forward widely, get involved!

INVITATION:

Since the end of last year a process has started to prepare the first European Feminist Forum (EFF), planned for 13-15 June 2008.

The EFF secretariat had called last year to start ‘Affinity Groups’ on different subjects to prepare the Forum, and so a group was started focussing on women and tech, ICT, New Media – called ‘agitate’ (Affinity Group InformaTion And new TEchnologies).

We are now looking for and inviting more women and women’s groups to join us in this process.

The general aim of the group is to increase visibility of women in IT, with a focus on FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) and new media.

From our application to co-ordinate this topic for the EFF:

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Our affinity group will discuss, analyse, raise awareness and get active around issues of women and new media and information and communication technologies (ICTs). The percentage of women who are actively interested in these issues is extremely small, due to different reasons. The roots can be found in education, gender roles, homogeneous and exclusive male structures in existing gender-mixed groups and networks (most of them in fact not mixed but instead almost all-male).

We want to build a stronger network to

* give visibility to our actions,
* carry on the debate about why it seems to be just ‘natural’ that women and computers don’t go together well and what the real reasons are,
* develop more activities with a clear feminist focus (wonderful recent example: Take back the tech),
* share experiences and empower each other and others
* help make access to new media easier for feminist activists
* interrogate and address the ways in which both gender and race are factors that prevent people from having full and equal access to virtual and tech spaces
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