2019-09-29
Last fall, I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to do a participatory research fellowship in Taiwan, writing a report about the origins of an incredibly inspiring civic hacker commmunity/network called g0v (pronounced gov-zero). In the time since, I’ve been struggling to piece together a difficult narrative and theory that my time there helped me to start seeing the contours of.
I’m a bit intimidated by how sweeping a hypothesis it feels like I’m leaning toward. Others have expressed that one should be skeptical of such things, and I tend to agree. But despite that wariness, I keep fitting pieces together, wiggling them around, stepping back every so often, but continuing to walk to other sides of the same table.
Some of my hesitancy is that I want to take the time to get my attributions correct. It feel very important to both my own sensibility (and the substance of the evolving hypothesis) that I tread careful with the knowledge I’m claiming to be seeing, and I’d like to embody theories of feminist citation (h/t DCW) as much as possible as I nurture these ideas amongst others and amongst aspects of myself. Which is to say, I want to attribute as much as possible, not in the spirit of solidifying my authority as a speaker, but in calling attention to all those I’ve learned from, and ensuring that they derive benefit/credit/power/recognition through their experiences and insights moving through me as conduit.
I have a sense that this work might be the culmination of the last few years of tenuous employment and exploration. I feel uniquely privileged to feel some of these connections between topic areas — as a community organizer, technologist, and biochemist with an interest in network science and systems, but also deeply grounded in human-scale concerns like empathy and interdependance (h/t AMB). And it feels like it doesn’t hurt to have a skepticism of overly hierarchical systems and authority-based leadership (which often minimize relational leadership).
The development and explanation of the theory might have to move at a slower pace, but I just wanted to bookmark the scope as a list of topics I’ll be trying to synthesize from: biology, evolutionary genetics, group selection, evolution of sexual reproduction, networks and social science, structural holes, social physics, mathematical properties of small-world networks, the small world effect, Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory (of leadership), philosophy of open source, emergent strategy, gendered approaches to organizing social networks, the gendered nature of social capital in networks, the Leiden theory of language evolution, and complexity science (h/t AMB and Santa Fe Institute).
If I were to try to summarize my highest hope: It’s about pulling together the foundations of a network-centric and mathematical basis for feminist ideals, which speaks the abstract language of the dominant neurotype in tech, a sector that is madly building the digital underpinnings of a world, and building it not only blindly, but badly.
Disclaimer: I’ve been saying for a few years that I’m in search of a personal (and collective) spiritual foundation that maps to base-reality. Which is to say, a belief system (perhaps simple in practice) that is underpinned by forces that hold true down to the lowest levels of reality. So I’m inclined to seek patterns that might suggest that sort of thing at work :)