❗DWeb Bay Area Meetup: Change in Speaker Lineup
DWeb Bay Area Meetup: Change in Speaker Lineup
Hi DWeb Friends,
For more than eight years, the DWeb movement has strived to create safe, ethical, values-driven spaces to develop a better Web through decentralized tech. We align around a set of principles that include mutual respect: “We expect participants to remain mindful of, and take responsibility for, their speech and behavior, by acting out of respect for others and respecting physical and emotional boundaries.”
So it is only after deep consideration that the DWeb Bay Area Node leaders have decided to withdraw our invitation to Redbean and llamafiles creator Justine Tunney to speak at tonight's DWeb Bay Area Meetup. Our community has raised serious issues about her past tweets from 2014-2015 about Jewish people, indentured servitude, and slavery. They have raised more recent issues about her behavior in lobste.rs and llama.ccp. We would like to create space for Justine to respond and take responsibility for her past statements if she chooses to. There isn’t time to do that before tonight’s event, but we leave the door open to move forward together.
How does that happen? How do we build a technology space that is both safe and inclusive?
In the planning process for this event, we shared our DWeb Principles with Justine to ensure we share the same goals. She read them and replied and that her projects are all about enabling people to uphold their security, privacy, and self-determination (as described in our first principle); Justine writes:
That's what Llamafile and Cosmopolitan are all about. I want to be able to share software on my own, without needing to go through spies and rent-seekers. So I build tools to save myself, and I make them open source, so everyone else can have them too.
From her bio: I believe in elevating the quality of software through world class engineering, and most importantly, making that accessible to every member of our society.
We asked Justine to come to talk about her work with llamafiles and its application in democratizing the use of LLMs. It’s important decentralizing technology in an era of AI, and there is much we can learn and build on in Justine’s open source code.
Tonight at our Bay Area Meetup, we will discuss some of the larger issues this situation raises. We want to ponder the thoughts of organizer adrienne marie brown on call-out culture:
the kind of callouts we are currently engaging in do not necessarily think about movements’ needs as a whole. movements need to grow and deepen, we need to ‘transform ourselves to transform the world’, to ‘be transformed in the service of the work’. movements need to become the practice ground for what we are healing towards, co-creating. movements are responsible for embodying what we are inviting our people into. … knee jerk call outs say: those who cause harm cannot change. they must be eradicated. the bad things in the world cannot change, we must disappear the bad until there is only good left. but one layer under that, what i hear is: we cannot change. we do not believe we can create compelling pathways from being harm doers to being healed, to growing. we do not believe we can hold the complexity of a gray situation. We do not believe in our own complexity.*
So we invite you to join us tonight in San Francisco, and globally throughout this year as we grapple with core issues: in a decentralized movement, who decides what is acceptable and what violates our principles? How do we harness the good in tech and technologists while standing up against behavior we find objectionable? In this explosively divisive era, how do we move forward together in areas we agree upon?
Thanks, DWeb Bay Area Organizers Thanks for reading!Questions? Write to dweb@archive.orgStay in touch via our Matrix Channel, Discord, Bluesky, Mastodon, or X. Our mailing address is:300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118Want to change how you receive these emails?You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.