26 Jan 2025
One-day event: 19:30-22:00
Valby Kulturhus
Valgårdsvej 4, 2500 Valby
https://kulturogfritidv.kk.dk/valbykulturhus
Admission:
Free
IMAGE
Event poster. Designed by Cristina Cochior, Batool Desouky for NEoN in the context of the Counter Cloud Action Plan (November 2022). Available under the conditions of the CC4R https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html
TEXT
lowkey – code and relax is a social hangout for anyone who wants to write computer programs with other people. Whether you're new, need inspiration, or just want to throw on headphones and hack, you are welcome to join. Expect it to be laid-back and self-organised outside the usual teacher-student hierarchy: study groups, spontaneous pair programming, parallel working/body doubling, or just folks on couches with laptops. We can all learn from each other. We will do brief check-ins at the start and end of lowkey, to see how everyone is doing and what you feel like doing today.
We are focused on creating a space for diverse coding practices and building a community outside the usual institutions and sites (academic institutions with an End-of-Life, businesses and entrepreneurships with ethical compromises, or "expert" meetups/communities). We are also open to discuss the politics and social issues tied to coding - feel free to bring in ressources you want to share such as books, visual essays, or the likes, both in regards to coding and the political mechanisms that surrounds coding, but be sure to include trigger warnings if necessary.
We recognise the historically inequitable social reality of software and the patriarchal and capitalist structures and behaviours within them. We aim for an inclusive and soft space as a disruptive action to change this history. This event is inspired by live coding and community coding events happening all over the globe, but especially the Calm Coding event of Varia in Rotterdam to set a healthy frame and tone of such an event.
Come work on a project, follow a tutorial, or just hang out!
We would like to ask everyone who wants to join to read the following:
• Social Rules
ursuppe is a public service for contemporary art in Denmark, amplifying events, archives, and highlights, as well as providing a pinboard. Built on an artist-run, anti-authoritarian, and open-source ethos, we are organized as a platform cooperative. We are a political platform, critiquing the establishment while recognising the need for engagement to drive structural change. We seek to enhance accessibility and inclusivity in contemporary art, as well as software culture, bridging digital and physical spaces. See more at ursuppe.dk/about.
If you have any questions please reach out to us at ursuppe@kollektiv.email.
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Social Rules
Our Social Rules is highly based on the Social Rules of Recurse Center.
ursuppe has four social rules. They help create a friendly, intellectual environment where you can spend as much of your energy as possible on programming.
The social rules are:
• No well-actually’s
• No feigned surprise
• No backseat driving
• No subtle -isms
The social rules name subtle behaviors that put other people down or show how much we know instead of supporting each other’s learning. For example, working at the edge of your abilities requires taking emotional risks, and the social rules help create an environment where it’s safe to do that. Letting someone know that they impacted you by breaking a social rule and accepting that feedback gracefully when you’re the one who messed up are important ways to learn generously. This allows everyone to keep working and growing together. One thing that often surprises people about the social rules is that we expect people to break them from time to time.
No well-actually’s
Alice: I just installed Linux on my computer!
Bob: It’s actually called GNU/Linux.
A well-actually is when you correct someone about something that’s not relevant to the conversation or tangential to what they’re trying to say. They’re bad because they aren’t helpful, break the flow of conversation, and focus attention on the person making the well actually.
This rule can be a bit tricky because there isn’t a clear line between relevant to the conversation and not. Sometimes your correction might actually be necessary, and it could still come off as annoying when you make it. The best rule of thumb is, if you’re not sure whether something needs to be said right now, hold off and see what happens. You can always say it later if it turns out there’s no way for the conversation to move forward without your correction.
No feigning surprise
Dan: What’s the command line?
Carol: Wait, you’ve never used the command line?
Feigned surprise is when you act surprised when someone doesn’t know something. Responding with surprise in this situation makes people feel bad for not knowing things and less likely to ask questions in the future, which makes it harder for them to learn.
No feigning surprise isn’t a great name. When someone acts surprised when you don’t know something, it doesn’t matter whether they’re pretending to be surprised or actually surprised. The effect is the same: the next time you have a question, you’re more likely to keep your mouth shut. An accurate name for this rule would be no acting surprised when someone doesn’t know something, but it’s a mouthful, and at this point, the current name has stuck.
No backseat driving
Bob: What’s the name of the string copy function?
Alice: Strncpy.
Eve:(from across the room) You should use strlcpy. It’s safer.
Backseat driving is when you lob advice from across the room (or across the online chat) without really joining or engaging in a conversation. Because you haven’t been participating in the conversation, it’s easy to miss something important and give advice that’s not actually helpful. Even if your advice is correct, it’s rude to bust into a conversation without asking. If you overhear a conversation where you could be helpful, the best thing to do is to ask to join.
No subtle -isms
Carol: Windows is hard to use.
Bob: No way. Windows is so easy to use that even my mom can use it.
Subtle -isms are subtle expressions of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia and other kinds of bias and prejudice. They are small things that make others feel unwelcome, things that we all sometimes do by mistake. Subtle -isms make people feel like they don’t belong at ursuppe. We want to create an environment where everyone can focus all their energy on programming. It’s hard to do that if you’re regularly being made to wonder whether you belong.
Subtle -isms can also be things that you do instead of say. This includes things like boxing out the only woman at the whiteboard during a discussion or assuming someone isn’t a programmer because of their race or gender.
The fourth social rule is more complicated than the others. Not everyone agrees on what constitutes a subtle -ism. Subtle -isms are baked into society in ways that can make them hard to recognize. And not everyone experiences subtle -isms in the same way: subtle homophobia won’t hurt someone who’s straight in the same way it hurts someone who's gay.
There’s another part of no subtle -isms: If you see racism, sexism, etc. outside of ursuppe, please don’t bring it in (It is ok to have these conversations in private or opt-in spaces. The goal is to make the default ursuppe experience free of outside -isms). For example, please don’t start a discussion about the latest offensive comment from Random Tech Person Y. Everyone who comes to ursuppe should have the same opportunity to focus on programming, and people from oppressed groups often find discussions of racism, sexism, etc. particularly hard to tune out. There are many places to discuss and debate these issues, but there are few where people can avoid them. ursuppe is one of those places.
How do they work?
The social rules are lightweight. You should not be afraid of breaking a social rule. These are things that everyone does, and breaking one doesn’t make you a bad person. If someone says, "hey, you just feigned surprise," or "that’s subtly sexist," don’t worry. Just apologize, reflect for a second, and move on.
The social rules aren’t for punishing people. They help make ursuppe a pleasant environment where you are free to be yourself, tackle things outside your comfort zone, and focus on programming.