Social Rules from the Hacker School User Manual

Came across Hacker School's User Manual last night. For those unfamiliar, 

Hacker School is a free, full-time, immersive school in New York for becoming a better programmer. We're like a writers' retreat for programmers. People come from around the world to write code and grow as programmers.

Take three minutes and go read the part about Social Rules. I'll still be here when you get back.

So many things I appreciate about this post. Let's start with simplicity of naming behaviors to make the implicit explicit. For the edu folks reading this, it's like Doug Lemov Teach Like a Champion techniques but for coders. Brilliant.

If I had a nickel for every "Feigned Surprise" and "Well Actually" that found its way into the late night discussions we'd have in the computer lab as we worked to get our programs to compile during my undergrad years, I'd be pretty rich. And Hacker School's not the first to call attention to this; Dr. Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College, also speaks about counteracting these social forces (in order to create a more inclusive environment) in a university setting (see here, here, and here).

I'm especially jazzed about the fourth rule's use of the term subtle-isms, as opposed to the increasingly popular term micro-aggressions. I find this choice (whether intentional or not) to be a much more welcoming way to describe - and thus discuss - behavior that is often not intentional.

Subtle -isms are small things that make others feel uncomfortable, things that we all sometimes do by mistake. For example, saying "It's so easy my grandmother could do it" is a subtle -ism. Like the other three social rules, this one is often accidentally broken. Like the other three, it's not a big deal to mess up – you just apologize and move on ... If you are a third party, and you don't see what could be biased about the comment that was made, feel free to talk to faculty. Please don't say, "Comment X wasn't homophobic!" Similarly, please don't pile on to someone who made a mistake. The "subtle" in "subtle -isms" means that it's probably not obvious to everyone right away what was wrong with the comment.

Yes. This. Normalizing it because it's true; pretty much everyone does make these mistakes and we benefit when others help us recognize when we do.

Update: Yes, even famous people, like Stephen Colbert, make the mistake of subtle-isms :) See 3:46 into his "Ask a Grown" on Rookie Mag. The fact that I picked up on this is a testament to the naming of subtle behaviors - I otherwise would have probably overlooked it.

The Hacker School faculty recognized that most subtle-isms are inherently not obvious, and Allison Kaptur recently wrote a good followup post that acknowledges it's more difficult to follow this rule (as compared to No Feigning Surprise, No Well-Actually's, and No Backseat Driving).

Breaking the fourth social rule, like breaking any other social rule, is an accident and a small thing. In theory, someone should be able to say "Hey, that was subtly sexist," get the response "Oops, sorry!" and move on just as easily as if they'd well-actually'ed. In practice, people are less likely to point out when this rule is broken, and more likely to be defensive if they were the rule-breaker. We'd like to change this.

For the last year, the "No subtle -isms" rule has carried some implementation guidelines. One of these is asking people not to debate whether or not something is an -ism. When we introduced this policy, many women in our community responded positively. At the same time, some men described their process of discovering what their female friends were going through, and worried that other men would miss out on this opportunity to become allies. That's a genuine cost of having this policy. Nevertheless, we believe that this cost is outweighed by two benefits. First, we want marginalized people to feel welcome, not like they have to defend their presence. Second, we don't want marginalized people to have to spend time educating non-marginalized people who might be coming to these ideas for the first time. Faculty - not other Hacker Schoolers - are happy to help people discover resources for learning about anti-oppression.

What a pragmatic way to make the case for "not wanting marginalized people to have to spend time educating others" because of the obvious reason that said people enrolled this school to become better programmers, and these conversations can be one huge distracting time suck.



Connecting the dots:

In response to Audrey Watters' post on sexism at ISTE earlier this year, I (privately) mused that changing a conference's code of conduct (edtech events like ISTE and in general) would not substantially address the unwelcoming experiences many attendees have. I didn't have the words to explain why at the time, but now I do -
We often say that the Hacker School social rules are intended to be lightweight. Another way to put this is that we expect that Hacker Schoolers will occasionally break one of the social rules. When this happens, another Hacker Schooler will say, "Hey, that was a well-actually," and the first Hacker Schooler will say "Oops, sorry!" That's it – accidentally breaking social rules is common, expected, and readily forgiven. Even Hacker School founders sometimes slip up. Hacker School social rules are much lighter than a code of conduct. Someone who violates a conference's code of conduct could get written up, warned, or ejected from the conference. Violating a code of conduct is a big deal, and it usually isn't hard to avoid doing so. By contrast, it's much harder to avoid breaking the Hacker School social rules, and people often make mistakes.
Emphasis in that last line is mine - this is exactly what I wanted to articulate in the dialogue about ISTE policies. I'd love to see conferences, meetups, barcamps, etc. adopt Social Rules in addition to a Code of Conduct, because the behaviors that contribute to an unwelcome environment are often so subtle (and often unintentional) that applying a Code of Conduct in those situations seems like overkill. This desire not to blow something out of proportion often discourages people from addressing the subtle-ism at all.

Essentially, make it ok for everyone to sweat the small stuff so that the big stuff is less likely to happen (and certainly, when the big stuff happens, you are prepared).

Lastly, I'm going to start pulling this User Manual out in casual conversation as a means of broaching the topic of implicit social norms. Feels like it would be far less intimidating (and thus far more productive) then to ask "Hey, so how do we solve sexism in tech?" ya know? So holler if you want to grab a beer and chat.


P.S. Related posts I read as I fell through the rabbit hole that is the Internet: