After looking over the Recurse Center’s Diversity Policy and User’s manual, I noticed a number of sections within the documents that reflect the good codes we discussed during class. To preface these findings, I want to first discuss some background on the Recurse Center, and the growth and progress it has made during the last several years. The Center, formerly called the Hacker School, is an educational facility which hosts retreats for programmers in New York City. What makes this facility stand out is that it offers these retreats free of charge and provides need-based grants for individuals that may be interested in starting a project, but do not have the financial resources to manage it. This facilitates a learning environment that allows for any level programmer to join and acquire new skills to improve. These offerings explain much of the success and numbers in terms of participation the Center has experienced.
The Recurse Center has proven its ability to make what is generally a male and straight dominated field of programming into a more inclusive setting. In April of 2012, the Center made it its goal to reach 50% participants women, trans, or non-binary, and just recently it has reached 48%. These numbers didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Managing an environment of many backgrounds, whether that be socioeconomic, race, gender, or sexuality can be challenging, and requires the policies to eliminate the friction that may arise. Before I discuss the code of conduct, I want to point out the Recurse Center’s “social rules”. These don’t fixate on specific policies but serve as a general overview on what shouldn’t be done to make the Center a place for all levels of background when it comes to programming. Two of these that really stood out to me are “no backseat-driving” and “no subtle -isms”. First, in an open learning environment, members can have a wide range of knowledge and capabilities, thus the members are told not to jump into conversations trying to one up someone in how they are implementing something. Furthermore, “subtle-isms are subtle expressions of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia...” and so on. Although there may appear to not have any significant meaning, certain salient identities may feel unwelcome, and that should be avoided at all costs.
These are just a couple examples of the social rules that exist in the Recurse Center which are stressed over and over for the members, now I would like to discuss the official documentation on the diversity and inclusion policy, and the user’s manual.
The diversity and inclusion policy first discuss how Recurse Center has been able to build its diversity as discussed earlier. Most programming bootcamps or college level courses are expensive and can be difficult for many people that don’t have the financial capabilities to pay for these classes. For this reason, The Recuse Center has made its entire programming experience free of charge. This is certainly a “good code” because it opens the doors for those who do want a career in programming but don’t have the means of learning. The process to join is also straightforward. The Center doesn’t ask for much information, and it’s not a merit-based application. This is another good code found within the Center’s policies. Most programming boot camp institutions have rigorous applications that require a minimum amount of experience, this leaves a large margin of people that still want to pursue the field out of the game. Yet another key feature of the application procedure is that members are not identified by their names, rather by random generated id number. This helps to reduce bias when the applications are looked at by the team.
Another important document is the User’s manual which is for the admitted members, and provides the guidelines to help them understand what the Recurse Center entails. One of the first thing the document points out is the social rules as discussed before, and the Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct lists a number of unacceptable actions which would lead to immediate removal from the Center. This is similar to the code we saw in class for SoundCloud which makes it clear that there would be no room for tolerance for any threatening behavior.
Something to point out here is that the members are highly encouraged to take action if any of these codes are to be broken. This may be difficult, especially if one becomes a victim to abusive behavior or just unfriendly remarks in general. For this reason, members have the ability to report any activity to the team anonymously through the website or by phone call. This was also something common among most of the companies we looked at;
A learning environment can get stressful at times especially with programming, and as a Computer Science student I can attest to this. To minimize the stress, the user manual highlights three resources available to the members. The first one is pair programming. New members that do not have much experience with a new language or a new technology can pair with someone more experienced, and this will allow for a one on one learning experience. Having someone by your side when learning new concepts without having the fear of asking an embarrassing question certainly removes a lot of the stress.
It is the combination of all the above policies and decisions that has made the Recurse Center so successful as a diverse learning community. The common policies implemented in the companies we looked at were as follows: explicit prohibitions and consequences for any type of offensive speech or violent enticing actions. These were for both users of the service of the company and the employees themselves. Furthermore, more subtle behavior that doesn’t get noticed but still has implied meanings are prohibited. These are also more common within the workplace since there result from ignorance and not paying attention.
As students of Diversity and Technology, keeping these policies in mind, when we either develop technology or in the future, have our own companies, will make for more inclusive environments and will be a step forward in the right direction.
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