Conclusion: Overcoming Diversity
This chapter assess the potentials and limitations of diversity advocacy in open-technology as a site for claiming equal rights, and as a quest for representation. It also evaluates the market logics that accompany advocacy. It reflects on the challenges inherent in centering a project that insists on a redress of imbalances of power around technology, arguing for a project of justice and equity that ironically decenters technology as a primary axis of intervention. The chapter argues that while voluntaristic tech communities cannot singlehandedly attain the scale of the endeavors they hope their interventions will address, they are well-positioned to offer care and analysis that can set a more expansive, yet more rigorous, agenda. It explores a variety of diversity advocates' interventions, which include changing rules and norms in open-technology communities, creating separate spaces for feminist hacking, bringing to the surface other political concerns like militarism and colonialism, and questioning the makeup of open-technology communities.