In recent years, conflicts over values and practices have emerged in hacking and free/libre and open source (FLOSS) communities, centering around diversity and inclusion. Based on ethnographic research, this talk presents how participants work through thorny issues of inclusion in their practices with artifacts and with one another. It illustrates how there is more at stake in “hacking diversity” than a politics of representation can capture, and argues that how diversity advocates bound their interventions matters for both hacking/open source communities and “tech” more broadly.
Christina Dunbar-Hester is associate professor of communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism.