logging back on to mastodon today because i'm in a room of really cool feminists and we're thinking about how to use internet platforms differently for the purposes of disrupting hateful behavior and/or toxic social environments. mastodon came up in part because i like this space but also because it is a way into the F/LOSS community, which doesn't have the best, um, reputation for being inclusive, accepting of / safe for women. e.g., http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1461444811422887

we're here today for the 2017 Fembot Symposium (fembotcollective.org). we're thinking about what people affiliated with Fembot can do to use and contribute to the development of Mastodon as platform and community. one of our ideas is to create a conversation tag — #fembot — where we can seed and aggregate conversations/toots relevant to this distributed group that already exists on many platforms. this can also be means of finding new groups on here can that can be a challenge

We talked about the possibility of paying someone to help us develop an instance of mastodon for the #fembot community. This would be useful for a few reasons. It would provide us with a means of improving inter-community communication and information dissemination that we currently mediate through use of a listserv (ugh). It would also bring more cool people to mastodon who want to engage in critical projects, and it might lead to the seeding of Fembot with cool people existing here already.

#fembot grew out of marginalized spaces, and with the hands of people who were crafty, keen, and considerate with respect to accessibility and diy. There have definitely been lessons learned in that respect on how to attend to accessibility better, but from the onset the project was about trying to not privilege any one standpoint (from which a monopoly of power might develop). As a collective, we didn't want it to be exclusive and invite only; we wanted to mirror that ethos in our web presence.

From the point of view of peer review, #fembot wanted to radically shake up paradigms. We wanted to experiment with legitimizing different forms of publication, and playing with what it means to professionalize graduate students, junior scholars, etc. Carol Stabile talking right now about how peer review is a way of producing a structure of power. In the humanities it polices disciplinary boundaries & intellectual orthodoxy. "Traditional peer review is a cruel & abusive star chamber." - Stabile

The peer review system built into the platform for the #fembot Ada Journal tries to provide feedback in productive ways, even if not everything reviewed is published on the platform. Feminist peer review is clear and transparent as possible; adopted from Kathleen Fitzpatrick's process of review for her book (using Comment Press). In the long run, this platform/process provides graduate students w/ opportunities to develop skills & network applicable and useful outside academia. adanewmedia.org

Because we didn't know what we were really doing with #fembot, the early years (been around since 2009) were full of many experimental jaunts. The ways in which we benefit bear out in our international presence and global readership; but at the same time we know that one way in which we hope to improve upon on our humble beginnings: invite more people to contribute and edit ada journal for whom english is not their primary language.

Carol Stabile also making argument that #fembot needs to refocus & think about how we could work w/ other feminist publishers to improve upon how contributions circulate & speak to each other. Another thing we need to work on is the platform itself; Comment Press has exhausted its usefulness. It was an NEH project for whom funding ran out & we're feeling that. Moreover, we're increasingly needing to automate aspects of the review & publication process that contributes to production of analytics.

We also need to improve production and circulation of multimodal content. We also need to help in the training of people in the practice of peer review—learning how to be clear, concise, generous (!!!) in the process. People for a long time have been telling #fembot that this project is not worth money because "it just can't work." We know that this is just not true. The challenge moving forward is to find/produce infrastructure for all our great ideas that don't reproduce same old problematics.

We're talking now about different kinds of projects that can be incorporated into the Fembot project, and how the listserve we have can serve the needs of people who aren't interested in academic publishing. I suggested we try to facilitate open calls for public (in-group) discussion on timely topics happening at the intersection of feminism & technology; Roopika Risam suggesting we think about how #fembot might host salons to have these kinds of conversations within the community.