When access isn’t even access

Last week I attended auDA’s Australian Internet Governance Forum - something I’ve been wanting to do for a couple of years. It started off badly, with a really unacceptable comment from AuDA Chairman Tony Staley about Terri Butler’s physical appearance (unacceptable in that it was a comment about her physical appearance). She laughed it off - she was sitting on stage with him - but it reflected very poorly on auDA, especially since the very first session after Staley and Butler’s introductory speeches was “Gender and the Internet”.

Despite this unfortunate introduction, it was a great session, talking about online abuse targeted at women and girls, and a sometimes fiery discussion about women in the tech industry. The latter discussion is relevant here. Theoretically, women and girls have the same access to IT careers as boys and men. But this ‘equal access’ comes with some pretty large asterisks. Girls are steered towards humanities and ‘helping’ careers, and boys are steered to science and ‘doing’ careers. Decades of cultural tropes have changed the image of IT and computers from “women’s work” to “socially awkward men’s work” and, lately, to “dudebro work”. The VC and startup culture of hiring via personal networks shuts out women when the people with the networks are all men. I could go on, but you get the picture - this is not a new story. Sure, women can walk in to the party - but if everyone ignores them (or abuses them) they don’t get to join in the fun.

One of the plenary sessions on the second day, Internet and indigenous communities, mostly focussed on the difficulties faced by indigenous people in remote communities. But ‘access’ in this context shows how multilayered and complex it can be. We heard about communities where cable and fibre is rolled out and connected to homes, but the local indigenous community can’t afford the subscription rates. We heard about big telcos refusing to offer discount phone and data bundle deals in areas where it isn’t profitable enough for them - so remote and regional communities have access, but not on the same terms as those in the big cities. We heard about people in Western Australia being imprisoned under “three strikes” laws because they can’t get online to register their car, and the nearest place to register is 200kms down the road - too far away to afford the petrol.

The most compelling and crucial message was that indigenous communities want and need access to the internet as first class citizens. As creators and communicators, not just as consumers and audiences. Australia’s indigenous communities have stories and knowledge stretching back more than 60,000 years. These communities are not ‘information poor’. The rest of the world has as much to learn from them as they have to learn from any of us. The don’t need ‘access’ as much as they need control over their own destinies and culture.

Dance Haptics - a joint project by Access Arts Victoria and the Monash Motion.Lab - is a great example of this point. The project was initially conceived as a way to give deaf-blind people ‘access’ to dance. Choreographers worked with Motion.Lab engineers to create a dancing robot which provides haptic feedback to deaf-blind dance partners - enabling them to dance with it. As the project progressed, however, the deaf-blind participants wanted to choreograph the robot. Dance Haptics became a much more empowering and creative experience by putting the participants in control as creators.

In the afternoon I went to a session called The influence seekers - a fairly free wheeling discussion about how government policy is made, and ultimately about how people make decisions about what information is reliable. Again, the issue of what access really means was a key underlying theme. Amidst horror stories of government departments losing their own reports because of changing website architecture and political fortunes, someone on Twitter pointed out that the National Archives hold all of this information. Which is fine, as long as you don’t need it for another twenty years. Public documents are only public when they are publicly controlled - if you can only get them from a government website that may or may not still exist, they are government documents, not public ones.

The other interesting thing to come out of this panel was Margaret Simons’ assertion¹ that there is more ‘grey literature’ (reports and studies published outside of academic journals) published every year than what is published in academic journals. She compared this to what the Open Access movement has managed to release into the world, and it struck me that in a weird way Open Access has already won, but perhaps has been focussing on the wrong objective. The grey literature is