Weeknotes S01E03
/ or: why information management is a feminist act.
It’s been a week of lists. Gathering them, analysing them, communicating about them and importantly, noticing the power they bring.
Professor Lyn Craig says, ‘what isn’t counted, doesn’t count.’
And therein lies the power of a good list.
Counting the uncountable:
I’m not a trained librarian, it’s just something I’ve accidentally become as I try to document and make available user research. My odd progression from artist to business manager to IT helpdesk to translator to technical trainer to business analyst to data analyst to data architecture, to ontologies to metadata management to user researcher to librarian is a funny one to unpick. Yes, I had to write all that out. There’s an obvious thread- that of trying to make sense of the world, and trying to help others as I go about it.
As a PhD student, I’m becoming intimate with the ways our lives are writ large or small. How they are determined by the stories others tell about us, and by the stories we tell about ourselves. Our future selves are made and unmade by these acts. Who we can be, and the choices we make - how our history is told, relies on people to bear witness, or on our cataloging of what was important, and by making it discoverable.
As a librarian, what I choose to store and how, matters. The standards I chose to use, the terms I choose to add, how I choose to describe and define the terms within the taxonomy of the research, matters.
How is this a weeknote?
Well, ok, you got me. Here we go:
This week, we spent valuable time writing out the stuff that isn’t counted so that we can count it. Communicating the unseen is crucial, especially for an emergent practice. Lack of clarity brings poor decisions and undermines our capacity to deliver. It felt like an unnecessary bit of housekeeping, and I’ve been reflecting on how I can do better to see what’s unseen, communicate it better, and generally do better for my team.
In ResearchOps, we welcomed a newbie to the board, Mark McElhaw, and while we didn’t write lists (about that anyway), we got together so I could tell him my version of the history of our little community. Think of it as a mental list. Again, what is told, how and by whom, matters. It was lovely to do a telling, and he was kind and interested and diligent in noticing the things that seemed important. Holly Cole spent proper time taking Mark through the actual lists, all the things, how we get our stuff done and how much of it there is to do.
The ResearchRepos project appears to be sitting quietly on the outside, but again, nothing could be further from the truth. This week we met a lot, and worked through how to do this or that, we welcomed some newbies on board, and super importantly, the wonderful Paul Kotz wrote out some lists so we can count the things and make them visible. There are lots of people doing pieces of work, and lots of people wanting to do more, and so he took our giant lists and made them available on Trello.
Small steps matter so very much.
In the Australian Government Linked Data Working Group, we had a wonderful exchange of information going back and forth between federal, state and local government data scientists and architects, one of the best and most impactful exchanges I’ve seen in a while. People brought out their lists and surfaced the steps of the process of making the structures of their work extensible. On my list for this weekend is to send out a proposal I’ve been working through for ages, to formalise or make this kind of exchange a bit more regular by creating space to connect through our Connected Community initiative.
I met with Nour Sidawi on Thursday night so we could make some progress for a OneTeamGov global online event, exploring future leadership. We are coming to a vision for the event, and I have several action items on my to-do list.
Importantly for me, I woke up feeling overwhelmed this morning. I realised that my failure to make lists was creating a ridiculous burden- that the mental load I write about for uni was a cause of my overwhelm, and that the first step to valuing my own time, was to write out what I needed to get done. To make it visible to myself and my family.
Here’s my list for this weekend:
Yes, it’s pretty personal. I’m happy to share with you my need to clean the toilet and the bathroom. But I think this is important. How we document our lives and who we let tell our stories matters. This unseen work, like much of the operations of research (not necessarily ReOps itself, but the stuff that gets us there), like care work, like housework — that’s the stuff on which the visible work is built. It’s those things that make us productive, that allow us to power through the day, and sometimes that allow others to shine.
In a leadership sense, it is the stuff that helps one create spaces for others. I think it is an act of servant leadership, doing this unseen stuff. I can see I’m going to need to unpick this a little more to understand the nuance between servant leadership and care work. Between that which is valued and that which is not.
While I am grateful for the privilege that makes my ‘stuff’ far more visible, I’m cognisant of the damage I do to others when I undermine or minimise it. When people do this unseen work and do it while carrying around a whole lot more baggage or disadvantage than I, making the burden more visible has a capacity to palpably lift a load.
Making it visible makes it harder for others to erase or minimise. And that’s why writing lists is a feminist act. That’s why information management is a feminist act. It takes the stories of today, and preserves them, making them available for others when the time is right.
In the design world, this was made obvious recently:
I’d seen the update from the Design Council and felt confused, because I was sure there were some women who’d been pivotal that I couldn’t see in their communications. Weeks ago, I’d shaken my head and assumed that I’d imagined it. That history was not as I remembered it.
It took someone standing up and pointing out what was left unsaid, who’d been forgotten, for me to readjust my internal story about the Double Diamond. Such is the power of knowledge management, of who tells the story and how.
My librarian’s ask of you this weekend, is to go find a story that seems devoid of women, of people of colour, of people with diverse circumstances. And ask yourself who has been forgotten? And why? Where are these people? The visible veneer of our lives in the world that is counted is carpeted by people trodden underfoot, forgotten, erased, and muted, who are they, and how do we make space for their stories?
Or find a story that tells history from another perspective, and socialise it. Talk about it with people you care about, and know you are changing the fabric of the future world, creating new and diverse possibilities.
Here’s a nice place to start:
Have a lovely weekend all.
