[Events] economic diversity

Wed Jan 30 14:24:27 UTC 2013

My pal Sheila Miguez told me to jump in on this conversation to share some
of what I've learned about economic diversity in my years as staff at
FreeGeek Chicago. My apologies for a fairly long email.

There's been some talk of FreeGeek Chicago and FreeGeek Portland in this
thread. The FreeGeek model started in Portland, OR. We adapted the model
here in 2005. Our core program is called "Earn-a-Box": Volunteers take
apart old computers, test the parts, put them back together, and install
Linux. After completing the 24 hour program, volunteers earn $75 in rewards
to apply towards the purchase of a desktop, laptop, or parts from our
thrift store, which sells full desktop systems and laptops starting at
about $50.

FreeGeek Chicago is thriving. In 2012, 767 participants volunteered 17,873
hours and recycled 20+ tons of electronic waste. We don't track volunteer
demographics, but our community is *extremely* diverse in terms of gender,
race, language, economics, and age. Sales from our store and circuit board
scrapping program are the main drivers of our roughly $90k budget and
part-time staff of four.

So, is coding a useful skill for hard-pressed people? It really depends on
the person, but in general, coding and command line skills aren't going to
pay the bills for the vast majority of poor and working class people. But
there are certainly people in tough economic straights -- like young people
of pretty much all demographics, immigrants with technical training still
struggling to feel comfortable in their field, older people with technical
backgrounds fallen on hard times -- who you should be trying hard to find.
How you build up that community is the name of the game.

Different models for teaching tech serve different communities. Diversity
means something different at a Python workshop than it does at a FreeGeek
teardown station. I believe a way of describing FreeGeek's mission is to
call it "practical computing". What does someone need to know to function
in the digital world?

Our current understanding of models for tech education and empowerment look
something like this:

If you want to reach really poor, vulnerable folks: Teach hardware skills,
refurbishing, and teardown. Get laptops, droids, raspberry pis, whatever
people need into their hands for less than the market ($100 or less for a
fully configured "practical computer"). Go cheap, scale up slowly. This was
pretty much the FreeGeek model in the early days.

If you want to reach working, decently educated people: Teach Excel,
troubleshooting, web search. Promote at churches, community centers, corner
stores, after school programs. Did I mention teach Excel? FreeGeek's
education program has been at this for a couple years now. One problem:
It's a lot of work and doesn't make any money.

If you want to reach potential developers from a diversity of economic
backgrounds: In my experience this is perhaps the hardest one to answer.
But we've finally, after 3 years of false starts and crappy ideas (mostly
pushed by yours truly), found some traction with the Supreme Chi-Town
Coding Crew (https://github.com/sc3/sc3), a volunteer civic coding team.

To be a developer, you need some infrastructure -- like consistent internet
access, basic literacy, a laptop with Linux or OS X, and some personal
wherewithal. But just because someone has that infrastructure now, they may
have really earned it. Or maybe they're just undervalued or a poor match
for their current job.

I believe that organizing for economic diversity in software development
projects and education is best served by looking for talented people from
diverse backgrounds (especially race, gender, and age) whose talents aren't
being developed or used to the their fullest capacity.

To these ends, it's also been really important at FreeGeek to teach people
real job skills and given them real world experience, with no bullshit.
Paradoxically, that means we don't make the grand claims that some training
programs do about jobs and opportunities. In fact, we try to steer people
with potential and interest in coding away from technical school programs
which do a poor job of preparing people for real world development jobs and
instead encourage fundamentals like git and participation in open source
projects.

But if participants in SC3 and FreeGeek can level up in their jobs, or get
internships and entry level coding positions that let them advance their
skills, then I'm doing my part to help create a bigger, better, more
diverse pool of qualified tech workers.

About promoting your events. If you're white n' nerdy (like me) and you
want a diverse event, try really hard to do outreach outside your comfort
zone before falling back on your own privileged social networks and do your
level best to be creative in your outreach.

What I've found is that when it comes to tech organizing, if you build it,
white dudes will show up. It doesn't take a lot of effort to get geeks to
come to geeky events, so I haven't spent a lot of effort. I try not to
promote FreeGeek a lot on Twitter, because that's not really where our
audience hangs out. Accurate, simple printed material has served us much
better in reaching people who read church bulletins and bulletin boards,
the kind made out of cork and wood.

In general, be intentional about attendance -- get a few people lined up
before you even announce your event to ensure you have a diverse audience
and, if possible, some trusted leaders.

It helps immensely to read a code of conduct at the beginning of an event
or volunteer engagement. (We read this:
http://codex.freegeekchicago.org/wiki/FreeGeekInfo/Policies/CodeOfConduct).
In general, a reminder at the beginning that you're there to share and
learn from each other and work as a team is always worth opening an event
with. I've found that in many cases even notorious mansplainers will chill
out when reminded beforehand they need to have some manners. Outreach for
diversity doesn't mean much if you can't create a welcoming space where
people of all backgrounds have some respect.

I could go on. I hope our experience at FreeGeek helps this conversation in
some small way.

David

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah at wikimedia.org
> wrote:

> >> On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 4:26 AM, Catherine Devlin
> >> <catherine.devlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Congratulations on your work!  I especially applaud the planning -- you
> had food, you had a fallback exercise platform when your first didn't
> work, and you got cool demonstrations.
>
> To get more students for the next round, don't forget to ask your first
> round to evangelize to their friends and social groups!
>
> >>> At and after the Columbus Python Workshop, some of the students and I
> talked
> >>> about how we could use workshops for not just gender diversity, but
> economic
> >>> diversity.  They had great suggestions for organizations and agencies I
> >>> could partner with - job agencies, women's shelters, and so forth.
>  Lots of
> >>> possibilities there....
>
> Thank you for bringing this up and for being interested in broadening
> the scope of your work to class diversity as well as gender diversity.
> Here's my take.
>
> Just like the "pipeline" that brings women into open source, the
> "pipeline" that brings socioeconomically disadvantaged people into tech
> and specifically into open source has lots of leaks along the way.  All
> failures are cascade failures.  As OpenHatch, we can help patch up some
> parts of the pipeline and won't be as effective at others.  So let's
> concentrate on the parts where we can, and (when possible) place
> secondary or tertiary importance on lending support to people and
> institutions working on other parts of the pipeline.
>
> So: with all of OpenHatch's strengths, we are not going to be able to
> help much if someone is currently absolutely homeless and jobless, and
> does not have regular access to the web via a device with a real
> keyboard.  But we would still improve the economic diversity of our
> contributor base by reaching out to pink-collar women who have clerical
> jobs, and poor students at community colleges.
>
> We might do best to define a few opportunities and demographics that
> would be easy to start with -- like targeting community colleges for
> some OpenHatch Comes to Campus events.
>
> I do agree that the questions "what hardware & software?" and "what
> would make this appealing to the demographics we're interested in?" and
> "but what if they can't practice at home?" would be pretty important to
> this kind of attempt.
>
> --
> Sumana Harihareswara
> Engineering Community Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
> _______________________________________________
> Events mailing list
> Events at lists.openhatch.org
> http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/events
>

-- 
David Eads - 773.354.2285
News applications developer, Chicago Tribune (
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/)
Founder, FreeGeek Chicago (http://freegeekchicago.org)

“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” -- Jean
Renoir
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openhatch.org/pipermail/events/attachments/20130130/46a77c36/attachment.html>