Eclectic Tech Carnival
The Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC) is a potent gathering of feminists who critically explore and develop everyday skills and information technologies in the context of free software and open hardware. /ETC chews on the roots of control and domination, disrupts patriarchal societies and imagines better alternatives. To do so /ETC prioritise the participation of women and female identified, transgender and queer persons who want to learn with and from each other.
The Eclectic Tech Carnival started off as a Genderchangers-On-The-Road event but it grew into a project of it's own. The /ETC, as it is also known, is an international event, every year in a new place where there is an interest in having it. The Genderchangers "open doors" and "skills from scratch" happenings recur every week or month in a specific spot like for example the ASCII or Peper Cafe or Volkskrantgebouw in Amsterdam. The one local, the other global but they both consist of a combination of tech skill sharing and networking among women.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the evolution is that the group of women that initiated the project were nearly all not originally from Amsterdam: from Canada, Sweden, the UK, South Africa, USA, Germany, Australia and so. Another reason could be that there are not so many of us, but we find each other on the net. And ICT is by definition global and distributed. A network would not be one when contained in a shell.
The /ETC started with a community of women who felt the need to learn technical skills in a space unimpeded by the typical competitiveness of male geeks, they wanted to flourish trying things out and working through all diverse questions together with an open mind. Since 2001, the network of feminists who help organize the /ETC has grown both far and wide, responding and adapting to new contexts. /ETC are geographically diverse and have varied experiences and expertise in computing, technology, art and activism. Their long history of activity informs what, how and why /ETC do what they do in different times and different places. [1]
This cohort also founded the earliest known feminist web server collective is SysterServer.net launched on International Womxn’s Day 8 March 2005 as an initiative of the Gender Changer Academy (2000–current). The SysterServer.net (2005–current) offers services to ‘feminist, queer and antipatriarchal groups and collectives’. It provides an autonomous repository of resources and digital literacy support to womxn where it was, and still is, partially seeded from the Open Source and Free Software movements, which incorporate rinciples of freedom in sharing information and source code for others to modify and extend to better suit idiosyncratic predilections [[2]]
The story of /ETC in english
"In 2001 a group of women going under the name The GenderChangers Academy (GCA) were giving workshops in the ASCII (Amsterdam Subversive Center for Information Interchange), one of the first hackerspaces in The Netherlands.
Ivana from Croatia heard about it and invited the group to give their workshops in Pula. They agreed and to do this they picked up glasses at a local bar to collect money. With the money they hired a large car and drove to Pula. There they gave presentations on Free Software and the Open Source movement, on how a computer works and on how to make your own website in HTML. One participant had travelled from Athens to follow the workshops. At the end of the weekend she asked the group if they wanted to do the same in Greece the next year. When this was accepted the group thought: we need to give the event a name. After much lateral thinking, brainstorming about the Linux file system and so on, the name Eclectic Tech Carnival aka /ETC was borne.
Many of the Genderchangers had been to HAL (Hackers at Large) in Enschede in 2001. They loved it, but there were very few women at the hackers camp. In fact it was generally difficult to get their female friends and family as enthused about GNU and recursive acronyms as they were. They decided they wanted the /ETC to be similar to HAL but for women only. Another difference between the GCA workshops being given in Amsterdam and the /ETC was that the first was ongoing and in one place.
In 2005 the Genderchangers Academy sisterhood appeared again at What The Hack and continued their demolition and reconstruction approach to computing the hard way with a soft soft hand. Nancy Mauro-Flude initiating a 'spiritual hack'
Over the years each /ETC developed its own particular character. There is always the inevitable attempt each iteration to move away from identify politics and into the experiential learning of the technology being offered.
The defining characteristics of an /ETC are: skill sharing, with free and open source technology, are women* only workshops, diy." (2019)
Editions
- 3. 11-18 July 2004, Belgrade, hosted by Women at Work, website
- 7. 25-31 May 2008, Amsterdam, organized by the Genderchangers and EYFA, website
- 2010, Brussels, hosted by Interface3, La Compilothèque and Pianofabriek, website
- 6-10 March 2012, Ljubljana, held in conjunction with the Red Dawns festival organised by Kiberpipa and Red Dawns, website
Articles
- Aileen Derieg, "Things Can Break: Tech Women Crashing Computers and Preconceptions", transversal, 2007.
