Is geek culture sexist? Joseph Reagle, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies at Northeastern University and author of a new paper entitled, “Free as in Sexist? Free culture and the gender gap,” returns to Surprisingly Free to address geek feminism and the technology gender gap.

According to Reagle, only 1% of the free software community and 9% of Wikipedia editors are female, which he sees as emblematic of structural problems in the geek community. While he does not believe that being a geek or a nerd is in any way synonymous with being a sexist, he concludes that three things that he otherwise loves—geekiness, openness, and the rhetoric and ideology of freedom–are part of the problem inasmuch as they allow informal cliques to arise, dominate the discussion, and squeeze out minority views. Reagle also comments on a unintentional androcentricity he has observed even amongst free software community heroes, highlighting the ways in which this behavior can be alienating to women and prevents geek culture from growing beyond its traditional base.

Reagle prescribes a 3-step solution to sexism in geek culture: talking about gender; challenging and expanding what it means to be a geek; and not allowing the rhetoric of freedom to be used as an excuse for bad behavior.

Reagle further supports efforts to form female-only subcultures within the geek community, which opponents argue goes against the free software value of openness. Instead of the balkanization of their movement that opponents fear, these closed-group discussions actually strengthen geek culture at large, according to Reagle.

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Related Links

• “Free as in Sexist? Free culture and the gender gap”, Reagle
• Geek Feminism, blog
• Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog, blog
• Geek Feminism Wiki, Wikia

Over at Mashable, Ben Parr has a post (“Facebook Turns to the Crowd to Eradicate Offensive Content“) expressing surprise that Facebook has a crowdsourcing / community policing solution to deal with objectionable content:

Did you know that Facebook has a crack team of employees whose mission is to deal with offensive content and user complaints? Their ranks number in the hundreds. But while most websites have people on staff to deal with porn and violence, none of them have 350 million users to manage… Now the world’s largest social network found a way to deal with this shortage of manpower, though. Facebook has begun testing a new feature called the Facebook Community Council [currently invite-only]. According to a guest post on the Boing Boing blog by one of the council’s members, its goal is to purge Facebook of nudity, drugs, violence, and spam. The Facebook Community Council is actually a Facebook app and tool for evaluating content for various offenses… The app’s tagging system allows council members to tag content with one of eight phrases: Spam, Acceptable, Not English, Skip, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. If enough council members tag a piece of content with the same tag, action is taken, often a takedown.

What Facebook is doing here is nothing all that new.  Many other social networking sites or platforms such MySpace, Ning, and many others, do much the same. Video hosting sites like YouTube do as well. [See my summary of YouTube’s efforts down below]**

No doubt, some will be quick to decry “private censorship” with moves by social networking sites, video hosting sites, and others to flag and remove objectionable content within their communities, but such critics need to understand that:

1. Big communities require interest-balancing: Online communities like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc., are broad-based communities with diverse interests and sensitives. Some forms of community policing are, therefore, necessary to achieve a reasonable balance among those interests. You are always free to “move” elsewhere if you don’t like the standards set by a particular online community. The Internet is a big place; there’s a community out there for every taste and interest!
2. Private community policing beats public censorship: If larger, more popular online communities fail to take steps to establish private community standards, policymakers will suggest they should do it for them. Better that the various private online communities police themselves by “flagging & tagging” objectionable content than to have 5 unelected bureaucrats at the FCC (or FTC) regulating online speech for us.  As pointed out above, you can always escape private online communities. By contrast, you cannot escape blanket, one-size-fits all federal censorship efforts.

** In late 2008, YouTube created a new “Abuse and Safety Center” to make it easier for users to report abusive behavior or inappropriate content. The site also makes it easy for users to find helpful information from various expert organizations who deal with troubling behavior.

For example, if a YouTube user reports “hateful content,” they are directed to tips from the Anti-Defamation League. Similarly, information from the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is provided to those who report suicide concerns, and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children provides information and links about sexual abuse of minors. YouTube also has strict “community guidelines” governing appropriate behavior on the site.

Finally, in May 2009, YouTube announced a new “Filter Wrds” program that lets users block profanity and racial slurs. According to the site: “Users can opt into this by clicking on ‘Options’ next to the Comments header and checking the ‘Filter Wrds’ box. Users can also choose to hide comments altogether by clicking on ‘Hide Comments.’” Those user preferences will then be saved by the browser.  According to YouTube, the site uses “a combination of feedback from users, proprietary technology, and a commonsense collection of words in English to decide what to filter.” Incidentally, there’s also a free Firefox extension called “YouTube Comment Snob” that that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads.

I vented my frustration earlier today with the FCC’s failure to make comments it receives easily accessible to the public—which means, more than anything, making them full-text searchable. This may seem like Inside Baseball to many, but it’s not. It’s a failure of the democratic process, a waste of taxpayer dollars, and a testimony to the general incompetence of bureaucracies, regardless of who’s running them. It denies the public an easy way to follow what goes on inside Washington, while essentially subsidizing law firms who get to bill clients for having paralegals or junior associates do things that existing web technology makes completely unnecessary—like reading through every comment in a document (at the rate of hundreds of dollars per hour) instead of just looking for keywords in a full-text search.

Later in the day the FCC announced:

1. RSS feeds for all news from the agency  (1 general feed + 48 issue-specific feeds);
2. “FCC Connect” a page for Social Media Sites—so you can follow the FCC on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook; and
3. A “crowdsourcing platform” to discuss the administration’s plan to transfer nearly $8 billion from taxpayers to broadband providers.

I’m thrilled about the RSS feeds, which go a long way in letting all Americans know what the FCC does, supposedly in the “public interest.” Still, I can’t help but note that the FCC waited until after a huge discussion about whether RSS is dead to finally start using RSS in a serious way—fully a decade after the birth of the RSS standard. Better late than never, I suppose.

FCC Connect is also good news: once you have an RSS feed, there’s really no reason not to pipe that feed into as many platforms as possible—which is precisely why RSS isn’t dead, even if most people will never use an RSS reader.

But I’m less thrilled about the crowdsourcing platform. It’s not that it’s not a good idea; it is: The site allows users to submit suggestions, comment on suggestions,  and vote them up or down—allowing the best ideas to rise to the top (at least in theory). This sort of functionality really could make the process of commenting to regulatory agencies much more interactive and democratic. But I don’t understand why the FCC invested time, effort and taxpayer dollars into developing a separate forum for just one of the many important issues currently before the FCC when the 10,000+ comments filed in the official docket on that issue (and many thousands more comments in many other dockets) are still unsearchable and essentially inaccessible to the public .

As I emphasized this morning, the FCC doesn’t need to build a fancy new search engine to open up access to these comments (although that might be nice). All the agency has to do is edit their robots.txt file to allow search engines like Google and Big to “crawl” the contents of the agency’s Electronic Filing Comment System (ECFS) database—which would be completely free and should take less than a minute. The FCC has already allowed crawling on some subdomains, such as the International Bureau’s filing system, which is mainly used for satellite licensing (for example). So… what’s the hold up, guys?

This matters a great deal because, like all federal agencies, the FCC is required by the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946 to give “consideration” to public comments on the agency’s regulatory proposals. Essentially, the comment process is one big “town hall,” and intended to give every citizen their right to be heard by the regulator. Fundamentally, this implements the “due process” guaranteed by the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. Even if the FCC were required to give “consideration” to the comments filed on the crowdsourcing platform, that wouldn’t diminish the need for transparency into the comments filed in the “Big Boys” area—ECFS. In short, Crowdsourcing may be a great way to engage the general public, but it’s no substitute for opening up the comments that matter most.

So what’s going on here? I certainly don’t think the FCC is intentionally creating a sideshow of Web 2.0 interactivity to divert from the inaccessibility of official dockets (although I fear that is the practical consequence). Instead, I can only assume this mis-prioritization of resources has to do with two factors:

1. The agency feels pressure to do something about the National Broadband Plan issue because that particular subject has reached a critical mass of public attention—but doesn’t care enough about fixing these problems across the board; and
2. The agency has caught a case of “Shiny Object Syndrome,” (SOS) the irresistible desire to try out some new Web 2.0 gadget that seems really cool, even if the time spent on that could be used to address issues of far higher priority.

Two final notes:

• The crowdsourcing platform built by the FCC has some serious problems: anonymous posting and commenting may sound great to the tin-foil hat privacy brigade, but as the top suggestion (currently with 27 votes) points out: “Anonymous, cookie-based voting is so easily game-able and therefore unreliable. User accounts are a better way to prevent multiple voting.” Since the FCC currently requires anyone submitting comments to provide their name and basic contact information, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask users to associate a name and e-mail address with suggestions, comments or votes they submit on the crowdsourcing platform. Of course, there’s nothing to stop anyone from using a pseudonym, but… that’s how just about every blog comment area on the web works!
• The FCC needs a modern Content Management System. The announcement of today’s news isn’t available in HTML on the FCC website.  Instead, users have to go FCC.gov > updates > recent releases to find a list of releases, each with a link to the document in .doc, .pdf and .txt.  Here‘s the .txt of release announcing the FCC’s foray into social media—which looks as though it was sent by telegraph back when the Federal Communications Act was written back in 1934.

Again, we need to realize that government will always be behind the times. So why trust them to get it right when it comes to regulating the Digital Revolution?

I have been asked to testify at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Thursday, March 19, 2009. It is entitled “Preventing Stimulus Waste and Fraud: Who Are the Watchdogs?” [PDF] and it will focus on accountability for stimulus spending. I will talk about how third parties can build interesting tools to help citizens find and sort spending, jobs, and performance information if only government provides the data in a complete, timely, and standardized manner.

As a way to illustrate the concept of crowdsourcing to the Committee (and to make myself seem smarter than I am) I thought I would ask you all to help me edit the testimony. I have set up a wiki with my draft written testimony on it. Please feel free to add anything I may have missed and to make any changes you see fit.

To contribute, you will need to click the “Edit” button and then ask for permission to edit the wiki (it doesn’t let me give automatic access). I will grant you permission immediately. My testimony is due by C.O.B. tomorrow, and I will incorporate all changes that I would feel comfortable testifying to.

Thanks for your help!