Children leaving the Lodz ghetto for the death camp at Chelmno

This is not the bottom

Friends, please stop assuming things can’t get any worse. We got to this nightmare through complacency. Let it stop now. Things can and WILL get worse than this. We need to be prepared and act accordingly as soon as possible to stop this crazy train.

I’m glad to see some resistance starting to form now, in spite of the dearth of anyone seriously organizing it. Wouldn’t it have been great if people had listened when we said resist and don’t normalize19 months ago? How much suffering could have been avoided?

I have the sense that millions of people would be willing to participate in strategic direct action to stop migrant family separation right now, and as far as I can tell no-one is organizing them! Last year I was hopeful that Rev. Barber’s new Poor People’s Campaign would be able to channel people’s frustration into direct action. I appreciate what they are doing, but their actions are inconveniencing no-one, they are aren’t spreading the message beyond existing supporters, they are stopping business as usual.

This year I my hopes were raised by the students who survived the massacre in Parkland, FL. But it doesn’t seem that they’ve been able to hold the national attention, and while they have been expanding their vision and starting to see how many issues intersect with gun violence, they are not in a position to lead a national movement against Republicans as a whole, which is what I think is needed right now.

Note: There will be actions across the country on Saturday June 30. Visit familiesbelongtogether.org to find one near you. If there isn’t one on the map, organize it!

Two men in fatigues, one standing in the garbage bin

Stand up against the jerks, no-one else will do it for us

I was disgusted to learn today that progressive tech leader Clay Johnson has been harassing women he worked with with almost no repercussions for years. I’m appalled that I never knew about any of this in spite of being in his professional orbit the entire time. I even know some of the people quoted in the story, although not very well. We have to learn to tell the truth, shout it if we have to, and stop covering for people.

The fact that this stuff started so long ago and that even Clay seems to agree he should have been fired from the Dean campaign, but instead he was able to build an entire successful career on it while continuing to abuse people is such a great illustration of how tolerance of chauvinism systematically holds women back and keeps us out of leadership positions while simultaneously reinforcing itself by promoting these men ever higher.

Reading about his behavior at the Sunlight Foundation you can see that it wasn’t a secret. In fact the staff had to band together to alienate him since the organization wasn’t protecting them from him.

Every man that gets ahead while abusing people is keeping at least one other person from succeeding, and is taking up space that should go to people with better judgement than his. Then people look around and wonder why they don’t see as many women “qualified” for top leadership positions! Women are missing the opportunity to build our careers because we are trying to protect our dignity and bodily integrity from creeps who some other men think are geniuses.

I’m not mad at people for not exposing this sooner, because I know how hard it is (was?) to go public. I’m disgusted at Clay himself, but even more sick of the systems that just continue this culture and people who refuse to think beyond their own tiny bubbles. (ie: Well he’s not harassing me or anyone I care about, so I’m OK.) Of course I’m disappointed with Joe Trippi, but I wouldn’t expect any better from him. People like him are the reason I avoid certain lines of work.

Of course we should be able to expect our leaders to do better, but given that most of them are men that got there by succeeding in the current culture (if not actual harassers themselves) or women who got there by not rocking the boat too much, I’m not counting on them. The rest of us need to take care of each other by speaking out as publicly as we can when we find out about this stuff.

Hopefully people speaking out will eventually put more and more pressure upward on leaders to do the right thing in the first place before their new hire becomes the latest scandalous headline. Unfortunately I don’t expect any of this to change significantly before my son comes of age in about 10 years. I’m thinking of how us non-leaders can develop a strategic defense against the tsunami of bullshit.

Leaders like Zephyr Teachout are calling for better (or any) processes to address harrassment in political campaigns, but this problem is much bigger than the culture of political campaigns and nonprofits that take advantage of people’s dedication to the cause to keep them quiet. I’m not going to assume any of these institutions have my back until they have shown me that.

People need solidarity with each other, we can’t wait around for some brave leaders to save us. They’re not coming to help unless we force them to. I loved the way the Sunlight staff responded. I’d like to see much more of that.

 

Much of this post was initially written in conversation on Facebook with my friend Zephyr Teachout, hence some disjointedness.

"Kids Before Guns"

A national turning point

So many school shootings. So many protests. But it really is different this time. 
This moment reminds me of when the Greensboro Four sat down at a lunch counter in 1960 and captured the nation’s attention, largely because it was covered on national TV and the timing was right. It wasn’t nearly the first sit-in of it’s kind, but it had a bigger impact than most before it.
 
These young people have a national platform and they’re using it SO WELL. They’re increasingly intersectional, and they’re building a movement. I think this will evolve beyond guns and really help to energize the actual majority of the country that is sick of Republican greed and corruption.
 
I hope we can all continue to support their leadership.

 

Empty chairs

If you build it, they won’t come

In the Drupal diversity and inclusion working group, we are often asked how people can improve the diversity of their tech events. I wrote up some thoughts about this today and thought it would be useful to share here as well.

The most important thing you can do is have your leaders look how you would like your speakers and attendees to look. No matter how well intended, a group of men is going to be less successful recruiting women, and an all-white group will not be able to recruit as many speakers of color.

Representation in leadership matters both because people can do outreach more effectively within their own communities, but also because even strangers will look at that and get more of a sense that they would be comfortable and welcome at the event.

Ashe Dryden is a former Drupaller who is an expert in both diversity and conferences. Here’s a post she wrote which is chock full of examples and links to other good articles. And here is Ashe’s talk at DrupalCon in 2013, which really helps to explain the whole challenge of this stuff. I was at this talk in person and it was awesome.

Beyond leadership, here are two practical articles for event organizers: Women speakers, How I got 50% women speakers at my tech conference. They focus on recruiting women, but we need to go beyond white women if we want really diverse and representative events. Many of these principles apply for outreach to other marginalized groups like people of color, people from other countries, low-income people, people with disabilities, non-Christian people, etc.

It’s good to broadcast your intentions to be more inclusive, but you really have to work one-on-one to make a change. You often have to tell people that they would be good speakers because when we spend our whole lives being marginalized, we often lack the confidence of the average white guy.

Emma Gonzalez, January 2018

I’m ready to follow these young people to a better future

Parkland students like Emma Gonzales remind me so much of myself at their age. I was ready to change the world, and I knew exactly how to do it. I also rocked the same kind of natty friendship bracelets, and even shaved my head (well, part of it). I helped mobilize thousands of students to stand up for a free-standing Black Cultural Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. I was ready to take on the world. But then life kept beating me down and telling me I was not so important, and eventually I started to believe it.

People my age (and especially older) lack the fire and vision to make the changes we desperately need. These students are right, they are mobilized, and they have a platform to speak to the nation. I am totally ready to follow those young people’s leadership and energy. It’s their turn, and us olds have fucked it up enough already.

Here is some information (via MomsRising) about how we can support their upcoming actions:

Wednesday, March 14: #Enough – A National School Walk Out! The Women’s March Youth EMPOWER Team is calling for a seventeen-minute (1 minute for every life lost at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School) national school walk out on Wednesday, March 14th at 10am in all timezones.
https://twitter.com/WomensMarchY/

Saturday, March 24th: #March4OurLives – Student survivors from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL are calling for a march on Washington, D.C. and also in cities across our nation on Saturday, March 24th Go to https://www.marchforourlives.com/ for more information.
https://twitter.com/AMarch4OurLives

Friday, April 20th: #NationalSchoolWalkout – Other student and education groups are calling for a longer-term student walk out on the anniversary of Columbine.
https://twitter.com/schoolwalkoutUS/

Photo credit: Humans of MSD 

"You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it." – Grace Lee Boggs

Stay alive, stay connected

Check out the late Grace Lee Boggs on how to foster solidarity and make it through this horrible time with our souls and hopefully our social fabric intact. Her words are only becoming more and more important.

“I’ve come to believe that you cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.”

1. Come alive

2. Connect

3. Care

It’s a short read, go ahead and check it out: “What Grace Lee Boggs Would’ve Taught Activists in This Moment; Three principles to help you avoid burnout and continue working toward a better world,” published March 20, 2017.

DrupalCon 2016 group photo - I'm in there somewhere

This beautiful mess we’ve made – the Drupal situation

My professional life revolves around a wonderful, crazy, powerful piece of software called Drupal. Drupal is open source and is created and supported by a massive community of great people who contribute code, ideas, and leadership to make Drupal an incredible tool to solve a large and growing range of problems.

After participating in last year’s DrupalCon, I got involved in the newly-forming working group to address diversity and inclusion in the Drupal community. It’s been a great opportunity for me to both learn about how things work in the community and contribute my past experience working on both social justice issues and online communities.

Last month, a wedge was driven into our community when long-time contributor Larry Garfield was asked to step down from his leadership position, and it is shining a harsh spotlight into existing problems that need fixing. Our official structure and leadership is not adequate for the size and scope of the Drupal community, and hasn’t been for a while.

Also, there is a fraternity/culture within the developer community at large (not just Drupal) of White, straight, cisgender, American and European males. As we have seen of late, many groups are so accustomed to their privilege that any attempt at sharing fairly with others feels like oppression to them. Many people are simply unaware of this dynamic.

But some members of this club have been waiting for an opportunity to fight back, and they have taken advantage of the poor communication about what happened to make their own points about how “social justice warriors” are secretly out to steal all their cookies. There is a lot of misinformation out there and reporters have been loving the salacious kink-shaming angle without understanding any of the actual issues at play.

One interesting aspect of the recent events is that there is no single venue where people in the community can come to discuss the community itself and how it is governed. Because of that vacuum (and some other factors) our diversity and inclusion Slack channel became one of the primary places for people to share their concerns and learn more about what was going on. We have also been a target for dudes to troll, mansplain, and pick fights with those of us who think that it’s important to make sure Drupal is a safe and welcoming place for marginalized people to participate, even if that means potentially excluding those who don’t share that goal of inclusion.

There are as many opinions about the controversy as there are Drupallers. Amazingly, a lot of well-intended people have lined up behind those vehemently opposing Garfield’s exclusion, even though a lot of the heat around that is actually coming from outside the Drupal community. Much of this is due to the fact that most people are quite unaware of the privilege in which they are soaking and are not interested in understanding how it impacts the world they live in. Still I am amazed at how many are willing to be used as tools of Gamer Gate types with an axe to grind.

Personally I also came away frustrated with the leaders of the Drupal project (the software) and the Drupal Association (the community*), but for completely different reasons. They are clearly doing their best to handle this challenging situation, but their best has not been not up to the task. A large part of why this was so controversial is because they were wholly unprepared for how the community would react, and responded from a defensive position without helping people understand the situation or the decision-making process. We need much more from our leadership, and there is currently not even a structure in place by which we could make those changes.

Fortunately, I think those same leaders do generally agree at least that there is a need for change, even if they lack the vision for what it should be or how to make it happen. Our community’s evolving needs will be on the agenda at DrupalCon next week. It’s time for Drupal to grow past the start-up phase which is necessarily driven by one leader with a strong vision, and into a fully-fledged organization with our own community infrastructure. I hope that we will be able to have some productive conversations about this without getting sidetracked by arguing about misinformation and political agendas.

A lot of people have written a lot of things about this in the past month. I can’t even begin to catalog all of them, but here are a few key points:

If you are not bored to tears by all this and want to stay up to date, I recommend following @DrupalDiversity on Twitter.

 

* The DA is not actually The Community. It runs our annual conferences and hosts drupal.org, which is where the core software (and contributed themes and modules) lives and is worked on. It’s governed by a board which is mostly self-appointed but has 2 community-elected members.

Because of the lack of any other formal leadership structure for the community, a lot of expectations fall to the Drupal Association, but it doesn’t have the capacity (ie: funding) to do much of that type of leadership.

Photo Credit: DrupalCon 2016 group photo by the Drupal Association. I was there for the photo but am not visible in the picture because I am small and not in front.

Don’t negotiate with terrorists

What is up with these Democrats playing kickball at a gun fight? They are negotiating with themselves. Republicans are not playing, they’re burning our government down as fast as possible. They’re not compromising, not looking for common ground, not thinking about how they’d want the system to work if they were not in power. (This is why they are a death cult. There is no end game.)

There is no long game. There probably won’t even be a functioning democracy left to govern in 5 years.

Everyone knows you don’t negotiate with terrorists. WHAT. ARE. THEY. THINKING?

Reality check for grassroots organizers

It’s so obvious, but nobody does it. We say we’re working for “The People” (or poor people, or immigrants, or women, or African Americans, or whoever) but do we really accept their leadership? Do we even listen to the voices we think we are empowering?

Zack Exley’s manifesto “An Organizer’s Guide to Trusting the People” lays out a network-centric approach if I ever heard one.

Those and other experiences like them gradually woke me up. I started approaching groups of workers with the assumption that they were, taken as a whole, savvy and strategic, not apolitical and apathetic. That opened the door to all kinds of great collaborations. I started assuming these groups of people were strong, deep, strategic and concerned — “even if they were” made up of Evangelical Christians, survivalists, muscle car drivers, trailer park dwellers, pit bull breeders, and anything else my Northeastern Liberal upbringing had taught me to ridicule.
An Organizer’s Guide to Trusting the People

To me this isn’t just something that it helps to think about when organizing or to try to believe, it’s something that I must believe to be an activist and organizer. In fact, it’s fundamental to the whole idea of network-centric advocacy. The People = The Network. They collectively are the leaders, our job as organizers is create tools and infrastructure that allows them to do their thang.

Continue reading “Reality check for grassroots organizers”