Sumana Harihareswara

“ And nothing is magic. I think that was – that’s something that all of us sometimes have to remember, is that that thing that someone else is doing that seems impossibly hard, or the thing someone else knows that’s full of all this jargon – if we try different ways, if we ask the right questions and set up nurturing learning environments, we can learn it. It’s not magic. And I didn’t have that belief before I think I came into Hacker School a little bit afraid of certain buzzwords, as though they were just impossibly hard. ”

“ Free access to education and free expression of political opinions and privacy from unwarranted surveillance are human rights (in the UN Declaration of Human Rights) , and even if you don't want to go that far, in general they're social justice goals that we all like. We're here because we share a vision -- less waste, more empowerment, getting knowledge into people's hands. But actually getting these benefits to our users requires that our users be able to use our software. So, in getting rid of user experience obstacles, we are working to achieve social justice goals. ”

“ And Wikimedia is a wonderful place to be because I can help everyone, and everyone can help me. All of us here have goals, about what we want Wikimedia to be, about how we see that mission unfolding. And we each have our own different perspectives, which is great, because no one of us has all the answers to how to achieve this mission, which means we have to learn from each other. Every single one of us – every single one of you – has stuff we need to learn to help achieve the mission. ”

“ Those who perform or reinforce masculinity -- whether they're male or female, are privileged, and *everyone,* women and men, gets trapped in this cycle of (usually unknowingly) reinforcing all these things that say hospitality, empathy, and so on is stuff that gets you demoted down the respect ladder and the payscale ladder. And naturally, all this stuff gets smushed out of our software, because it's not just *not* incentivized, it's actually penalized. ”

“ When someone is criticized for doing something inhospitable, the first response needs to not be “Oh, but remember their edit count. Remember he’s done X or she’s done Y for this community.” We need to start treating hospitality as a first class virtue, and see that it is the seed of everything else. Alberto Brandolini said “The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” ”

“ I use these lessons in my open source work all the time. We know how to do this. It's the standard best practices & due diligence:
documentation, gardening, well-run events, responding to people who show up, having junior jobs, not putting up with sexism or racism or jerkitude I treat my own attempts like No Big Deal; compassion demands that I recognize my privilege and help others build their skills and confidence. Safe is better But all that writing and editing stuff was a hobby. My mom told me: it doesn't work to try to make money at what you love, because you'll get sick of it. ”

“ And I'm speaking from my experience here - I know library tech is its own field - but in my experience of our industry, we just drop the ball on empathy and hospitality, a lot.
One reason is that our industry systematically undervalues the jobs and roles that require empathy, and has deeply gendered associations with hospitality and empathy -- they're not seen as masculine traits. And this isn't just a women versus men thing; it affects everyone. The tech industry values masculinity over femininity, meaning traits like hospitality are devalued. ”

“ I think we’ve seen this in my own experience at Hacker School, and we see that also the invite-only spaces, or spaces where everybody coming in agrees to follow the same rules so it’s a place where you feel safer -- these are like tidepools, places where certain kinds of people and certain kinds of behaviour can be nurtured and grown so that it’s ready to go out into the wider ocean. ”

“ And It included ads for those Kannada Koota meetups, "how I started a Kannada Koota" articles, and tutorial exercises for "how to learn Kannada", for your kids. And I helped staple them, and stamp the envelopes.
One of the greatest gifts you can give your children, your employees, the people to whom you are a role model, is the knowledge that some field of endeavor is in a sense No Big Deal. Knowledge -- belief backed up by experience -- that they can do interesting and rewarding projects in it without fear of public embarrassment. ”

“ But for all these big systems, there are little capillaries, where people exchange information or get healed or get whatever they need. And when those capillaries aren't working right, then those people just don't get what they need.
Over and over, in lots of different fields, we see that bad usability makes a HUGE difference, and that when choosing between two services, people will make very different choices depending on which service actually seems designed around the user's needs. ”

“ And any time that you’re talking with someone who knows less than you about something, you have an opportunity to teach them. And this includes in those on-wiki conversations, in IRC, in the bug tracker, in RT, in the outreach – behind the scenes on those outreach days, everything!
There are three really important things that will help you teach them. Learning is designable like code. Our brains are snowflakes; different people learn differently. And we do not function stand-alone. We learn in communities. ”

“ When you do outreach, help these kids fight their parents. And of course that's a bit strong -- we don't actually want fights. We want to help kids persuade their parents that we're legit and that this hobby is worthwhile. Honestly, strong brand names like Google and Wikipedia will help convince them. Teach this stuff in schools so the parents trust that it's a real thing, and what's more, make up for schools that do not promote creativity. ”

“ Better user experience is the best force multiplier we have at our command, so it's vital that we make it a first-class priority, throughout the development process. And with disciplined empathy we can do that - here at the intersection of libraries and tech, we can figure out how to scale hospitality, fix the new last mile problem, and actually achieve the social justice goals that so many of us got into this for. ”

“ If there’s any members of Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth Team here they might be kind of bouncing up and down, because that’s a lot of what they help enable. The idea of legitimate peripheral participation is “Here’s a main, hard, complex activity that only the most expert people in a community can do” but sort of coming out in ripples from that are smaller, less complex, easier to learn tasks, where if people do the easier to learn tasks first while they can look over the shoulders of the experts, they’ll learn more. ”

“ Provide ways for people who have never heard of open source to hear about our role models, including our female role models, and hang out with them and learn with them. You cannot admire or learn what you can't see! ”

“ It's a higher barrier for designers that takes time to overcome. I've found all of my team to be receptive when I've taken the time to explain the principles that guide my decisions." And I like that she mentions that -- I think in any negotiation, it's good to help people see the principles you're reasoning from, and the experiences you've had that led you to where you are now.
If you don't think empathy is one of your strong suits, you can change that. We all came into this community with some skills and without others ”

“ If you are having a bad day, if you are worried about being good enough, if you find it demoralizing that someone told you were wasting your time trying to contribute to some open source project, you are not weak for having these problems and talking about them openly. If we are publicly vulnerable then we can also help each other.
Speaking about being vulnerable, now's when I talk about what it's like to be a woman in Wikimedia. Especially when I'm the only woman in the room. There's an xkcd about what it feels like to be the only woman in the room. ”

“ We in the open source community -- and code4lib is part of this -- put a lot of energy into lowering barriers to entry, like licensing and cost. And those are visible barriers that stop people from getting information. But bad usability is a barrier to entry too-- it's less visible but it's just as real. ”

“ You may have heard of Carol Dweck's research on the fixed versus the growth models of how we look at the world and learning. The short summary is, if you believe that talent is nurture and practice, then you’ll grow. But if you believe that some people are just good at X, if it’s inborn or nature, then we won’t learn. And I was able to learn at Hacker School because it was safe to fail. ”

“ Well, yeah, but I think a lot of us contribute to that mission in very different ways and have somewhat different conceptions of what it is; some of us contribute to Wikisource, or to Commons, some of us care more about editing, some about programming, some about design, some about outreach – it can be fuzzy, and Hacker School is much more concentrated. Every single person there is just there to become a better programmer, even if they’re learning different languages, and so on. ”

“ I work for the Wikimedia Foundation in the Engineering Community Team, and I help people integrate with our API for Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, and all our other sites, and it's really exciting to me that we're finally moving towards a service-oriented architecture and away from the SCM, Spaghetti Code Model. ”

“ And when the group making the software isn't very diverse, then the cycle just repeats, and gets even worse.
In general, marginalized people develop more empathy than the dominant group, because we *have to*. We have to be able to see from other people's point of view, the dominant point of view, as a matter of survival.
This is one reason diversity in a group is useful - it includes people with different perspectives, AND is likely to have more people with the ability to see from multiple perspectives. ”

“ The vast majority of the stuff that’s happening is being done ad hoc, by volunteers, people helping each other, but we agree there are some things it’s really useful for paid people to do. At Hacker School there are five paid facilitators, who do things like helping people set and reach their learning goals, and directing them to resources, and starting them off with things like pair programming. And there are diversity goals at Hacker School, and that feels familiar to you, probably. ”

“ The Open Internet Tools Project's James Vasile said in his Open Source Bridge keynote last year that the privacy tech community would be better off spending the next year of our time on user experience design, localisation, and end user customer support, rather than writing new tools or features. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHsRPd_U-0
Why the bottleneck? So these examples - banking, lending, Wikipedia, healthcare, encryption - show you how bad usability can really change what choices people make. ”

“ I learn best by setting small goals for myself, to combine textbook learning with making little apps or websites. And I learn with and from others. It is important for me to be around other people in person and online, so that I can learn from them and I can teach them. For me, it has to be reciprocal. And it worked! I learned a lot at Hacker School. I came in a dabbler and I came out a much better programmer. ”

“ And you can learn and exercise your empathy skills as well. If you have a sequential learning style where you prefer a structured approach, take a course in conflict resolution. If you want something more self-study, read novels and blogs written by people with lives very different from yours. And at your own institution, watch real users use your library and your library's digital services -- patrons and colleagues. ”

“ In the book Women's Ways of Knowing around community confirmation, there’s also an observation that some groups, especially many women, find that confirmation and community are prerequisites rather than consequences of learning certain hard things. ”

“ I recommend Crystal Beasley's blog post, "Code Talks and Designers Don't Speak the Language" http://skinnywhitegirl.com/blog/code-talks-and-designers-dont-speak-the-language/930/ , in which she says that in general, coders don't know what to expect from user experience designers, and developers don't have good judgment procedures to know whether proposed designs are correct. She says: "representing the work of a designer requires a shift in culture" which I think is totally true. ”

“ Hacker School has a selection process, and not everyone gets in. They aren’t that big on you having to be some kind of hotshot programmer. They are totally fine with letting in people who have, let’s say, two months of programming experience, or twenty years of programming experience. ”

“ Usability is pretty poor; a lot of offices aren't open at night or on weekends, you have to call them during business hours to make an appointment, you have to book a whole appointment just to get a flu shot, and there's a long wait once you get there. ”

“ Vulnerability Sumana delivering this talk Community management is a first-class responsibility at Hacker School. Every one of the five facilitators who are the only employees at Hacker School are community managers. That’s a big part of their job. They will help with any kind of problem, including the brains of everyone trying to work, and including helping you with having a bad day, with your emotional fears and anxieties as well. Emotions are first class citizens. ”

“ You know, if you’re sweeping up sawdust in a woodworking shop and then learning to measure while you watch other people doing the really complicated cuts, you’ll learn more. You’ll see how long things take, what the rhythm is, what kinds of decisions you have to make. And the Growth Team has been helping people find legitimate peripheral participation in editing through things like typo fixes. ”

“ For a few years I've helped run internship programs that bring new people into the community of practice that is open source, and I've done my share of mentorship, and I also want to talk with people about that this week, but not right now. ”

“ The How Learning Works book points out that we have known about stereotype threat since 1995. We have known that if you point out to members of a marginalized group “Hey, hi there Member of Marginalized Group, did you know you’re marginalized here?”, that’s going to decrease performance and their willingness to be vulnerable. And there are different kinds of accepting climates for marginalized groups. DeSurra and Church, also in How Learning Works, talk about the climate for people who are LGBT. A community might be explicitly marginalizing, overtly discriminatory ”

“ So I want to give you some thoughts and some examples from other communities and products, about what good and bad user experience can do, and then talk about why we technologists usually don't put enough investment into user experience, and what we can do to fix that. ”

“ When you look at how our editathons have been able to increase attendance by women by starting with the social aspect, I think you can see how this plays out in practice. Software Carpentry, another learning outreach project, has also been able to increase attendance by underrepresented groups at their bootcamps by suggesting that people bring their friends. ”