Back in May I attended the Digital Preservation Coalition’s 2024 Unconference in Dublin. It was my first face-to-face DPC event since joining in January, and so it was also the first time I got to meet many of my new colleagues in person.
It was a great event, and I got to meet lots of lovely people and talk lots of nerdy talk. I was struck by how warm and positive the experience was, but struggled to put it into words. It was just a good vibe.
But then during the closing session, one of the DPC members spoke up to say that one of the great things about the Unconference was that it felt like a safe and brave space. One where everyone felt comfortable enough to talk about their experiences openly, to allow themselves to be a little vulnerable. Willing to being questioned and challenged, knowing they will be respected and supported.
This really struck a chord with us, as it seemed to perfectly express what we are trying to do. I feel like the ability to create such spaces is one of the things that makes the DPC special.
But it also feels a bit mysterious. Clearly, just declaring a space to be safe does not make it so. So what does?
The specific language of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘brave spaces’ appears to come from finding ways to support marginalised or persecuted groups. In that context, spaces can either be safe or brave. They can’t be both.
The concept of feeling safe while being brave enough to be vulnerable seems a lot closer to the idea of psychological safety. In recent years, this version of safe and brave has become seen as a crucial pre-requisite for building teams that work well together (e.g.) after having been popularised through influential research by Google:
Psychological safety: This was the most important dynamic in an effective team. Psychological safety is about risk-taking and being comfortable with vulnerability. People who don’t feel psychologically safe worry that taking risks will mean they’re seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. Psychological safety means feeling confident about admitting mistakes, asking questions, or offering new ideas.
That article includes some suggestions about how to create this sense of safety:
- Frame the work as a learning problem as opposed to an execution problem.
- Acknowledge your own fallibility.
- Model curiosity by asking a lot of questions.
Which all sounds sensible, but somehow it doesn’t really feel like we’re getting to the heart of it. It focuses on the role of the leader. It ignores the role of the room.
One of my biggest mistakes came down to failing to read the room.
Early on in my time at the UK Web Archive, I became hugely frustrated by the splintered situation that we seemed to have ended up in. Almost every web archive was running some version of the Java-based Wayback access tool created by the Internet Archive. But everyone was maintaining their own separate development forks and deployments. Independently fixing essentially the same bugs in a dozen different places, each based of a different version of the core project. All I could see was the waste. The duplicated effort.
In 2013, I worked with a small team of folks from the Internet Archive and other IIPC members to launch the OpenWayback Project, shifting maintenance and management over to the IIPC. The project leadership was in place, the governance model was clear, the goal and purpose had been widely disseminated. The community would be engaged. All we had to do was wait for all those fixes and tweaks to roll in!
But it didn’t really work.
We did get contributions from those who were able to, but I’d misread the room. I was asking folks I didn’t really know to speak up in the biggest room of all. The wide open space of the Internet.
Open is always better, right?
Open source!
Open access!
Open data!
Shouldn’t we all be open to being more open?
Open your eyes!
Be open to change!
Just open your heart!
Join us.
Out in the open.
Join us.
Open water.
Join us, please.
Open fracture.
Please. Please join us.
Open season.
…please?
Open wound.
One problem with the OpenWayback Project was that I had failed to grasp how small the pool of software developers working on web archives actually is.
But the biggest problem was that I’d vastly underestimate the personal and institutional barriers to working out in the open.
Not everyone is comfortable working in the open. Not everyone finds maintaining an internet presence an easy and fun thing to do. Not everyone enjoys the kinds of ‘feedback’ and attention they get online. Nor expending the endless energy it takes to push past those prejudices to get their voice heard.
Not every developer has the support of the institution they work for. In truth, few do. A lot of crucial work across our field is done by folks who are fortunate enough to have the autonomy and licence to just get on with it.
I had become so used to being ready to ask for forgiveness, rather than have to ask permission, I forgot how fortunate I was to be able to get away with that.
But not every IT department will let you get Git. Some firewalls cannot be sidestepped. Not every policy bends.
There have been casualties.1
There are even some institutions for which involvement in any collaborative endeavour would likely lead to withdrawal, because their administrators would see any real success as a reason to leave. Why should they pay their staff to do the work, when there’s all these other folks doing it?!
Not everyone can play out in the open. Not everyone wants to. Some already have enough scars, thank you very much.
If people can’t join you in the open, forgive them.
You don’t know what’s at stake.
I started to think I’d found a new iron triangle…
In other words:
Safe, Brave, Open. Choose Two.
I can stay safe and work in the open, no problem. But if I choose to really put myself out there, I can’t expect to stay safe. It’s a big world. I can’t control what happens.
But the truth is I can afford to be open because I risk very little.
I’m pale, male, stale, and I’m on the Internet. And I’m not alone!
And people seem to take me seriously! I’m rarely undermined by superficial judgments or empty critiques. Those prejudices bend in my favour, baby!
“…there is a privilege in being able to confidently share your knowledge and not feel that it will be appropriated or it will be misunderstood or it will be intentionally […] misused.”
Kirstie Whitaker, from Code for Thought: Happy Birthday - The Turing Way Part 1, 4 Jun 2024
I can afford to make mistakes in public. I can deliberately take risks in public to illustrate how unfamiliar spaces operate. Because I get to choose the stakes.2
But I can’t expect that of others.
It’s easy to open up when you’re only putting your own heart on the line.
You don’t know what’s at stake.
Better to be curious. Better to be kind.
Perhaps kindness was the crucial ingredient needed for a psychologically safe space?
Well yes, but then, I’ve made mistakes here too.
A basic desire to be kind, especially when coupled with a tendency to avoid conflict, to be a people pleaser, can be a dangerous thing.
Sharing any space take compromise, of course. But others don’t always see the steps you are taking to make them feel at home. If it’s always you stepping back and making room, it becomes a kind of kindness trap.
Sometimes you need a better space in which to be.
You deserve kindness too.
Sometimes you need to assert some boundaries.
Push back.
You can’t read a room the size of the world. You can’t judge what’s safe to share. And kindness can’t survive without boundaries.
You a need smaller room. Cosier space.3
How do those rooms feel?
In my experience, there is a warm welcome. But one that also make sure the rules of engagement are clear. Governance matters.
There is shared purpose. Something that everyone there cares about.
There is commitment: everyone has skin in the game. But there’s also an easy out. We’ve chosen to be there, but we can engage on our terms.
There is a healthy lack of machismo. Egos are leashed. Good will is assumed. Intentions are not pre-judged.
And there is laughter.
Joel Morris’s book Be Funny or Die: How Comedy Works and Why It Matters really digs into how laughter lives or dies in different rooms. Fascinatingly, it also argues that one of the ways comedy works is by dancing along the boundaries of the rules of the room. Pushing against them… as if to break them… but then… the tension… POPS! We’re safe! It’s all fine! We’re laughing, together, cradled by the boundaries we share. Held closer than we were before.
The absence of laughter would be the reddest of flags.
This rings true for smaller rooms, for fewer folk. All the way down to two.
But something was missing. The triangle was wrong.
Along one edge, Safe and Brave make a slightly strange pairing. They sound almost like opposites, but they are not.
You need to feel safe, in order to be brave enough to open up.
Don’t worry. We’ll catch you.
But why risk anything at all? What do you get for being open?
Recognition.
Understanding.
Connection.
You need to be open, in order to be seen.
-
Back in 2017, the British Museum fired a well-known and widely recognised leader in digital methods for cultural heritage collections for ‘running shadow IT and dangerous technology’ (see also this related Twitter thread). ↩︎
-
I have a theory that this is the real reason why so many projects use Discord rather than an open forum. It might annoy some people and be a terrible way of doing documentation where no search engine can find it. But at least you can keep the bad actors under control and keep the AI scrapers out. ↩︎