Who said that science and technology are not women’s things? – Brazil Post

Still very dominated by men, the world of science and technology has attracted, increasingly, the female audience. He was thinking of boosting this scenario that MariaLab Hackerspace emerged, a collective formed in 2013 willing to create a safe and stimulating environment for the exchange of knowledge between women .

Since then, the idea not only worked as grown. Currently, the group includes women with varied experiences and has been present in important areas such as Campus Party , where this year they presented a panel on the performance of MariaLab in the fight to reduce inequality gender in technology.

In addition to participating in mixed events, the group has directed its activities to embrace minorities as black women, cis, trans and gender binary. A walk-centered desire to empower and emancipate women so that they gain confidence, voice and time in technology.

In interview that follows, the MariaLab women rely more on the trajectory of the collective and the challenges of maintaining this experience.

The experience of spaces that function as a laboratory has been increasingly common in the fields of education and culture. What understanding do you have about this idea?

MariaLab : The idea of ​​laboratories as knowledge exchange and learning space is part of the context of the maker culture that encourages people to do by themselves, whatever that is. In recent years, technological innovation has resulted in a number of new tools and changes in the production process that directly impact consumption patterns and social structures as a whole. We now have 3D printers with hardware cards at reduced cost etc. In addition, the Internet has reduced the geographic distances and broadened the scope of communication, making it almost immediately. What a person placed in Egypt can be read in real time in the world by a large number of people. If I put a project on GitHub [ a social network geared to developers, where you can work collaboratively ], anyone can replicate it and modify it. In this new world we see a growing appreciation of ideas such as collaboration and horizontality, to the detriment of the centralization and hierarchy. That is, everyone is both sender and receiver know. And this, in turn, is one of the central ideas of these laboratories.

How the MariaLab acts? There is a closed schedule? I would tell you more about the day-to-day

The organization of the group currently has eight. We are women between 25 and 35, cis and trans, black, white, mestizo, Eastern, with different sexual orientations and different professional experiences, trying to bring our eyes and differences for the operation of the group. Regular activity has been the study group for programmers led by Vanessa Tonini and that occurs every 15 days, and we are evaluating possibilities of a study group focused on management systems, very little explored area and encouraged women. This year, we are also playing two other projects: superstars, a server (poetic license on behalf of the women’s cut) safe with collaboration services, communication and hosting safe to minimize attacks on collective and feminist activists, and workshops to introduce the technology topics involving the Women Tech Award in Sampa (computer maintenance, labor market, open to statistical data focused on the woman and programming). The best way to know the dates of the workshops for each of these projects is following us on Facebook and soon on our website that is going through reformulations because of the growth and scope of the activities.

Given this growth MariaLab what the current challenge in making the gear work?

the main challenge is funding, is to offer “coffee” to participants during activities or to fund the transport of those coming from further afield. We have great intention to awaken interest in technology also by women from the periphery and it is quite mitigated by the limited budget, the spaces concession difficulty with viable infrastructure for workshops outside the centers and the fact that all organizers of MariaLab work of voluntarily, which possibly generates impediments are time or financial resources. Also we missed its own space, although we have access to partner spaces. An additional challenge is to arouse the interest of new tutors and organizers. It is common sense a certain distance because we are a collective with hackerspace proposal. Soon we must devise strategies to continually educate and remember that the maker culture and hacker comes to doing the best for the community and other people with the knowledge and technology that each already have, providing the exchange of experiences to acquire the knowledge, still, it does not have. In this sense, the diversity achieved by intersectionality helps a lot, but it is an ongoing effort to show in practice and develop a dialogue that makes others more comfortable women to contribute what they have to offer.

still thinking about it, how important or the participation of government edicts to MariaLab activities remain?

Because of these difficulties, it is still quite complicated engage more people around notices . Fortunately, at the moment, we are managing to structure and articulate us technologically to organize and spearhead these issues, since it is a vital issue for us to engage more women in technology and that this technology is for transparency of government accounts, data open statisticians, especially in regard to the most sensitive issues of women in Brazil, for example, femicide, harassment, lesbo, bi and transphobia, unemployment mothers and women especially related to etarismo. At the time, many of our members, both inside and outside the organization, working in public and private initiatives addressing such issues. With greater organizational strength we will be able to divide and assist the community in relation to critical government edicts.

In this walk you, which the space occupied by free software? Do you see any resistance or difficulty in relation to this use by the public of the workshops?

The involvement of free software and technology is essential in our workshops. Recently, in the more technical workshops assigned to the flagships project, we have been accompanied by a public that has deep interest and very little intimacy with free tools, operating systems, open source and secure technologies, but who are willing to work habits and gradually assimilate such philosophy in their lives. We have members with much participation in the core of the open source community, professionals working directly in the implementation and development of open technologies, and it ends up creating an empathy and a willingness to contact us and share experiences and doubts. At the moment, not least of which encourage the use of free software, safe and Anti-spyware, we seek to educate people to do it with the technologies already working and depend on a healthy migration, less forceful and terrifying (we have several reports women who felt discouraged to move forward on this issue because of the incisive approach of some community members, mostly men). In the last Cryptorave, we have a presence in the Install Fest with a positive balance: 15 computers “liberated” [<> to free software ], four were women. Also, we had a very healthy discussion and encouragement of other women who came out of there with a more positive outlook for this migration. For this semester, we have projects to make our own Install Fest and start average of workshops with topics such as preventive and sustainable maintenance of computers, introduction to Linux and Shell Scripting for everyday automation tasks and preventive security for personal computers and smartphones.

What do you balance the trajectory of these three years of the MariaLab

we are still relatively far from the possibility of a traveling space education and a hackerspace. However, we are managing to reach a growing number of women who, beyond being trained, gained prominence and today work in several areas of technological knowledge. Some with their own personal and collective projects of varying purposes, but all around a common goal which is the role of women in the sciences. Last year, we achieved a projection that sometimes is even beyond our hands. Even with the difficulties of management we can extend our ideals beyond the exclusively female environments. Currently, we maintain the blog Do Same, the Link within the portal Estadão without losing autonomy and without abandoning the values ​​that accompany us from the beginning. Above all, be able to act in professional educational demands of women, in both public and private initiatives have not come, it is certainly an achievement that makes our renewable and more vibrant energy.

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