[HacktionLab] ogg camp

[Zoe Young]

hi again,
I'd been going to leave  this be, as there's little left for me to add 
and I'm not making myself very popular... but then I saw this:

On 21/06/2011 17:32, Ben Green wrote:
>
> Quoting Sy <sytaffel at riseup.net>:
>
>> On 21/06/11 10:34, hacktionlab-request at lists.aktivix.org wrote:
>>> I don't even want particularly to be 'included in techies' 
>>> processes' so much as
>>> to know that design of the most important of those processes are
>>> starting from the needs and desires of ordinary activists, particularly
>>> those with a lot less techy knowledge and interest than me..
>>>
>> This seems like a deeply problematic approach to me.
>
> Me too, coders and users are one community. Don't expect to have a say 
> in software where you aren't contributing to the community.
>
and it raises questions about people who don't fit into this community 
very well

What if you are - or have been - contributing as much as you could to 
the 'community', and yet you lose energy, partly because you feel that 
you aren't being heard? Do you still have no right to a say?

What if you don't have the courage, confidence, access, time, language, 
ability, awareness etc to contribute to the 'community' in the first 
place? Do you still have no right to a say?

What if you really, really want to use free software, and to find a way 
to contribute to the community within your particular limitations, but 
you haven't found a way that fits the way you are in the world, your 
immediate concerns and forms of action?

what real encouragement, facilitation is there for such outsiders to 
make ourselves heard? how can we realistically contribute to a community 
if we are, for any reason not comfortable stepping into it, eg attending 
a barncamp is a step far too far for most activists?

this is basically why I started this discussion - by agreeing with 
someone else's comment that there could be value in some tech activists 
thinking a bit more politically .. which I understood in terms of paying 
attention to who tends to be excluded by certain ways of working, and 
how this could be rebalanced a little further in the future...??

just asking difficult questions really - sorry. better crawl back under 
my stone now.

Happy Solstice!

xx Z


> I think though Sy that you seem to saying that Free software is really 
> good, whereas in fact lots of it sucks. Lightworks is in Beta and not 
> even available for Linux. LibreOffice has a sucky spreadsheet 
> implementation. Crabgrass is a pain in the arse. Ubuntu is not stable 
> enough and Debian is not accessible enough. These are all opinions of 
> course, but I'm not the only one with them by a long shot.
>
> Free sofware takes longer to make because we need to find ways for a 
> large number of unpaid people to collaborate. Because of that we need 
> to build small components which work together and can be independently 
> maintained. We also end up scrapping large frameworks because they 
> just don't do what we want anymore. It all takes time. We don't really 
> yet have methodologies for deciding how to improve these structures 
> either.
>
> Ah, if only providing nice GUIs was all we needed in Free Software, 
> we'd probably be there by now. Things is, Free Software is getting 
> better, getting stronger. We can speed that up by using it with 
> tolerance of it's faults and contributing to the development. Free 
> Software is not a service.
>
> Woops, bit of a rant there.
>
> Cheers,
> ==
> From Ben Green
>
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