The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - With great power comes great responsibility (Interview)

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

Adam and Jerod are joined by JS Party panelist Nick Nisi and #causeascene advocate Kim Crayton for a deep discussion on ethics in the technology industry at-large and our roles as software developers. If you've never heard Kim describe what life is like online for underrepresented and marginalized folks, you _have to_ listen to this show!

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with products like droplets, spaces spaces kubernetes load balancers block storage and pre-built one-click apps you can deploy manage and scale cloud applications faster and more efficiently on digital ocean whether you're running one virtual machine or 10 000 digital ocean makes managing your infrastructure way too easy. Get started for free with a $100 credit. Head to do.co slash changelog. Again, do.co slash changelog. All right, welcome back, everyone. This is the Change Local podcast featuring the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of software development. I'm Adam Stachowiak, Editor-in-Chief here at ChangeLog.

Today on the show, Jared and I are joined by Nick Nisi, JS Party panelist, and hashtag cause-of-scene advocate Kim Creighton for a deep discussion on ethics in the technology industry at large and our roles as software makers and developers. Now, if you've never heard Kim talk about what life is like online for underrepresented groups or marginalized folks, this is a show you don't want to miss. Hello and happy UTC time to you, wherever you are listening to this, whenever you are listening to this, just adjust that to your locale. Hey, this is a little bit different changelog today. A little bit of a hybrid.

We are mixing and matching JS Party with the changelog. We hope you like it. As I say on JS Party sometimes, if it's bad, we apologize in advance. And if it's awesome, we'll thank you in advance. So you can be the judge of that. I'm joined today by an awesome panel, JS Party style. First of all, we have a special guest, Kim Creighton. Kim, welcome to The Change Law.

Thank you for inviting me. Happy to be here. Kim, you are the Chief Encouragement Officer, CEO. I love that. Chief Encouragement Officer for Underrepresented and Marginalized in Tech. Now, if you haven't met Kim, you probably haven't been to a technology-focused conference lately where she's been doing awesome keynotes, even dancing into the room sometimes, really powerful, enjoyable, awesome talks. Everybody else, Kim, I bet who's met you,

knows exactly who we're talking to here. Yeah, they either. It's the, when you just said, if you like the show, that's great in advance. If you don't, we apologize in advance. I come with a disclaimer as well. And so I just like to put that out. My slides, the first one has my name. The second one, no, the first one has my talk title, whatever I'm doing. The second one has my name and all my Twitter stuff so you can follow. And my third one is a trigger warning. My job is to make white people uncomfortable.

So that's how we roll. Very cool. Very cool. Well, I love people who put it out there like this is what you're going to get and there's no surprises. So that's awesome. Now, Nick Nisi is here. Nick, this is not JS Party, but here you are. Welcome. Thanks. I'm happy to be here. So Nick and I actually met Kim a couple of years back at NEJSConf. We are co-organizers of that conference as well as co-panelists on JS Party. And Nick and I had Kim's keynote at NEJS Conf. And Nick, you were dressed up as a wizard, isn't that right? Always.

I mean, especially that day. Because it was Tuesday. Yeah. That's your Tuesday costume. So a little backstory on that. Nick is the emcee at NEJS Conf. And every year we have a different theme for the conference. And whatever the theme, Nick will dress up in a costume on theme.

So he's been a wizard. He's been a train conductor. He's been a safari leader. I don't know. What else have you been, Nick? An astronaut. Those three and an astronaut. Very cool.

Well, it wouldn't be the changelog without Adam. So of course he's been waiting here silently to be introduced. Adam Stack, what's up, man? Hey man, how are you? I'm good. I'm feeling a little odd. I don't know if I should do the changelog shtick. I should do the JS party shtick, but do them both. So we have a topic today and our panel will take up the topic. It can be a bit of a touchy subject. It's definitely an interesting and a very relevant subject that all of us face on a day-to-day basis in different ways. And it really has to do with our relationship with regard to our ethics and our own morals and that relationship with organizations or corporations. So the genesis of this conversation

came from two different places. So first of all, another JS Party panelist, Chris Hiller, aka Boneskull. Boneskull brought this up as a potential JS Party topic, and it is this idea of ethics with regard to software engineering, with regard to companies that we work for. Let me just read a little bit about that, what he said with regard to this website that popped up called npmuninstallfacebook.com. And he said this is similar to conversations around ethics and software engineering traditionally. And he put a question mark there. So, you know, it's controversial. Developers have felt exempted from asking these types of tough questions of themselves and the companies they work for.

And in recent years, many are saying, yes, you have a responsibility to be ethical. At the same time, others vehemently disagree. But the interesting thing he said is, does this same question not only concern the software that you yourself build, but does it also extend to the software that you consume? And so that I think is maybe the new conversation that we're starting to have, which we haven't in previous years or generations. So the other thing that kicked us off is a website, which I previously mentioned called npmuninstallfacebook.com. We'll link to that in the show notes. And so this is a list of open source projects that are alternatives to open source projects created or substantially backed by Facebook. And so this was put up by a UK-based designer, Andy Bell, and has generated some controversy, some conversations about this topic.

And I'll read what Andy said here, just setting the stage for what we're all going to discuss. He says that Facebook's relentless abuse of their position is making them difficult to support. Unfortunately, their products and open source projects have a large impact on our everyday lives. Some people understandably want to distance themselves as far as possible from Facebook. So this site provides alternatives to well-known Facebook products or products that are heavily reliant on Facebook technologies.

He says this is not a call to boycott Facebook or their open source contributions. People are, of course, welcome to make those decisions on their own, et cetera, et cetera. So he has a website of alternatives if this is something that you want to look into. And he says people are, of course, welcome to make those decisions on their own. I think that's the key bit.

And that's really what we'd like to talk about is making those decisions and all of the different things that go into those decisions and how we can make healthy decisions for ourselves, for our friends and families, for the community at large, etc. One thing I would like to note before we get into the thick of it is that while this website and a lot of this conversation will use Facebook as the example, we do not necessarily want this to become a, we don't want to look at the particular aspects of what Facebook is doing and focus solely on that. We want to use Facebook as a lens for the bigger discussion of organizations whose values, whose actions contradict or offend our own. And so I just like to put that out there. We have listeners at Facebook. We have Facebook contributing to open source. We're not here to trash on you. We're here to have a conversation. And Facebook has brought a lot of these things to the forefront because of things the company

does and because of the huge contributions to open source and that dichotomy. Okay. So with that said, I would love to start this conversation thinking about it from the consumer perspective. So consuming organizational products and our relationship to organizations, whether it's Pepsi, Facebook, your local grocery store, whatever it is, where do we draw lines with regard to our use, our consumption of businesses, things, and the beliefs or the actions of the businesses themselves. I'll open it up for anybody to hop in. I'm going to start with, there's a question that is even below that.

Okay. And this is a question that, why I'm so challenging and pushed back in this space is because the vast amount of individuals who are asking these questions aren't in that position or have the lived experience or the perspective to even begin to answer these questions. And it is when we do not prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable in our community, these things happen. And these are the questions we need to have. So when people, I am not a diversity or an inclusion person. I am a business strategist.

And I am always talking about lack of inclusion is a risk management issue. Lack of inclusion is a risk management issue. And based on, we're looking at Facebook as the case study today. Move fast and break things was not, and that was, you know, just, you know, a way to do things. That's how development was done. And then you just kept going.

You really didn't stop to think about what you broke and how it broke and how it affected people. You just kept moving on and on and on and that is what is undergirded in our whole community currently it is this this this keep moving keep moving keep moving keep moving at all costs right um and so 10 years later, you have, oh, crap, we kept moving. And now you're seeing the negative outcomes. But that was the intent, though. The intent was to break things. But you just did not have the perspective of how those broken things were going to impact a larger community.

And that is where the conversations I like to have. Because when you don't have the people who are going to be most vulnerable and have to deal with the impact of you breaking things at the table to have these discussions, you won't see it until 10 years out because now what it becomes is all this stuff is like a parasite.

It now becomes eating on those people who created it. Marginalized group has been talking about the pain of this for years. It's not just Facebook. It's Twitter, it's Reddit. It's all of these spaces. It's Stack Overflow. It's all of these spaces.

We've been saying that we don't feel welcome. They're not safe for us. But now that it's bothering you guys, now it's, oh my God, let's run from Facebook. But we've been telling you it's been a problem. We told you that bots were out way before everybody started talking about bots. And these are the conversations we need to have. We need to, it's, having diversity on a team is not a good to have. It is a business imperative. Because at some point, we are going to start being held accountable legally for the breaking things and the problems we're causing. Absolutely. So let's talk about the perspective of an individual with regard to relationships to these organizations who are moving fast and breaking things. From a consumer level, I guess, where are our levers and when and how do we pull them in order to forward the marginalized, in order to forward our own lives and not contribute to the problem, but contribute somehow to the solution? Well, one of the things is we.

So when people when people, you know, are because I'm looking at this list of things right um all of these things that are on this uninstalled Facebook are things that only a subgroup of people can do anything with when we're talking about your average consumer where we made our mistake was, I believe, as an industry, was the narrative that tech, computers, and technology is always right, and you're safe with us. So the average consumer did not ask questions, did not think that it was necessary to understand all these things that they were checking off. When we look at, you get a new app and they're like, do you want to sign up with Facebook or Google? Because that's easier.

The average person is going to say, yes, I'm always, nope, we're going to do email because then I can control these things. You're not going to be connecting all these things up. But the average consumer does not know that because they've been told, we've told them, they've been trained very well, that this technology that we're creating is infallible. It is the thing that's going to solve all these problems. So when you look at Facebook, that was it. They were trying to solve this problem and they created so many more by doing that. So it's the thing of, it's hard when you have a grandmother who lives in one part of the country or one part of the world to disconnect from Facebook when their grandkids are on the other side of the world and she wants to see them and talk to them.

Right. Yeah. I mean, that's why I think it's fundamentally a little bit different conversations at the consumer level versus maybe the open source level like this NPM uninstall Facebook. These are these are open source project alternatives and so it's really just at a much deeper more a tighter higher level or deeper and higher level those are opposites but really speaking to developers right what we can do potentially to disassociate from these projects uh the consumer level conversation i know adam you've been thinking about this a lot is much more broad sweeping is much more difficult And a lot of it I think plays into, it's very difficult to compete with free, especially when you can't afford to not to choose something that costs,

right? Like free Gmail versus pay money for fast mail or for an email service that will protect your privacy. Just for one example, it's as a person who has means, I can make that decision because I can deal with the $5 or the $20 a month, whatever it is. But for a huge group of humanity, like free is the only choice. And when they aren't informed about what they're actually trading for that free, then they're undermined. Right. Because I would,

I would assume that many of them if they truly knew what they were trading, I would pay $5 a month because it's no different than when you had the phone plugged into your wall. We're used to, we were used to paying for things and when we couldn't, there were systems and programs available that help those who could not pay. Right. It's the, but when you attach free to that, um, you're right. People don't think about, and, and because we've trained them that we got you, we got you, we're, you know, we got your best interest at heart. Well, Adam's best interest

and my best interest, I'm sure, are not the same things. And it's not. No, I'm going to be honest. And it's not that one is worse than the other. We don't have the same lived experiences. Right. But with regard to privacy, you think you have different best interests, for example? Probably.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Can you? Because, well, I'm going to suggest for, so with the work that I do with hashtag cause a scene, I'm currently, um,

have people in my community who have made sure that I have the resources, financial resources and otherwise to make sure that my personal information has been taken off, um, all these brokerage things. So I don't get doxxed. Um, and many of you don't aren't thinking about that. That's not how you're living your life. I'm really pushing the envelope. And I'm thinking, because even when I'm speaking at conferences, when I spoke at your conference, my threat level has gone up. So I'm thinking when I'm going to conferences, when you bring me in to speak, have you thought about my security? Right. Okay. So I see what you're saying with regards to the

magnitude of the need. But fundamentally, both of you have need for privacy. Exactly. Yours is tantamount, whereas his is, just for example, Adam, is not as uh tantamount it's not as paramount or compulsory well I wouldn't even say that it's just different it's just he has different concerns I have concerns like on Facebook I've had to make sure my mom and my cousins or whatever don't attach me as friends so that people cannot go back and harass them yeah so they can't find me that way so these are the things I'm having to think about. Do you think about those things? If not, what you think about doesn't make it wrong. But that means you don't have the perspective to make those decisions when you're building these things out that will protect me.

Right. I think anytime you build something, you have a diverse set of people's concerns. You know, like I may not be aware of the particulars of your concerns, but I think as software makers, you know, we say often here on this show and others, and you've heard me say this year, there's a human on the other side of this code and we have to take that into account.

You know, not a particular color person or a race color person or anything like that. It's a human. And we have to as fellow humans, we have to take everyone's concerns at heart when building technology. It's responsible

ways to build. So I'm fully with you on that. Yeah, and it seems like the move fast and break things is explicitly not doing that, right? I would say, I would argue that they probably thought they were and and i mean i'm looking again when i'm looking at twitter and and facebook and and how they're rolling out these new things they okay this is my role okay it's to push back

because i'm gonna i'm gonna disagree because just because it's humans, that is the problem. Whiteness assumes that everyone is having the same experience. We are not. We are not. Where you feel safe, I do not. So just human is not enough for me and my safety. And that's where we're missing the boat. So I'm not saying we have to just,

you know, get rid of white guys. And no, I'm saying we need to bring other people in these and have these conversations that challenge this narrative because human is, it's the same thing as all white people. No, it's not the same. We have very different needs. And yes, we are human and we don't want to, at that level, it's a very broad level, not cause harm, but we see it happening every day. And I'm going to tell you, I'm sure that Twitter had the same, you know, these are humans. You can see the stuff that they're rolling out and the people that they're now blocking. And it's like, it's activists. It's people who are raising their voice and saying, hey, we've been hurt, but we're the ones that are getting blocked. Right. So the difficult part with corporations, sorry, Nick, you can definitely hop in here, is that a corporation is a bunch of people acting as one, so it's very difficult to, I've said this before, is to attach either benevolence or evil or any sort of like human characteristic onto a corporation.

Now we know that they have incentive structures and the ultimate incentive structure of these corporations is the bottom line because that moves the stockholder value, which is their ultimate goal. And so like that incentive structure definitely informs the way the organization works as a whole, which we know starts at leadership. But there's so many individuals that it's difficult to say like they thought they were doing the right thing. It's like, who are they? You know, certain people probably did, certain people probably didn't. It's just very difficult to kind of pierce that corporate veil and see the people inside there. Nick, you were going to say something? I was going to say something kind of along those lines, but related to what Kim is saying,

I think that maybe the problem sets that they're trying to solve for just aren't solving for the problems that Kim has and others have, maybe because there is a lack of diversity. And that's just a well-known thing in this industry. So it's definitely stemming from that, or most likely stemming from that. And the thing is, what I'm saying and how people take it, it's not about moving resources or expending more resources. When we focus on the most vulnerable, everybody is taken care of.

Everybody feels safe. That's just the way that is. So speaking to what Nick just said, it's about you're solving the wrong problems. The problems you think are important. Like every city now has scooters on every corner. I have nothing. But Atlanta is a car city.

Talk about dangerous. Atlanta is a car city. Why do we need, what business model is this? What problem are they solving? If they're not over by Georgia Tech or by Emory, what problem are they solving? I don't know. Is that a problem that this community needs? And without those individuals at the table,

and so it's not about, you know, again, getting rid of white guys or flooding people, I mean, companies with, you know, people of color, even though that would be great. I mean, even just to move the numbers some would be great. But it's about having people, and not tokenizing people, coming to these communities and saying, you know what? We screwed up. We don't know how to fix this because you don't.

What are your, what, how is the A affecting you and causing you harm and B because you don't even see it. So it's not even, it's not even about blame. I do not know what it's like to be a white guy. I don't know what it's like to be a white woman. I don't know what it's like to be a person of Asian descent. I about ethics when we're seeing it right now, when it comes to we saw it in the 2016 election. It amplified in the 18 and it's going crazy now coming up to 20 with these bots that are mimicking and the voices of black women. I'm not familiar with this. What is... Exactly. And this is what I'm talking about. There's been a lot of research on this. So the Russian bots that were on Facebook in 2016, the reports and stuff,

and black women have said this before, what they were doing were targeting black communities with disinformation on both sides, but they were mimicking a black woman's voice. So their vernacular and the things they were saying. And so- Like an actual voice or written tone? It was all in textual. Yeah. So, you know, like trying to use our, how we say words or whatever, but the avatar was a black woman and all the pictures on there were, you know, like, and it's happening now big time with now that there are two, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have announced it has exploded. And you see it on Twitter.

It is. And when the white dudes who are in info security come into my DMs, bringing it to my attention, because now they see it, there's a problem. You know it's in big numbers at that point. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And they're seeing it and they're commenting on it and they're like, oh my God, what is going on?

And we're like, we've been talking about this. I did actually two of my podcast episodes were called text attack on black women. Some people saw this back and some people can attribute this to Gamergate. Some people can attribute this to fandom. It's been happening in fandom circles where they were testing out some of these bots. And now it's just on a huge scale. Do we know who they are when you say that like who is that um i did like i said i did two episodes with a person who is um her

one's named asher she was attacked and her her group were attacked they used to watch um i forgot as a disney show um but they had a fandom and then I did several actually I'll drop it because I did several episodes yeah give us those links and we'll put them in the show notes for this episode

yeah because I actually I did so Digital Sisters won and then I went to two professors who are white individuals who have been studying this stuff as well

so I've really been I've talked to like the person who wrote Automating Inequality I've interviewed been, I've talked to, like, the person who wrote Automating Inequality. I've interviewed the author of Technically Wrong. I've been hitting all these different things to get this message out that these communities are being inundated and being harmed by this stuff. And so if you're telling me that, I know I have a small community, but the fact that this is new to you and this has been on the news, this has been in the press, this is one of the things that Twitter was, when Jack went to Congress to talk about, these things are huge.

And it started in the Facebook community. Yeah. So it's important that these things are brought up because like you said the fact that i knew that some of this was going on i didn't know it was specifically targeted or imitating uh black women accounts or black women um the question that i always come to is like everything starts with the conversation so you know what can we be doing about it well like we're having the conversations we're bringing awareness to the fact that this is happening that's a starting point that's the that's what you've been out there doing causing a scene right like you've been doing this this work to bring you

know to represent the people who who aren't here to talk for themselves and so that's awesome um when it comes to like ethics and technology you know is and i know you're not saying who's to blame but like is it to twitter to fix because we all agree that like these bots are unethical and this is ridiculous and like if we if we had a red button we could push it that stopped this from ever happening again we'd push 99 99 of us everybody except for the guy who's running the bot account right we push that stinking button immediately and be like this is ridiculous push the button know, who has, is there a button? Can Twitter fix this?

You know, do we hold, how do we hold them to the fire, et cetera? I don't know. Well, one of the things is, let's get to the ethics thing. So I did a closing keynote at the 2018 at JSConf, Scotland JS, excuse me. And my topic was do no harm. I think that was and I was talking about we need a Hippocratic Oath. Tech is although it it goes across every industry. I mean, tech drives every and this is why I stay optimistic, though, because please don't think that I'm pessimistic at all. The fact that I'm in tech and I can have these conversations, I can have these conversations in law and medicine. It's only because tech is now grappling with these things that I can have

these conversations. I can be as blunt and honest as I need to be to get people to understand. And once tech figures this out, other industries will have to change. So I love being in this space because I feel so empowered. And so we need to talk about a Hippocratic oath. We need to, and I'm not even talking about legislation. I'm not even talking about when people are talking about, yes, there needs to be help for employees. I don't know if that looks like a union or what that looks like, but we've done a lot of things based on privileges that everybody didn't have in this space because we could, because there was, we didn't, no one had our hands to the fire. So we need to go back and look at ethics. Is there, is, is there a, can we come up with a code of ethics that is universally just

agreed on? Just like if you want to practice medicine, if you want to practice law, these are things you have to agree on. And when you are proven to have violated those, there are several sanctions or consequences to those behaviors. Right now, we don't have that. We don't have anything that's worthy of, if I do wrong, will I be held accountable? We don't have that. I mean, you look at when they all went to Congress and the questions that were being asked. Those senators have no idea what they were talking about. They really have no clue, do they?

And so all of us techies are sitting there watching like, what, what, what? You know, because we're like, no. The internet is a series of tubes. Yes. You get answers like that. Yes. And so they're not even informed so i don't want them

making any legislation that curtails our abilities to innovate right and and and no i would rather us decide for ourselves that you know what this is not personal this is not i don't think they're as you said i don't think there are tons of bad agents out there. They're just people who cannot make choices for other people. And that's why I put myself in that as well. If I'm a nurse or if I'm a doctor, if this is not my specialty, what do I do? I go ask someone else who specializes in that. Why is that so hard to believe? And why is for us so hard for us to grasp?

And why does that not equate to value in money? So why do people want to continue to talk to me about this and think I'm supposed to do this for free? Where if your direct deposit as a developer didn't hit your bank account, you'd be really pissed off. That was another question we need to talk about. No, absolutely. But that does cross the line now in open source because it's a whole different game. No, no, that's not open source. I'm not open source. I'm a business person. Well, I know, but when you talk about developers putting their time in without getting paid, you are talking about open source. No, no, I was talking about people who work at a company. I said if their direct deposit did not hit their accounts,

these are people who are being employed as developers. I wasn't speaking about open source at that point. I'm talking about if your job is to go to work and write code and you get a agreed upon amount and that check did not go into your account on the 1st and the 15th, you would have a problem with it. Why are my skills so downgraded as to, oh, let's have coffee. No, I'm not doing free consulting. This episode is brought to you by GitPrime.

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self-regulation or um what we need? Twitter and Facebook? Every industry starts with associations. Why don't we have associations? Why don't we have gills? Why don't we have something that people, just like this conversation we're having, you said we need to start with the conversations. We're not having the conversations and we're not having the conversations in volumes enough and it's scaling enough for people to understand this. Just like I tell people all the time time I understand why the google manifesto guy was upset I totally get it he was being required to do stuff that he absolutely did not sign up for and did not want to do it and this is why his his his um his his um his case was thrown out with the

with the employment people because what you did was not violate that. What you did was violate company policies, which is when you sign that contract, what you said on with inside and using your company's equipment caused a problem for your company. That's why you got fired. Not for what you said. It's how you said it and how you did that. Why would we force people who have absolutely no desire to understand unconscious bias to force them? It's not changing anything. We need to have these honest conversations. I need to hear him or people like this. What about this do you not think is good for the bottom line? So this is why I say I don't even talk about this from this is the right thing to do or this is this hard. No, this is about business. So let's talk about the

association idea. You know, if you have an association, you know, is it a global association? Is it, hey, you cannot be you cannot put code on his server and run it in certain capacities unless you agree to these oaths or things like that. Like, how do you see that playing out? Is it a country basis? Is it a global basis? Because I do see like you got associations for dentistry, right? Or you pick your trade. You've got some sort of association that may not be the only bar to cross or agree to to play but there's some sort

of enforcement and that requires um representation responsibility and then clearly just the ability to enforce how do you do that well at this point we still have people who are upset that we have codes of conduct we we need to get that across. That is a bare minimum. A code of conduct is so reactionary. That is putting the bare minimum in. That's what I tell people. Please do not copy or paste the code of conduct. Please do not put a code of conduct in and thinking that's going to solve your problems. A code of conduct is the very bare minimum of what it takes for everybody to feel that they can participate in in any community and we still have people who are arguing about that we have people arguing that we should change

the wording from master slave and that's an open source right why is that an argument why i don't why is that an argument it's it's it's so it's it's we can We need to get to those. I don't even think we're anywhere near an association because we can't even have the conversations. And this is why when people are like, why did you start hashtag cause a scene, blah, blah, blah. Because I got sick of people getting to the line of discomfort and backing back up. Let's go through the discomfort so we can get to the other side. Because right now we are causing harm to all stakeholders, people who work for us, people who invest in us, people who buy from us, and people who partner with us. We're causing harm to our

global community that we should not be doing. And we need to have these conversations. Yes, they're uncomfortable. They're uncomfortable for me. Do you think I want to have these conversations? No. Do you think I want to have these conversations over and over and over again? No. But I do it because I recognize they're necessary. Also, because I'm an educator. I know it takes, I am certified special needs.

I had students of all levels in my class. We all had to get to the same finish line, but I recognize that everybody wasn't going to get to that same finish line the same way at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Repetition is the key to education. The timing too. I mean, you know, sometimes people don't come to a conversation as soon as they could or should, or their awareness is behind others. You know, there's always going to be, you know, a trickle effect, so to speak to, you know, your awareness to something to Jared's awareness and my awareness of it. And then at the same time, you know, how, you know, how impactful it is to my personal life if I get involved in the conversation or if it's, if I'm motivated to, so everybody has a version of

that for themselves. You know, I don't know how you, I'm glad that you repeat yourself because that that's, you need that remembrance and repetition in scenes like that because you know i may begin to follow your twitter feed and get caught up today whereas someone else has been following you for six months to a year whatever the number is and they're more aware of these concerns and you know for one i applaud you for your courage to do this kind of stuff because that's what it takes and two like we want you on this kind of show to share these kinds of things because we just don't know or we're just not that aware.

And we need that as a community, not just as individuals. And that's been the thing. And again, I'm going to push back because I don't do this because I'm courageous. I do it because it has to happen. It has to happen. What I can't abide by is the, like I said, the grandma who's getting,

who's, all she wants to do is see her kids, her grandkids, and her, all her personal information has been on the, it's just gone. It's just gone. She has no, she had no say in it. She had no, and you can say, yeah, she signed, she put, you know, she agreed to these terms. Dude, come on now. Ain't nobody reading that. You already know that.

You already know that. And so it's about. Or if there's a documentary about that. Yeah. And so this is about, so for me, it's, we need to come up with, this is where I start all. And I don't know if I did it at that talk. Because this is when I was really recognizing. I was morphing when I was at your conference, because I was really recognizing,

hmm, I need to bring some education to this. So I start every talk with, let's define these terms. So the terms are, so I start with privilege. Privilege is simply about access. It is not, people get so offended when people talk, privilege is simply about who has the access. Some environments I have access where others don't. Other environments you have access. So it's simply about access. Underrepresented is simply about numbers. How many of something is there as a part of the majority? How that is simply about numbers. Marginalized is about treatment of a group It's not about individuals

It's about the treatment of a group of individuals And how, where they fit Or are they marginalized or not The next one is about diversity And that's just about variety So I use this as an example When you're talking about a Crayola crayons If I only have four

My mom only got me four The box of four. Yeah, I can draw some stuff, but it's going to be ugly because I can't do much. I'm not that creative. But if you give me that box of 64 crayons, it still may be ugly, but it's going to be a colorful, ugly picture, right? So it's all about variety. I have more to choose from. And inclusion is about experience. So it's about how safe or how included I feel in an environment. And you don't get to tell me if I'm included or not. I can only tell you that. And this also goes back when people's like, oh, I'm your ally. You don't get to tell me

who is ally for me. It's based on your demonstrated consistent behavior. Do I feel safe enough to trust you and trust that you'll be consistent in your behavior that not harm me? That's what an ally is. So for me, when we're talking about association, we're talking about all of these things, we need to stop skipping steps. There are no simple solutions to these things. We need to go back to where, because medicine didn't have this back in the day when they were cutting off people's legs. They didn't have a Hippocratic Oath. But they had to go back and put all that in place.

But everybody wants these quick fixes. These things have been happening for a while. But the more we keep talking about blah, blah, blah, we keep doing harm. Can we go back and say, hey, let's talk about square. What's the base level? What is the basic level of engagement? And if you can't agree that a code of conduct is that, then me, you and I need to have a different conversation. So can we imagine a world where we all agree on the code of conduct for a second, since we're in an effort to move forward somewhere. What's beyond that? Because like you said, that's just rudimentary, basic reactionary thing. I get mad that we even have to have that.

I get mad about all this stuff as a lot of people do. Like, I can't believe that we even have to have code of conduct. But we do. I'm not saying we don't need one. I'm saying I just it just makes me angry. But why does it make it? But why does that make you angry? Why? Okay.

Going back to the excuse me, going back to the classroom, my classroom management was so on point because every student knew what the expectation was. It was a very clear line so that they knew if there was an infraction, what that infraction was, what the consequences of that was. Who wants to go in somewhere every day it could be different? That's stressful. That's anxiety. So why are we viewing codes of conduct as anything different than we're just agreeing on these are just how the basic rules of engagement.

And if people saw it like that, we might have a different conversation. I think what Jared may be describing was more along. He says mad. I think maybe it's more like it's just sad that the world has to be that way. Not saying that they don't have a place because I'm fully with you or an organization or whatever, and you understand what the rules of engagement are, what's expected of you, what the lines are, what the rules are, so to speak, I think that's so much more healthy than ambiguity. You know, when you assume, you don't know what happens. Right.

Yes. And I think that's the big problem is that there's too much assumption, too much of this is the way that I work and I see the world this way. Exactly. So I assume that you see it. Exactly. Yes. And that's the problem.

That's the problem. And we are in a more global, wide-reaching, really diverse community groups than we're used to. I mean, we're used to being very hyper-local. Exactly. being very hyper local, a lot of times inside your own family where like the established rules inside your own family have been there implicitly or explicitly laid out by your parents when you were younger.

But, you know, just kind of like people don't need to have rules of engagement because they're implied. And when you move beyond those bounds, which I mean, look at everything we're doing is at a global scale in terms of communities especially in open source like every everybody in the world talk about access and everybody with computer access internet access network access which i recognize is not everybody there's lots

of access which i wasn't previously here and so more than ever it's necessary to have these things. And like you said, Kim, it's relaxing or de-stressifying to have clear expectations. But I think when you asked about why do people care about the master-slave naming distinction, again, I think it goes back to the explicit versus the implicit or like just the status quo resistance to change like there's obviously there can absolutely be racist reasons as well which i'm sure some people have but it's the a lot of it i think is just a lackadaisical status quo resistance to change but that's but that speaks to your privilege also and see that and that's a whole nother because you've never had to consider these things you'veiteness has never been under examined. Everybody else is an immigrant or whatever. We've had to be examined. Whiteness is the default. So when we challenge that and say, well, no, why is whiteness the default? Then that's when you get the pushback. It's the same, and you say this all the time. We need to stop our economy. We need to stop acting like we're building widgets when what we need to be doing is helping people build knowledge.

Our companies need knowledge. It makes no sense for you to hire me. I don't feel safe, so I'm not gonna contribute. And anything that I learn, I'm not gonna share, which means organizational leaders are not going to be able to leverage that for competitive advantage or innovation. And I'm going to take that with me. So now you lost that.

These are the things we need to be thinking about. This is why I say I'm a business strategist. I am not an inclusion and diversity. Inclusion and diversity is necessary for good business strategy. So when you talk, we're not, this is not the Ace Hardware on the corner where everybody in your community went to the Ace Hardware. We're building stuff for people in countries

I don't even, can't even begin to understand the language or the customs of. Let's talk about that for a second because that's something I'm kind of trending on. It's like Gary Vaynerchuk introduced me, I guess, to this topic idea a while back. It's like, you know, in terms of thinking of the Internet as a teenager, this is like 10 years ago. I think you may have said this where like it was 15 years old and now maybe it's a 25 year old it's through economic abilities or literal network abilities to become connected to this table.

And I think we're in a unique position where in humanity, you know, across all of time, where we now are hyper-connected in ways we never were. Where these problems had always existed, but they were in microcosms and smaller or more compartmentalized. And now they're at global scales and everyone is coming with their concerns. And we're learning how to communicate those concerns because I don't want to hurt you. Jared doesn't want to hurt you. And that's the work that I do. I tell people I'm not here to convince or convert. I'm here to educate those who no longer want to be complicit. Right. But I think, you know, the hyper-connectedness cannot be removed from that. Like we're in a whole different world now where not only are we super connected, it can be analyzed. But then at the same time, you know,

you can participate if you want to. You can can participate if you want to you can not participate if you want to which I think is kind of what some people do with Facebook I personally don't participate I have a profile I'm not involved in Facebook I don't even tweet that much it's not because I'm a weirdo or a I'm not weird

I mean I'm slightly weird you know I'm not I don't have a tinfoil hat or I don't have these concerns I'm not a conspiracy. I mean, I'm slightly weird. I'm not I don't have a tinfoil hat or I don't have these concerns. I'm not a conspiracy theorist or whatever. But, you know, I just don't participate because in very fast ability to share information that was, that took long time before. I think it was a comedian who might've said this, and it's probably the worst person even to use as an example, but people used to die trying to send a message to someone, right? Like, you know, send a message from here to there, and it may be several states away or several hundred miles away. And a baby would be born before the message was delivered. We don't have that problem now.

Messages are delivered on demand in an instant without regard sometimes to whomever gets this message. And then that message is then received by a brain that has such crazy neurological connections that can't even be counted in the trillions and we only use 10 of it like we are unique beings in a world that's hyper-connected and we are acting a fool in all ways you know and we're just trying to catch up and be good people and influence those who are being bad to somehow either step back and get away from the table or hand over control or as as people that are not there represented to come there so we can build better software that's an overarching perspective to like craziness in today's world and it's so funny

because i can give you the exact opposite of that although i'm not on facebook because i got got off i mean i'm on facebook only because my family's there. And so that's how we stay connected. But I shifted away from Facebook because I live on Twitter. And this is so, and it's so interesting that I find you'll see, and I'm not going to call any names, but you'll see these, these Twitter, these white guys who have, they're all developers who have 100,000 more followers talking about how bad Twitter is. Yes, Twitter can be a show. It absolutely can. But it's the one place that I found my community. I've been able to create and cultivate a safe space for me on Twitter that I can never have done anywhere else. I could never have gotten the reach. Most of my followers are white individuals who want to learn from me.

This never would have happened if it were not for Twitter. And so when people say, oh, let's burn that. No. This is also where I connect with other advocates and other people who are doing this work where I feel, oh my God, I'm not by myself. This is where my community is.

And those are the things, because we're here. We're here. That's it. We're not going back. Now, how do we improve the experiences of people enforce anything based on what that code of conduct said. And that was one of the big telling things about writing a code of conduct, but with no teeth means absolutely nothing. And so I spoke at Node Interactive. My talk was basically when good intentions go bad.

Because in my research, so on the surface, if you're on Twitter, you thought it was about this one incident or this one person. In my research, it actually was based on something that happened two years ago that didn't get resolved and that thing that happened two years ago was a was a blow-up because of something that happened four years ago that wasn't resolved resolved and this is what our open source communities have become it are these spaces where um because i talked to um ryan doll he was but he spoke at um jsconf eu 2018 i spoke there as well and he was um he's saying that he was he was introducing a new project and i uh someone introduced me to him and he and i had a conversation then and then we had a conversation

afterwards because i really wanted to do an experiment I'm a again a researcher experiment where you think about community and connection we just talked about at the beginning of these projects instead of just focusing on code and pushing code and what this thing can do because it's open source it will invent inevitably have a community let's think about community at the same time. So we're iterating code and we're iterating community at the same time. He and I didn't reconnect about that because he wasn't sure the project was going to go anywhere or whatever, but that's still something I'm interested in. And now, right now I'm working with the Selenium community on that to putting in a code of conduct and seeing how we can make that community,

and that's a really welcoming community already, but seeing how we can make that community have more diverse contributors and all these other kind of conversations. This is the work that needs to be done. Everybody wants to speed this up. It takes time. We've got to go backwards. We've got to, like, okay, here's where we are.

Let's stop for a moment. Let's take a breath, like you had to do at let's stop for a moment let's take a breath like you had to do the beginning of the stuff so let's take a breath and let's put in some yeah and put in some things in place so then we can move forward we cannot keep we cannot keep our heads down and focus on code and think community is going to take care of itself because your house when you who i don't know who spoke about this you're talking about in my house your house, I don't know who spoke about this. You're talking about in my house. Your house and your neighbor's house, I don't run totally differently. Oh, for sure. So we can't go by how it was done in my house.

Yeah, exactly. We have to come up with universal house rules. Exactly. So a couple of thoughts on that. Super interesting. I love the idea of what happens in an open source project when you put community code of conduct, all these thoughts up front. It's similar to the security idea. So a lot of people will just build a thing and then they'll try to bolt on security afterwards.

And security folks have learned that that's a really, really bad idea. In fact, it's darn near impossible to just bolt on your security later. Similarly, you know, bolting on your community at the end seems like it's disastrous as well. If anybody could have a successful project from the start, it'd be Ryan Dahl, of course, starter of Node. I think the thing he's working on now, Deno, has a great chance. I don't know if he's made it to a public release yet, but

a lot of it... That was the project I was talking about. We haven't heard much about it recently. I don't think, Nick, have you heard anything about Deno since that talk? Yeah. I've been seeing a bit of activity on GitHub with like projects around that and blog posts and such.

So it's still active and alive. I haven't personally checked it out though. Yeah. So hopefully that's still a thing that's coming. Cause very exciting. One thought I had is like, I think one of the reasons why this does happen, like you said,

when you start open source thing, like it's going to have a community is like most of us never think that way because a lot of open source code has no community. It has no, it's just like you build a thing for yourself and you put it out there. And a lot of the people that we interview on this show, we find out like they didn't necessarily ask, they didn't expect any of this to happen.

And so it's hard to be intentional when you're just slinging some code that you wrote for yourself onto the internets. And then all of a sudden, you know, fast forward and all these people are using it. And now all of a sudden you're like, holy cow, I don't have, I'm not ready for any of this stuff. That's a great point. That goes back to, again, when you're building a business as well. For me, again, as a business strategist, these are things, if you're already, if you're, because we talked about like, you know, when you were saying about stockholder value, many of these companies are already thinking about that at the beginning.

So why aren't they thinking about these things at the beginning? So even if you're the one guy who is working on this thing, if you have made a decision to make this public, this is something you should be thinking about whether someone comes to it or not. This should be the baseline. If you're going to keep it on your computer, that's great. But the moment you decide that I'm going to put this

out in the world, because you can't control it once you put it out in the world, these are the things you need to start thinking about. And it's just like basic stuff. It doesn't have to be, you know, just, I mean, there are basic things you can think about. Huh, let's, you know, let's say before you put this out here,

hey, we're going to put this out here. We're going to, one of the pull request things we're going to have, we're going to have a code of conduct. If you want to participate in here, help me build this code of conduct. So do you think that that's really the way to go forward with that? Where, like, if you're an individual creating something and wanting to put it out into the world, it's obviously solving something for you that's very personal to you. But at the same time, like we've talked about, that's only your perspective and may, like may have detrimental um exact results for someone else so is it really setting

a a baseline uh welcoming standard like a code of conduct and then building from there trying to build the the diverse community to come in and uh and then being receptive to like no this is a terrible idea or the way that this is implemented could have. I don't know. That sounds like open source. This is a terrible idea. That's how we talk to each other. That's a terrible idea.

Go back to sleep. Yeah, exactly. Take this off. But yes, so it's the same thing when I'm working with companies. We start, I stop whatever they're doing and we work on core values. Because when you do the hard work up front, it helps inform your decisions in the back end. So I'll give this example. I'm working with Tito. Have you heard of Tito? Not the liquor. The conferences, right? Events. Yes, exactly. Events. Yeah,

they're in Dublin and they're my current sponsors for the podcast, but I love them so much in their product that I'm working with them on helping them build this out because this is, again, a business strategist. What most of these things are are products or services. They're not businesses, but we act like they're businesses because somebody makes some money off of them. A business requires processes, procedures, and policies, those things in place that help you scale, recover, and grow. That's what a business is. What most I see out here are not businesses. They are products and services that are making money. So what I'm doing is working with Tito right now and the two founders. We're sitting down

and talking about, because they've been rocking this out and they can admit, particularly Paul, his head has been in the coal for so long. He hasn't even been able to look up. That's not how you run a business. That's how you create a job for yourself. So what we're working on are core values that will help him, his team, everybody who comes in contact with this product understand how to make decisions so that they don't have to have their hands on everything if we put these things in place up front you don't have to have your moderating job will be so much easier this is the point people think it's it's making more work no it's making less work because they're very clearly defined um expectations and then when you have those rare times when things

aren't clearly defined then those are the times we need to come to have a conversation about that. But we're not even dealing with the basic things. So when I was talking about, I had a client who one of her core values was beautiful things. And it was so important to her that, and it's something that you can measure, you can gauge, she was like, I don't understand how I'm going to measure this. For her, beautiful things were so important to her company that if she's looking at toilet paper for her bathroom, she has to consider that through the lens of beautiful things. So every decision she makes, that was one of her core values, but every decision she makes has to come through that, which makes things so much easier. Because now they're not, when we talked about arbitrary, now they're not arbitrary. When you're making hiring decisions,

when she creates emails, they have to sound and be a certain way to implement for her core value of beautiful things. So her customers see consistent, beautiful things throughout everything. Her employees see it. Her investors see it. The company she partners with sees it. It's going to make it pretty hard for her to buy toilet paper.

Well, not really. She just can't get that single ply, the roll that doesn't have the perforations on it. No, that's just not, she can't do that. But for my company, because that's not of core value of mine, you know what? If you're using the bathroom in my house, you're going to be doing what I'm saying. But that's going to be using whatever I'm comfortable with. But that's how core values dictate the, and that goes back to when we're talking about ethics. That's where your ethics comes from. That's how you communicate.

It's not about writing a mission statement and slapping it on a wall or putting it on your website and going from there and thinking that's all you need to do. These things can be measurable they're tangible they can be um you can data driven all of these things but that's what we don't have because we have individuals who want to solve whatever problems they see fit and then they just put that out there so if open source project if it's not just sitting on your computer, if you intend, if you put it on GitHub and it's open, it's an open project. You should be thinking about community from the start, even if no one comes, because that's the same thing as being. That's what you buy. Don't you buy health insurance or car insurance because they want to make sure your car is covered, whether you're in an accident or not. Right. It's again, lack of inclusion is a risk management issue. This episode is brought to you by our friends at Rollbar.

Check them out at rollbar.com slash changelog. Move fast and fix things like we do here at changelog. Catch your errors before you use users do with rollbar if you're not using rollbar yet or you haven't tried it yet they have a special offer for you go to robot.com changelog sign up and integrate rollbar to get 100 to donate to open source projects via open collective once again rollbar.com slash changelog. So let's talk about the developer who has something they think is worthy of the world. It's been on their computer solely so far, but they think, hey, maybe some people will benefit from this.

And they've listened to this episode or they've heard your talks and they think, OK, I know I need a code of conduct. I don't know if this is going to be successful or not. I'm just putting it up there. And they they they do what many of us do with our code, which is we copy and paste. And so it's kind of like the limp in approach, uh, net benefit worse than not having anything at all. What are your thoughts on that? Should, you know, maybe they, maybe they read it. Maybe they didn't. They just thought, I know this is what I'm supposed to have.

I mean, like we do that with licenses a lot of times, you know, choose a license. I don't know. Just take the easiest one from over here, put it in my project, not being very thoughtful. Yeah. If for me, it's it's now this is this is the community part because that's what it is. So you shouldn't be doing this by yourself. So you should be if you have a group of people, even I mean, worse come to worse, if it's all white guys. OK, that's OK. At least that's something. So you can bounce some ideas off of. But you should, when you're talking about community, that's what community is. It's about community.

And it's not a community if you're the only person making these decisions. So just informally, hey, I want to put my project out here. Do you, can I have, can I buy the four of you coffee? Let's go talk about this thing. What things should I be thinking about? What things have you experienced? What four of you coffee? Let's go talk about this thing. What things should I be thinking about? What things have you experienced? What things have you seen? Have you seen any articles that talk about how bad this is?

Blah, blah. Those are the, you have to do the research. It's just like when, you don't just sit down and start coding. You sit down and you put out a plan. You have an end game. What is my MVP going to be? You're giving me too much credit. Well, you know it's going to do something.

I mean, or are you just coding? You know, you're just writing code? I don't know, Nick. Do you always have a game plan when you start coding? Sometimes I do. On my better days, I got a plan. Yeah, I have an idea that usually changes. Yeah, exactly.

It changes as you go. Yeah, I mean, there is some isolation aspect to open source. And I think it's getting better. Again, we talk about the hyper-connected world online. But many of us are isolated. You know, of course, there's the stereotype of the, you know, overweight person sitting in their parents' basement coding. And that's been broken down, thankfully, but it's still out there to some degree.

But those stereotypes are rooted in some sort of figment of reality. And there's a lot of isolated programmers. There's a lot of people that don't have local community at all. Maybe they're very remotely located geographically. And they never get past just like building this thing for themselves and then open sourcing it. And the community is like a surprise because they never had it before, which is a sad state. Yeah, I'm going to. Yeah, I get it. I empathize. But I'm not going to say I don't care because, again, we're hyper connected.

You can find it's, it's about effort. It's about, I tell people all the time at this point, we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. So if you want to create something that is about community, it has to be about community. You,

one person does not make a community. So, um, if you hanging out on Reddit, find some, you, I, even this stereotypical fat, slobberly whatever thing person

they are they playing video games they're doing something they're not isolated where they're not going that i don't that i don't believe especially as as geeky as we are we find fellow geeks very easily well that's another example you're go ahead nick i was just gonna, that's another... Just for example, you're... Go ahead, Nick. I was just going to say that's another problem with technology moving forward because sometimes technology has made it easier

to... for these smaller isolated groups to find each other that are not there for good intentions. Yeah. Bad actors.

Yeah. And my thing is, though, and I... and again, this is why I remain optimistic. They're not as many as we think they are. Because up until this point, they've been the only one with the power and the privilege and the mics and the platforms. And we're seeing that change. um we've when the more conferences like yours and platforms like this um this podcast invite people like me on here it emboldens other people like me to say hey i can do this too and there are more of us than there are of them they're always going to be bad actors i mean i

can't i'm not going to run around trying to put out every fire. I believe in, I was having a conversation with a group yesterday, a group of women. And I had to tell them and talk about law of attraction. The more you focus on something, the more of that you get. So I'm going to focus on the things that I can proactively do. Also, I don't like being reactive. And at least that takes a lot of energy. So I'm going to focus on the things that I can proactively do. Also, I don't like being reactive. And that takes a lot of energy. So I'm going to be proactive when I can.

And that scales for me. Hashtag cause a scene came out of nowhere in March of last year. And I'm profitable. That scaled for me. Awesome. You're thinking about the bad actors and there's always going to be you know these small isolated units that brings me back to the thought that i was thinking of adam while you were talking about the hyper-connected world that we live in now um especially as as software developers and i think

i've said this before not sure where but we we really live i'm talking about access we we as software developers we have we live at the height of human leverage in terms of our ability to leverage meaning a small amount of people can now affect a large amount of people like they never could in history and i love it and that's awesome and terrifying right so you know twitter is because of the platform it's provided, it's provided both the good and bad actors in any context to amplify their messages. And so when we talk about the ethics in software development, you know, Kim, you rightly brought up other fields which are important, such as medical fields in terms of like the odes and whatnot, even more than that, one person can affect the entire population, connected population. And so think about the, you know, it goes back to the old Spider-Man, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.

And I think where you're driving at, Kim, when I was pushing back with my isolated developer stereotype is like that person has a responsibility to everybody else to not be that person right to not be completely unnetworked completely ignorant of these things and to know that their software will affect the world and it's going to affect it in ways that they don't realize because they do not have the advantage of like everyone's shared experience well there are two points to that one is it's going to affect them as well. And they don't understand that. And the second one is when I talk about the law of attraction and focusing on what I want and letting that expand, I also believe

in starving the oxygen of things that don't need my focus. And so although there are, as you say, both good and bad actors on Twitter, the bad actors have always had the privilege in the platforms. Whereas people like me have not, I could not afford, um, as long as I have an internet and a mic and a, and my Twitter, I can say whatever I want to. I never had that freedom before. So the bad actors have always had the platform and the power to craft my narrative. I, for the first time, can tell them, no, dude, that's not how this is going to work. You're no longer speaking for me. And then there are us coming in in volumes. So where other people see chaos, I see liberation. I see movement. I see these great things happening because change is not going to, if you know anything about change, it does not happen when people are comfortable. So these people who want to continue to be isolated, they're going to further isolate themselves until they're starved from oxygen. And that's how I just look at it. I love, I don't, I have this thing. I don't, I'm not going to debate you. I'm going to debate you about my lived experience. I'm not trying to

convince you about it. I'm going to say what I have to say. And there are people who want to hear that. And then those people will influence the people that they want to influence. And that's how that grows. From 2000, the fact that, and I, this is, this is I try not to try to be as apolitical as I possibly can. But I'm going to tell you, I live in Georgia, which is a traditionally red state. The fact that a black woman almost flipped this state to blue couldn't have known about how many ways that votes were being disenfranchised couldn't have happened without the internet let's key in on that that access you have to twitter that empowers you i think you said earlier that you don't use facebook you use twitter and twitter is i can't recall the exact word you, but it's basically your platform for putting your voice out there and shaping things for you.

That it's run by a corporation that has shareholders and particular people. whatever you want until a certain point because there is an opportunity for them to disagree with you and remove you and block you and change the access and power you have yeah but what's interesting about twitter in particular is is that it's become a global utility for sharing small ideas and i mean small ideas not so much in their grandiose of the idea itself, but more or less how you communicate it. 240 characters, I believe, or 280 characters is the limit. It was 140. And you do it in micro ways or in Twitter streams or tweet streams

and things like that. I'm describing Twitter to people who know Twitter. I'm just kind of giving the full spectrum here. Tell us more. How does this work? How does Twitter work? You type on it. Yeah. You get what I'm saying here, but the point I'm trying to make here is like, you know, this question is more particularly for Kim, but definitely welcome others to join in here on this one. But what do you do when this thing that is a utility to so many, it's backed by a corporation. And we have the similar feelings we've had and talked about with Facebook distrust or other large corporations or really anybody.

We said we did this conversation through a lens of Facebook and the mistrust that we've had for them because of clear things out there. You know, what do you do when this utility is no longer available to the masses or it changes the rules okay so and this is um i don't know if you're gonna like this answer but whether it is what it is uh marginalized people are used to that so we have the skills in the and the um and the um uh what's the what's the word I'm looking for? Oh, forget it. No, it starts with an R.

We have the resilience. Our lives have been what you just described. So we adapt. We are very good at adapting. And Twitter has been that one thing where we've been able to adapt to our needs. Yes, are we treated unfairly on that platform? Yep. Yep. Do we, um, have to whatever? Yep. Yep.

All of those things that we see in our everyday Twitter for us is just a microcosm of what our, um, uh, what our lives are like. Um, we just get to share it. It just doesn't stay in our communities anymore. So if they change the rules, we'll adapt. We figure it out every single time. And so it becomes this thing where, oh, we get frustrated. We get on there, we'll cuss and fuss, but we're not going anywhere. Unless they shut us out, we're not going anywhere. So I'm glad you said that then. So that's keying in on the very first thing we talked about, which was if the ethics of something you're involved in

change so drastically that it is completely against your morals, do you continue to participate or do you adapt? How does that change your answer? Let me say, let me be clear. When I say adapt, I'm not adapting my core values. I'm adapting how I now use this thing based on. Yes. Your tactical approach.

Okay. And it's because it's all strategic for me. So I'm going to change my strategy on how to use this thing with the understanding that it is immoral. But again, we have we say who's whose morals? Because personally, it's not immoral because they're they they're based. They have a business model that is about shareholder value. They lost shareholder value that one month when they closed over 50 million fake accounts, their price dropped. It showed right there that if anybody's interested, that it is not in Twitter's best interest financially to fight any of this. But we know that.

And see, that's the thing. It's like the white people on there get so upset about that. We know that. The marginalized people on there who are advocating and getting together, we already know this. It is not, it does not, they are not in their best, it's not in their best interest to shut down bots, to shut down racists, to shut, if not at all. Because we saw the data when they did it and they put it and when it became public, their stock prices dropped because it's now not showing growth. Even if these accounts were fraudulent, shareholders didn't care yeah couldn't that be short-sighted though oh it's all short-sighted if you own i mean the whole business model

their best interest but you really mean it is in their best interest right no i'm saying it isn't short term according to the shareholder value yes exactly yeah it's not in their best business not in their best interest as Twitter to do this. They have no incentive to do it. Let me put it that way. They're except for the they have no financial incentive to do it, except for the fact that. Again, this is where you get into the right thing. Who's right? Who's who's defining what the right thing is? That's why I don't like code of conducts and people telling me something nice. Everybody has a different idea of nice. That's not something I can measure. That's not something I can hold you accountable for. Right now, with Facebook, with Twitter, with Reddit,

all these platforms, there is nothing tangible that we can hold them account to. Because they're the arbitrators of what those decisions are. They get to say, I have sent, first of all, I don't block anybody. And I have a strategy of why I don't block anybody because the work I do, it is my audience is to educate white people. White people need to see how bad I have it. You need to see what I have to deal with on an everyday basis. You need to be just as uncomfortable as I am because that's the only way I can wake you up to I am not having the same experience you are, period. So I don't block anybody so you can see anything

on my timeline. So when I, if it's, I only will report if someone has said something threatening. And I've gotten those back from Twitter saying, oh no, that's not what that was. They get to make that decision. They've been notoriously bad at identifying that stuff. Exactly. So they get to make that decision well they've been notoriously bad yeah they've

been notoriously bad at identifying that stuff yeah exactly so they get to make that decision i mean this like the um the the shooter and i forgot which shooting it was who sent the message um it was a mass shooting but he had sent the message the week before to a black journalist who reported it to twitter that he had been coming after her. They said it wasn't. And the next week, he shot up a whole bunch of stuff. So we know that that's what's out there. So our best interest, this is strategic. I'm going to make sure I've protected myself physically as much as I possibly can.

Because that's that variable out there. So I'm going to do as much as I can to protect myself physically. My community is going to do whatever they can to help me with finances or resources or whatever To make sure I'm physically protected Someone's giving me a new laptop next week and he's amping up the security part of that That I have no idea about He's like, I got to put some more security stuff on there before I even send it to you So that is our lives. We've been, we have all, I have always been a person

who walked out the house and my race has always been an issue. That's how I've lived my whole life. So Twitter becomes this thing for marginalized people of, although it's quite unfortunate and it's quite threatening threatening and it can be very scary at times, that one or two or a thousand people does not negate everything else I've created on this platform. And so at some point, again, lack of inclusion is a risk management issue. Twitter is going to have to deal with that. And you're seeing it now. You're seeing, just like with all the people who are coming out of the work,

oh my God, I did blackface. It's like every day now, everybody's admitting they did blackface and it was normal in the 90s. I'm like, I was in school in the 90s, I don't recall this being normal, but okay. And so this is what's happening. So these platforms can be for good. They are

unearthing all kinds of stuff that people are having to face. They're having to face the things that they've done or the things that they're doing where they never would have been able to do it before. They've been in these enclaves. They've been in these quiet little corners doing and saying whatever they want to. So yes, Twitter can be problematic But for me it's less so because I have a strategy So I can say that That's what saves me a lot And why I don't get burnt out on Twitter

Because I only retweet or comment to very specific things When I know that is going to educate my audience Everybody else, I'm just going to leave it there So y'all can see what people are saying to me. I like that, man. It's like you have your own personal code of conduct of how you do and you get your rules of engagement, basically. You understand? Almost definitely.

I have a policy of do I want to be right or do I want to be happy? Yeah. Yep. And I want to be happy most of the time. So when I find myself trying to force myself to be right, it's coming out of ego and I have to back off. Yeah. So I have very clear, again, this, I walk my talk. So yeah, that's how I, that's how I navigate all of this. One small question before we tail off and call it a show. I was just thinking about code of conducts again. I keep going back to that. Just curious, because you mentioned bad ones. Do you

have a good, and this is like a totally a developer question, like, can I copy paste your code of conduct? Do you have a good like starter place for people who want to have a code of conduct that doesn't say things like be nice, but actually says like actionable, engageable, you know, clear things?

Because a lot of us aren't very good at these kinds of things. We'd love to ask. I would start with the, and I always get the name of it messed up, but the covenant, what is it? Yeah.

Contributor code or contributor covenant. Yes. Contributor covenant that Coraline added Epke. And has she not been getting attacked that the stuff that she's dealing with? I'm, I'm checking on her often because of the stuff that,'s dealing with i'm i'm checking on her often because of the stuff that and it's just a code of conduct she is not telling people to um to to adopt it people are adopting it so i can say for me that's a good one to start just to start now

you got to go through line by line and based on what you um want to experience in your community, what your community wants to experience, then you go in and tailor that. But I say that because it's so universal and so many people are using it. But you can't use it at face value. There is no one size, and that's another problem. There's no one size fits all answer for this.

I personally write my own codes of conduct with my clients. We write our own thing. It's very unique to that community or what that company's doing because every community is different. That's why people are like, oh, can you, no, I can't answer just one question. Oh, that's not going to, no, it's not going to be easy because every community, every organization, every event is different. They're dealing with different things. They have different people in there. They're dealing with different things. So I look at so even in my pricing, I do a five hour needs assessment before I even say what the strategy is going to be, because I need to go in and see exactly what's going on.

And this is, again, is the work that people don't want to do. Everybody wants to do the, let's get back to the code because that's the most important thing. Well, before we close, Kim, let's get you paid a little bit here. Go ahead and tell everybody how they can contract with you, like your business. How do they get ahold of you? How do they contact you to hire you to help them out with these things? You can find me at, right now we're combining two sites. So Kim Creighton LSC, I think is going down, right now we're combining two sites. So Kim Creighton LSC I think is going down pretty soon because we're going to combine that. Because again, hashtag cause of scene was something that came out of nowhere that I had to go back and start putting processes to. But you can find me at hashtag spelled out causeofscene.com.

Anybody can find me on Twitter at Kim C-R-A-Y-T-O-N-1 on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn, which I hate LinkedIn because it's nothing but a bunch of sales pitches. Oh, I hate LinkedIn. If I get one more thing, somebody asking me, do I want a job doing something that I don't do? It's like, dudes, please. But yeah, you can follow my podcast. I put out a lot of content. Just know

that I'm going to be real. I'm going to get you where you need to go, but it's going to be a challenging process. I have private clients or these are individuals who are now just realizing that they have been complicit. They've had friends and they're like, oh my God, I can't believe I said and did this thing. And I didn't realize I did it, all the way to enterprise clients who are trying to shift their culture. I work with communities. Like I said, I'm working with Selenium. I'm working with Tito, which is a startup. I work with event organizers who want to make sure their events are as, you know, as inclusive as possible.

I'm currently working with Global Diversity CFP Day with Peter Aiken. He actually ran Scotland JS and Scotland CSS. And this is a Global Diversity CFP Day. We're on the 2nd of March. Around the world, we have 80 locations so far this year so our second year doing it, where we're taking people who really want to, from marginalized and underrepresented communities who want to

do their first CFPs we're doing a day of that around the world and I helped him craft that code of conduct so there's a lot of things I do because I work for myself, I have my own business. I like the the the creativity in it. So if you have an interesting project that I'm interested in, I might, you know, be interested in working with you. We'll also make sure we grab Kim's podcast episode she referenced earlier. Kim dropped those to us.

We'll put those in the show notes and all of Kim's information. Thanks so much for joining us, folks. This has been a fun conversation, a challenging one, an entertaining one for me. I like to be challenged. And Kim, thanks for joining us. Nick, thanks for being here. And we'll see everybody next time. Thank you for having me.

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