General agreement is not how it works. Consensus is. General consensus is used in open source projects for code, and even in Bitcoin, but that’s just code. To get people to run the code you need support from all parties.
I understand that Ideal Money does not touch the concept of medium of exchange, which is why it suggests for government money to be based on Ideal Money. If Ideal Money is also a very good medium of exchange, there is no reason for government currencies to exist. I don’t think Nash had any objections to this idea.
Dor Nehemia hasn’t been active on Medium yet. Check back later to see their stories, claps, and highlights.
Entrepreneur in Monterrey, Mexico; interested in food, nutrition, and health. https://twitter.com/llovan0
I’ll never forget my satisfaction after typing in the first few lines of code I ever wrote into a black screen with a green cursor on an Apple II. I must’ve been 6 or 7 years old. It was amazing to watch the computer do what I was “telling” it to do. I don’t remember what the code was that I copied from that dusty old book, but I quickly progressed to writing my own original code after experimenting and tinkering with examples.
Today the choices of languages, frameworks, and even IDEs can be daunting and confusing, but never have there been so many resources at our disposal for learning: Wikipedia, GitHub, YouTube, etc., etc…
Maria Angela Marques hasn’t been active on Medium yet. Check back later to see their stories, claps, and highlights.
A middle aged man on a quest to track down and re-acquire 97 autographed albums that he used to own. 13 down, 84 to go.
While I wait for delivery of two more records this week, I want to let you know about a big (to me at least) update:
I re-read what I write. Not often, I just know that I sometimes struggle to put my thoughts into English language sentences. I also know that I can go off on dry tangents about the ritual of listening to records on vinyl, so I re-read what I write to try to improve it. What I’ve noticed is that I refer to this as “The Project” way too often. It reminds me of “The Manhattan Project” or “Project X”. This thing needs a name.
This project has already given me more than I expected since I started it in November. Now, six months later, with a new round of funding, I guess it’s going to be here for a while (88 records to go) so it deserves a name and a dedicated Twitter acccount. After much thought, I’ve decided to call it………
I know it’s not clever. There’s no alliteration, no room for a cute logo, the anachronym isn’t good unless I get a lot of traffic from people misspelling RSVP. What it does is give me a new short way to describe what I’m doing. It also allows me to give it a Twitter account, @VRSProject and a new outlet for getting the word out. Thanks for reading!
Michael Blaker hasn’t been active on Medium yet. Check back later to see their stories, claps, and highlights.
The first version of Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software was written as an invited contribution to the Human to Human issue of XRDS: Crossroads, the Association of Computing Machinery’s student magazine. After a series of presentations on diversity-friendly software, it seemed like an exciting opportunity to bring broaden awareness among budding computer scientists of important topics that are generally overlooked both in university courses and the industry.
The CHI paper What’s at Issue: Sex, Stigma, and Politics in ACM Publishing (by Alex Ahmed, Judeth Oden Choi, Teresa Almeida, Kelly Ireland, and me) explores the underlying institutional and sociopolitical problems this episode (and others involved in editing the Human to Human issue) highlights. What’s at Issue also proposes starting points for future action for HCI-related research and academic publishing practices.
This revised version of Sex pleasure, and diversity-friendly software is written as a companion piece to What’s at Issue. After a brief background section, it includes extended (and lightly-edited) excerpts from the earlier version of the article, and my reflections on the experience and the opportunities it highlights for software engineering. An appendix includes a brief overview of techniques for diversity-friendly software, along with links to more detailed discussions.
The first version’s “background” section with intended as a quick overview for students and references for those who wanted to find out more. As four-paragraph intros go, it was decent enough, with some useful links including Lynn Shore et. al.’s Journal of Management paper “Inclusion and diversity in work groups: A review and model for future research”, Candice Morgan Harvard Business Review article What we learned from improving diversity rates at Pinterest (a good overview of learnings from a program that incorporates many current best practices), and a resource page with definitions and videos on intersectionality.
“Diversity” itself is an interesting subject. Dafina-Lazarus Stewart’s observation in Language of Appeasement that “by substituting diversity and inclusion rhetoric for transformative efforts to promote equity and justice, colleges have avoided recognizable institutional change” applies to the tech world and corporate America as well. So does Natasha Wariko’s point that centering diversity de-emphasizes racial justice. That said, many people working on diversity and inclusion in technology are also fiercely committed to equity and justice. It would be really great to have a term for “intersectional diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice with an explicit anti-racist, anti-sexist, trans-inclusive, LGBTQIA+ forward, accessible, anti-colonial stance””; Jill Dimond’s Anti-Oppressive Design is one promising direction.
Sites like Scarleteen, OMGYes, O.school, and Make Love Not Porn, by contrast, are led by women, and take a much broader and more inclusive view of their audience. Scarleteen was created and built based on what young people ask for, and its philosophy starts with “A foundation of equality, respect, dignity, fairness, consent, liberty, freedom of thought and expression and other core human rights.” OMGYes provides “knowledge for women and partners” and takes a science-based approach. O.school’s initial alpha test covered topics including “Negotiating Consent While Living with a Mental Illness” and “Healing from Religious Shame”, “Why Pleasure Matters”. and “Sexy Safe Sex”. Make Love Not Porn’s Cindy Gallop says “Everything we do is purely to make it easier to talk openly and honestly about sex in a public domain.”
Another high-profile case of algorithmic bias was reported by Julia Angwin et. al.’s Pulitizer-prize nominated Machine Bias series on Pro Publica: “There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals. And it’s biased against blacks.”
Social networks provide other examples of bias. Harassment and threats of violence primarily target women and gender-diverse people — especially women and gender-diverse people of color. Twitter essentially ignored this issue for years, and their more recent attempts to do something about it have been remarkably unsuccessful. Facebook’s moderation disproportionately penalizes activists of color.
Improving the diversity of the teams creating the software, and creating a more inclusive and equitable culture and environment, is one approach to reducing biases in software. More diverse teams will naturally tend to consider more dimensions of diversity. If a team developing facial recognition software has Black engineers, they’re likely to notice the absence of black faces in their data set — or test the software on pictures of themselves and discover that it doesn’t work. Similarly, if a team developing social network software includes women of color activists who have been targeted by harassers, they’re likely to pay more attention up front to moderation features and other defenses against harassment, and have a better understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve.
While improving diversity, inclusion, and equity in the software industry is an important priority, by itself it is not enough. As mentioned above, industry’s progress on this front been extremely slow. Not only that, there are so many different dimensions to diversity that any team will have gaps; and most software today is built largely from existing components — which embed biases.
Not so coincidentally, these companies are led by women of color, asexsual actvists, trans and non-binary people of color, and others who have traditionally been underrepresented in the software industry.
As software “eats the world” — and increasingly defines the power vectors and distribution of wealth in our society — it’s more important than ever that we consciously design and implement it in a way that empowers everybody.
Diverse, Inclusive People and Communities create software that embeds diversity — and in turn empowers the diverse people and communities who created it
To be clear, the ACM didn’t make the decision not to publish with an explicit anti-diversity goal. As mentiond above, the decision was driven by concerns about discussions of sex and sexuality offending ACM subscribers and members. As What’s at Issue points out, “challenging oppressive systems will be naturally considered offensive under them.”
Similar patterns occur elsewhere in academic publishing. Colleen Flaherty’s IEEE in trouble once again for allegedly minimizing work of female historians quotes Sarah T. Roberts: women and other historically marginalized groups whose “pathbreaking scholarship and very identities challenge the status quo find themselves frequently in the multiple binds of having their contributions minimized — unless and until that work attains a certain popular acceptance.”
The effects also impact the tech startup ecosystem. Being mentioned in an article in a publication from a well-respected organization like ACM (or IEEE) is an important source of credibility and legitimacy. Skilled founders like the ones whose companies are mentioned here can use that credibility as an asset in getting media coverage and even funding; technical employees at those companies can casually bring it up in future job interviews. “We were mentioned in an article that didn’t get published but turned into a really interesting case study about systemic oppression” doesn’t have the same effect.
Software as it is today — and the effect it has on the rest of the world — has largely been shaped by these kinds of patterns. A huge amount of effort (and zillions of dollars) goes to improving ad targeting, unethical tracking, and blockchain; almost none on countering harassment or providing accessibility. Sites like Stack Overflow reward arrogance and shaming and exclude women and people of color, and as April Wensel rightly highlights, cause a lot of suffering. Y Combinator’s founder Paul Graham has a history of sexist statements; Y Combinator’s Hacker News discussion site is known for misogyny, nativism, and suppressing discussions of diversity. Only 0.2% of venture-funded founders are Black women. Facebook’s “move fast and break things” philosophy leads to massive privacy breaches and stolen elections, while their failure curb hate speech against Muslims contributes to violence in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. The list goes on …
The good news, though, is that there are more and more people who understand this and are working to counter it. The alt.chi track in the CHI conference provides a venue for work like What’s at Issue to critique accepted practices and challenge power and privilege. In response to the RSA security conference’s initial all-male speaker list, the community quickly organized the extremely diverse OurSA conference. Recent books like Safiya Umoja Noble, Ph.D.’s Algorithms of Oppression, Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality, and Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech have received excellent reviews — and the publicity associated with them helps bring awareness more broadly. Sarah T. Roberts (who I quoted a few paragraphs ago) has just been awarded a Carnegie Fellowship for her research on information work, information workers, and content moderation. Project Include provides detailed resources for companies that are trying to be more inclusive. VC’s like Arlan Hamilton’s Backstage Capital are gaining a strategic advantage by investing in underestimated founders. This list goes on as well — and it’s much more exciting.
Historical and current biases in software engineering and computer science are now embedded in the tools and processes we use to build software, and the building blocks that we use to create complex systems. How can we do better?
“Diversity-friendly software” is the term I’ve been using for the last several years to group together research and practice — some of which is very well developed, although very few people have heard of it.
The earlier version of Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software included a discussion about how several diversity-friendly software techniques — a robust code of conduct, pseudonymity and support for self- determination of gender pronouns, effective chat moderation, and threat modeling for harassment — applied to sex and pleasure education software. As with the background section, it made sense in the context of the article. As What’s at Issue notes,
Gender HCI, Feminist HCI, and Post-Colonial Computing summarizes some key research in these specific areas, and includes several videos. The GenderMag resources in particular — structured cognitive walkthroughs and personas for finding gender-linked software issues — are something that almost any software engineering team can apply.
There’s a substantial amount of related work out there — although mostly out of the academic mainstream. Algorithmic bias in particular has gotten a lot of attention these days; Emily Drabinski’s Ideologies of Boring Things: The Internet and Infrastructures of Race (a review of Safiya Umoja Noble, Ph.D.’s book Algorithms of Oppression), Cordelia Fine’s Coded prejudice: how algorithms fuel injustice (a review of Algorithms of Oppression and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality), and Ian Tucker’s ‘A white mask worked better’: why algorithms are not colour blind (an interview with Joy Buolamwini) are good starting points. On pseudonymity, J. Nathan Mathis’, The Real Name Fallacy on The Coral Project and the Geek Feminism Wiki’s Who is Harmed by a Real Names Policy should be mandatory reading for anybody designing software that relates to identity.
Image credits: photo of Malkia Cyril at Personal Democracy Forum by originally tweeted by @anxiaostudio (an xiao mina); other images from Supporting Diversity with a New Approach To Software, with Tammarrian Rogers.
For many street food vendors, small shop owners and thousands of entrepreneurs like them across Indonesia, access to financial services that can help them to meet their needs often lies outside their reach. With the uptick in the number of sophisticated financial technologies, there are emerging opportunities that can aid the delivery of faster and more efficient services in developing countries. To promote resilience and growth within Indonesia’s unbanked micro business sector, Pulse Lab Jakarta is collaborating with the Government of Australia on a research project to understand the experiences of early fintech adopters among those enterprises.
Micro and small-to-medium enterprises (MSME) in Indonesia employ more than 107 million people, contributing to more than half of the county’s GDP. In 2016, the Government launched a National Strategy for Financial Inclusion which aims to provide regulatory support for banking institutions as they work to guarantee more Indonesians’ access to financial services. Following this, the Financial Services Authority (OJK) announced that more progressive financial technology regulations — designed to promote financial inclusion — were also underway.
More than just a buzzword, financial inclusion focuses on ensuring that individuals, regardless of income levels, have access to appropriate financial services. The broader goal is to help improve welfare, by removing barriers to safe and efficient means of conducting financial transactions. For micro enterprises in particular, financial inclusion can contribute to the growth of their businesses with improved access to convenient financial services and products.
With the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Australia and in collaboration with the Indonesia Fintech Association (AFTECH), Pulse Lab Jakarta’s research project — called ‘Banking on Fintech: Financial Inclusion for Micro Enterprises in Indonesia’ — aims to contribute to the Government of Indonesia’s financial inclusion goals by uncovering behavioural and data analysis insights on micro enterprises as potential users of financial technology.
Roughly 99 per cent of all businesses in Indonesia are micro enterprises, according to the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs. The Government defines micro enterprises as ‘productive businesses owned by an individual and/or group of individuals that have net assets worth a maximum of Rp.50 million (not inclusive of land and buildings where the business is located) or an annual sales revenue that do not exceed Rp. 300 million’.
To narrow our focus, we are initially researching micro enterprises from the food and beverages as well as retail sectors, since enterprises in these sectors have the highest interaction frequency when it comes to supplier-customer exchanges. Our emphasis on behavioural insights stems from the realisation that: while financial inclusion efforts should be pioneered by higher-level policymaking, it must also be supported with a clear understanding of the realities of the target users.
Beyond understanding the users’ realities, we expect to translate our insights into opportunities that can act as incentives for the financial service industry, in addition to informing the improvement and creation of effective financial services for the unbanked population.
Prior to commencing our user research, we reviewed a series of publications and related work to gather informed insights relating to the unbanked population in Indonesia. We uncovered three main findings, which we used to inform our baseline knowledge on the issue.
First, most people who are unbanked are of the opinion that living in a cash-based ecosystem does not pose a significant enough problem that warrants a change in habits. Therefore, services might have to be designed to cater to their current cash-based habits, instead of completely excluding their existing habits and pushing for a complete behavioural change.
Secondly, most people who are ‘financially excluded’ are inclined to use informal financial mechanisms such as cooperatives or lending groups. This social dimension promotes trustworthiness and acts as a sort of active reminder that encourages users to save.
Finally, users interact with financial services according to individual habits and needs at different points in their lives. Services should thus be able to cater to the needs of different business-owners and to the medium- and long-term needs of their businesses.
Recognising that there is extensive research investigating some of the behavioural barriers to getting the unbanked population aboard, we have taken note of a number of key financial service providers in Indonesia that have indeed succeeded at converting the unbanked to banked. Our main question therefore is: Why, despite the same obstacles and behavioural barriers, have some micro enterprises made the leap and began to use these services?
Today, many financial institutions are adopting initiatives to advance financial inclusion for individuals who are unbanked, notably through digital financial services. As part of our research project, we will engage with a number of these pioneering services to identify the gap between early adopters of financial technology and those that are unbanked. We aspire to uncover learnings from these early adopters’ stories and translate them into opportunities for the rest of the unbanked population.
We are currently developing partnerships with those who have committed to supporting the financial inclusion agenda and aim to incorporate our findings to create prototypes by mid-2018. We will keep you posted as we progress — stay tuned!