we're here today for the 2017 Fembot Symposium (fembotcollective.org). we're thinking about what people affiliated with Fembot can do to use and contribute to the development of Mastodon as platform and community. one of our ideas is to create a conversation tag — #fembot — where we can seed and aggregate conversations/toots relevant to this distributed group that already exists on many platforms. this can also be means of finding new groups on here can that can be a challenge

We talked about the possibility of paying someone to help us develop an instance of mastodon for the #fembot community. This would be useful for a few reasons. It would provide us with a means of improving inter-community communication and information dissemination that we currently mediate through use of a listserv (ugh). It would also bring more cool people to mastodon who want to engage in critical projects, and it might lead to the seeding of Fembot with cool people existing here already.

#fembot grew out of marginalized spaces, and with the hands of people who were crafty, keen, and considerate with respect to accessibility and diy. There have definitely been lessons learned in that respect on how to attend to accessibility better, but from the onset the project was about trying to not privilege any one standpoint (from which a monopoly of power might develop). As a collective, we didn't want it to be exclusive and invite only; we wanted to mirror that ethos in our web presence.

From the point of view of peer review, #fembot wanted to radically shake up paradigms. We wanted to experiment with legitimizing different forms of publication, and playing with what it means to professionalize graduate students, junior scholars, etc. Carol Stabile talking right now about how peer review is a way of producing a structure of power. In the humanities it polices disciplinary boundaries & intellectual orthodoxy. "Traditional peer review is a cruel & abusive star chamber." - Stabile