Systemic Challenges
In this document, you’ll find a conversation about larger systems of knowing that extends beyond Feminist AI™, poieto, and our allies, but which is foundational to the work that we’re trying to do. This writing defines knowing as we understand in our own work so that all readers are working with a common definition; highlights the lack of knowing in existing systems and structures; and points towards the power of listening to our own knowing, feeling, and being.
One reason for sharing in this way is to acknowledge that we have spent the past years thinking about and developing this larger ethos and system, rather than move forward with unsustainable programming. We focused on meaningful growth rather than expansion for its own sake, returning to our original goals and intellectual guideposts – to assess what truly made sense for next steps.
Critical to this sharing is our hope that you will join us as we seek to center knowing in our practice – and in turn, become a part of our knowing ecosystem. By doing so, we hope to be able to engage in activism from a foundation that is continually working towards equity, and which takes care of our own houses and systems before we start to craft, deconstruct, or transform those of others.
In the arts and industry arenas, people in positions of power are increasingly calling for justice-focused projects. At the same time, these powerful people, and the organizations they oversee, largely fail to provide financial and organizational support or labor for those who create spaces in which justice-oriented work can occur, including communities hosting art shows, research, workshops, and salons.
Existing sources of funding offered through both for-profit and non-profit partners are more likely to be structured in ways that reinforce systemic racism, sexism, ageism, classism, location-based elitism and overall inequity, even as they speak towards justice. How we operate is too often contingent upon these antiquated and inequitable systems. These inequities inform how we learn (our education), how we are valued (social media metrics), what kinds of work we are – and aren’t – paid for - for example, labor oriented towards caregiving, domestic spaces, sharing insights, and providing critical reviews are often performed by unheard voices, and how the work we do is recognized publicly. The requirement of 501c3 status for organizations to receive many kinds of support is often a burden.
The system described above is not designed to fund longer-term, sustainable, justice-oriented research and art. Instead, it perpetuates inequity by assuming, in a huge disconnect with reality, that emerging artists and collectives exist in perpetuity despite relying on free labor to operate. Likewise, when an organization funds an art project without offering support for additional organizational, structural, and lived experience labor, it restricts visionaries, asking them to confine themselves within a specific practice rather than to focus on reimagining spaces for artists to learn, grow, and create.
While we are, by necessity, crafting a way to work within these systems, despite their very real flaws, we recognize the significant need to create additional support for our own knowing, living, and being that comes from outside traditional channels. Our goal is to be self-sustaining through legally working with both our for-profit (poieto) and non-profit (Feminist.AI) arms. Our ultimate hope is to be sustainable in a way that does not require external validation from funders entrenched in a skewed system. Rather, we are attempting to design a system in which we can choose who we partner with while crafting our own skills, support, and certifications approved by our knowing communities for our knowing communities.
In crafting a new approach, we’ve clarified a few additional challenges, and approaches we’d like to take in response as we move forward.
As we’ve stated, current approaches to funding in philanthropy and industry privilege those with money and contacts or outright exploit nonprofit members to legitimize their problematic histories and lived experiences. We are going to minimize the time and labor we dedicate to gaining funding from these systems in favor of alternative approaches to financial sustainability. While this does not mean we will completely abstain from seeking traditional funding – although that is a goal – we will prioritize from our knowing communities and being as transparent as possible with our financial decision-making.
Time is moving differently since the onset of the pandemic. We will measure the success of our work not through how much programming we can do each year, but instead through the actual impact we can achieve, skills learned, connections made, value offered, and how healthy we are as an organization – and as individuals – in the process.
While philanthropy, academia, industry, and activism are not equitable, Feminist.AI has members and allies working in inequitable spaces – including philanthropy, academia, industry, and activism – who may not necessarily agree with the models within which they find themselves. They have, and continue to, work incredibly hard to support Feminist.AI and this kindness is not lost on our community. It is our mission to co-create more equitable futures through our products, funding models, mentoring, learning, and knowing. In doing so, we will craft a space where we can work thoughtfully within spaces with which we don’t align while still supporting our members and allies.
What Is Knowing?
We are continually crafting a collective definition of knowing, as well as making space to honor definitions that exist outside of our lived experience. There are many ways of knowing and we understand them to be fluid and contextual. One definition of knowing may not apply to everyone, and this should be acknowledged and honored.
While “Knowing” is the core of our practice, this idea or feeling of knowing may exist through other languages. In both poieto and Feminist.AI, and outside of these spaces, knowing has been associated with: intuition, feeling, intent, “seeing through the bullshit”, feeling connected, being a part of the natural world, communicating and feeling connected to something larger than oneself, or being part of humanity. Knowing is being and feeling as if you are one small part of something larger, and as if you are one big part of a collection of smaller things. Knowing is embodied beyond a form. Knowing is physical. Knowing can be digital. Knowing is being in community.
As people, and as an organization, our power comes from communing, thinking critically, building data, models, talks, and crafting new tools. We want this power to come back to us and reinforce our shared and distributed networks and systems of power. Our co-crafted programming will continue to focus on this approach to knowing, learning, and living.
This idea of Knowing is celebrated in Feminist practices and inspired by pioneers in the field including Alison Adam (Artificial Knowing) and Sara Ahmed (Knowing and Strangeness). We also take inspiration from our communities of knowers, mentors, and allies, from the knowing practices that have been shared by the Tribal Nations members of poieto and Feminist.AI, to the Black Feminist knowing shared by Professor Safiya U. Noble, to the plant knowing of Monica Gagliano. Knowing is dreaming, Knowing is intuiting, Knowing is always changing. Trauma informs knowing, and that there are types of knowing that only lived experiences allow us to know.
Pulling from her book, Algorithms of Oppression, we resonate with Dr. Noble’s words that “concepts that may be widely understood and accepted ways of knowing are rarely cited in mainstream scholarship.”
Who are “knowing communities”?
Knowing communities are self-defined and may extend into governing systems, nations, locations, and our natural environment. Communities may be physical, digital, and hybrid. Communities may call themselves whatever they want – teams, groups, families – if community doesn’t feel like the right term to use.
Feminist.AI is an example of a knowing community. poieto hosts knowing communities and is also a knowing community. Our colleagues at the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, Algorithmic Justice League, The Feminist Center for Creative Work and Processing, are examples of what we would call knowing communities.
Knowing Opportunities
In 2021, Feminist.AI intended to offer individual and shared programming with poieto which included: 🧠 9+ COMMUNITY AI EDUCATION SERIES, 🖼 MULTIPLE COMMUNITY ART SHOWS, 🎥 2+ FILM SCREENINGS, 🎤 6+ TECH + ACTIVISM SPEAKER EVENTS, 🌷 6+ COLLABORATIVE EVENTS, and 💜 6+ COMMUNITY RESEARCH PRESENTATIONS. While we have received limited funds from industry and academia to support this work, most of our funding has come from our community and allies. As an organization, we have worked incredibly hard to allocate 100% of our funds to our community members and allies.
Instead of the planned programming, a number of factors caused us to shift our plans for the year. We placed our energies on creating a new approach to sustain our community’s energies and finances rather than continue to work with limited funding and within a flawed and biased funding system. We focused on crafting community by collaboratively discussing a new model with the poieto™ team, our current cohort of Feminist.AI members, and past cohort members. We consulted knowers in non-profit, for-profit, civic and arts spaces and tried to move forward with a legal solution that is continually working towards equity.
We are excited to receive much-needed organizational support from the Feminist.AI community and allies, as well as Meda Democracy Fund to hire a technologist. We are also excited to soon receive funds from The Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA, and we’re honored to again receive support from such a meaningful partner. Less than 3 months ago we finally received 501c3 status. Despite these gains, we can no longer honorably say we can achieve our programming without increased funding from additional sources. We are no longer waiting on those outside our community for support. Instead, we are going to work towards creating an “ecosystem of knowing” that aligns with our social justice values, focuses on the social implications of technologies, and centers around creating a space for people to learn, know, and get paid for their labor!
Why
Educational opportunities in the United States, which are limited to begin with, devalue lived experience and knowing. Funding for art-science education is practically non-existent. Public schools still reinforce test-based learning. Access to learning and valuing oneself within our education system in the United States is challenging.
We believe that the focus of educational opportunities should be on knowing, which includes learning, ways of being, and self-care. We expect this from our learning, our work, and our support systems. Combating algorithmic bias occurs not only through the crafting of new algorithms, but by creating new systems that honor all of the dimensions of our lived experiences and allow us to create our futures, and reframe the past and present. Join us as we co-craft our values-driven knowing and learning.
How We Are Crafting Change: Participatory Models
Our shared model is to create a space with multiple entry points of participation, focusing on “our knowing”. While our non-profit and for-profit both have limited funds, we’re focusing on creating a platform that allows all contributors space to engage in volunteer-focused work that with creator approval may also be licensed as a way of cultivating additional support, with terms defined by the maker and community.
Our work focuses on the whole person. It honors parenting, caretaking, wellness, artistic practices, activist practices, and all other parts of ourselves. We want to honor our “knowing”. We want to create a social tech platform that honors (through our limited funding) volunteering, contracting, and being a permanent staff member. We want to create a transparent system that continually works towards equity while acknowledging our challenges.
We can make this together, especially as we get more fully resourced. We will offer classes through poieto, Feminist.AI, and our friends and allies. We want this to be a place for you to bring your material. Many of you were a fundamental part of co-crafting or participating in community projects with the non-profit Feminist.AI and the for-profit poieto. By sharing your desires through our social technology learning tools with poieto, we believe that we can craft a platform with the intention of honoring contributors. Feminist.AI has been a volunteer-run organization, and we want to move beyond a volunteer culture into a knowing culture (as defined in post 1).
Our current plan is as follows:
We are crafting our own for-profit learning platform on our poieto learning management system. poieto is a methodology and a tool; however, there is no requirement to use the methodology and the tool to use our platform (although much of our work will do so).
We will offer modules (called sequences), or individual sessions, either for purchase or for free for a limited time depending on the wishes of the creators. We will place the work of both Feminist.AI, poieto, and our allies.
We will upload programming based on over five and a half years of work, including both poieto and feminist.ai projects teaching around arts, ethics, and product from various perspectives.
We plan to partner, collaborate, host, and honor crafting as well as social approaches to learning and producing technologies, art, and science research.
We believe that we need someone to run this learning management system, so we plan to employ a 50/50 model. 50% of profits will go to running the LMS and 50% will go back to the crafters of the content, however they decide to divide the funds. For shared programming with Feminist.AI and poieto, we hope to work towards offering more compensation than a small one-time stipend. With this approach, we hope to create a space where people can be paid overtime through royalties. We know how critically important it is to have avenues for everyone to work with us in a way that is comfortable for them; to honor that, we will try to connect with each person or group to find ways of working together that feel right for everyone involved.
Our intentions are to work towards this ethos and figure out a way to support ourselves and the people supporting us through the LMS. Additionally, we hope to fund Feminist.AI through our arts-science (and sometimes product) creations. Through poieto, we hope to create funding through our licensing of software, creating opting-in user research, project, data uploading, and algorithm creation. In this space, you will control your projects and research.
We would like to enable a yearly voting process to check-in regarding our needs and desires for this LMS. In order to do so, we would like to craft a committee of content contributors to discuss and check in with our intentions and the reality of our funding. We would like to co-craft a tiered funding system and we want to make sure that people bringing in existing content have the opportunity to discuss their licensing model. We understand this will be a work in progress.
We will honor our programming with Feminist.AI and poieto and enable a voting system for people to suggest what they want to learn. We can then craft and/or put a call out for those proposed classes. We would like to get to a space where folks who are using this system are also voting for or producing content.
The poieto platform will create a space where people can share how they want to engage, and what they are looking for. While trying to achieve more equitable approaches to volunteer practices and knowledge sharing, we will create a space to work towards honoring the wishes of our members.
This is a large co-crafted experiment and we would love for you to be a part of it. We can’t do it without you.
We are you. You are us. We’re designing a system where you have the capacity to negotiate your relationships, your knowledge sharing, your experiences, and how you occupy this space.
Knowing Feminist AI - How We Work
The Feminist AI™ community is an always evolving, self-defined, “living” community that values the experience of knowing, described by our members as something you can feel at your core. This core knowing and being has had several areas of focus over the past few years. It has been mapped to biomes, bodies, and solar systems (thanks Rox). In our current iteration, we used the following allegory to scaffold out our internal structure: we take this “core” and, starting from where we are, connect this to our being, our earth, and our solar system.
OUR COMMUNITY
Currently, Feminist.AI at Mutable Studio is organized by:
Inner Core
Outer Core
Mantle
These distinctions are layered and do not work within a hierarchy; rather, each grouping serves its own purpose, connecting with and supporting the whole.
The earth’s core is made up of both the inner and outer core (and more recently discovered inner inner core).
INNER CORE
Our inner core is comprised of our board, our staff position, and our independent contractors: the people who keep Feminist AI™ at Mutable Studio going long-term. The Inner Core is connected to the Outer Core, and there is often movement back and forth between the two. Together, they work to ensure the values, ethos, and support for Feminist AI™ are present, all while working to fulfill the organization’s mission and vision and providing opportunities for community-focused art-tech education for our members. Our current inner core consists of 3 board members, our design team (Open Form), 1 project manager/administrator (@ 5 hours a week), 1 business manager/bookkeeper (@5 hours a month), 1 social media educator (just starting) and an editor (as needed). Soon we will be adding a full-time Justice Technologist (our first fellowship). Currently, we have 2 Outer Core Members helping with our grant writing. As we’ve just received 501c3 status, however, we hope that we are soon able to bring on a grant writer for a staff position.
OUTER CORE
Our Outer Core runs Feminist AI™. They not only work on the programs, but they also play a major role in decision-making and organization operations. They approve budget, programming, expenses, and language, working between the Inner Core and the Mantle. They also create and manage Critical AI Education Projects. Our Outer Core members stay with us for a minimum of 6 months, and often for the duration of our annual critical Feminist AI™ project. Project-based presence for our core is helpful in avoiding burnout, and allows for a transition to occur between one cohort and the next. While our new cohorts are creating their projects, they are learning from the current cohort members who are speaking publicly to their work. This mentorship is built into the Outer Core process. Our Outer Core receives $599 for expenses throughout the year, and, if they would like to formalize a relationship with us as an independent contractor, we welcome this and ask for core approval based on the realities of our budget.
MANTLE
Our Mantle is our third layer and is Feminist.AI’s foundation, representing our members at large. For our Feminist AI™ members, this represents people in our community programming, previous core members, allies, and people who may join for a short-term project or who simply drop in for awhile.
OUR DOCUMENTATION
Over the past few years, we have created onboarding and offboarding documents and community agreements to support our inner and outer core. Our current focus has been on crafting a system that does not extract volunteer labor but instead is a space where people may learn, get paid, work towards a job transition, or engage in a critical AI project. Ultimately, we are working to craft a space where people receive support and connection, however this may manifest, and building a space of living and knowing through:
Co-crafting our internship, volunteer, and knowers guides and outcomes. This is done with and led by our interns and volunteers, and includes activating teams to manage programming, volunteers/interns, and social media. (more on our internships soon)
Co-crafting a more formalized budget approval system. (currently, it’s approved in discord)
Formalizing our programming processes while at the same time honoring our past programming. We’re doing this by moving from internal-participatory to a combination of internal and community-voted programming.
Continuing to develop our resources.
Deciding what parts of our work we want to monetize or share so that we can continue to value our labor and work towards self-sufficiency within our Feminist AI™ community.