I will now hand over the microphone to our moderator, Geraldine de Bastion, who, apart from the French name, does not speak French.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me here and hopefully enough English to moderate this session. Hi everybody, my name is Geraldine and I'm very glad to be moderating this session.

Maybe a few words to kick off with. Usually sessions at CCC come together because one person or a team of people hand in a topic that they feel they would like to talk about here on one of these stages. This session came together because several people handed in sessions where they wanted to address

how they're trying to build communities or spaces that are specifically feminist, diverse and inclusive. We thought it would be a great idea to give not just one person who handed in a session or two people, but all the people who handed in sessions on this topic the stage. So this is how the sessions came together by us grouping together different submissions on the topic.

I'm very happy that we have five very interesting and excellent humans here to speak on the topic matter. I'll be presenting their different approaches and their different strategies to building feminist spaces and communities. I'd like to welcome them here on stage. First up we have Hong Phuc who runs

FOSSASIA, which is a community in Southeast Asia for developing software and hardware, specifically open source. Welcome Hong. We have Ajem and Sora from La Reset, which is a feminist queer hackerspace. Welcome.

We have M.O. Sullivan, former hackerspace and Maker Faire organizer, now researching how to improve women and non-binary people's engagement in makerspaces. Welcome M.

And last but not least we have Lina Moore who is a UX designer from Stuttgart to start an initiative called Ready to Code, teaching young girls to code. Welcome Lina. So as I said, my name is Geraldine Bastian. I run a community called the Global Innovation Gathering,

which is a network of different makerspaces, hackerspaces, different kinds of innovation speakers, makers and innovators across the world. So a quick housekeeping note for this session. The format is that we're going to give each of the teams here on stage the opportunity to present their work to you in about seven to ten minutes.

And then we're going to gather here to discuss the difference and the likenesses in our approaches and in our perspective experiences and ideas. And then we would like to invite you all to join this discussion and open the floor. So to kick things off, I would invite you first to share a little bit the story of FOSSASIA and your work in the last ten years, Hong.

Thank you. You're welcome. I did not expect that I would go first. Okay, so hello everyone. My name is Hongfu Deng, or HP Deng, if you want to look for me on the web.

So today I will talk about how I get involved in open source community in the first place and also some highlights of my work at FOSSASIA during the past ten years.

Before that, a little bit about my background. I was born and grew up in a small town in south of Vietnam. It's called Canton. I don't know if any of you have been there before, but it's about 200 kilometers south of Ho Chi Minh City. This is my first 20 years of my life, so I've been always feel like a

confusing little girl because I keep wondering what I really want to achieve in my life. My family, my parents were not so poor at that time in 1987. Most of the

families were poor due to the, we just finished the war and then the reform of Vietnam. My parents been working very hard so that me and my sister could have a better future. And the only motivation that I have in my life until I was 20 to get a very good job somewhere after graduation so that

I can earn some money, take care of my parents, and be able to afford something that I could never have when I was a kid. So this is what I was thinking when I got to 20 years old. I went to school. I studied super, super hard, but I never really interested in school. And I also don't understand so much what I learn and get out from school.

I just know that if I study hard, I will have a good future. In 2007, I met Mario Belling, who later on become my mentor and also partner later on, not on Tinder, but at a free event, free technology event in Hanoi.

In 2007, that was the first time I learned about free software. In the same year, I switched from Windows XP to Ubuntu and started to use open source. Since then, I started to involve with different user groups in the region and also contribute small business localization into some software project.

At the same time, I also learned how to submit a bug report and make an issue to different projects. By involving in the open source community, I got to meet so many interesting people that inspired me. So I always have very cool conversations with people who've been involved in one project for over 15, 20 years.

That really inspired me how people can be so persistent and continuously work on something for so long. And when they talk about their job, they're so positive and genetic, even though they keep repeating, but they're very patient. And when I involved in the community, it's so good that people are always

very patient and took their time to explain to you when you don't understand something. So two years later, in 2009, Mario and I decided to founded a ForceAsia organization. So ForceAsia, the goal of ForceAsia is to bring together an inspired community across Asia, a lot of different communities,

to build a better future with open technologies. Since then, we have developed so many different projects with the ForceAsia communities. These are some of the software and also hardware projects that we've been working on. SUSE AI is an alternative to Alexa or Google Home.

PocketSight and Laugh is our newly released open hardware project. You can find all of the projects on GitHub of ForceAsia, actually. Event GA is an event solution that's similar to what you have here. The prep, the scheduling and also tickets selling open source is entirely built by the ForceAsia community.

We also organize a lot of event conferences and meetups throughout the regions. One of our biggest events is the ForceAsia Summit. It happens every year in March in Singapore. Throughout the year, we also have smaller workshops and events in China, in India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and many other places.

Some of the highlights of my last 10 years. In 2010, it was my first time entering Europe. It was so difficult to get a visa to come here. I know for many of you, but it was a big thing for me to enter Europe. For the first time, I got invited to the LibreRafix meeting.

This is the photo taken when I was giving a talk. You can see that I was super nervous at that time. The next meeting, after the talk, I went to dinner with a group of friends, the people from the LibreRafix communities. I was the only girl, but I did not realize that until somebody commented on my Facebook while you were the only girl in the picture. It was really cool and very welcoming to the community.

In 2012, we built a hotel in our hometown, Kento, and we labored at the Open Source Hotel. You can look up hotel site. It's the name of the place. So, basically, it's built by the Open Source community member.

So, we set up the wireless network, which opened up QRT. I did the entire wiring for the telephone myself. I did it for three weeks, but I was very proud of it. And we have the decoration inside the hotel. It's donated to us by the LibreRafix community, so by some artists in that community.

And in this space, we hosted a lot of workshops, and we hosted many Open Source contributors at our place. So, we have DBN developers, we have game contributors, we have people from all over the world to come and stay with us in this space here in Vietnam. In the same year, I also hosted the group of artists and designers that I met in Brussels in 2010 in Ho Chi Minh City.

So, we did an Open Source Design Week in Saigon, and surprisingly, more than 40% of the participants are female. So, what we did in this Design Week, we showed people how to make artwork

with free tools, with free software, and at the end, we also made an exhibition. What kind of work that you can do with free software. In 2014, it was my first time attending the CTC, and this is the first person that I met in the speaker room,

who spent several minutes of his valuable time explaining to me what is the difference between free software and Open Source. But I was very happy, I was also a speaker at that time, so we got a photo together. In 2016, we launched Code Heat program, which is an online coding program run by the Force Asia community.

So, the goal of this program is to help young developers and contributors to try to work in Open Source software, and how to become an active contributor to Open Source. So, we have our Force Asia members to guide them, so everything happened on GitHub. We have GitHub channel, where people compose questions, and at the end, the winners will win a trip to the Force Asia summit,

and present about their working experience during the program. 2018, so we released our pocket science lab to the market, so the project has been going on for the past two years,

and we finally produced them in China, and now started to distribute them all over the world. So, we have a shop in Japan, which is sold out within two days. We also distribute in India, in Singapore, in Europe, and it's been piloting in school in Singapore, in India, and also in Vietnam.

So, basically, it's a small device that helps you to make science experiments, oscilloscopes, with a lot of logic and many different functions. We have a workshop here at the CCC if you want to find out more. Okay, so my approach and lesson learned, so there's a question about what strategy

that you do to engage many people in the community, and how to rule the community. So, what I learned from the past ten years, the first thing is to be sincere with whoever you met. That how my reaction in the community, to be sincere with people, empower the people in the community.

Just like when I first joined the community, the more responsibility to give to people, they feel empowered, and it's also better to scale up the community. Motivation, in order to work with people and to find the right approach, you need to understand the motivation behind individuals,

and it's really important to rule the community. And my philosophy is always better by sharing, so we share our knowledge, that's why the reason we are here, we share our resources, and we bring people together. Finally, in the Force Asia community, I make friends, friendship is important over the year,

and I know that the people that I've been working with, or engaged with, would be friends for life, so that is the good thing about the Force Asia community. And next year, 2009, will be our ten-year milestone of the Force Asia organization. We have a big celebration in Singapore between March 14 and 17.

If you happen to be there, or you plan to trip to Asia, you are very welcome to join us. The website is 2019.forceasia.org. And here at the CDC, we have a group of Force Asia member flew in from Singapore, from France, from Spain, and also in Germany.

We have a laser cutter here, built by a Force Asia member in Singapore, an open-source laser cutter. The small picture here, we carry at our Force Asia assembly, if you want to check it out. If you want to get in touch with us, or you want to look for me at the end of the talk, you can search on the navigation app for Force Asia, and our number is 8575.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Hong, for that introduction into Force Asia and your work.

Ajem and Sora, would you like to go next to present La Recette? Okay. So, we both come from France. We are part of La Recette, which is a feminist and queer acu-space. And we're going to explain a little bit what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how.

So, our acu-space welcomes actively people who usually do not feel safe or included in many other acu-spaces, so mostly queer persons and women.

Because most of straight men feel really entitled to learn and share what they learn, and teach everything. And on the other side, you have queer persons and women who have major imposter syndrome

when it comes to technology. We observed these things, and also that the solutions to fix our issues are also designed by straight men, so they are not adequate with our issues.

And that we have a big lack of transmission in our communities. So, as we were the geeky ones around queers and the queer ones around geeks, we did La Recette to have a space that is the intersection of queer and geek people. So, it takes place in a queer bar in Paris every Sunday.

I'm really scared, I'm sorry. We started in 2016, and we speak directly to women and queers so that they feel welcome and included,

and would come to our space. We built a code of conduct that we may discuss further, that we embody, so we endorse it and not just write it somewhere.

So, our bases are feminist ethics based on the Ethics of Chaos by John Tronto. We do workshops for beginners every session, and we really insist on the things for beginners.

The workshops are mainly hosted by queer or women. And we do not treat differently infosec, coding, gaming, crafts, care practice, and all the things. We do not make an hierarchy. We analyse the power dynamics with material feminism, and most of our projects are cyber-feminist.

So, I'm going to talk a little more about some projects that we have at La Recette. So, I took three different examples. The first example is the crypto bar. So, it's basically a one-on-one crypto parties with just one person, as they were launched by Asher Wolf.

And those security talks, they are mainly oriented towards cyber harassment, because women and queer people usually ask us about security issues when they have trouble with cyber harassment,

and so we have identified it to be the main threat model for us, and not like the NSA or something else. Another example of a project that we have is everything about health re-appropriation. So, as women and queers, our health is often in the hands of doctors that don't explain stuff to us,

or that don't do what we want them to do with our health, because they have norms that we're supposed to follow. And so we work around, we work with transgender people around hormones, and also with trans people and women around gynecology,

and so we have a partnership with women doing self-gynecology workshops. And so we create zines, and we share knowledge and practices about those, and we also have a lab project that is inspired by the Ginepunk lab from Calafou, and also by the Open Source Geostrogen project from Marimagic that was presented in the CSA last year.

And so the goal of this lab project is to take and analyse our own cervical smears, so that we can do our own analysis with it. And the third project I wanted to talk about was the Queer Games. So the Queer Games is an artistic and political movement that was initiated by an entropy and Matty Bryce.

So the idea is that they're using game design as a tool to criticise oppression systems, and so we're doing monthly Queer Games workshops in order to empower queer people, and we empower them through rendering our own narrative visible through video games, and also by learning skills to make our own video games,

even though most people who come don't have any idea of how to code, so we also learn coding through it. Thank you very much. Thank you for that introduction into your work.

I think a lot of points raised that we're going to debate also in a minute. Em, can I ask you to go next? I don't have any slides, but I do have some notes. And my story is maybe a bit different to my other panellists,

because I don't come from a specifically feminist organisation. I live in Brighton in the UK, and our hackerspace is called Build Brighton. It started in 2009, so it was a fairly early hackerspace in the UK. It grew out of an existing meetup that was focused on robotics,

and some of the people involved in that group decided to set up their own hackerspace, so it began fairly organically. It was inspired largely by the early US hackerspaces. In particular, Mitch Altman visited the robotics meetup when he was in Brighton, and basically said, hey, you look like the kind of group who should start hackerspace,

and that kind of triggered the idea to go and set one up. So it followed the same kind of ad hoc kind of duocracy structure. It had some informal leaders, but things were kind of largely decided by group consensus. For example, when we first moved into our own dedicated space,

we spent the first couple of years meeting once a week in a co-working space, and then in 2011 had an opportunity to get our own workshop, and the decision around whether to do that was put to the entire membership around whether we wanted to take on that responsibility, those extra costs, and that decision was passed by consensus,

and that's kind of how things have typically been done. In terms of activities, there's a lot of electronics projects typically, especially with it growing out of the robotics group. The laser cutter has always been really popular and was one of the first tools that was bought by the group, and we've recently had lots of woodworkers coming in because we do have a fairly well-developed woodworking shop.

And in terms of gender diversity, it's also a fairly typical hackerspace. There's currently 115 members, of which around 10 to 15% are women or femme-presenting people, and the aim of that statistic isn't to point out how low this representation is in this particular space, it's to highlight that this is a typical number for a hackerspace.

For me personally, a bit like Honfruch said, I'm used to being in masculine spaces. I trained in media production originally, which is very male-dominated. Then when I went to work in IT, it was normal for me to be at events

that were mainly men, and I suppose I just got used to this, and it became invisible to me. At the time, I was working for a software development company in Brighton, and the company had two offices, one for the technical team and one for the rest of the staff, so like admin team, production team, HR, finance, and so on.

My desk was in the tech room, and I looked up one day and realized that I was the only femme-presenting person in a room of 20 men, and it took that to kind of dolt me back into realizing how weird this situation was, and I also realized that Build Brighton, my hackerspace,

was a similar environment as well. And I became really interested in why this was happening, because hackerspaces, they're theoretically open environments. Like our space, anyone can join. Membership is on a pay-what-you-can basis from five pounds a month, so the financial cost to entry are very low.

But we're still seeing the same issues as in other technology environments, in that women and femme people were very underrepresented. And I saw this as a useful opportunity to look at the cultural issues that continue to prevent women's engagement in technology spaces,

even when some of those structural and financial barriers have been removed. And the reason this was really important to me as a topic was because for me personally, joining my hackerspace was an extremely empowering experience. I didn't have much experience before with DIY, with hardware, with working with materials, and joining that community

and having access to those tools and that knowledge had a huge impact on how I see the world around me, on my confidence to fix and adapt things when I need to. And I really want more people to have access to that empowerment, especially people who don't necessarily have existing experience with technology.

So in 2016, I began my PhD looking at how some hackerspaces and makerspaces have been more successful than others in engaging women and femme people. I'm currently still in the data collection phase of my research, but I visited various hackerspaces and makerspaces around Europe and the US, spoken to lots of people from these spaces,

and seen a wide range of approaches to dealing with gender diversity, ranging from acute hostility towards any suggestion of specifically trying to engage women, right through to spaces that have made this a core part of their group culture. So I hope that range of perspectives can come in useful to the discussion today.

And I'm also currently putting together a zine with contributions from hackerspaces and makerspaces that have developed inclusive practices, not necessarily focused on gender, but also on engaging other underrepresented groups like people of color, people with disabilities,

people with lower socioeconomic statuses, because I think it's really important that those practices are publicized as quickly as possible so that other spaces can learn from them. So if any of you have any suggestions about spaces that should be included in that zine, please do email me. My contact details are on the FAR plan,

and I would love to hear about any spaces that you could recommend. Thank you, Em. And last but not least, Lina.

I'm Lina. I'm one of the three founders of Ready to Code. We are an organization based in Stuttgart in the south of Germany, and our story started, so first what we do is we inspire women and girls to learn how to code and to work in tech and support each other.

And there are two main reasons why we do what we do. I think the first one is quite obvious that there are not enough women who work in tech. And the second one is more personal because I am a user experience designer, and part of my studies was learning how to code, and I found it extremely difficult because I had all these biases and pictures in my head,

and I just knew that I was going to fail at coding before I wrote my first line of code, and I was not alone with this. I saw this in a lot of my friends and a lot of the girls who studied with me, and the good news is that we had to pass the exam, so we sort of had to learn it,

and I also had really great and really patient friends who not only taught me to code and taught me the facts, but also convinced me that I was able to do that. And the moment when it clicked, like you said, that was a really empowering moment

because I felt like not only the knowledge opened a whole new world of opportunities, but also the self-confidence that I gained through that, and that is what we also want to share with other women and girls. So what we do is we run workshops for women and for girls,

and like, we make sure that they are for beginners so everyone can participate, and I think we're probably going to talk about that as well a little bit further. And we also have a networking event that's called Cocktails and Code,

where women in tech can meet and connect and share their experiences, and we organise lightning talks from female speakers, so people who are new to tech can come and it's really low level and everyone can participate. And we also organise different events, for example, a couple of weeks ago

we organised a social haircut on, and I think what we do a little bit different is that one of our founders is a guy, a straight cis guy, so a lot of the volunteers that are working for us are also male

and we had a lot of good experiences with this because we think it's important to include everyone, but we talked a little bit before and I think we're going to have a discussion about that afterwards as well, that a lot of women who come to us are also looking for a female-only space,

or they really appreciate a safer space where they can just be around other women. Thank you very much, Lena. So as you've heard, we have very different work realms, let's say,

very different rooms of experiences, and we'd like to just jump right into the discussion. We're going to take about 15-20 minutes to discuss a little bit amongst ourselves before opening and including all of you in the debate. So let's pick up straight the point that you closed with, and I'd like you all to join in, but I think I'll direct the question at you first.

Sometimes we have to, or it seems that way, we'd have to be exclusive in order to increase inclusion or fairness, and if I understood you correctly, you've created a space that doesn't necessarily exclude anybody, but it doesn't put straight men in the focus. Can you explain a little bit exactly how you try to shape that community that you're working with,

and where you drew the line of inclusion and exclusion in your approach? So we have a cut-off contact. Everybody is welcome to come in the hackerspace as long as they apply to the cut-off contact.

So we are open to everyone, but everything that we organise is directed to queer people and women, so our communication is oriented towards them. The workshops are organised also by queer people and women, so basically we just don't care about straight men.

But they can come. They can come. Lina, you said one of your founders is a straight man, so is that something that you do differently? We just started a year ago, so we are also still trying out different approaches,

and I like what you said. I think you mentioned that they are invited if they want to come, but you're not marketing for them. And I think you saw our logo. In the first workshop that we run for kids, we said it's only for girls,

and the second one we said we are reserving a number of seats for girls because we want to increase diversity, and no boy is signed up. So from now on, we're not even putting it's only for girls on our flyers, but because it looks so girly, no boy is interested in joining us, apparently.

And I think that's interesting because usually it works the other way around, so probably subconsciously or unconsciously, posters on our website look like they are made for boys or for guys, and women don't feel attracted to it, and we do it the other way around and it works quite well.

But we also have men that are asking us, we also like cocktails and cold, why can't we join? Of course you can, you are welcome. And we didn't have any negative experience with it so far. You're going to be our academic sounding board on this panel.

In the research that you've conducted, do you see certain kinds of trends emerging or maybe perhaps a strength of certain strategies of those hacker spaces or communities or programs that try to specifically target not straight men but other communities?

On the question of how exclusive do you have to be to be inclusive? I've been to spaces that are women only or women and non-binary people only and they're really important for getting over the question of is it just that women aren't interested, which is something that I've encountered in a few spaces.

We're not excluding women, they just don't seem to be interested, they're not coming here. And then when you provide a women only space and women go there, then you can point to that and go, well okay, that's just not true, there must be something about these other spaces that isn't including them. But then the next step is how do you get that inclusion to work in an all gender space because we live in an all gender world

and how do you take it out of those safer spaces and take it into other environments? And there does need to be a specific aim to be inclusive. It's interesting that you said we don't exclude men,

we just don't focus stuff on them and that seems to be the approach of maker spaces and hacker spaces in general except there's no recognition of that. We don't exclude women, they're just not here, they could come here and there's not the recognition that all of their presentation, all of their culture from the outside looks like it's geared towards men

so of course that's the kind of people that they attract. But yeah, they haven't made that decision, it's just what they're doing and there's no recognition of it. So yeah, to change that, there does have to be a recognition that if you want to attract people from different groups then you do need to reach out and specifically engage them,

it's not going to just happen by itself. Thank you. Hong, how has it been for you in the last 10 years of managing FOSSASIA? Because there's another level that comes in, you do this across different cultures and across different countries within Southeast Asia.

How do you find that has developed over the last 10 years and how much do you have to put an emphasis on trying to bring in not just women but perhaps also people from different backgrounds into your community? So if you look at Southeast Asia and why look at the FOSSASIA community,

we find that it was inclusive, it will take forever to talk about different cultures from Singapore, Malaysia, it's also related to the religions and the culture of each country. But could I ask, like I said, a question? I was curious, I kind of have the same opinion with M. I was curious, was there any experience in the past

that motivated you to create a base that focuses more on women instead of men? Is there any experience or incident that occurred to you? Yes, of course. Could you share a little bit about that?

Because I also, like for the past, maybe I was lucky because in our community I haven't experienced that much of an incident that made me feel that I need a space for myself because when I joined the open source community, I feel that everyone is very welcome

and also people don't look at you as who you are. People always look at your work and your contribution to the community. So sometimes in the conversation you don't even realize that you are with a bunch of other people from Europe or men. You just focus on the topic and the work that you do. So I'm curious to learn about the incident that you had before.

I have a few examples if you want, but I think it's not about what you can do or not, but it's about coming in the space and feeling that you can come here and stay and be welcomed. So as a woman, actually, the people were asking if I came with my boyfriend, where he was,

so they were wondering what I was doing here because I was a woman, so sorry I don't have any boyfriend and will never have one, but many are friends, so no.

And also, I was waiting to do lock-picking and waiting in line to do that. When I came to the tools, the guy said, oh, sorry, you have to leave the place for the guy because I was just here to look, not to try, many things like that.

So that lock-picking happened here at the Congress? Yeah, I know. Ah, okay, so now we know what prevent women from joining the tech community. So maybe it wasn't intentional. I think it's really interesting what you said. When your community and the experience you have, you see the code and not the gender.

I think a lot of people here in the room, I'm guessing, who came to the session but also on the panel have had really different experiences, but of course this is really positive to hear, maybe even a little bit surprising to hear because perhaps there would have been maybe a stereotypical perception that in some of the societies, which are part of fast Asia, they're very traditional

and it's maybe not so typical for women to be, or people of different backgrounds, maybe, like I said, not just women, but also people of different educational backgrounds or different cultural backgrounds to be part of this community, but of course it's very nice to hear that you've had a very different experience.

That's, I think, a key word that we've heard from many of you and you also mentioned your core values is empowerment and creating empowering experiences for others. You've already said a little bit about how you try to do that and giving people space to create their own narratives.

Do you want to share a little bit more what have been successes for you where you notice this has been working for your community? I think one of the women who came to our meetup afterwards,

she came to us and she was really happy and she said, okay, I have a place where I can be among my geek friends and talk about geeky stuff and I have my feminist friends to whom I can come and talk about feminist stuff, but I never had both, so I have friends and I think it's also important that you mentioned that it probably wasn't intentional when someone asked you,

hey, where's your boyfriend? Maybe it was trying to start a conversation, but that doesn't make it any better. I'm not sure. Okay, okay. I can also say I have the same experience regularly and even in spaces where I've been a member for years and that I really love dearly and I think you sort of,

or at least me personally, I never try to take offense, but of course it is offensive. And this is something we had a quick chat about, your level of tolerance for this, the threshold of acceptance is, for me at least, becomes less and less.

And I think we had a quick conversation and one of the key words was patience. So when you have tried to sort of, yeah, already create spaces that are different for communities like all of ours that are different, you expect more, basically. You expect people to be better at this game and things to change faster.

So I think the sort of level of frustration that builds up when you find it's not changing, just as you said in your talk, it's shocking to hear that that level of apprehension of including women and doing things to actually really support women coming in and making sure all parts of society are equally represented is still that strong.

Have you looked into the why a little bit in your research? Something that's really interesting is that the absence of groups like people with disabilities is more readily seen as something that can be helped by changing the space,

by introducing ramps, wheelchair access technologies, rearranging the space so that it's more accessible. But then when it comes to cultural aspects such as including women, that's seen as something that's unchangeable. So spaces are often willing to change, to be more diverse, but they have kind of a mental block on being able to include people

like women or people of colour who they see as more kind of, there's no way that these groups can come and join us, they're just not interested and that's a very unusual thing to see. So you mentioned earlier that you have a code of conduct and I think that's, I'd love to hear,

how did you develop this code of conduct for your community and is this sort of a living thing? Did you come up with this in the beginning and it's been set like that or is it something that you revise and how do you implement it? Actually it's a really simple code of conduct with 10 sentences and it says not to discriminate anybody and to respect boundaries

and things that make us all live together well. The important thing is that we endorse it really, so we put it on the walls, we talk about it

and we observe the dynamics into the outer space, what the people do, how do they feel, we welcome them, we apply ethics of care, that's the thing that I was talking about.

We help people but we do not do things on their behalf, we do not speak for the persons but we are here to support if they need and that's how it works. So are there many cases where you find you need to mediate or have you had cases where you've had to exclude people

based on your code of conduct? We haven't excluded many people but we feel totally fine with having to exclude someone, we're not afraid of it but usually we try to talk to the person before we have to get them out, like remind them of the code of conduct.

Our code of conduct is something that we have to apply but it's also full of keywords and so the idea is that every time we're saying that we're organizing a workshop or doing a conference we talk about it and we tell people to read it before they come so that they also can Google the words that they don't know

so that they come in the hackerspace and they know what it means to actually respect somebody's pronouns or things like this. So how would you all balance the mission of what your spaces are there to do and what your communities are there to do in terms of creating safe space

for the people that you have as part of your community and educating the rest of the world? I can say something.

So code of conduct is a good way to ensure that a safe space for people in terms of inclusiveness so I think that in order to solve this problem at first it's a good way that we bring people together who can talk about the challenges and the incidents that they had in the past so that the people in the audience are also aware

that they might not intentionally trace this question but now people are aware what could be an offense to another member but I think one of the biggest challenges is that the people in the community sometimes people are not aware of the level, the difference of background of different people in the community.

For instance, I want to give one example. When you visit one of the hackerspace in Singapore, normally when you come in, even though this is your first time entering the hackerspace, nobody would come and talk to you, try to introduce to you the space, what are the equipment because they assume that you already have the knowledge.

If you enter the hackerspace, you know everything and sometimes I find a little bit intimidated that I did not understand some joke that's made by my male colleagues because they have different kinds of knowledge coming from the West, from Europe or America so it's very important that we are aware

that people coming from different backgrounds, so something that you think is so obvious that you might not be obvious to people and it might raise some kind of conflict and misunderstanding so if we are all aware that that piece of knowledge we have might not be relevant to another person and always be aware and be more flexible, then that could be less complex in the community, in my opinion.

So again, I guess you're free to look forward. How do you try to balance that?

We welcome everybody that comes into the space. We're here every Sunday so we usually know who has come before and who hasn't and every time we see a new person, there is always someone who comes and explain the code of conduct but also what is this space, where you can find the stickers, where is the workshop, so we explain everything.

I think that sounds really nice. I think from what you've explained, there's a lot of magic in that very personal approach. It's not that you're taking people's space when they come in but it's like this taking care of each other and looking out for one another

which should be part of respectful human conduct, no matter what kind of human you are. Maybe one last topic on the panel before we open up a little bit. I thought it was really interesting to read on one of the little things on your slide. I really like the one that said AI is just privileged people's choice.

In my experience, very often we create spaces like yours or like community you're creating with the mind of bringing in new people and giving people who maybe haven't had

the typical tech career a chance to explore and see that they can be the creators of technology themselves. But we end up also creating kind of bubbles in usually attracting people with a certain background, usually creating spaces with people. We live in Europe with middle class white communities

and that's also perhaps not the levelist of playing fields when it comes to creating inclusive technology. Is that something that you address in your spaces? I'm not looking at you specifically because it's a little bit of a different intercultural setting

that you have with FrostAsia, but how does that come into play when we talk about diversity in your experiences? Actually, we are located in a queer bar, so the people that are used to come to this bar to party and date,

they also come on Sundays, so we have people that would never enter a space in other times. So we have actually many women, many trans people and queer people.

One time we had this girl who never touched her computer, we have people who have never played video games and so on. So we have really diverse public. I think that's also interesting because that was mentioned before, the setting of where your space actually is, which is a really important fact of how to make spaces accessible to different communities as well.

How is that for the space that you help out? This is such a tricky question, particularly with volunteer-run spaces, you have a limited amount of time and energy and do you spend that on educating people or do you spend it on engaging with people who can use your resources?

I lean towards the engagement, I feel that it's important to get people in and to share what we already have with other groups. There are resources out there where people can educate themselves. People in technology communities are very intelligent people, they are more than capable of finding other resources and educating themselves.

And if the group has the capacity, for example, to run workshops around specific issues, around consent, around introductions to feminism and other topics, then that's great and that can be a great way of educating our own community

and also taking those ideas into the outside community. I think if time was limited, then I would definitely want to dedicate more to engagement rather than educating people who are capable of educating themselves.

By that education, our Hackers' Press has been invited to give Feminism 101 talks a lot so we answered yes to those invitations and then we did not do Feminism 101 because we believe that there has been enough talks about Feminism 101 already

and there is plenty of things available on the internet. So we make usually talks about ethics of care or cyber feminism and every time we go somewhere we have a Wiki page about it with all the links about a four lines definition on Wikipedia or a 40 pages PDF that you can download or podcast.

So all the Feminism 101 and all the education has already been done so we are making sure that it's accessible and then we are moving on because as you said, we don't have this energy to do again and again what others have done before us.

I think you mentioned it already and I think you are also working voluntarily or a lot of volunteers come in so do they have the time and the energy

and for me it's also sometimes I'm just not in the mood to explain everything again like the really 101 stuff but other times when I feel like someone is really curious and really wants to learn something and is respectful and is not trying to provoke a discussion just to have a discussion

because then with some persons I feel like for him it might be a fun discussion just to test the borders and see how far you can go but for me it's like I'm talking if I have the right to be here as a woman and I don't always feel like I want to discuss that.

Your patience level is going down as well. Hon, how is it for you? How do you try to engage people in open source communities that perhaps wouldn't normally walk into a hacker space or don't yet know about the work that you do?

I founded ForceAsia and then for me it was quite lucky because the founder of the organisation is a female so it also makes other people feel more comfortable to engage with the open source community

but I think as Ann and Luca and Lina also said that the number of women who work in the tech community is still very small and I think it's important to understand that when you talk about technology

it's not only about coding because there's so many different responsibilities and possibilities that you could engage the women or other community members in the community so it's important to have the guidelines to help people, a lot of good documentation

to show people that by joining the community the first step you did not have to fix a bug or to write a line of code in order to join the community you can do translation, you can do design, localisation, there are many things that any single one of us can be involved and can contribute as our space

so I think that is one step to lower the barriers to enter the community Thank you. I'd like to start opening up your questions and for comments we have I think two microphones here in the centre of the room and you're first

Hello, first of all thank you girls very much for this session I can relate to that, we are from the same club, I came from Estonia and there I'm the organiser of the conference Women in Cyber Security

and also head of Google Women Techmakers in Estonia and I can relate to a lot of things which you have mentioned but what I'm really interested in because you are from different countries and Ms. Dong has answered this question partially but I'm interested in other answers

how do you actually attract more women into IT? Not from the marketing perspective but from the perspective for your mission of your hackerspace or your community and how do you make those people stay and come to the events

or if not come to the events how do you make them thinking of that and continuing studying and the success story that is something we all would be really interested in hearing because for example from Ms. Dong's story we can see the open source projects

I guess a lot of girls might have been involved there and the hotel and other projects but what about the Europe tellers, that's very curious, thank you. Thank you very much. Should we collect a couple and then do a round or how would you like to do it? I can remind the questions if needed.

How do you attract, how do you keep people and how do you end the success stories? Thank you. So let's do that. Do you have your community, is it very fluctuating or do you have a kind of stable group of people, do you ever have a problem connecting them back to your space?

Before we start from the answers of ladies, there is something else I wanted to mention. There's a long queue behind you and we've already collected a couple of questions so maybe just one more sentence? Of course, yeah, thank you. No, then go ahead for the answers. Okay, thank you. How long time is your community, how much does it fluctuate,

how do you sort of keep people? We have people that come like every Sunday and we have people who come just for one workshop because they've been interested in that topic. What we do to attract people is that every Sunday we have a workshop,

at least one workshop, so people are usually interested in the topic or just interested in meeting new people but they always know that they won't just stand there and have nobody to talk to. There is a workshop like they have a purpose for being here and because the topics are always oriented towards women and queer,

we don't have any issue attracting women and queers in the hacker space. We've never had a majority of straight men in the hacker space. That has never happened. Thank you. Does that simulate your experience? Well, I mean, it's a huge question. How do you attract women to IT and retain them?

Just to keep my answer fairly short, one particular tip I have is, to get a bit academic for a second, focus on developing the social bonds within your community rather than necessarily the tech aspects. When people have friends and people they care about in this community,

they're much more likely to join it and want to stay there and to get more out of it. So sometimes focusing on things that seem quite tangential like socialising, people spending time together outside of the physical space and kind of doing fun non-tech things together

can actually do that job of bringing more women and friend people in and helping them to feel comfortable and welcome there. There's a challenge maybe the other way around too. In my experience, for many people, spaces like the ones that you create are part of a home and so sort of keeping people,

having people want to be part of that home is not so hard but making sure that you remain open for new people to join that family and feel as equally welcome can sometimes be an even bigger challenge than just attracting people and keeping them in the beginning. Next question.

So my question will mostly be related to this mergery of the feminist Heka spaces and the male Heka spaces. So I see that you are making spaces for women and for queer to get creative, but making these separate from other Heka spaces is a bit of an isolation, and I guess this would be a next step to merge these kind of societies.

So from a male perspective, it's sometimes hard to understand what female don't find attractive or find distracting about joining male societies because

feminist activism usually do not target male to express what the problem is. So what do you think that could be done towards this mergery? So to make women try to get involved in male Heka spaces and to make men more acceptable to female

so this mergery to get involved together. I hope my question was honest. You can all feel free.

I don't think our goal is to merge our Heka spaces. We are creating Heka spaces around our issues. If you want to come you're welcome, but what you will find here is things that concerns us, but of course you're welcome.

We don't have any interest in your issues, so we're not coming to your Heka spaces, but I don't think that what you do is wrong. I just think that this is a sort of isolation between two different kinds of creative energy.

I think you've been in isolation much more longer than us. Again, I'm going to say there are many people queuing behind you, and we do want to get in a conversation with everyone, but we want to give everybody the chance to speak as well.

I'm going to rephrase your question, if I may, when it comes to the actual creation of technology, because I think let's see if they're two separate things or not. The one thing is that you have a community, and you have a space for that community, and you want to prioritize the issues of your community. The other question is when we create technology, and we create technology for the general public,

how do we ensure that that technology is created by the public, as in all members of that public, and then reflects all of our values equally? I don't believe in the general public. Sorry, I don't believe in the general public.

So, I could answer your question. I also don't want to give comment about if we're merging the two groups, but if you want to make your space, any hackerspace that more welcome to women or any members,

so the first thing, just like in a normal context, if you have a new guest coming from your home, the first thing is to show the guests around, like to interact with a person, and to be patient, and show them what they can do. And also, one thing that I mentioned earlier, because people have different backgrounds and knowledge, so it's more important that you find out what is their motivation to get to know the people better.

So, make the women feel more comfortable to come to your space, instead of asking them to merge together with another space, just create a more friendly environment in your space by just approach the people, the newcomers, and welcome them.

Sorry, next question, please. So, I have some more of an experience to share, then a question. I organize events for geeks, and they are very male-heavy, let's say.

And what I found is when it comes to disabled people, and that the community is more likely to actually change, is because then they change environment, and they don't have to change themselves. The huge problem usually is that the male-populated hackerspace, or generally,

community in general, feel that when they have to open to female presence, or gay presence, etc., they have to change their own behavior, and that is not something they are willing to do, sadly enough.

Thanks. Thank you. Was there a question in there, or you just wanted to share? OK, it's good. Thank you. There's an online question we'd like to take next, please. The question was answered. Oh, OK then, in that case.

Hello, first of all, thank you for all of your great work. I just want to have a question about something that may be a little bit missed in this conversation. So we talked about all of the communities and the hackerspaces that focus on women and non-binaries, but imagine a scenario that there is a company, or there's a startup, and there's not much diversity,

and we want to prove a presentation of people of marginalized group or anything. How we can achieve that? There are lots of suggestions, like hire people who are visible to others,

to be very open about this and try to attract more people, but is there any sort of way to talk, to get these successful stories about, to improve the diversity of companies and startups and other types of communities?

Thank you. I think it's often you have biases sometimes in the hiring process, so maybe you go through different CVs of different persons, and then you... I only know examples from Germany, but I guess it's the same everywhere.

If you read a CV with a name that sounds foreign to you, you might put it to the site, or might automatically think, okay, maybe this person is not equally capable, even if the skills are the same. And also in your job descriptions, you can make sure that it's more inclusive,

so you don't say like, okay, the perfect person, he should have this and this, but you put he and she. And I think a lot of times it's about really, really subtle changes and small things, and like you said, it's a change of the mindset.

Actually, in Larissa, we do not value success stories at all, we don't care. We value partnership and being well together, and that's what works actually. We do many things, but not by pushing things to be a woman or a query or whatever.

We do what we want to do, what we like, and that works. That's just that. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe we can exchange after this. There's a lot of great written works already out there that give advice to companies and startups who want to be more inclusive,

but like the simplest thing, if like you said it yourself, if you want to be inclusive, have an inclusive team. You cannot have an inclusive or diverse startup if your team are all men. And the excuse that you didn't find the right people out there doesn't really go either, because like you said, then maybe you're looking the wrong way.

And if you seriously can't find anybody with a skill set you're looking for, then help build, help people build that skill set. So there are always ways to actually do that in your team. Please. Hi. Hi. Six of you proposed talks. We got one talk.

Yes, you are six awesome women, it's an awesome topic. We've got an audience of roughly 50-50. It's one of the most balanced audiences I've seen at this entire event. But I'm pretty certain that the men in here are majority male allies. The women, you're preaching to the perverted here. Why is it that we have allowed ourselves to be gerrymandered in this way?

Why do we have only one session? Why do we not have six sessions? Why...

Adams, Borg, Clark, Dykstra, the meeting rooms are named after men. Women are 50-50 of the population. Why are we allowing this to happen? I appreciate I'm looking you in the eye and I'm guilty here of preaching to the perverted too. But why are we allowing it?

Why is it happening? It's 2018, it's soon to be 2019. We deserve better. Thank you very much for your concern.

Don't you think that it's good to bring people together? Because of course we can have separate sections, but it's also very good to have everyone come together and share their opinions so we can have the conversation, we can learn from each other. So again, the Congress is very busy. Not everyone can come to every single talk. Maybe we will not be able to attend all our friends or other panelists here,

but it's good that we can come all together. So they're always pro and con. But thank you very much for your concern. We have exactly time for one last question, intervention, and that shall be you. Thank you. Thank you for the talk and thank you for this opportunity.

I'm probably in the category of a straight male engineer, but I also, more or less, but I also have... I'm running a co-working space in Copenhagen and I'm specifically focusing on making it inclusive. So I'll be trying to find the information and tips on how to do that.

But I have two other questions then. What would be your top three action points on ending the digital gender divide? It's a big topic, I know. Just a small question for the end of the session.

And you had a second one even. Yeah, the second one was... I guess that's... I mean, I really see the points being raised about designing... I mean, just down to the level of design, designing a website targeted to a male audience versus targeted to a female audience.

The second question was... Yeah, what was that? The first, Asia.

In Asia, I read an article lately from the After Access magazine about internet usage throughout the global south and its deaths. In Asia, you have like 20% of the population on the internet. Do you see that as a problem and what do you think could be done about that?

Okay, so how do we close the digital divide as such and how do we close the gender divide specifically? Okay, thank you. I just want to announce that AIM suggested we have after panel discussion, so we hosted a follow-up discussion at the Force Asia Assembly after this.

If you have more questions and you want to continue the conversation, we can meet there at 8.15? 8.15 to 9.15. We're not dodging your question or we're just going to move it to that meetup. That's okay. As we have run out of time.

But I would like to end maybe with a little bit of a closing round because I think this came out of a number of statements that you made. And you specifically, of course, work as a leader of an open source community, which is on shared resources. So, you mentioned a lot of times you're putting your resources out there

and they're out there for other people to share and to learn from. I'd be interested in a little bit of a closing round of either recommendations, reading recommendations, places to go look for further information, maybe places where you're going to be publishing your research, but also the question of connecting, like how do we strengthen each other's work, not just by coming together at conferences like this,

but by making our knowledge open and sharing it and perhaps also exchanging experiences with one another. So, if maybe you want to leave with an idea or a recommendation or a point of inspiration or a question on that issue. Let's do a quick round. Do you want to start? So, we're quite lucky in the UK that we have the UK Hack Space Foundation,

which is a kind of umbrella group for the 70-odd hackerspaces in the UK. And these kind of organisations can be great for raising discussions about these topics. I'm really pushing to have more of a focus on inclusivity and diversity in the UK Hack Space Foundation at the moment. And that can be a way of kind of funnelling best practices out

through all of the member organisations. Thank you. I think for us, we really focus on, like you mentioned as well, the personal connections. So, we would of course prefer that you visit us for Cook, Tits and Co. And I think there are a lot of almost every...

I think especially in the bigger cities, you will find a feminist or women only or women and non-binary people only space. And if there's none, maybe then you should find one because I think it's really important and I think it happens a lot through personal connections. Thank you, Lina. Yeah, so the same thing.

You all are welcome at our open-source hotel in Vietnam, if you ever want to visit and welcome at any Force Asia events. At the same time, I think that we could share our best practices and the successful story on our website. So, whatever Force Asia develop and what we do, we publish everything.

So, I think that is a good way to share resources with other communities. And final discussion is always good to learn and to continue the conversation. It's definitely a good one with you guys. Zohra? There is only one thing to do, it's to go to our wiki. We have all the resources that you need in French.

Our website is English. So, yeah, we will try as after this conference in the SSA, we will try to put the video on our wiki with a page with all the references,

as we do usually in French, and so we will do it in English this time. So, you should find it in a few days on our wiki, which is wiki.loresette.org. Excellent. I would like to thank you all for handing in such great ideas for this event,

for sitting on this panel and sharing your thoughts and experiences. Thank you, Ajem, thank you, Zohra, thank you, Hong, thank you, Lina, and thank you, Em, for being part of the session. Thank you all for attending and your inputs and ideas as well. And let's say a big thank you to the stage host and the translators for doing a wonderful job as well.