Value Allies with Complementary Expertise

In privacy, like in other areas of life, diversity is an incredible strength. If you want your community to have a broad understanding of threat models, and be able to address issues on multiple levels, you need to value a diversity of expertises.

Gathering people with a wide range of skills and experiences in your community is critical to effective work. People with different skill sets and lived experiences will together be able to reach out to a broader audience, and provide much more accurate and useful advice covering a variety of situations.

Here's how to recognize, respect, and retain experts with skills that are different to your own:

Recognize people with different skills

Privacy is a vast multidisciplinary field. It doesn't just encompass the privacy technologies we use to protect our data, but also the laws that determine the legality of the tools and practices we use. Furthermore, the culture plays an essential role in our fight for better rights, despite being often a neglected aspect of privacy.

Being an expert in privacy can mean so many things. No two specialists have the same knowledge.

Whatever your own privacy expertise might be, make sure to always stay aware of the bigger picture, and recognize that other privacy specialists might have knowledge entirely different from yours. Your knowledge might intersect, or you might not share any at all.

This doesn't mean they are any less valuable. On the contrary, this diversity of knowledge gives us the best chance to succeed in our common cause.

Respect people with different knowledge

It's easy to fall in the trap of staying with our own group of peers who share the same knowledge as ours and discard the others. Unfortunately, this attitude is detrimental to our movement.

As a privacy activist, it's essential to develop respect for privacy advocates who specialize in privacy-related knowledge other than your own. You need them to fight with you, and they need you to fight with them.

Pay attention to the people in your groups that might be pushed aside because their area of expertise is different from the majority that are present. Try to make them feel respected and included in your groups and communities. Engage with them positively when they contribute, even if you don't understand their specialty.

If you specialize in technical tools, value people with legal and social knowledge and be public about your respect for these specialties. Conversely, if you are a privacy lawyer, bring technical or cultural experts to your groups, and value their roles working for our common cause.

Retain specialists that are different

Inclusivity is key to retaining newcomers in your groups and communities. People who are new or different from the majority of the group should feel welcome and valued.

Work on developing your awareness of these dynamics in your groups. Try to improve your empathy skills, and support better your privacy comrades, especially those who might be different from the majority because of their expertise, demographic, or location. Reach out to them in private to make them feel welcome. Praise them publicly when they contribute in a way you like. Give credit where credit is due.

If you organize an event or hire people, make sure to fairly compensate all your contributors. Pay special attention to make sure people with different expertises or demographics aren't always the ones who have to work as volunteers.

Inclusivity, empathy, support, acknowledging successes publicly, and fair compensation are all tools that will help you retain diverse specialists with expertises that are complementary to yours in your communities.

This is something that is incredibly valuable in our fight for privacy rights, together.

More resources

[PWAs]：漸進式網路應用程式 [WKD]：網路金鑰目錄 (Web Key Directory)

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