Golan Levin: Our final pre­sen­ta­tion this evening is from eve­lyn mas­so. eve­lyn mas­so is a per­son all the time, an engi­neer­ing man­ag­er on week­days, and a poet on week­ends. She’s been work­ing in and around open source soft­ware since 2017, pri­mar­i­ly on p5.js and GitHhub Desktop. She likes to talk about mixed iden­ti­ties, queer poet­ry, and her recent love for run­ning. Originally from Ohio, she cur­rent­ly lives on unced­ed Tongva land near Los Angeles, and uses she/they pro­nouns. eve­lyn masso. 

eve­lyn mas­so: Hey every­one, and thanks again for hav­ing me today. I’m real­ly excit­ed to get to talk to you about p5.js and access. And I’m so grate­ful and excit­ed to be here with so many excel­lent and won­der­ful peo­ple that I’ve got­ten to know and have get­ting to know recent­ly. I’m going to take a sec­ond and share my slides. And we’ll get started. 

Yeah, so my name is eve­lyn mas­so. You can find on most web sites on the Internet under the han­dle ​“out­o­fam­bit.” And my talk is called ​“Crafting Access for p5.js.” I think you’ve heard a cou­ple allu­sions to the thing I’m going to talk about today around this access state­ment with­in the project of p5.js that has real­ly tak­en shape over the last year or two. 

But before that, I just want­ed to say hi! I guess did­n’t see you there. I’ve worked on and around, or with, p5.js for almost five years now. My day job is being a man­ag­er for an engi­neer­ing team, which I used to be cod­ing on, and I also write poet­ry sometimes. 

I also have done a num­ber of work­shops and class­es around design and tech­nol­o­gy. This is a pic­ture of me facil­i­tat­ing a work­shop in 2017. This is a work­shop that I facil­i­tat­ed with a meet­up I was co-organizing with called Write/Speak/Code, the Los Angeles chap­ter. The orga­ni­za­tion was very much focused around help­ing peo­ple with mar­gin­al­ized gen­ders kind of devel­op pro­fes­sion­al skills who are coders. 

And so as part of being involved in this, we would host mee­tups. And I real­ly enjoyed doing these work­shops as part of it. And one of the work­shops that I helped put togeth­er was one around bring­ing peo­ple into open source for the first time. So this was peo­ple that maybe had some cod­ing expe­ri­ence but had nev­er real­ly got­ten involved in an open source project. 

And so this was real­ly inter­est­ing, because peo­ple who maybe even have the kind of skills that are clas­si­cal­ly thought of as like the kind of work you do in an open source project can also feel intim­i­dat­ed and scared to real­ly dive into a project and get involved. And so in doing this project, it was real­ly impor­tant for me as a facil­i­ta­tor to be able to have them work on a project that was real—like an actu­al open source project out in the world, and also that that project was a safe space for them, or at least a safer space for them to kind of get involved in and that they would be met with respect and sup­port, and all of the things that I want­ed them to expe­ri­ence as their kind of first for­ay into a pub­lic soft­ware project. 

And at that time, I real­ized that p5.js was real­ly the only com­mu­ni­ty that I felt com­fort­able intro­duc­ing first-time open source con­trib­u­tors into. At least that I knew of. I think part of this was because I real­ly took that respon­si­bil­i­ty as a facil­i­ta­tor seri­ous­ly about pro­vid­ing them with that sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment. I had heard of p5.js before doing these work­shops, because I had actu­al­ly learned how to code in it ini­tial­ly with Processing and Arduino way back in my under­grad thanks to a won­der­ful men­tor and teacher, Jacob Tonski, who I hap­pened to over­lap with for a cou­ple years at that school. 

And so I had seen and heard about p5.js a bit over the years. But I nev­er actu­al­ly used it myself. And at that point, even in doing those work­shops, I had­n’t actu­al­ly used p5.js to make any­thing for myself. I thought of it more of it more as like a con­tain­er for peo­ple to learn about what it was like to be involved in an open source soft­ware project. And again, this exam­ple I’m talk­ing about def­i­nite­ly is focused on coders, but part of this idea is real­ly embrac­ing that wide range of what it means to be a con­trib­u­tor beyond just code, and there’s so many oth­er things as Cassie men­tioned ear­li­er that go into run­ning an open source project. 

And I had the plea­sure and oth­er feel­ings of learn­ing what all those things were actu­al­ly after doing some these work­shops a cou­ple years lat­er when I joined GitHub and worked as a soft­ware engi­neer on a project called GitHub Desktop, which is an open source project. And so for two years it was my 9–5 effec­tive­ly to work on a project that exist­ed on GitHub pub­licly as open source. Even though we were fully-funded and staffed by the organization/company GitHub itself. 

And then in 2019 I received a fel­low­ship from p5.js to spend some hours every week work­ing on p5.js for the entire­ty of 2019. And it had been a cou­ple years at that point since I’d giv­en one of these work­shops or tak­en some­one through using p5.js for the first time, or con­tribut­ing to p5.js for the first time. And so I came in with this expec­ta­tion, I was like okay I’m a coder; that’s my day job; I’m gonna come to p5 and I’m gonna code a bunch of good stuff and it’s gonna be awe­some. Gonna like, total­ly kill it. 

Over time I real­ized that was­n’t real­ly what was impor­tant to me on the project. And was­n’t the rea­son I had become famil­iar with or involved in p5.js in the first place. I had come because I was inter­est­ed in the com­mu­ni­ty more than any­thing else. And dur­ing this process of work­ing on p5.js, it also involved work­ing in the GitHub repo and triag­ing, field­ing new issues and requests that came in. As I’m sure many peo­ple here have expe­ri­enced, work­ing in a GitHub repos­i­to­ry day-to-day, field­ing requests and going through that process can be real­ly drain­ing espe­cial­ly when you feel like you’re unable to say no to cer­tain things, even if you don’t think they are impor­tant or if they’re not the best use of the time of you and the com­mu­ni­ty that are work­ing on this project. 

So maybe I would come across some­thing and I’d be like, I don’t real­ly feel like this is some­thing that either I want to spend time on or that I even think the library as a whole should maybe incor­po­rate? But at the end of the day at that point I was like who am I to make these deci­sions? Like I’m just some­one who works on p5.js. I’m not…in charge, if that’s even a thing for this project. 

And so that made me start ask­ing a lot of ques­tions to myself and oth­ers like how do we pri­or­i­tize work? How do we say no to ideas? What belonged in p5.js and what did­n’t? And I think for myself, I was real­iz­ing that this access piece was real­ly impor­tant to me. And that I was­n’t work­ing on p5.js to write code. I was­n’t even work­ing on p5.js to make art. I think maybe still I have yet to make an actu­al piece of art with p5.js. I have con­tributed mul­ti­ple fea­tures and done lots of oth­er work around it, but I’ve nev­er actu­al­ly made art with it. 

So again, like why am I here? I’m here actu­al­ly for the com­mu­ni­ty for the work that we do togeth­er as a group of peo­ple that care deeply about care and access and all these dif­fer­ent issues and approach­a­bil­i­ty and things like that. But at the time I was won­der­ing like, am I actu­al­ly the only one who feels like this? Like I felt unsure if this is like a limb to go out on as an indi­vid­ual involved in the project. 

So luck­i­ly lat­er that year in 2019, I was for­tu­nate enough to get to attend the p5.js Contributor’s Conference, where I met Luis for the first time, and Cassie for the first time, and many oth­er peo­ple that are in this won­der­ful pho­to. And so I got to learn a lot from that expe­ri­ence, and from con­ver­sa­tions over the course of 2019 with oth­ers that these things were impor­tant to them, too. And now when I look back at the his­to­ry of p5, it feels so obvi­ous, see­ing all the work that Luis and oth­ers have been doing for so long. So it was real­ly great to get to see all those things and under­stand that there was a com­mon val­ue here around access and pri­or­i­tiz­ing that in our work and involve­ment on this Javascript library. 

And so in many ways this kind of crys­tal­lized a lot of my feel­ings I’d had dur­ing that year that in order for us to have a way to say what was impor­tant and not work on the things that we did­n’t think were impor­tant at least in the short term, we need­ed to have some kind of com­mu­ni­ty agree­ment around what we thought was impor­tant and what we were going to prioritize. 

So at this con­trib­u­tor’s con­fer­ence, and espe­cial­ly after talk­ing with Luis and some oth­er folks I’ll name here like Olivia Ross, Sina Bahram, Kate Hollenbach, Claire Kearney-Volpe, Lauren McCarthy, and many oth­ers at the con­fer­ence, I made this pro­pos­al and we had a moment of col­lec­tive agree­ment as a group, as a com­mu­ni­ty, that this was some­thing that was impor­tant to us that we want­ed to adopt as part of the project going for­ward. I think an inter­est­ing thing that we haven’t talked about late­ly I guess, pub­licly at least, is that we did­n’t talk about how long should this last for? And at that moment we set­tled on basi­cal­ly like until we feel like we’re in a spot where this maybe isn’t as impor­tant or we’ve made sig­nif­i­cant head­way on these things and we want to con­sid­er oth­er things. But basi­cal­ly indef­i­nite­ly, maybe, or TBD is the best way to char­ac­ter­ize that right now. 

So this is at the end of 2019. We kind of had this moment of agree­ing. But there was a next step that we need­ed to take togeth­er, which was cod­i­fy­ing this agree­ment. I think ​“cod­i­fy­ing” the word feels real­ly heavy. It always makes me think of like stone tablets and snakes or some­thing, I don’t know. It feels real­ly final. But real­ly it’s about writ­ing things down togeth­er as a group. And now, writ­ing things down, doc­u­ment­ing them, is a hard enough process. But when you’re doing that in a group in a com­mu­ni­ty where there’s a whole process of con­sen­sus embed­ded in that process of writ­ing and agree­ing, it becomes even more com­pli­cat­ed. Because there’s just a whole…you know, it’s not just your­self just decid­ing this thing. It’s like every­one kind of com­ing togeth­er and mak­ing sure their pieces are heard and that we can come to kind of a work­ing agreement. 

I do think the impor­tant thing about cod­i­fy­ing is that it is tem­po­rary, or it’s always up for debate or for chang­ing. It’s up to us to decide when we want to change it. And so one thing I’ll talk about after I go into a lit­tle more detail about the state­ment itself is that I think this kind of writ­ing and com­mu­ni­ty process is a kind of tech­nol­o­gy, too. It’s a tech­nol­o­gy of com­mu­ni­ty and of work­ing togeth­er and mak­ing these com­mu­nal agree­ments that allow our­selves to work in the same direc­tion, work on the same page, and hold our­selves account­able to that direc­tion as well. 

So any­ways I’m going to share a cou­ple of pieces of the state­ment. I won’t read through all of it, but you can see the begin­ning kind of recaps a bit about the Contributor’s Conference. I’ll read the first para­graph briefly.

At the 2019 Contributors Conference, we made a com­mit­ment to only add fea­tures to p5.js that increase access (mean­ing inclu­sion and/or acces­si­bil­i­ty). This means con­sid­er­ing the vec­tors of diver­si­ty (e.g. gen­der, social, eco­nom­ic, race, eth­nic­i­ty, lan­guage, dis­abil­i­ty, etc.) that can impact access/participation; and tak­ing action to acknowl­edge, dis­man­tle, and pre­vent bar­ri­ers. We pri­or­i­tize the needs of his­tor­i­cal­ly mar­gin­al­ized groups over the con­tin­ued com­fort of more priv­i­leged groups with p5.js.
p5.js access statement

I love that peo­ple in ear­li­er talks today have shown the p5.js com­mu­ni­ty state­ment, which is a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent than this but very much in the same line. Similar words, sim­i­lar atti­tude, sim­i­lar val­ues, just I would maybe char­ac­ter­ize it like extend­ing it a lit­tle bit even further. 

So the next part talks about how we will not accept requests that don’t sup­port our effort to increase access. And then we talk a lit­tle bit about how this is part of ongo­ing efforts and acknowl­edge the work that has been hap­pen­ing in the past. 

So I’ll talk about the goals for this state­ments. I’ll be hon­est, these are retroac­tive goals, these are things that after the fact I was like oh yeah, these were the things I felt like I and oth­ers were shoot­ing for. Like hav­ing a clear bound­ary and a clear cri­te­ria so this focus, this goal, is clear to oth­ers and not just peo­ple who were in the room when we talked about it. 

When we talked about not adding new fea­tures or not doing work that does­n’t serve a par­tic­u­lar goal, I think it was also impor­tant for us to affirm our com­mit­ment to main­te­nance of the fea­tures that we have; to make it clear that we’re not let­ting cer­tain parts of p5.js fall into disrepair. 

Also I want­ed to call out spe­cif­ic exam­ples of groups we con­sid­er with­in this pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of access. I think it’s real­ly impor­tant to make these things con­crete, even if we’ll nev­er name all the groups that we need to. But we can at least give some exam­ples and some start­ing places for peo­ple to have a conversation. 

Also want­ed to call out spe­cif­ic projects and work that’s already hap­pen­ing in this area. Because again there’s been a lot of work that’s been hap­pen­ing since essen­tial­ly the incep­tion of p5.js that falls very much in the same theme.

I also want­ed to not screw up lan­guage about oppressed peo­ples, espe­cial­ly groups that I myself am not involved in. That was def­i­nite­ly some­thing that I was anx­ious about per­son­al­ly. I’m very grate­ful for oth­ers that were involved in the writ­ing process to help bring oth­er per­spec­tives and knowl­edges to that document. 

And also give peo­ple an entry point to the con­ver­sa­tion about access. That was real­ly impor­tant, too, and some­thing that I specif­i­cal­ly remem­ber Lauren mak­ing sure that was high­light­ed at mul­ti­ple points dur­ing this process, is that this isn’t meant to shut peo­ple down, even if it’s meant to say ​“no” some­times. Because we’re say­ing no so we can say yes to oth­er things. And because we want what access means for p5.js to be a conversation. 

vlc-00_15_23-2021–07-15–16h06m38s641
Increasing access is not a focus on expand­ing the raw num­ber of peo­ple in the p5.js com­mu­ni­ty. It is a focus on mak­ing p5.js avail­able to and approach­able for peo­ple who are exclud­ed from the p5.js com­mu­ni­ty (inten­tion­al­ly or not) and from sim­i­lar tools and com­mu­ni­ties. Access here means mak­ing p5.js bet­ter for: People who speak lan­guages oth­er than English; Black peo­ple, Indigenous peo­ples, and People of Color; People who are les­bian, gay, bisex­u­al, trans, or queer; People with mar­gin­al­ized gen­ders; People with dis­abil­i­ties or ill­ness; People who lack oppor­tu­ni­ties and/or resources to engage with cre­ative cod­ing due to class or income; People with lit­tle or no pri­or expe­ri­ence in open source and cre­ative cod­ing; and oth­er peo­ple who are sys­tem­i­cal­ly exclud­ed and his­tor­i­cal­ly underrepresented. 

And so I have anoth­er image here that shows the kinds of access that we out­line. I won’t go into detail about this, but I will talk about some parts— I think many of the groups in this list or the ideas in this list are kind of reflect­ed in that ini­tial paragraph. 

But I also want talk about that grat­i­tude first, of course. For Lauren McCarthy, Luis Morales-Navarro, Kenneth Lim, aarón montoya-moraga, Dorothy Santos, and johan­na hed­va, who all had like direct…I guess pen to paper in a dig­i­tal sense, on this doc­u­ment that was put togeth­er. And of course we’ll be revis­it­ing it over time. 

But I also want­ed to share that there’s lan­guage that we could­n’t col­lec­tive­ly find that we want­ed to find. I think it’s impor­tant to acknowl­edge that the state­ment isn’t by any means per­fect and that I think that maybe you could say some amount of dis­com­fort with cer­tain parts of how it’s been laid out. I’m shar­ing part of this process so that oth­ers can see what this might look like. You could also go to the GitHub repos­i­to­ry for p5.js and see the pull requests and the con­ver­sa­tions that hap­pened about that, and all the changes that were made from the very ini­tial draft. I think maybe this kind of demys­ti­fies what this process could look like. 

So, I don’t think we were able to find lan­guage that real­ly out­lined access for peo­ple who aren’t in the United States. There’s def­i­nite­ly a heavy com­po­nent of peo­ple who don’t speak English and pri­or­i­tiz­ing them in that state­ment, but there’s also oth­er vec­tors of just geog­ra­phy that we weren’t able to cap­ture, I don’t think. Maybe I should reem­pha­size, it was­n’t that we weren’t able to find these because we did­n’t try, it was because we tried and we could­n’t in that ini­tial pass. 

We also looked for bet­ter lan­guage for ​“mar­gin­al­ized” or ​“under­rep­re­sent­ed,” and I think there’s just inter­nal aster­isks about bet­ter ways we can say this in the future. 

But putting aside the actu­al state­ment, anoth­er impor­tant piece that we did was we incor­po­rat­ed this into the issue tem­plates, the new fea­ture requests, on the p5.js GitHub repo. So this is an exam­ple here. You can see where you open a new issue as a fea­ture request, the first ques­tion that is asked is ​“How would this new fea­ture help increase access to p5.js?” And this is some­thing I think every­one had sug­gest­ed while we were writ­ing this out—maybe it was Kenneth—that we did short­ly there­after. And I think we’ve had a lot of real­ly inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions because of this small piece, that I think real­ly pushed us or moved us in the direc­tion that Lauren had brought up ini­tial­ly about how do we make this an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion for peo­ple that are maybe very involved in the project but also maybe who are new­er to the project as well. 

And so I’m going to high­light a cou­ple of those con­ver­sa­tions because I think there are some real­ly inter­est­ing things. Some of the com­mon respons­es to this access prompt were many peo­ple leave it unan­swered. Which is okay. Like we can bring it up in the dis­cus­sion after­wards and talk about how this fits into access. Sometimes it means they did­n’t care, they did­n’t see, some­times it means they don’t know. And that’s also total­ly fine. 

Some peo­ple will dis­cuss the impact of trans­la­tion or local­iza­tion efforts on access, which total­ly 100% makes sense, is a com­mon theme that I’ve seen read­ing through some of these. 

We’ve also got­ten some sto­ries from edu­ca­tors about their stu­dents’ expe­ri­ences, and that’s been real­ly cool to hear some of those first-hand stories. 

And also a cou­ple of times we’ve got­ten peo­ple just talk­ing about their per­son­al chal­lenges with p5.js. I’ll share one of those in a sec­ond, but it’s real­ly cool to see peo­ple be vul­ner­a­ble in response to this ques­tion as well. 

So in this exam­ple, this is a fea­ture some­body had filed about adding the abil­i­ty to spec­i­fy ver­tex nor­mals when draw­ing three-dimensional geom­e­try. And hon­est­ly some­times I’m not super famil­iar or skilled at 3D graph­ics? Sometimes when I see a fea­ture request like this my eyes will glaze over a lit­tle bit. But hav­ing this piece in here about ​“this would make things more acces­si­ble to users who are new to 3D graph­ics than jump­ing straight into 3D mod­el files,” which I know can be chal­leng­ing, espe­cial­ly for some­one who’s new to that process. And it ​“also presents an oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce vec­tor math con­cepts” in an edu­ca­tion setting. 

So in some ways for me it’s not even about ver­tex nor­mals and whether we sup­port that or not, it’s about this con­ver­sa­tion about whose lives does this make bet­ter, how does it help peo­ple get more involved in the project, and how does it help peo­ple who are learn­ing about the var­i­ous con­cepts involved in mak­ing art with soft­ware along the way, too.

Another one was, this is an exam­ple of some­one just being real­ly vul­ner­a­ble. It was an issue some­one had filed a ques­tion about how to load or list fonts or some­thing like that. And in response to the ques­tion about access, they said, ​“I would be hap­py if it was eas­i­er to change fonts. I found it hard to find the path of .ttfs and .otfs,” which are two dif­fer­ent kinds of font files. 

I actu­al­ly thought it was so sweet that this per­son­’s response to this ques­tion about access, which can feel pretty…maybe abstract I imag­ine for cer­tain peo­ple? But they were just real­ly ​“This is my per­son­al thing that I had a prob­lem with.” I think this falls under that cat­e­go­ry of mak­ing it eas­i­er for peo­ple to get involved in the project or use the project, and I total­ly agree with that. 

I think also out­side of peo­ple sub­mit­ting issues and talk­ing about how they think access weaves into it is also being able to hold our­selves account­able for how we make sure that we main­tain this focus over time on access. 

I’m run­ning a lit­tle bit short on time here but I will talk about these case ideas real­ly quick. One is some­one came in and they said ​“I don’t know how this fits into access,” after being asked. And we talked. This is one I think Kenneth had respond­ed to, where he said ​“It’s not your respon­si­bil­i­ty to come up with the acces­si­bil­i­ty argu­ment on your own. Let’s leave the issue open and have oth­ers chime in.” 

I think we left the issue open for maybe three or four months and no one had real­ly come to add more to the con­ver­sa­tion. And so then we said okay, well there’s not a clear expla­na­tion for how this expands access. It does­n’t seem like there’s a lot of inter­est in this, so we’re gonna close the issue but we’re hap­py to talk about this more if any­one has ideas around access.

And I think it’s real­ly impor­tant that if we’re going to say no to some­thing that we explain why. And we also give them a way to know what would change that con­ver­sa­tion and enable us to kind of…or make us feel more open to revis­it­ing it. 

This is a some­what fun­ny one where we had asked ​“Did you have any thoughts on how this fea­ture would help increase access?” And the per­son replied ​“Oh! I’m sor­ry. I don’t think it does so in any way. Thanks for address­ing that!”

And again, I just real­ly appre­ci­ate the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and I think there’s a longer con­ver­sa­tion we can have. Someone actu­al­ly replied I think a day or two after to say ​“Actually I think this has this entry point into access.” And that’s real­ly cool. I’m just so grate­ful and thank­ful for all the dif­fer­ent things that peo­ple have been talk­ing about that have to do with access, like just as part of our day-to-day activ­i­ty in the GitHub repo for p5.js.

And so I’ll just reem­pha­size here that I think com­mu­ni­ty agree­ments are also a tool, just in the way that like soft­ware and so many oth­er things are. And that for me, maybe I write code but I think that com­mu­ni­ty is much clos­er to the kind of work that I’m inter­est­ed in that I do and want to be doing more of. 

So, what’s next? I think what’s next is us mov­ing beyond these maybe…I guess you could call them maybe more iso­lat­ed or one-off con­ver­sa­tions. And I think I want to find a way for us to be able to do more like coimag­in­ing as peo­ple in, and out, or at the bound­aries or var­i­ous posi­tion­al­i­ties of the p5.js com­mu­ni­ty, like think about what does access mean to us and how we want to see access to p5.js grow and change in the future. Again, I think these con­ver­sa­tions in the repo have been real­ly inspir­ing, and I’m think­ing about ways that we can have those in more facil­i­tat­ed, group kind of ways. 

So, thanks so much for hav­ing me and lis­ten­ing to me. So let me know what you think. I would love to hear about how you would want to see access grow and change for p5.js. Feel free to find me on Twitter or Instagram, again as @outofambit. My DMs are open. And thanks again, every­one, for such a won­der­ful day to just talk to you about this.