Lieve Vrouwen Tech Huis

From What The Wiki?!

Onze Lieve Vrouwen Tech Huis

Onze Lieve Vrouwen Tech Huis, is a place where people can meet, drink tea and eat cookies, re-instal macs with ubuntu, audio stream, learn drupal, make a Mandala using old hardware, Discuss Wavelan, life love and other catastrophies, and many other interesting topics regarding free software in a comfy genderchanging environment. We will also be selling T-shirts and interviewing people about genderchangers [1].

We have a few projects running at the moment.

• We offer computer hardware courses - [2].
• We co-organize a yearly event called the /Eclectic Tech Carnival - [3].
• We collectively run a server called systerserver.net - [4]. This server is run by women. It's a learning server and place for women's projects.

All projects have their own website. Our first website, genderchangers.org is based on the linx file system structure.

We had fun, but got bad press...Journalist focuses too much on differences and makes stuff up.

Dutch translation of this response. Whatthehack_tali_nederlands.txt

In response to “Veel te veel hitsige nerds op What the Hack�, published Friday, 29 July, 2005 on page 5 of the Algemeen Dagblad [5].

I am writing in response to the Maurits Schilt article entitled “Veel te veel hitsige nerds op What the Hack�. I was interviewed by Maurits Schilt on July 28 at the What the Hack in Boxtel, the Netherlands. I was shocked and upset by the contents of the article. He made up facts, mistranslated quotes, took quotes out of context and focused on the age-old battle of the sexes in a rather unenlightening way. It all added up to very poor journalism, in my opinion.

Let's first put the interview in context because Maurits didn't do this. It's the first official day of What the Hack. It's a bright sunny morning and we had just set-up the “Onze Lieve Vrowen Tech Huis� village tent, our “genderchangers� banner flapped in the morning breeze held in place by a sewing machine, sledge hammer and some old computer hard ware. Our group officially consisted of about 5 women, a man and a 2 and ½ year old boy. We were all working together. Maurits, a young male journalist shows up looking for “women hackers� and asking what a “genderchanger� is. Sara and I explained what a genderchanger [6] is showing him an example of the little piece of hardware that changes the “sex� of a computer cable[7]. “It's a metaphor,� I said. “We have some ideas about how women are excluded from IT, and we try to challenge these things. We want to change the gender of technology, get more women involved.�

Maurits and I conversed for quite a while on several issues, but he only focuses on “sex� in the final article. During the conversation, he kept putting words in my mouth, and I had to keep re-explaining what I meant. He obviously chose not to understand what I was trying to say because the article doesn't reflect anything true about our group's work or our participation at What the Hack.

Maurits Schilt was looking for "women hackers", so I asked him what he meant by a "hacker". In reality, he was looking for women CRACKERS, not HACKERS. I explained to him the difference between a hacker and a cracker. I tried to explain to him that we (me and my like-minded girlfriends as he wrote it) were doing a kind of "social hacking" in our projects and at What the Hack, though I didn't use the term “social hacking�. We were (I quote myself) "hacking a place for ourselves". “By doing a bit of sewing and making a mandala out of old hardware, we are HACKING A SPACE FOR OURSELVES and just having fun.

By using hardware for something other than what it was meant/designed for, we were “hacking the hardware� (kind of literally with screwdrivers and hammers). We attempted to "hack perceptions� about the computer itself. I think we succeeded to some degree. Reactions and comments varied a lot, and we engaged in several conversations that started with passers by noticing the mandala in the wet soggy grass. “Hey, that network card has a life-time guarantee,� one young guy says in horror. “Oh, nice. It's beautiful. Very balanced,� says another.

Maurits Schilt basically didn't get it, chose not to or wasn't interested in our project/s. I told him that we gave hardware courses to women only, that we had a yearly computer event called the /Eclectic Tech Carnival where women get together to share skills. None of that was printed in the article.

Ok, so he chose not to understand what we were doing. He could have at least got the facts and quotes right. But he didn't.

Maurits never asked me how old I was, but he writes that I am 33 years old (not true). He made that up. I didn't say anything about "dreaming of getting more women behind computer screens and for real work not play". I just didn't say that. We don't focus on getting women “behind computer screens�, we focus on getting women to take computers apart with a screwdriver and put them back together again. I also said nothing about “having to swallow the fact that most computer systems are designed by men.� According to my sources he also misquoted the other women in the article.

He takes my quotes out of context, too, when he writes that I said, "I feel uncomfortable [at What the Hack]". He asked me if I would feel comfortable if I was by myself at "What the Hack", and I said, "No, I wouldn't feel comfortable�, and all the women in our tent nodded in approval. In the same breath, I said, “I wouldn't fear for my life or anything, but I just feel more comfortable if I am with other women at such a big event.� It's more fun if you are with your friends. I think anyone, man or woman, would agree to that.

He then asked if I thought there were more women in IT than before (that's a rather general time frame). I said that I didn't work in IT, so he should ask my friend Sisi (who is a web designer) what she thought. He then said, and I quote, "Web designer? That's not computing." He obviously has a very narrow idea of what computing work is.

He then went on... "Why are there less women in IT?" And all of us at Onze Lieve Vrouwen Tech Huis said, “[We didn't have] a researched academic reason why there were not so few women in IT, but that there seems to be social barriers. It's complicated.� I said, "Women are often treated in a patronizing and sexist way, especially on lists and that women often don't use a female name on tech lists, in order to avoid come-ons and other behaviour." He pressed me for an example, and I didn't want to give one, but I did. I thought it would make it clear to him that there really is some unacceptable behaviour by some men on some lists sometimes. The example is horribly miss translated, and really had nothing to do with What the Hack. Printing the example (especially the way it was miss-translated) did nothing but likely infuriate a lot of men who don't behave poorly on lists and who likely support the kind of work that the genderchangers do.

Below is the example in English, and it is very nasty, but keep in mind, as nasty as it is that it is true and that a woman (on a male dominated list) was subjected to this comment. Try to imagine how she felt.

Example: A woman sends an email to the vanlug list asking for people to "spread the word" about a Linux event she was organizing in Maple Ridge (a suburb of Vancouver, BC). The first response occurred about 30 seconds after her post and all it said was, "Spread?". There could be a long discussion about what that little one-word question, “Spread?� meant or didn't mean, but this story is already too long. Really, what is important is that stuff like this happens, sometimes just by accident through lack of awareness, but sometimes just through pure chauvinistic ignorance. It makes PEOPLE uncomfortable,and it makes some people more uncomfortable than others, so these people sometimes choose to hang out with “like-minded people� instead of having to deal with this kind of behaviour. This is the point I was trying to make when I told Maurits about it.

The entire article focuses on sex and the sexualisation of our experience at "What the Hack". The accompanying photograph further objectifies the women that participated at What the Hack. Why wasn't there a picture of the woman who gave the LinkSys hardware hacking workshop; a woman showing men how to hack hardware? Or a picture of the woman giving a presentation on encryption?

I had a great time at What the Hack, but that article really pissed me off. The journalist missed the entire point of our work. In my opinion he is just part of the problem, not part of the solution. He furthers the stereotypes about "mal-adjusted nerds" and the “battle of the sexes�. That's not what What the Hack is about and it's not what the genderchangers [8], systerserver [9] or the /etc [10] are about.

What the Hack is about FREEDOM, and so are we.

I hope that clears things up for some people who may have said, “What the heck is this?� when they read that unenlightened article.

By the way, I am a 37 year old Canadian woman and a free software enthusiast. In my spare time, I volunteer on three projects that focus on the concepts of DIY or DYO (do-it-ourselves) and doing it ourselves using free software. Our projects are: The Gender Academy [11], the /Eclectic Tech Carnival[12] and the systerserver [13].

Dutch translation of this response. Whatthehack_tali_nederlands.txt