This are the notes from FemTechPlayground experiements with 3TS
Today I organised a playsession in the Feminist Tech Playground proposed by QPC and Numfund.
I have been using 3TS card game remotely with a group of 5 persons based in India SouthAsia Africa India. We worked in English, unfortunately I did not manage to send physical card decks to them in advance as I would have wished, but several asked for them after and will distribute them in their communities.
I first started to explain orally the principle of the game, then we used a web interface to randomly draw lots from the topics of the cards, first questions then tactics, it was a little sad to have only this means but it did work.
The first question we drew was:
- How do you surveillance technology
I was happy that this question specifically came out as I think it is a funny one and a good start.
Others had the same feeling asking themselves if they ever used surveillance technology and for what purposes. Several examples came out mostly stories of people threatened and in need to seek for help to protect their community. The result of the move was according to the person telling the example the source of many discussions and thinking many different strategies and finally giving up on third party support.
The Tactic card we drew was very interesting according to this example, it said:
- Assume solidarity
This almost got me laughing…
So the conversation evolved into thinking that in case of a threat the need to assume solidarity from our peers was essential.
Then we decided there was space for another round of play
We drew the question:
- Was your community ever hit hard by software? (unavailability, malfunction, inadequacy, etc.)
We got 2 very interesting example, one describing issues related to Internet shutdowns, and one describing a community that was organised around a stack of free software tools but when it grew bigger it was unable to bring in new comers who did not have the knowledge of this type of tools, and some important power relations started to grow from this differenc of knowledge.
We then drew 2 tactic cards:
- Listen carefully.
Some other meaning is escaping you. Find it! - Find a porous part.
Break through the apparent solidity to a more fragile way to approach the problem.
We did continue the discussion from there and as we talked things started to get more profound and deep, and we were suffering from our technological setup and mumble exchanges were not enough… We chose to resume our exchange because time was over anyways but I feel there was still a lot to discuss.
A proposition was made to document strategies to have during Internet shutdowns.
