One Month of Inclusive JavaScript
Today marks a full month since wealljs.org publicly launched and got announced on twitter. A month isn’t a long time, but there’s still plenty to talk about, since this post will be the first time I talk about it in detail.
I didn’t write a lot about it back then. Mostly ’cause I’d been focusing on seeding the pre-launch community, writing the initial policies, such as the Code of Conduct and Enforcement policy, getting the website working, and putting together a Slack App to manage admin tasks, invites, etc. Shortly after, I drafted the earlier versions of the Signup Policy.
That seems fine — turns out in the past month, WeAllJS has hit a whopping 370 members on Slack, which isn’t too bad for a brand new Slack focused around a single topic! We’ve already learned a few lessons, grown more policies, and developed a distinct community identity with useful resources for its members.
What’s So Special About This Place?
Most online communities I’m in tend to fall into two categories:
- exclusive communities intended to serve some slice of intersections, serving as backchannels or support groups, bastions of safety from the larger tech community.
- everyone-jump-in communities centering around particular technologies which tend to deprioritize inclusive community building and supporting the underrepresented in favor of being open forums for specific topics.
WeAllJS is different: It’s based on the premise that it’s possible to build an inclusive space where everyone can benefit from open access to resources (including jobs!), but where voices that are usually drowned out by the usual tech scene can be raised up and heard without fearing harm.
It’s often said in my community-building circles that you get to pick one or the other: Openness or Safety.
I believe WeAllJS can pull off both at the same time.
Well, sort of…
There is No Such Thing as a Safe Space
We talk a lot about “safe” spaces and the benefits that they bring. I completely agree that having spaces to withdraw to that are more isolated from particular categories of aggressions and harm. But from a community organizer/manager point of view? If there’s anything that I’ve learned is this:
You cannot guarantee your members’ safety.
You can do all the policy work you want. You can have all the application processes, filtering practices, Codes of Conduct, enforcement policies. But it won’t guarantee anyone’s safety. Because in the end, someone will say something or do something. And the damage will be done.
And the targets will not feel safe anymore.
And the more people you keep out, the fewer resources your members have access to.
In Defense of Supportive Spaces
WeAllJS adopted the label of a “supportive space” to describe what it does. We know we can’t guarantee the safety of anyone who joins, and that something will always happen, no matter how hard we try.
So instead, we’ll do something that we can commit to: We’ll support you.
Supporting means that when something happens, it’s the person who was harmed who takes priority. It means that we need to be proactive in structuring the community in such a way that the possibility of harm is reduced. It means everyone should know what happens, what to expect, and that they won’t need to fight for the smallest shred of justice. They won’t have to justify the pain before anyone is willing to take action.
Supporting means that you’ll help lift the weight off their shoulders without pushing them to the sidelines.
Structuring Supportive Spaces
Supportive spaces aren’t just about setting a bunch of rules (we do that), or having diverse organizers/admins (we do that, too): They’re about having a structure for your community that clarifies social expectations and balances access to resources with connection and community.
WeAllJS, being primarily a Slack-based community, uses a particular strategy for balancing these two: Resource Channels and Identity Channels.
The idea to structure a community in this way originated in the lgbtq.technology community, which started making such a distinction at some point, and implemented specific policies around them to better strike the balance between resource access and reduced exposure to harm.
Resource Channels
The premise behind resource channels is that there are some things within a community that are much better when everyone is able to share them. In the case of WeAllJS, these channels are public, managed by admins, and fit specifically into some narrow categories, such as “platforms/technologies”, “jobs and career advice”, “local community”, and a few miscellaneous channels for specific purposes like meta-conversation about the Slack.
Resource channels have an expectation of low-intensity conversation, of being spaces that are limited to those specific topics and generally to keeping connection between people careful and polite: as one might do at a professional meetup in meatspace at a work-related venue. We know how to behave in these spaces. We’re still friendly, we can still bond, but everyone is there because they see the space as a resource. The experience at WeAllJS so far is that this pretty naturally stays within a respectful, polite range of conversation.
Identity Channels
Identity channels exist on practically the other end of that spectrum: They’re private channels centered around specific parts of personal identity, different intersections. These spaces are created so we can bond with people who are like us, who we’re more familiar and more comfortable with. Spaces where we don’t have to watch out for particular microaggressions. Where can expose a side of ourselves that it simply isn’t comfortable (or safe!) to openly expose when others are looking. These are the spaces where we can have Those Conversations. They’re our backchannels. Our whisper networks. Our circles of friends and kindred spirits.
Examples of these channels are: lgbtq, poc, mental-health, not-men, not-women, persons with disabilities.
These channels are arguably just as important as resource channels for creating a healthy, bustling community. Identity channels work out to be incubators for particular intersections of your community. It turns out that when you go somewhere, look around, and realize you’re literally the only one there that’s anything like you… well, you know it’s not a place for you. And it’s probably not. Because no one will be there to understand when something affects you in a way that the others aren’t affected. You feel alone.
But when you look around and there’s a few of you, and you have a space where you won’t lose them in a much larger crowd — a place where you can make sure to only hear each other’s voices — you don’t feel alone anymore. You have a place to withdraw to. You have people that you need to ask questions of that you know will understand your needs related to that intersection better than others. People that you don’t need to educate.
And then, energized, you can go back into the bigger crowd. It’s much easier to be vulnerable when there’s a safety net right there for you. And it’s much easier to feel like you belong in the larger space when your little corner of your own is a part of it.
A Month of Results
No joke, I’m really happy this group exists. I feel like I belong and have support much more now and it is lovely to have folks to talk to about my nerdy hobbies and to exchange knowledge with. WeAllJS is amazing. — @matsie
i like how active and respectful this community is —Elaine
yeah our community seems really mature and developed because we have actually the highest concentration of dads — @mysterysal
(quoted with permission)
It’s pretty great so far! The Slack has been seeing a lot more activity in the past two weeks as a core of participants get more comfortable participating, as channel cultures start forming. It’s amazing to sit in our #watercooler channel and see a huge variety of folks contributing. Not-men, queer folks, black folks, and cis white dudes, all in the same regular conversations.
Identity channel membership:
- mental-health: 23
- not-men: 63
- not-women: 15
- neurodiversity: 20
- poc: 23
- black-folks: 8
- latinx: 11
- people-with-disabilities: 11
- lgbtq: 52
Note that there is a lot of overlap between members in these channels, and not everyone in the slack who falls into the general scope of an identity channel joins it. These numbers are less useful at looking at the overall balance in the community, and more at seeing the various groups that are being served by identity-based spaces — as well as just general representation in the Slack.
The community is also fairly spread out geographically. Bay Area techies turn out to not be a majority: there’s significant representation of Latin Americans, Europeans, and even a bit of of East and South Asia. One of the larger location-based channels in the Slack is even dedicated to people who are “out there” — that is, fairly far from significant tech centers in their respective countries.
The Slack also recently adopted a Docent System for helping encourage conversation and have dedicated individuals to act as points of contact. And, most importantly: to watch out for voices that might be otherwise drowned out, and make sure they get heard in the conversation. The process is still in its early testing stages, and only a few channels have active docents so far (#npm, #backend, #rails, and #arthack). They’ve definitely already nudged those channels into more regular activity!
And all of this isn’t happening entirely without Code of Conduct violations. The Enforcement policy has been put into action more times than I can count, but most people don’t even notice. Let’s take a quick look at that policy:
1. Tell someone “hey, that’s not ok”.
2. That person should apologize immediately and correct the behavior.
3. If this doesn’t happen, isn’t safe to do, or is not satisfactory, message admins.
4. Admins will take appropriate action in a timely manner, prioritizing those who were hurt.
Almost the entirety of CoC “violations” have stopped at #2 in that list. Because our enforcement process is not zero-tolerance (and in fact, operates in distinct stages of seriousness), people who are called out for various issues simply apologize, edit the relevant message, and move on.
Perhaps, to me, the biggest sign that “The System Works!™” is this: it is not a common sight for a cisgender heterosexual white man to be asked directly, in a public channel, to refrain from using some ableist term (read: “crazy”/”lame”/other terms which are widely-accepted in common parlance). And they just go “oh sure, sorry about that!” and everyone moves on. This might seem like an obvious conclusion to you, dear reader, but it’s mindblowing to someone who has had to field numerous CoC violations as an admin in other communities for years.
Reactions like that means that no one involved feels particularly threatened: The person who Said That Word knows that they won’t get banned or publicly shamed for messing up or saying the wrong thing, because we just don’t do that — because our enforcement policy says we won’t. And the Person Who Was Hurt knows that they can speak up, and that admins will have their backs. They know that the worst-case scenario as far as they’re concerned means they have to escalate to #3 in the tl;dr, and admins will make sure things are handled from there. They won’t have to justify it to us. They won’t have to fight tooth and nail for what feels to them like basic respect. When you take a trust-but-verify approach to these things, temperatures stay low, and everyone is simply better able to handle what can very easily become a deeply uncomfortable conflict.
And so, We All Grow Together.
I’m Done, I Swear
This first post about this stuff was a little long. Thanks for hanging in there! I can only hope that writing about this, sharing experiences, and showing what really really worked and what really really didn’t will be useful to others and to this very community.
Let’s see where it all goes from here, dads! Wanna join us and help us make a difference? Head over to wealljs.org and sign up! I look forward to seeing you!
P.S. dad jokes have become a thing. Especially in the queer corners of the slack. I’m not even sorry.
