MCH2022

How to make your project more inclusionary
2022-07-23, 10:00–11:30, Gear ⚙️

Let's talk about our projects and surroundings, and how their setup may be discrimnating.
Let's find barriers, and think about ways of to remove or bypass them.
Whether it's about your hackspace being way too white and able-bodied, your IT project being too male-dominated, or your leftist intiative somehow being very non-working class: let's find a way to figure this out and make your surroudings more diverse and equitable.


The target group for this workshop is primarily people working in/with tech, and there is no need to know sociology theories to keep up.

This talk covers the work that I have done for my master's thesis. I looked at how (in Human Computer Interaction) projects tackled different forms of discrimination not by the stuff that they created, but rather by how they went about it.
From writing proposals to deciding on which methods to use (and how), to documenting the work afterwards: there's lots of things we can do to be more inclusionary.

In this workshop, I will present a set of recommendations that I have created for the purpose of helping non-social sciences people be better in including people that are different to them (tech people still are a rather homogenous group of white, affluent, cis non-inter men). After the presentation, we will apply said recommendations to whichever projects the participants would like to -- ideally, they bring their own (with a short explanation), or we come up with some fictional setting.

I studied Computer Science at Technische Universität Wien (Vienna, Austria) with a focus on Human Computer Interaction and Ethics in CS.
Based on the work on my master's thesis (which is the basis for my MCH workshop proposal), I already published two peer-reviewed articles, and conducted national and international workshops.

I have a strong interest in politics, activism and society and the connections in between these topics and computer sciences. I was a student representative and political activist on various university levels (Österreichische Hochschüler_innenschaft) over the course of my studies, and am a member of Chaos Computer Club Wien (c3w) and metalab (hackspace in Vienna).