Casey's take on "About This Group" [DRAFT]

--- tags: drafts --- # Casey's take on "About This Group" [DRAFT] Todo - [ ] for each value add examples like CLEAR ## Intentions - no ads - open source - [Code of Conduct](/@disorientations/codeofconduct) - zine librarians code of ethics ## Basics ### What is the basic structure of the community? Those who take initiative to do work for the community can decide how they do that work. If any community members hold serious concerns, they can start a proposal to halt what someone is doing. [^4] Disorientations is a group of volunteers. Our members of our group self-identify as: We are actively seeking... We have a code of conduct. ### What is the community’s mission? ### What core values does the community hold? This community shares a bias for action and a commitment to empowering and encouraging its members. Exceptions should be on the basis of serious ethical or moral concerns, not disagreements. Do-ers should keep in mind the best interests of the community as a whole and consult with community members when those interests are not clear. [^4] #### Archive in the service of organizers * zines are often produced by members of marginalized communities, [^7] * we strive to respectfully engage with and represent those communities, [^7] * librarians/archivists are often part of the communities that make/read zines, [^7] * the material itself, so beautifully and wonderfully varied, is often weird, ephemeral, magical, dangerous, and emotional, and because [^7] * we reject the myth of library/archival ‘neutrality’, therefore [^7] * we want to be accountable to our users, our institutions, our authors, donors, and communities [^7] - The safety and wellbeing of the activists should be valued higher than the interest in documenting activism for posterity. Although collecting documentation can be helpful for future activists and the movements they support, documenting activists and their methods can potentially be dangerous or harmful and can affect people’s personal and professional lives. Refer to Project STAND’s S.A.V.E Methodology (Stop, Asses, View, Educate) for this work. [^6] - Be mindful that activism can be complicated (for example, multiple, changing, or diffused leadership models) and emotionally charged (even successful activism can involve trauma).Due to the complexity of activism, it is helpful to ask questions to deepen your understanding as needed to assist in documenting the event or movement. Refrain from making assumptions. [^6] - Consider your motivations for collecting the work of activists; people who do social justice work will care about your answer. Beware of motivations or directives to improve the image of your institution, especially if the activism was in response to your institution’s (in)action. Activists at colleges and universities run the risk of having their work and success appropriated by the institution. Consider how both the archives and its users will use and contextualize that material. The archivist should consult with donors on whether all portions of the material can be made available to researchers. A good solution to donor concerns might be to specify a time period before certain portions of material may be opened to the public. [^6] - Be truly informed and transparent about your institution, the profession, and your local practices. Evaluate your institution’s ability to collect and preserve the material properly, as well as to tend to donor needs surrounding privacy. Consider whether donation of this material to your institution incurs current or future risk to participants. - Bias and prejudice about social, political, and personal issues is always present in ourselves and our institutions. Being cognizant and educated about this can help us avoid discrimination in our practices. Never claim to be unbiased, which is impossible, but continue to learn how to apply equitable and inclusive practices (see resources below). Consider how implicit bias and racial dynamics affect the practices and environments of archives, and dismantle practices which are counter-productive to the communities you document and serve. If dismantling institutional biased practices is not possible, consider how to be flexible in order to best serve varying needs and concerns, such as granting an atypical restriction request in order to protect campus activists. Likewise, consider any negative effects that white supremacy, professionalization, and the siloing of material into academic institutions can have on personal and community narratives. These complex issues cannot be fully explored here, so we suggest checking out the resources on these subjects below. [^6] - If your institution has not yet considered participatory archiving or post-custodial archiving, consider whether these approaches fit the needs of the situation. [^6] #### Technology in service of organizers - We value, prioritize, and advocate for free and open source tools and platforms, and strive to create or contribute to them as we are able. [^2] - We cultivate expertise in the technology that will best serve social justice movements and grassroots organizations. We do good work by implementing that technology to the best of our ability for our clients. We look ahead to the future and stay on the cutting edge as technology and our movements change. [^1] #### Humility and Solidarity - To work with and among others, humility and solidarity are key values to ensure we are respecting others. In science, values of individualism, heroism, machismo, rescue, paternalism, and exceptionalism are dominant. Humility and solidarity counteract this. [^5] - Humility is enacting the understanding that our world is interconnected and that there are bigger things than ourselves. It is about recognizing that one still has much to learn regardless of age, education, or lived experience and about remaining teachable no matter how much we already know. Being humble means that we—as members of larger groups of humans and others1 —recognize that we are not singular nor superior in our knowledge, perspective, experience, or social position, and that we are connected to others whether we want to be or not. We can be humble by being ready to change our minds and actions, being responsive to context, and being mindful of our surroundings so we might adapt to it rather than force it to adapt to us. Humility acknowledges feminist standpoint theory2 and understands that there are many ways to know things, many different forms of knowledge, and recognizes the limits of a single way to know things (e.g.: strictly via the scientific method rather than lived experience). [^5] - Humility is not modesty; modesty usually means not talking about or celebrating your achievements. If you are modest, then you are not acknowledging or celebrating the network you are part of which is also part of those achievements; you do an injustice to yourself and that etwork practicing modesty (erasure of connections) rather than humility (being beholden to connections). [^5] - Solidarity is the act of working together towards a shared goal. In this context, it is a collective response to situations of injustice and oppression, deploying supportive actions to transform those situations. Humility is particularly important for solidarity, as different groups might share a goal with others and work to reach that goal together, despite difference. For example, we as marine plastic researchers and the Nunatsiavut Government both wish to avoid polluting life-giving water, so working in solidarity on issues around methylmercury at Muskrat Falls makessense. Crucially, our acts of solidarity should be in alignment with the actions the Nunatsiavut Government (or others we are in solidarity with) advocate for--this is part of why humility is central to equitable solidarity work. [^5] - Humility and solidarity act in concert, and operate as synergistic values. Being humble in solidarity means being ready to change oneself, being responsive to and mindful of one’s context (i.e.: our social environment) so we might adapt to it rather than force it to yield to as we are. To violate these principles would not be acting from a place of solidarity or humility. Solidarity requires accountability to each other, to other beings, to place, and to the things we produce (i.e.: our lab space, our knowledge/research) because we are always already connected to these things (the basis of humility). [^5] - Solidarity is a verb, not a noun. It is not just discursive work (saying things in support, clicking things in support), but involves concrete actions that make material change on the ground (“being in the trenches” rather than “armchair activism”). Like equity, enacting solidarity will be different for everybody as each person has differing relationships to power and privilege and each body has different abilities, needs, knowledges, resources, etc. [^5] - We stand in political solidarity with labor, environmental, and abolitionist movements and work to advance those causes. We are anti-racist, anti-war, anti-transphobia, anti-prison, and anti-police. [^1] - As a cooperative, we are explicitly anti-capitalist. The value of our work is not dictated by the profit motive, and we strive to build an economy of solidarity and cooperation rather than competition and extraction. We stand for the seven cooperative principles and work to support and collaborate with other technology cooperatives. [^1] #### Equity, Intersectionality, and Anti-Oppression - We believe in the intersectionality of all movements dedicated to collective liberation. [^3] - We understand that we are all impacted by, and benefit from, different systems of oppression. When considering the ways we work with one another and those we work for, we strive to address power and privilege in ways that support liberation for all. [^2] - We are creating an alternative and we do this by centering women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups, and by breaking down systems of oppression in our work, and by advancing uses of technology for justice and liberation. [^2] - We prioritize the leadership and development of people who have been most directly affected by oppression and colonization. [^3] - We practice our politics by working with organizations that uplift and build the power of marginalized and oppressed communities. We work to implement and develop technologies that are politically and practically beneficial to those groups. [^1] - CLEAR’s work is fundamentally informed by the feminist value of equity, whether we are ordering supplies or building scientific instruments (see Liboiron, 2016). Equity is different than equality. Equality involves treating everyone exactly the same and as a result has no impact on the uneven positions from which different people start. Equity, in contrast, is attuned to the different social, economic, cultural, and political positions of participants and aims to address and transform power relations that lead to this unevenness. [^5] - To make these powers explicit we acknowledge our social locations by talking about them openly—something seldom done within the academy. CLEAR has, at time of this Lab Book iteration, a mix of faculty (tenured and untenured); PhD, masters and undergraduate students; men, women, and non-binary trans folk; people that are descendents of settlers of European descent, people Indigenous to Turtle Island (aka North America), and people from other countries outside of Europe or Turtle Island. We believe that simply bringing more diversity into science--equality--while maintaining the status quo only perpetuates the violence experienced by peoples who are systematically unacknowledged, underrecognized, and oppressed in and through science. In order for diversity to be meaningful, intersectionality must be embraced. Intersectionality is a feminist concept, from race/ethnicity scholars, that emphasizes the interconnectedness of identities (e.g.: ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, sexuality, etc.) and their complex interactions; a straight, cis, upper-middle class man’s experiences are different from that of a woman and different again from a black woman’s at both a personal and systemic level. [^5] - This is called intersectionality. Intersectionality recognizes the interconnectedness of identities such as race, class, and gender of a community or individual, and the intersections of various ways of being: a person is not just a woman and a scientist, but also white, settler, from a rural frontier town, living below the poverty line, a daughter, a sister, an auntie, an academic-in-training, and disabled, among many other social locations. Thus, equity work involves many levels, systems, and ways of knowing and being. [^5] - There is no “outside” of power relations, and our efforts in the lab are unable to overcome inequity completely. Yet these practices serve (at least) three functions: they are an ethic-in-practice that confirms our solidarity with one another in the lab; they make the politics that are always at work explicit and able to be addressed rather than implicit and unacknowledged; and they are a form of “prefigurative politics” where we work to model the world we want, rather than merely critique the world as it is. [^5] #### Anti-Ableism and Accessibility - We strive to make our services accessible to organizations engaged in struggles for social, economic, and environmental justice. [^3] - We work to create an accessible and sustainable workplace for all of our workers. In our policy and decision making, we take into account the ways in which our different class backgrounds and family structures affect our needs as workers. We prioritize and support each other in living full lives outside of work. [^1] #### Decision-Making - We strive to make ethical decisions according to our shared politics as we operate in an unjust world. [^1] - We treat each other well. We value fairness, collective decision-making, shared accountability and responsibility as a group. We value autonomy, individual growth, and professional development for individuals. We work to keep each other safe. [^1] #### Supportive Openness - Supportive openness is caring for each other so that we can share the important things with each other. When we collectively described what we value about CLEAR and what values CLEAR exercises, the terms open and supportive came up often. This comes from the lived experience of lab members feeling welcome, safe, and at home in the lab. bell hooks does a great discussion of “radical openness”, which approximates our position. [^5] - Support is the care we show for each other and the contexts we are in. Support is manifested within the lab and extends beyond to all we interact with: to the communities we work with, the technologies that we build, the beings that we are in relation with. We support each other through actions, not just words, which is also in line with our value of solidarity. However, support does not mean always agreeing with each other, but rather moving through difference and disagreement while holding each other. Support is both collective care work and holding each other accountable. Support without accountability is paternalism. CLEAR is dedicated to building the structures that allow us to care for each other and help us be accountable to our contexts. [^5] - Support also includes self-care. Plastic pollution and/or environmental research—and activist work in general—are heavy and depleting activities that require significant emotional and physical labour. This is why this lab values each person’s self-care needs and encourages self-awareness and reflexivity in our members so they are attuned to their needs (as opposed to encouraging them to manage or ignore them). An important caveat of support is that self-care on its own is not support, but survival. Self-care requires enabling community structures and processes. When thinking of self-care we ask, what am I going to do for myself that allows me to thrive in the lab? [^5] - In this way, CLEAR also values mutual caring and support, otherwise known as an “ethics of care”, believing that caring is not just work we must do for ourselves (self-care) but for each other as well. Support and care are forms of political and ethical practice that “holds things together” (de la Bellacasa, 2011, p.90; Martin et al., 2015). We also acknowledge that care work can disportionately fall upon or be needed by certain groups more than others depending on gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and perceived abilities (Upping the Anti, 2016). With this in mind, the lab aims to distribute and acknowledge care work in its various forms. By doing caring work for ourselves and for each other we assure the longevity of our lab and the wellbeing of its members. [^5] - Openness speaks to our value of sharing things that are important to us, especially what can’t be shared outside of the lab, with each other. This includes our emotions and states of being: exhaustion, frustration, pain, joy. Openness allows us to celebrate our differences in identity and experience and provides us with context to move through the complexities of difference when it gets tricky. [^5] - A supportive environment allows openness. However, openness cannot disable support. For example, someone being open about their racism or sexism within the lab is in conflict with both our values of equity and support and therefore is not acceptable. A supportive, open lab will foster trust between lab members. [^5] #### Orientation towards process - CLEAR is an activist lab; we strive to make concrete changes in the world through our scientific work. But rather than use scientific data to make arguments for change (though we do that, too), our focus is on making social change through our methods. How we choose new members, how we order supplies, how we gather samples and with whom... every step of our scientific processes aim to achieve equity, humility, solidarity, and supportive openness. This means two things: first, we are focused on processes and methods rather than outcomes and findings as processes and methods are an opportunity to insert feminist politics/practices; and secondly, that we are devoted to change, and to flexible processes instead of fixed and rigid structures or rules for doing things. There are important differences between a rule bound structure and a system of processes and practices. The former is authoritative and resists humility, and the later is situated-- responsive to what is happening, when, and with whom. [^5] ### What is the legal status of the community’s assets and creations? ## Participants ### How does someone become a participant? A member is anyone who has actively contributed to the community's mission within the past year. [^4] ### How are participants suspended or removed? If a member believes another member is not respecting the serious concerns of others, a proposal for removal may be submitted. The proposal goes for a vote before all members for 1 week. If at least 2/3 of voting members agree with the proposal, the offending member is removed. [^4] ### What special roles can participants hold, and how are roles assigned? ### Are there limits on the terms or powers of participant roles? If a member exhibits disregard for others' serious concerns, they can be removed from the community. [^4] ## Policy ### What basic rights does this Rule guarantee? Members have a right to decide how they make their contributions, while other members have the right to object on the basis of serious concerns. [^4] ### Who has the capacity to decide on policies, and how do they do so? Individual members and subgroups can decide what and how they want to contribute to the community, reasonably respecting the community's precedent and the expressed opinions of others. [^4] ### How are policies implemented? Community members are responsible for carrying out their own initiatives, and they will not expect any other members to do so, except by those members' own volition. [^4] ### How does the community monitor and evaluate its policy implementation? If another member holds serious ethical or moral concerns, that member can create a proposal stating clearly what actions should be prohibited. The proposal goes for a vote before all members for 1 week. If at least 2/3 of voting members agree with the proposal, it passes and becomes a policy for the community. [^4] ## Process ### Where does the community deliberate about policies and governance? ### How does the community manage access to administrative accounts and other tools? ### How does the community manage funds and economic flows? ### How are grievances among participants addressed? ## Evolution ### Where are policies and records kept? ### How can this Rule be modified? A proposal to change this Rule goes for a vote before all members for 1 week. If at least 2/3 of voting members agree with the proposal, it passes and the Rule changes accordingly. [^4] ### Meetings We meet weekly via Jitsi video calls. Meetings are on Tuesdays at 5:30pm PT / 6:30pm CT / 7:30pm ET. We rotate meeting prep, facilitation, and notetaking. Anyone may participate. ## Structure and Decision-making We currently operate as a "[do-ocracy](https://communityrule.info/templates/do-ocracy/)". We recognize that as this project grows we will outgrow this system, and are preliminarily researching governance structures that are clear, inclusive, and participatory -- to be shaped by the project's collaborators. --- [^1]: https://palantetech.coop/our-values [^2]: https://info.usworker.coop/form/tech-worker-coop-pn-appl [^3]: https://bookkeeping.coop/points-of-unity/ [^4]: https://communityrule.info/templates/do-ocracy/ [^5]: https://civiclaboratory.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/clear-lab-book.pdf [^6]: https://standarchives.com/project-stand-toolkit/ [^7]: http://zinelibraries.info/2016/05/30/code-of-ethics-1115-web-version/