Keep Your Posts and Community Inclusive

Inclusivity is not only the right thing to do, it's also essential to grow our movement. If we want privacy rights to succeed, it's imperative that we build communities where everyone feels safe and welcomed, regardless of who they are or where they come from.

Here's how you can keep your communications and communities inclusive:

Why you need communities that are diverse and inclusive

In privacy, diversity is an incredible strength, a necessity even. When people with different lived experiences, identities, localities, specialties, and mentalities join our group, we benefit from a broader perspective as a whole.

Having a broad perspective is essential to understand the scope and impact of privacy issues, as well as the actionable solutions for diverse situations.

When people with different lived experiences and identities join our group, it expands our understanding of numerous threat models, and allows us to adapt our message in ways that will be more inclusive.

When people from different localities join our group, this helps us to regionalize our content and communication to make it accessible to people all around the world, and expand our network. And when people with different mentalities join our group, it helps us to reach out to people with different ways of thinking more easily.

==The more diverse is a team, the more resources it has to understand and support a diverse population of people== interested (or potentially interested) in privacy rights.

Inclusivity allows diversity to thrive, and diversity will make it easier for your group to be inclusive.

Of course, for all those benefits to happen, it's crucial that group leaders be good listeners, and actively nurture diversity and inclusivity.

Beware of gatekeeping

Gatekeeping is sadly a common social phenomenon in niche communities, especially in tech communities.

Gatekeeping happens when a group tend to restrict who can join it, or who gets opportunities within it. It can be done maliciously to exclude marginalized people, or inadvertently when it emerges from unconscious biases.

Many of us have had experiences where we felt excluded from other social groups where our privacy values weren't understood. Once we finally find a group that makes us feel like we belong, it's easy to quickly occupy the whole space and forget that newcomers might feel pushed aside if we do not actively try to include them.

Sometimes, gatekeeping happens unconsciously when we get overexcited about our own space, and when we tend to only communicate with the people we already know, or who look or sound like us.

To counter this bias, we must actively and continuously examine our own behaviors, and make sure to course correct to leave the doors of our communities opened, and welcoming to all. This isn't always an easy thing to do, but it's critical for our movement to grow.

What can help keep your community inclusive

There are many things you can do to keep your community inclusive and diverse. Here are a few easy tips you can start implementing right now in your privacy advocacy practice, to make more people feel safe and welcomed:

Keep your language inclusive: Make sure to keep the door wide open in your communications. Be mindful of the language you use to make newcomers from all origins feel like they could belong in your community. Limit the use of technical jargon, regionalisms, and unnecessarily gendered language.
Listen to others: Listen to people with experiences and identities different from yours, and try to genuinely understand their perspectives. If they don't feel safe sharing, make sure the space is safe enough for them to do so. Regularly reach out to them to ask questions, while not pressuring them to give answers if they prefer not to.
Ask people their preferred name(s): Always ask people how they want something attributed to them (or not), and what their preferred public name is before publishing it anywhere. Never assume someone is comfortable sharing their legal name publicly, and never assume someone is comfortable using publicly the name they use privately. This is doubly important for any transgender or gender diverse persons, but it's also true for anyone who might have privacy concerns. Always ask for consent first.
Normalize the use of pronouns: If you are in a leadership position, it's especially important to lead by example and display your preferred pronouns in your social media profiles, email signatures, and other relevant contexts. Encourage everyone on your team or in your group to do the same. This helps to normalize the practice, and makes a clear statement that your community is inclusive and welcoming to transgender and gender diverse people.
Give credit: Make sure to appropriately give credit where credit is due, and make people feel supported and seen. Recognition and appreciation are fundamental to inclusion.
Prioritize accessibility: Accessibility should never be an afterthought, it should be designed in your content and events right from the start. Make sure that your website or software follows accessibility standards, uses alt text everywhere you can, and ensure that your in-person events are accessible and enjoyable for everyone. Reach out to people experiencing disabilities to ask how you could improve accessibility for your content and events.
Moderate your community: To keep your spaces inclusive, it's important to remove bad actors promptly. This is critical if you host a platform where people exchange together such as a forum, but it's also true for replies to your social media posts, your Signal groups, or your in-person gatherings. Whenever you become aware of a reply or answer that is abusive or bigoted, make sure to intervene quickly. If you neglect to moderate the community you are responsible for adequately, marginalized people targeted by these attacks will leave your community, and bad actors will prosper and multiply.
Observe special days: Make sure that your group observes or celebrates special days that are relevant to members in your community. For example, people might have different religious celebrations that are important to them. Make sure you mention these celebrations, and give your members the time they need to observe them. Celebrating special days and months such as Pride Month, Black History Month, National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and International Women's Day are also important events to acknowledge in your community.
Representation: Pay special attention to the diversity of representation within your group, especially for people in positions of power. For your community to be inclusive, it's important for members to see that diverse people can access leadership, and to feel like your community leaders are aware of a diversity of experiences.
Be mindful of invisible barriers: If you find your community to be quite homogeneous, take the time to think about what might keep people from different identities and origins to join your group. Perhaps there are some invisible barriers that you could identify and reduce, in order to make your group more inclusive and welcoming. If there are already a few members with diverse identities in your group, try to reach out to them for feedback on ways to improve inclusivity in your community.
Ask for feedback: Regularly ask the members of your community and people from diverse groups what you could do to improve inclusivity. Genuinely listen, and be careful not to answer defensively if you receive negative criticism. Stay open and keep in mind that constructive feedback is important to make your group more inclusive and more diverse.

More resources

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