Journey of draft feminism
Mallory Knodel
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From 2014-2021 (and beyond) a global network of movement leaders in intersectional feminism have set out to define a set of principles for everything from access to governance of the internet, with the aim of influencing its design, development, application, use and imaginations. Fast-forward to now, where globally engaged groups from around the world are building the changes they want to see. This includes experts engaging the engineering and technical community to visualise core internet protocols differently, from routing to security, through illustrations, drawings, charts, images, metaphors and texts, namely at the Internet Research Task Force through the development of a guidelines document for developing internet standards with intersectional feminist considerations.
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A global network of movement leaders in intersectional feminism defined a set of principles for the internet and now an engaged group of expert engineers are setting out to visualise core internet protocols differently, from routing to security, through illustrations, drawings, charts, images, metaphors and texts.
Would feminists have built a better internet? For years, the global, intersectional feminist movement has been unconsciously asking itself this very question. In sporadic, in-person convergences over the course of several years and mailinglist and Twitter threads, a truly staggering conversation was started with the prompt #ImagineAFeministInternet. The result was the Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPIs). And yet how to apply those principles to the internet's core design and implementation remains unanswered. Within the context of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a global standards community devoted to this task, a proposed research project emerged as an "internet-draft (I-D)". This project as part of an "Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet" exposition will look at the I-D's sub-questions by searching visual and textual archives for answers.
The I-D states, "This document aims to describe how internet standards, protocols and its implementations may impact diverse groups and communities. The research on how some protocol can be enabler for specific human rights while possibly restricting others has been documented in [RFC8280]. Similar to how RFC 8280 has taken a human rights lens through which to view engineering and design choices by internet standardisation, this document addresses the opportunities and vulnerabilities embedded within internet protocols for specific, traditionally maginalised groups." It summarises intersectional feminism for an engineering audience and then takes each of the FPIs in turn for further analysis that is relevant to IETF protocol development and implementation.
To answer our original question, we must take more than one distinct approach. The _movement approach_ has yielded the FPIs, which are brilliant and visionary and intersectional in all the right ways. They have profoundly shifted human rights centred policy advocacy on issues of content moderation and social networks. Yet they do not easily translate to technical design and implementation-- something falls short. The _participatory design approach_ may provide more insight into this research. The crux of this proposal rests on an innovative participatory design project for participants to "imagine a feminist internet protocol".
The vision for this research is essentially to combine the two approaches: Given what the intersectional feminist movement has identified as its principles for the internet, an engaged group of expert engineers (a subset of that same movement) can now visualise core internet protocols differently. Those core internet protocols will be specifically chosen from the following areas of real-world design and implementation: applications, internet protocol, routing, security, transport and operations. The expressions will be visual (illustrations, drawings, charts, images, metaphors) and textual.
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#imagineafeministinternet
What is the thinking behind feminist internet and what might it look like? What are the key issues of feminist internet and what are potentially its main building blocks? Is internet access for women and sexual minorities being increasingly compartmentalised into 'good access' and 'bad access'? Is surveillance gendered and therefore are the consequences of tech surveillance gendered too? This meeting in 2014 is the first attempt to document the feminist imagination in the digial age.
Conference participants speak about: what does a #FeministNet look like to them?
The feminist principles of the internet
The Feminist Principles of the Internet are a series of statements that offer a gender and sexual rights lens on critical internet-related rights. A group of volunteers from the 2014 meeting drafted version 1.0 of the principles. This was then subsequently brought to different workshops and events, local and global, and then to the second Imagine a Feminist Internet meeting in July 2015, where a new group of 40 activists discussed, elaborated, and revised the set of principles. The new version was published online on this website in August 2016, where anyone can expand the Principles by contributing resources or translating the Principles.
Feminist principles of the internet and who holds all power | Neema Iyer | #CTIF21
Third meeting on the body
By the third meeting in 2017 the principles were being applied. One activist in Mexico discusses the ways in which internet principles had manifest in an offline world.
Article: Interview with Lili_Anaz: A body that knows itself ...
The first draft-feminism
In 2018 an internet-draft was submitted to review in the Internet Research Task Force. This document applies an intersectional feminist approach to describe how internet standards, protocols and their implementations may impact diverse groups and communities. The research on how some protocols can be enablers for specific human rights while possibly restricting others has been documented in {{RFC8280}}. Similar to how RFC 8280 has taken a human rights lens through which to view engineering and design choices by internet standardisation, this document addresses the opportunities and vulnerabilities embedded within internet protocols for specific, traditionally marginalized groups.
Resource: https://github.com/mallory/feminism/blob/main/draft-feminism.md
The IFF workshop
Participants at the Internet Freedom Festival taking place in Valencia, Spain, joined Alexandra Haché from Tactical Tech, Jac sm Kee from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Mallory Knodel from ARTICLE 19, Juliana Guerra from Derechos Digitales and others to discuss how protocols are being designed and defined in a session entitled "Let's make internet standards feminist", held on Tuesday, 2 April. More specifically, a discussion was opened up around a draft that is being developed by the Human Rights Protocols Considerations Research Group (HRPC-RG) at the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). The IRTF promotes research of importance to the evolution of the internet by creating focused, long-term research groups working on topics related to internet protocols, applications, architecture and technology, while the parallel organisation, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), focuses on the shorter-term issues of engineering and standards making.
The IETF presentation
At the IETF 104 meeting in March 2019 in Prague, Mallory Knodel and Juliana Guerra presented both the FPIs to the IRTF/IETF audience and the first draft of the document.
IAB workshop on data
After the internet was already a couple of decades old, a global network of movement leaders in intersectional feminism identified and published a project called the Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPIs). Would it be possible to bring together expert engineers to visualise core internet protocols differently, from routing to security, through the lens of these principles?
At the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), our attempt to apply those principles to the internet's core design and implementation remains unanswered. Within the context of the IETF a proposed research project emerged as an "internet-draft (I-D)". The I-D states, "This document aims to describe how internet standards, protocols and its implementations may impact diverse groups and communities. The research on how some protocol can be enabler for specific human rights while possibly restricting others has been documented in RFC 8280. Similar to how RFC 8280 has taken a human rights lens through which to view engineering and design choices by internet standardisation, this document addresses the opportunities and vulnerabilities embedded within internet protocols for specific, traditionally maginalised groups."
Draft-feminism summarises intersectional feminism for an engineering audience and then takes each of the FPIs in turn for further analysis that is relevant to IETF protocol development and implementation.
We have to look at the history of many different internet governance institutions when we ask the question: would feminists have built a better internet? We must look at many institutions and we must take more than one approach, too. The _movement approach_ has yielded the FPIs, which are brilliant and visionary and intersectional in all the right ways. But a _participatory design approach_ may provide more insight.
Although there are many methodologies to achieve participatory design outcomes, a common step in the process is to develop or seek out public information. The use of Big Bang on the open data sources of the IETF may be a useful tool in the exploration and publication of relevant trends in internet governance, so as to better understand key research sub-questions, such as:
- Diversity of participation in internet governance, Influence and marginalization in internet governance, Alignment between expressed governance values and feminist principles, and potentially many more.
The excavations: A feminist internet is a better internet
A global network of movement leaders in intersectional feminism defined a set of principles for the internet and now an engaged group of expert engineers are setting out to visualise core internet protocols differently, from routing to security, through illustrations, drawings, charts, images, metaphors and texts.
Would feminists have built a better internet? For years, the global, intersectional feminist movement has been unconsciously asking itself this very question. In sporadic, in-person convergences over the course of several years and mailinglist and Twitter threads, a truly staggering conversation was started with the prompt #ImagineAFeministInternet. The result was the Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPIs). And yet how to apply those principles to the internet's core design and implementation remains unanswered. Within the context of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a global standards community devoted to this task, a proposed research project emerged as an "internet-draft (I-D)". This project as part of an "Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet" exposition will look at the I-D's sub-questions by searching visual and textual archives for answers.
The I-D states, "This document aims to describe how internet standards, protocols and its implementations may impact diverse groups and communities. The research on how some protocol can be enabler for specific human rights while possibly restricting others has been documented in [RFC8280]. Similar to how RFC 8280 has taken a human rights lens through which to view engineering and design choices by internet standardisation, this document addresses the opportunities and vulnerabilities embedded within internet protocols for specific, traditionally maginalised groups." It summarises intersectional feminism for an engineering audience and then takes each of the FPIs in turn for further analysis that is relevant to IETF protocol development and implementation.
To answer our original question, we must take more than one distinct approach. The _movement approach_ has yielded the FPIs, which are brilliant and visionary and intersectional in all the right ways. They have profoundly shifted human rights centred policy advocacy on issues of content moderation and social networks. Yet they do not easily translate to technical design and implementation-- something falls short. The _participatory design approach_ may provide more insight into this research. The crux of this proposal rests on an innovative participatory design project for participants to "imagine a feminist internet protocol".
The vision for this research is essentially to combine the two approaches: Given what the intersectional feminist movement has identified as its principles for the internet, an engaged group of expert engineers (a subset of that same movement) can now visualise core internet protocols differently. Those core internet protocols will be specifically chosen from the following areas of real-world design and implementation: applications, internet protocol, routing, security, transport and operations. The expressions will be visual (illustrations, drawings, charts, images, metaphors) and textual.