Category Archives: Take action

“Help us build” workshop a great success

Open Inclusivity’s “build your own organization” was a resounding success! We modeled this un-workhop on HUB Heidelberg’s innovative style of un-seminars after being inspired by them at the Science in the City Festival at ESOF in June. Many people showed up to participate in helping build the structure of this new organization. We mainly focused on clarifying what the nuts and bolts of what should be of such an organization — we talked about what should be in our own code of conduct, what we should encourage other open knowledge organizations to put in their, how to approach open knowledge and traditional organizations to ask if we can use their codes of conduct as examples and how to best spread the word about Open Inclusivity to interested parties.

One of the main things discussed was whether or not we should employ the naming and shaming strategy. There were several opinions on the topic within the group that worked on that question. In an unexpected turn of events, two participants named and shamed another when we reconvended to discuss the outcome of the working groups.

This incident highlighted exactly why the strategy is controversial; some of the people present had previously been in conflict about improper conduct and had been unable to resolve it – and as outsiders to the conflict, a lot of the other people present were unsure how to approach the issue because of the great difficulty in getting all the information about a complicated situation quickly from the involved parties.

This situation was a wake-up call for how hard naming and shaming is to handle for an organization that at the present time does not have the resources to thoroughly investigate a situation from a thorough and just standpoint. This helped us realize that we do not believe that naming and shaming should, for now, be a part of Open Inclusivity beyond the one open case we are already handling.

Going forward Open Inclusivity will be in contact with various hackerspaces to investigate what they think of naming an shaming and other points of its construction. We also have plans to poll the online community and engage them in dialog for feedback on this.

We would like to thank everyone who showed up for displaying interest and support for open knowledge and inclusivity!

Below are some photos of the notes that were taken by the different groups that took part in the workshop:
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Help us build and develop openinclusivity!

openinclusivity.org is hosting a “build your own organization” workshop at Kapelvej 44 on Saturday, July 19 at 3pm. Everyone is welcome to stop down and get involved as long as you come with an understanding values of inclusivity. Paradoxically, working towards a future inclusive society means not letting everyone shape inclusivity. Confusing? We’ll explain more at the workshop! See you there!

For more details about the event please check out the Facebook page. You can also sign up there but that’s not necessary and the event is free.

We’ll be facilitating more actions to help form the organization soon. Most will be online as this is a global movement! Keep checking back for updates.

Write to the Labitat board and request that Malthe, Søren and Emil be expelled.

In the process of updating the community regarding the fact that Malthe, Søren and Emil had pulled out of Labitat requested mediation for no good reason, it was discovered that Labitat has a bylaw that allows for the board to exclude members who “obstruct the association’s interests”. This is news to us here at openinclusivity.org and feels like a way to quickly solve this problem which Malthe, Emil and Søren desperately want to sweep under the rug by avoiding any avenue that would hold them accountable.

Although there has been much clamor among the undereducated, emotion-driven body politic of Labitat to exclude everyone involved (and in a sickening twist, some call to exclude only Jen in a punitive measure for her speaking out), it’s clear to any reasonable person that the root of this problem is the interpersonal and organizational misconduct perpetrated by Malthe Borch, Søren Borch and Emil Polny.  They should be expelled from Labiat as soon as possible.

Write to the Labitat board at bestyrelse@lists.labitat.dk to request this action.

Emil Polny calls security on me while I try to protest the Kopenlab Festival.

Following me Occupying Kopenlab via a discussion that was mediated by Allen Alfred Hansted of collaborativesocieties.org on Monday June 23 on the specifics of the case and the solution that openinclusivity.org could help hackerspaces implement to prevent and deal with future cases such as this, I returned to Kopenlab on Tuesday June 24 to request a continuation of that original conversation.

As Kopenlab was supposedly an open knowledge festival, I should have been allowed to discuss the very important issue of the systemic problem of gender discrimination and harassment in hacking culture. This is not just a problem that has touched my life, it has affected many other women as well. I felt like it would be very wrong to only discuss the particular matter at hand without discussing the broader context.

Emil, however, had other ideas. You can hear the pertinent part of his and my conversation here. When I ask him why he’s calling security, he says that he doesn’t want my negativity around. You can hear that I am not pleased with him, but I am not shouting or ranting. There is nothing in my behavior that warrants a call to security. He is simply, I think, trying to remove me and silence me.

Also, it later turned out that he was highly motivated to do so as a friend of mine had accidentally happened into Kopenlab to meet another friend of hers who was there (and unaware of the situation). She and I talked later that night and it turns out that she was there right when Emil was calling security on me. He and she talked later and at no point did he tell her what he had done. He also later told her that he was interested in talking with me and her both to try to figure things out. Which seems an odd thing to do when you’ve just called security on one party and failed to inform the other of that.

Not knowing quite what to do, I allowed myself to be led outside by a woman who I had met previously at Kopenlab who was unaware of the situation before arriving at the Festival. She and I had a good talk as security pulled up. I could see Emil and the guards talking in the doorway. The guards stayed in the door watching me but never approached and I did not approach them. Eventually it started raining and I had another appointment (the press and media party) so I left.

This was just one of a very long line of tactics they’ve tried using to prevent my voice from being heard. It was one of the most extreme, however. the ultimate silencing tactic

What can I do to help protest the Kopenlab Festival?

The protest organized by openinclusivity.org is organized in what was originally the way the Kopenlab festival was supposed to be organized– in a non-hierarchical manner in which everyone is welcome to be inspired to add their own contributions as they see fit.

That said, here are some examples of actions you can take. Some of them are very simple and require next to no effort:

Join us for our un-protest as we peacefully “Occupy Kopenlab”. This is a non-traditional style of protest where there’s no head organizer and everyone is welcome to organize their own action or to link up in any way they see fit.

This protest is in the same vein of the Occupy protests– we the people want to stand up against corporatism and the abusive bully tactics it all too often features as they have no place in open knowledge as far as we’re concerned. As openinclusivity.org sees it, the intent is to instigate open and honest dialog about the specific problems in Kopenlab and investigate how they reflect those that the movement as a whole faces and to raise awareness on how to spot them early on before they become cancerous as they did here in Copenhagen.

Also, in the spirit of ESOF, openinclusivity.org hopes to build bridges and educate those who have erred. After all, no one is really a monster at the end of the day– almost everyone is convinced they are doing the right thing, even when they’re not. We might end up learning a lot from each other and spreading and deepening public awareness of open knowledge  and building bridges in this process.

Occupy the Festival. Do this by creating an event at the Kopenlab Festival grounds that demonstrates why you think what the organizers have done to both a human being and to the open knowledge movement is wrong. As far as we understand, The Kopenlab festival was supposed to be an open festival meaning that anyone was welcome to participate so long as the theme was surrounding open knowledge, citizen science, or hacker/maker culture. Therefore, if you want to schedule a talk about how those movements shouldn’t be co-opted and abused, by all rights you should be able to. …Unless the whole thing is indeed a top-down, non-transparent sham. But that couldn’t possibly  be the case, right

Print out this flyer or this flyer and distribute it where and how you see fit. You could make it handout size and pass it around or poster size and plaster it all over town.

Post the anti-Kopenlab poster online somewhere. On your Facebook wall, your Twitter feed (please use the hashtags #Kopenlab and #scicity), on your site, your blog or on their Facebook page. 

Write letters and make phone calls to those supporting the Kopenlab Festival. Here is the contact info for its sponsor, Industriens Fond.  We suggest writing to Lars Møller Holmegaard lmh@industriensfond.dk , Cecilie Alsted ca@industriensfond.dk and Adm. dir. Mads Lebech ml@industriensfond.dk

Simply show up at the Kopenlab Festival, talk to those involved and tell them why you think it’s wrong to continue with a Festival that goes against the values of open knowledge and basic human decency. Open dialog is the way of the future. After all, no one is really a monster at the end of the day– almost everyone is convinced they are doing the right thing, even when they’re not. We might end up learning a lot from each other in the process of talking.

You can also write to participants  and partners of the festival by visiting its website and finding contact information for them there to share your ideas.

Dream up your own action! We’re sure there’s a whole universe of possibilities not listed here. Get creative, get inspired, figure out an action that calls to you. It can be totally small and easy to do. If you strike on an idea you want to share feel free to make a wikia page or write to us at info@openinclusivity.org

Why Protest the Kopenlab Festival?

For the past few months, our friend and political comrade Jen has been sexually harassed and exposed to racist and sexist bullying by the anarchist collectives Labitat and Biologigaragen. This is an experience that has been echoed by several other female ex-members of the collectives, many of whom left because of the culture of harassment and bullying.

As they claim to be anarchist and open, one would expect the collectives to listen when called out on their discriminatory behaviour. This is sadly not the case. Instead, the members have continued and intensified their grossly oppressive behavior. In fact, the main perpetrators are currently preparing the Kopenlab Festival which is a supposedly open and collaborative space– except the team behind is notoriously sexist and have a hidden agenda in using the festival to further their own financial interests and CVs. This is not what we know as anarchist or open knowledge integrity.

The sexual harassment, sexism, and racism faced by Jen has had a severe impact on her physical, mental, and social health. The hacking community has been incredibly damaged as well by this incident, due to the behaviors of the perpetrators. Due to this, the international hacking community at large has expressed their horror at the behavior of the organizers of the Kopenlab Festival. Almost all international backers have pulled out. Please join us in protesting the festival– let’s show the Kopenlab Festival, the community and the perpetrators that sexism or racism has no place in open source hacking spaces, anarchist collectives or anywhere on this earth, period.
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