Update, May 4: Our proposal is on standby -- meaning, they hope they'll have space for it but might not. Fingers crossed!

Here's the description:

How can we make social networks more “diversity-friendly” — that is, more welcoming to women, people of color, trans, queer and gender-variant people, and others whose perspectives are typically marginalized? It starts with an anti-oppression attitude from people running the site, embedded in the community guidelines and norms. Other key techniques include tools, technologies, and policies in areas such as moderation, muting, blocking, reporting, pseudonymity, accessibility, privacy, and user rights.

This session will look at what does and doesn’t work in a variety of online environments. Dreamwidth, Gender Overflow, the feminist and womanist blogospheres (and mailing lists before them), and others provide positive examples to learn from. Less-positive examples like Twitter’s recent blocking faux pas, the Nymwars on Google+, Google Buzz before that, Storify, and Facebook’s privacy abuses also provide valuable lessons. This session will look at what does and doesn’t work in a variety of online environments, and will include an annotated collection of resources on the wiki.

If you think this would be an interesting session -- or if you've got some suggestions how to improve it -- we'd love your feedback! You can leave a private comment to the organizers on the Open Source Bridge site, or reply to this post.

My name's Jon ¹, and I first started working on TapestryMaker to create a new online home for me and my friends. All we want is a beautiful friendly place where we can hang out and meet new people; with a vibe that's intersectional feminist, pro-LGBTQ, values diversity and privacy; where the experience looks the way we want it; and where we're seen as people with rights instead of product to be packaged and sold. Is that too much to ask?

Of course not. There are already sites like Dreamwidth out there that come close to those goals. But it turns out that's not really all we want.

We also want all the functionality we can get from Twitter (status updates), Facebook (likes, sharing links and videos, events), Google (collaborative editing like Google docs and spreadsheets, video meetings like Hangouts), forum sites (threaded discussions), Instagram, Tumblr, tribe.net, Pinterest, and our other favorite social networks.

Without the ads and tracking of course.

And prettier!

Oh, and since so many of our friends and acquaintances are on those other sites and most of them aren't moving any time soon, we also want to follow and participate in discussions there as well. And encrypted email and text messaging would be nice too.

Okay, this is starting to be a lot to ask :)

As far as I can tell, there isn't a site like this out there yet. And with my entrepeneurial hat on, hmm: a beautiful diversity-friendly open-source social network platform with this kind of functionality would also enable lot of other interesting things -- and there are a lot of good open source packages that are potential building blocks and allies.

So last fall I started prototyping² to get more of an idea about what it will take to build the kind of site we want. TapestryMaker (the working name for the software) is still at a very early stage, and our online home is very much a work in progress. Still, early results are encouraging; and when I describe the possibilities, lots of people get excited. So it feels like we're on to something.

As things move forward, we'll be discussing everything from the vision to the architecture to the planning and prioritization. We'll also talk about related topics like diversity and technology, privacy and civil rights, software engineering, blogging, and social networks ... and probably some random other topics as well :)

Thanks for checking us out. Stay tuned for more!

jon

1. More on my background here. My personal blog at Liminal States gives an idea of my interests. Liminal States has been fairly quiet for the last few years, and I'm excited to get back to blogging!

2. using node.js, express, passport.io, jade, and jquery! It's been a while since I've written this much code, and I'm also excited to get back to programming :)