening there. We want information to be
accessibly by everybody and I think that’s really important to think of from a social
justice standpoint. Now, in addition to that there’s stuff that some audiences might
immediately think of when they think about social justice, like improving the voice that
people get when they have been traditionally marginalized especially in the US due to
issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. The first thing that we do is
we’re setting up a platform where everyone can speak. It’s really quite, at the heart of it,
technologically a meritocratic system. Anyone can speak, anyone can suggest I know this
fact, and then contribute it to the world. And then when it comes to systematic issues that
even within our communities possibly perpetuate some of the systematic –isms and
kyriarchy that you see in the outside world sometimes replicated in our communities. The
Foundation itself and the community as a whole, there are people acting to combat that
and creating initiatives to combat that. There are, for example, these things called
Wikiprojects, which are extremely loose people coming together towards some specific
goal of improving content on, let’s say, English Wikipedia relating to a particular
projects. So there’s Wikiproject Physics where physicists get together and they have
some loose coordination around some specific articles that they really aim to make better
quality or something like that. Well, there’s Wikiproject Women’s History where people
who care about women’s history, usually feminists of any gender, are aiming to improve
the quality of information you can get on feminism and women’s history on, I believe in
this case, English Wikipedia. And I do specifically am saying over and over again
English Wikipedia because I want people to remember there are hundreds of other
projects. There’s projects I do not know about happening on let’s say Portuguese
Wikinews to make sure that the news that people who read and write Portuguese can get
via this kind of free service is of a quality and a diversity that we would hope. And it’s a
movement of innumerable people, and the Foundation neither tries nor wants to have a
hand in all of it because this is the movement of the community. We just aim to
empower.
KJ: I was wondering if you could talk more about how these open source foundations or
organizations or communities can replicate the kyriarchy and are hostile to certain
communities. And part of that question is also why should feminists care about open
source technology?
SH: I feel as though I am perhaps failing as a geek feminist because I should have a really
glib answer instead of finding myself thinking really hard about a bunch of different
stuff.
KJ: I don’t think it is a simple answer.
SH: True, true. It is because I know how powerful and it is because I know how much
potential technology has to shape our world that I know it is essential that the people who
shape that technology represent that world, represent the best that world has to offer. I
have experienced what it feels like in stories and in code to have my existence, I would
not say erased though some people have had that experience, but I have experienced what
it is to have the possibility of my experience not forethought, to have when I show up
then I must be shoehorned in. I am giving this interview right now in a church, and I
believe in the Bible there’s this quote of welcoming and hospitality. “In my father’s
house there are many mansions, there are many rooms, and a place has been set aside for
you.” And when you have an attitude of hospitality and accessibility in the way that you
do things, if the default is open rather than closed, is welcoming rather than intimidating
then it makes a different world and it makes the world that I want to live in. And I’m
speaking on two levels now. I’m speaking about code itself. I’m speaking about
technologies, technologies that assume a variety and diversity of people who might
interact with it and who might therefore benefit from that. And I’m also speaking of the
layer of people who create that technology. When I’ve been in communities that by
default were open and accepting and enthusiastic about receiving diverse perspectives,
the end product was more alive, was more likely to be able to be used in many ways and
many purposes. And I enjoyed working on it more, and people enjoyed interacting with it
more. Everyone who cares about open source software knows innately that instead of
individual hoarding it is in our union and our communion that great things can be made.
And there is a human joy in sharing in that and hospitality. And if feminism, as I said, is
the belief that women are people then for any subset of that, for any awesome thing that
women can do well women can do that too. So I don’t want the technological
communities that im apart of to lack half the awesomeness that they could have by being
sexist and excluding women. There’s probably about eight other answers that I could
give, but have I at least begun to address the contours of your question?
KJ: Yes.
SH: Ok, good. But you had an earlier question of how the open source communities
replicate the kyriarchy.
KJ: Would you also give what you think is the definition of kyriarchy?
SH: Oh, crap! I was hoping that because I’m talking to Bitch Magazine readers that they
would just know!
KJ: So how do open source communities replicate systems of oppression we see in our
day to day lives of gender, race, class, sexual orientation?
SH: All the oppressions.
KJ: All the oppressions compounded.
SH: Right. You’ve reminded me of two funny things. One is there’s a web cartoon by an
artist who goes by Hyperbole and a Half, and at one point she’s talking about what it is to
be an adult and one of them is the moment you’re failing to be an adult is when you look
around at a dirty house and you’re like “Clean all the things?” And I have some friends
who sometimes say, “Fight all the oppressions?” Because it looks really like you kind of
got to pick a few I think to concentrate on. Although, you try your best not to actively
engage in most of them. But another thing I’m reminded is last year after my open source
bridge talk, which was partly about how to get more open source contributions at forprofit companies, I got a question from the audience from someone who basically said,
and I’m simplifying radically, “While I was able to get more openness and transparency
at my company so that they were contributing to an open source project or to a project in
the community, but I was able to do it only with some closed source software that I
employed” which is not so great, right?
KJ: So what does that mean?
SH: So open source means that anybody can modify the code, closed source means that
no one else other than the people who basically sold it to you can modify it, and therefore
you are disempowered, and you are under someone else’s control. And as Mr. Rogers
once said, “I am against the idea of anybody being programmed by anybody else.” So on
the whole in the open source movement we try to be using tools that anyone can modify
that empowers us and on a pragmatic level and on an ideological level. But sometimes
one has to be pragmatic about the fact that you are aiming to get some goal done then in
the short term the answer might be to use a method that you might not be so happy with
doing in the long term, and just keep that tension in your mind and try to resolve it later.
And the way that I stared off my answer was, “We’re all complicit in so much bullshit!”
Anyway, I’m just reminded of that when I think about how all of us, including the most
well meaning of us and those of us who do a lot work for social justice are often
complicit in a lot of bullshit and you just have to try to be aware of it and kind of make a
note to pay for your carbon credits at some point. You say all right, I flew to this open
source conference representing some really great stuff, but you know what? I flew in a
plane and I’m not so happy about that. Or hey I'm eating vegan and that’s fantastic, but
actually the people who picked this food may not have been treated so well. You know,
all that stuff. There are a million little intersecting oppressions where sometimes you’re
trading off one against the other. It’s the old paper and plastic, right? And that’s to say
that it’s always zero sum. There’s some choices that are obviously better than others,
but… Anyway, I’m sorry. That’s quite a sidetrack from the question that I’m not trying to
avoid, it’s just that it brings up a lot of interesting side thoughts. Open source
communities are communities of the people in them, and so therefore the people in them
will bring their oppressions, will bring their prejudices and that is just a start. Any
community that we run into is partly going to be determined by the people in it and the
environments they came from. So that’s just a start, that open source communities are not
starting off as things that came from people full of diverse people of diverse backgrounds
and experiences. Etc, etc, etc. Because very few communities really ever are, obviously.
No matter where you go, whether you’re talking about industry, geography, or whatever.
So there’s that. And then there’s the fact that the open source movement, especially in the
United States and Western Europe, which is where I’ve spent most of my open sourcerelated time, is mostly white guys, especially fairly privileged white guys who can make
a living easily enough because they have a skill that capitalism likes. And so you have
that layer of blindness and privilege. And there are some values that the open source
community cares about a lot, which are good and have good effects but also have some
negative side effects especially when practiced by people unconscious of their own
privilege. For example, we value honesty and truthfulness the way that engineers and
scientists value honesty and truthfulness because it is a sin to mess with data. And we
value meritocracy. Anyone should be able to contribute and be judged by their
accomplishments, and secondarily how they get along with others perhaps, but even then
we have rather a tolerance for people who are unpleasant to get along with but contribute
a great deal of code. These are just two examples of some of our norms, and I think it’s
fairly obvious that these are generally good things: truthfulness, meritocracy, but when
practiced by people unaware of their own privileges, race privilege, class privilege, male
privilege, and so on, you run into situations like a person practicing a kind of bluntness
and insensitivity and misreading it to themselves as honesty. You see honesty unleavened
by sensitivity, compassion, or mentorship. And you might see people defining merit very
narrowly because the things they’re good at specifically may be the thing that they value,
and they would find any other kind of contribution scorn worthy and find themselves
dismissive of it without even realizing what they’re doing. For example, because so few
open source contributors have keen visual creativity in the graphical arts, I think that’s
one reason why you see open source folks somewhat dismissive and scornful of the
contribution that a good graphic artist can bring to something. Similarly with
documentation we put quite a high level of emphasis in our community on
resourcefulness and self-study and trying to get an answer yourself by searching available
information and asking for help. We also say you shouldn’t stay stuck too long, but still,
and I think partly because of that then people who have gone through a rite of passage of
working very hard to make something work well are then somewhat scornful of people
who aim to make it easier for others by adding usability or documentation. It’s not
completely cause and effect. What I’m suggesting is just one of many factors. I think you
can imagine that people think that if having done something hard is a badge of honor
making things easier for others is not valued as much. Although there are some
communities where it is. I think Open Source Bridge is a much more welcoming
community and a community where people value things like conference organizing,
contributions of making tools that other people find useful, and so on in a way that
overlaps more with valuing the kinds of contributions that traditionally come from, for
example, women.
KJ: I was also going to ask who you see, I know this Geek Feminism and Wikiprojects
you were talking about, either individuals or communities who are working within
technology?
SH: I am happy to report that there are now so many people in organizations working on
the cause of women in open source and open culture that I can not name them all. One of
them is the fabulous Valerie Aurora, whom you just spoke with. She and Mary Gardiner
started the Ada Initiative, which I am proud to say that I am an advisory member of and
we are ramping up now on some initiatives to not just make life better for open
technology and gender balance there, but think of it scalably so it’s not just us doing it.
Geeks need to think about how to scale up, because in computer land if you can figure
out how to make a computer do something once, that’s great. If you can make a computer
do something twice you might as well be able to make it do it a zillion times because it’s
basically the computer hitting it’s own “Do that again” button. So we think about scaling.
Anyway, so there’s the Geek Feminism blog and the Geek Feminism Wiki, which are
useful depositories of knowledge and best practices and venting. The Anita Borg Institute
is for women in technology in general and they host a conference called the Grace
Hopper Conference. And there’s an email list called Systers that I’m apart of that’s been
fantastic. Those are more for women in tech in general, but are very open source friendly,
so for example the Systers group has software that they maintain that’s open source. Hold
on there’s a billion others. There’s Valerie Aurora, there’s Kirrily Robert, there’s Rachel
Chalmers, there’s all the people on the advisory board of the Ada Initiative. There’s
Noreen Plunkett, there’s Mel Chua, who is a friend of mine who does community
outreach and community engineering at Red Hat, which is the makers of a couple of
major Linux distributions. So anyways, there’s a lot of people and they’re doing lots of
kinds of things. For example, Gnome, which is an open source project having to do with
desktop environments, like the kind like Windows and apps that a lot of people using
open source software might see, they have a women’s outreach project where they recruit
women who perhaps have never been involved in perhaps any tech or open source before
and get them into the idea of contributing, and especially to Gnome. And it could be in
any component of the Gnome project, which includes code, which includes
documentation, accessibility, testing, graphic design, marketing, because there’s a lot of
work that needs to be done, and the more perspectives and people we have doing it, great.
And this includes sometimes getting volunteers is great and also by ramping them up in a
volunteer space you can get them the skills on resumes that they need to get hired to work
in open source part- or full-time, which also enriches our community because our ecology
is a rich one that includes different kinds of payment structures. And the more
sustainable it is to do open culture and open source work for anybody, especially anyone
who is in a somewhat marginalized position, the more diverse our community will be.
KJ: My last question is what advice you would give someone who is going to make their
first Wikipedia edit.
SH: If you have not yet decided what you’re going to edit, but you kind of want to look
up your hometown on Wikipedia and see if there’s something you know that’s not on
there yet. Find a source for it, maybe in a newspaper or a book or some other fairly
reliable source, and add that edit and mention the citation, because an edit with a citation
means it’s verifiable and that means that it will stick around longer. If you don’t know
and that doesn’t make sense for you because your hometown in very well documented,
pick up the most recent non-fiction book or magazine that you read and see if there’s
something in there that you think ought to be on Wikipedia and do the same thing. Kind
of look around for a relevant article and stick in a citation. And adding a citation might be
an easy way to go in terms of it is much less likely that someone else will come along and
say it’s stupid and sucks and have it be reverted or something like that, because there is
unfortunately some number of people who as part of their anti-vandalism and anti-spam
efforts, if they see some piece of information that needs a citation then they will revert it
and then message you and say, “Hey, you need to add a citation on that.” So you can just
skip that step by just having a citation in the first place. But another thing I would say is:
Be bold and know that because Wikipedia is about individuals you have as much right to
be there as any jerk who you might run into. And if you make useful edits and contribute,
you will gain reputation and you will have made the world a better place.
KJ: Thank you.
SH: Sure.