[Elsewhere] Dragging academic publishing into the 21st century

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It’s been nearly ten years since I left academia, but I have enough friends who are academic researchers in various fields to know that academic publishing continues to be stuck in the 19th century. Every so often I need access to a research paper, and I have to beg friends at universities with the right subscriptions to get it for me; occasionally, I act as a broker for such requests from other people.
Read more over at ORGZine.

A good week for misogyny

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It’s been a good week for misogyny. We had the Archbishop of York presenting the misogynist case against marriage equality. We also saw registration open for RadFem 2012, a “feminist” conference limiting participation to “women born as women living as women”. While at first glance it may seem that the issues here are homophobia and transphobia respectively, both are driven by deeply held misogynist beliefs.
John Sentamu’s piece is vague by necessity: if he were to actually spell out his arguments, it would become very clear very quickly that rather than “speak the truth in love” as he claims to do, his position is one of deep-seated misogyny and sexism. He argues that men and women are different and “one man, one woman marriage” respects and accommodates those differences in the best possible way – that extending marriage to same-sex couples would somehow undermine this, even if existing marriages of individuals would not, he admits, be negatively affected. Quoth the Archbishop,

The family is designed to meet the different needs of its different members in different ways. It is the model of the just society that responds intelligently to differences rather than treating everyone the same.

Note, first of all the use of the word “family”. The church has long claimed ownership of the concept of marriage, but the above is clearly an attempt to also define “family” the way it suits the church – one man, one woman, married to each other. In one sentence, John Sentamu has denied the families of the 1.7 million children growing up with cohabiting parents, the 2.9 million being raised by single mothers and the 300,000 being raised by single fathers. (Source, PDF, Table 2.5) Nevermind those of us cohabiting and childless, for our families too do not live up to the Archbishop’s standards.
And what of those “different needs” he speaks of? How exactly are men and women different in a way that is met by the “one man, one woman marriage” set-up, that justifies making that set-up exclusive to heterosexuals? Or is it perhaps that Sentamu wonders, if we let two people of the same sex marry, how he will know which one to chain to the cooker?

But there is another view, based on the complementary nature of men and women. In short, should there be equality between the sexes because a woman can do anything a man can do or because a good society needs the different perspectives of women and men equally?

Here is a revelation for the Archbishop: It is not that men and women are different; it is that individuals are different that matters. Yet in his deeply misogynist world view, Sentamu seeks to define women’s – and frankly men’s – roles and contributions to “a good society” based solely on their sex. A good society should seek to enable all individuals within it to fulfill their potential. It must not limit what any of them can do (and that includes whom they choose to commit to in a legally recognised relationship if we are to have such things) based on their reproductive organs.
Speaking of reproductive organs, the organisers of RadFem 2012 have really outdone themselves. Originally restricted to “biological women”, the phrasing was quickly changed to “women born as women living as women”. The words “reproductively female” were also brandished at one point, and I hope I don’t need to spell out quite how problematic that is. While I have some limited sympathy for the desire to create a women-only space, let us be clear on one thing: There is nothing radical about buying into the gender binary.
The language used by these so-called radical feminists reminds me of nothing more than this vile piece of hate speech in which Irish right-wing columnist Kevin Myers feels so threatened in his masculinity that he needs to define other people’s gender identities for them. Choice quote:

[T]he obstetric revelations about this pseudo-male were accompanied by examples of other “men” who have given birth, beginning with Thomas Beattie of Oregon, who is a serial non-man, having given birth to three children, and Yuval Topper, an Israeli “man” who also had a baby, and Scott Moore — and here, I’m afraid we truly enter a quite phantasmagorical world — a Californian who lives with “his husband”, and who gave birth to a child in 2010.

Defining people’s identities and roles in life by their reproductive organs is what men like Kevin Myers do – it’s what the patriarchy does. It is sexism and misogyny of the worst kind and has no place in feminism, radical or otherwise. Here’s a radical suggestions for the organisers of RadFem 2012: Step away from biological determinism and the gender binary and treat people as people. We’d all be better off for that.

[Elsewhere] Andrew Lansley and my cat

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I have had cause recently to compare private and public health care systems – with unflattering conclusions for both.
After a week at home with the flu and still not feeling the least bit better, I finally cracked and tried to book an appointment with my GP. The process normally goes something like this: I call at 8.29am, only to get their answerphone which tells me they don’t open until 8.30. I hang up and and redial, at which point the line is already engaged. I then proceed to redial every two minutes for the next half hour or so, until I finally get one step further – into the hold queue.
Read more over at the Scottish Times.

Letter to Nick Brown, MP on marriage equality

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I find myself in the odd position of responding to government consultations and writing to my MP on an issue that I feel – at best – lukewarm about.
Marriage is not a social institution I feel has any relevance to me (not until I hit the inheritance tax threshold anyway, which is a long way off), and I have for a long time now felt that we’re doing the whole thing wrong. I also strongly object to David Cameron and Theresa May taking this opportunity to lecture me about the best possible set-up of my private life and family relationships. Even within the limited context of LGBT rights I believe there are bigger and more important issues than marriage equality.
On the other hand, I understand that marriage is hugely important to a lot of people – both heterosexual and not. It strikes me as a no-brainer that if we have an institution available to one part of the population and not another, this is discriminatory and unjust. So if we have to have marriage in its current form, I do believe that it should be available on an equal basis to all. With that in mind, I have today sent the below letter to Nick Brown, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East. Mr Brown and I don’t often see eye to eye, and he has a record of only replying on issues he agrees with me on. Let’s hope this is one of those where I get a response.
Dear Nick Brown,
I am writing to you with regards to the government’s ongoing consultation to extend civil marriage rights to same-sex couples.
The current set-up which makes civil partnerships available to same-sex couples while reserving marriage only for heterosexual couples is problematic on several levels:
1. It clearly creates a distinction and inequality between heterosexual and LGBT people and the legal recognition of their relationships. This inequality is arbitrary and discriminatory.
2. It is also particularly harsh on transgender people seeking legal recognition of their gender, as under current rules they have to dissolve an existing marriage or civil partnership to obtain such recognition. This is an expensive, bureaucratic process that is extremely emotionally traumatic at an already difficult time in a person’s life.
3. Finally, it was only two years ago that there were more countries in the world where homosexuality was punishable with death than countries where same-sex couples could get legal recognition of their relationships in the form of marriage. Yet over the last few years we have seen more and more countries embrace marriage equality, and now there are countries on four continents which do so. It is disappointing that the UK is lagging behind countries perceived as conservative and staunchly Catholic, such as Spain, Portugal and Argentina, on this issue.
While an actual marriage equality bill is some way off, it would be helpful to understand your position on the issue. The Coalition for Equal Marriage is tracking MPs’ stance on this at their website and it would be great to see your support reflected there.
Yours sincerely,
Milena Popova

Electoral Reform – R.I.P.

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…in which I am bitter and say “I told you so” a lot…
A year ago today, I spent the day stood outside my local polling station, trying to convince people to vote for a change to the Alternative Vote. We all know how that went.
We all know that the No campaign made up numbers about the cost of AV. We all know that we lost by a landslide. Through six months of campaigning not only didn’t we appear to capture a single undecided vote – from the final numbers it looks like we actually lost people who at the start of the campaign had said they’d vote for us.
Frankly, the Yes campaign was run so badly, we deserved to lose. There are two anecdotes that will give you enough of an insight into both the national and the regional campaigns to understand quite how abysmally the show was run. Firstly, on a national level we had the right to send out a direct mailing to every household in the UK that would have been paid for by the Electoral Commission. Yes, that would have been free to us. We didn’t. Read that again. The national campaign failed to get its act together sufficiently to send out the free mailing. In the meantime the No campaign cheerfully took advantage of their free mailing to send us leaflets telling us that no tax payers’ money had been used in sending said leaflets. Some households received four or five pieces of literature from the No campaign and none from us. Secondly, with 15 days to go to polling day I attended a staff meeting at the North East campaign office to discuss the plan for the remaining campaign time. The extent of the plan was “We have to do something every day”. And frankly, we didn’t even manage to do that.
No sooner were the results in that everyone who was anyone in the Yes campaign started writing their memoirs, pointing fingers at everyone else while completely exonerating themselves. Some of them remembered to thank the volunteers in the process; most didn’t.
All of that, however, is water under the bridge. The one bone I still have to pick is with all those people who voted against AV because it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t PR/STV/insert acronym of your choice here. It was a “miserable little compromise” (thank you, Nick Clegg). It is thanks to those electoral reform purists that the electoral reform agenda has now been buried for the foreseeable future. The really sad thing, dear purists, is that you were played. You were played from start to finish.
We were all dealt a crap hand – that was the whole point. We were given the option of keeping the status quo or making a minor change, a change that was a compromise, that no one in the pro-reform camp really saw as an ideal state; a change that the man who at the time could arguably be seen as one of the strongest pro-reform voices had gone on the record calling a “miserable little compromise”. We were given that crap hand deliberately and instead of taking it and making the best of it, we played it about as badly as we could have.
Having sown division in our ranks from the start, the Conservatives and other supporters of the outdated voting system we have were free to stand back and watch us tear ourselves apart. The LibDems were so terrified of the impending local election doom that they completely failed to support the AV campaign appropriately. Faced with practically certain obliteration in many councils, they still chose to throw their resources down that hole rather than take a long-term view.
The Yes campaign consisted of a fragile coalition of pro-reform groups with barely enough experience and clearly not enough resources between them to get a campaign going. We failed to reach out convincingly beyond the small group of dedicated activists we already had. We failed to build bridges with other groups whose interests potentially overlapped with ours, including the nascent anti-cuts movement, student occupations and other campaign groups. In a political climate increasingly hostile to the government, we kept harping on about the expenses scandal – a message that had played well 18 months previously when someone had had money to conduct the research, but had pretty much stopped being relevant by the time our campaign even started.
All of this time some of the strongest supporters of electoral reform in general opposed this kind of electoral reform in particular, because it wasn’t good enough; because in their eyes it was going to block the path to further reform. Yet somehow they never saw that a no vote would close the door on reform for good. I guess they got what they wanted.
So where are we a year down the line? The only mention of electoral reform over the past 12 months was at the Conservative Party Conference, where speaker after speaker triumphantly declared that the British people had said that FPTP was the best thing since sliced bread. The LibDems are now licking their wounds after another set of spectacular losses in local elections up and down the country. I spoke to a LibDem activist a few weeks ago who said most of them felt too bruised still from the AV campaign to even contemplate electoral reform again. The fragile coalition that was the Yes campaign has died a quiet, and frankly unmourned death, with a lot of bad blood between the different organisations and no clear direction for anyone left in this space who would like to continue to fight for electoral reform.
If you wanted PR and didn’t ruin a good pair of shoes campaigning for AV, didn’t even bother to vote for AV, I hope what you got is what you hoped for. It sure isn’t what I hoped for.

The only bisexual in the village

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I remember my first Stonewall Workplace Conference, maybe in 2006. We had spent most of the day discussing issues of “lesbians and gays” in the workplace when a woman interrupted one of Ben Summerskill’s keynotes to point out that we weren’t just “lesbians and gays” – some of us were bisexual. That was the moment I stopped feeling like a fraud for being there.
Despite the huge progress we have made over the past ten years in LGB (and to an extent T) rights in the UK, bisexual invisibility is still a huge issue. The Bisexuality Report found that bisexual invisibility, biphobia and bisexual exclusion have a profound impact on bisexual people’s lives in every area from health and crime to school and the workplace.
Fast forward to this year’s Stonewall Workplace Conference. There was a strong theme of role modelling going through most of the keynote speeches. Perhaps I am also more sensitive to it, having attended last year’s brilliant Stonewall Leadership Programme. One remark in particular, by Beth Brooke from Ernst & Young struck me: “We cannot be what we cannot see.” That sentence really rang true for me and reminded me of the woman who stood up at the same conference six years ago and pointed out that some of us were, you know, bisexual. That woman gave me a voice.
At any rate, I was delighted to see that Stonewall have produced a booklet in which they showcase 17 high-profile LGB individuals from across the private, public and third sectors, “Role Models – Being Yourself: Sexual Orientation and the Workplace”. I leafed through it on the train home after the conference, and the part of my brain that notices that less than a quarter of people travelling in business class are women, or that there are very few ethnic minority faces at an event, started ticking. When I counted, it turned out that there were eight lesbians, eight gay men, and one bisexual man profiled in the book.
I completely understand the challenges of coming out as bisexual. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you enter into a relationship with someone of a gender different to the people you’ve previously dated, some of your friends, gay and straight, may feel terribly betrayed. If you do explicitly identify as bisexual regardless of who you’re going out with, you’ll face reactions ranging from “Why are you flaunting your sexuality?” to “Don’t be stupid. You’re not bisexual, you’re married!” There is also a significant gender difference in how society views bisexual people. Bisexual women are to an extent more “accepted” but also considerably more fetishised than bisexual men. (The answer is no, I don’t want to have a threesome with you and your girlfriend.) Certainly in my experience that leads to more out bisexual women than men, but I haven’t got hugely scientific data sets on this.
I do have huge respect for Edward Lord OBE who was brave enough to take on the mantle of the one bisexual role model in Stonewall’s booklet. He tells a story that may ring true for many of us – how coming out as gay wasn’t half as dramatic as coming out as bisexual, how at least one of his friends stopped speaking to him after that, how his second coming-out was necessitated by him entering a relationship with a woman, how before that he had hidden his true sexuality “within the broader gay closet”.
It’s as good a story as any, but that’s the problem with it – it is just a single story. The booklet tells the story of the lesbian mother; the black Welsh gay man; the lesbian disability rights campaigner; the gay head teacher whose Irish Catholic family disowned him when he came out; the lesbian woman who grew up in Singapore where homosexuality is illegal; the gay soldier who with his partner celebrated the first civil partnership in the Household Cavalry’s 350-year history; the gay scientist from a northern Methodist mining family; the first openly gay peer ever; the lesbian former vice chair of the Conservative Party.
While sexual orientation is a reasonably significant part of some people’s identity (both straight and not, incidentally), it is not our only defining characteristic. Just because someone happens to be of the same sexual orientation as me doesn’t mean that their experiences are similar enough for me to be able to build a rapport with them and see them as a role model. Therefore providing a range of people with varying backgrounds and experiences is crucial if lesbian, gay and bisexual people are to find role models among the individuals Stonewall have profiled.
Equally, it is unfair on Edward Lord to cast on him all of the responsibility of being the one person that all bisexual people should look up to. That’s a role no one can be expected to play with any level of comfort. So where are the bisexual women? Where are the bisexual people in long-term relationships – the “don’t be stupid, you’re married!” ones and the “don’t be stupid, you have a civil partner” ones? Where are the ethnic minority bisexuals, the bisexuals whose families cast them out, and the bisexuals whose families accepted them? There is more than one bisexual story, and both bisexual people ourselves and those who tell us that we’re married/it’s just a phase/we’re only seeking attention need to hear those stories.
There isn’t a simple answer to all of this. For as long bisexuals continue to be invisible and face the potential of double discrimination, few of us will raise our heads above the parapet; yet unless more of us do so, we will continue to be invisible and biphobia will continue to go unchallenged. To an extent it is up to us to fix this by being more open, more visible, more honest about who we are.
Some of the responsibility, however, has also to be shouldered by Stonewall. They claim to speak for all of us – L, G and B. Yet reading the “Role Models” booklet made me feel a bit like I did back at the conference in 2006 – tokenised at best, silenced and invisible at worst. We cannot be what we cannot see.

Citizen engagement – a howNOTto

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The 1st of April this year saw the entry into force of a key new citizen engagement tool at a European Union level, the European Citizens’ Initiative. First set out in the Lisbon Treaty, the ECI allows one million EU citizens representing at least seven member states to call on the European Commission to initiate legislation in a policy area that falls under the EU’s competency. So far so good – it’s a great idea, giving citizens powers equal to the European Parliament and the Council (of the European Union – not the European Council or Council of Europe – but now I’m just being facetious) to request the Commission to initiate legislation. The implementation, however, is sub-optimal to say the least.
It is telling that the domain citizens-initiative.eu is owned by a group campaigning for the initiative rather than the Commission or another EU institution. To find the official website of the ECI you have to delve into the Commission’s website – which is unwieldy at the best of times. It is also telling that three weeks in, there are currently no formally registered open initiatives. Say what you will about the current incarnation of the UK government’s e-petition website, but on day one is was attracting 1000 hits a minute, taking the site down, and pro-death-penalty campaigners managed to get nearly 1500 signatures by mid-afternoon.
At EU level, things move at a rather more leisurely pace. There are a few reasons for this. Of course, working at a transnational level presents additional complexities over and above what a national government might face. Having to reconcile the interests and views of 27 separate member states, as well as work in 23 official languages will add a certain amount of overhead to even the simplest of undertakings. Yet just the fact that the ECI needs a 5MB, 32-page guide book tells me the number of hoops citizens have to jump through to create a successful initiative are disproportionate and likely to put off all but the most determined. Here are just a few areas where the European Citizens’ Initiative could do better.
The Citizens’ Committee
Each citizens’ initiative needs an organising committee made up of seven EU citizens resident in seven different member states. “This committee is considered as the official “organiser” of the initiative and is responsible for managing the procedure throughout.” The committee needs to be in place before you can register your ECI on the Commission’s website. Compare this to the five minutes it takes to set up an e-petition to “[b]an rioters and looters from holding passports” in the UK, and the timescale for setting up an ECI starts looking positively geological.
Of course, we’re looking at two extremes here. The UK approach is highly likely to get you some pretty ludicrous stuff – but equally, the silliest petitions are unlikely to get a huge number of signatures. And let’s face it, if you can get 300,000 people to declare themselves Jedi then maybe you deserve your day in Parliament anyway.
Requiring an organising committee from seven member states, on the other hand, makes initiation of ECIs highly exclusive and reserved for the European “elites”. Yes, I may have easy access to the right people, but I am fluent in three languages and have lived in five members states myself! Additionally, the time commitment required from committee members is hardly sustainable for the average EU citizen with a full-time job and a family. Between raising funds, making your funding transparent, getting your materials translated into 23 languages and publicising your initiative, you would pretty much be giving up about two years of your life.
There are a couple of good reasons why you might want something slightly more organised than the UK e-petition approach, generally to do with inclusion. Having representatives from seven member states on your committee makes it more likely that you will get the required minimum number of signatures from each country; you will have local expertise on the ground to help you promote your initiative rather than simply releasing it into the wild and hoping it goes viral on the internet. It also helps you remember that you need to reach out beyond the internet, opening access to ECIs to the one in four EU citizens who have never been online.
Both of these are good ideas in principle. What strikes me, though, is that when the Commission set about resolving implementational issues with the ECI, their guiding principles probably were around making everything water-tight, rather than making it functional with the least amount of hassle possible. While this is the right approach for transnational legislation, when it comes to citizen engagement I’d be inclined to err on the side of open and accessible rather than bureaucratic.
Signing a Citizens’ Initiative
Organising a citizens’ initiative is not without its challenges – but neither is signing one. For a start, unlike Direct Gov’s e-petition website, there isn’t a Commission site where you can simply add your support to an initiative. Every ECI has to build its own signature collection site which – this is my favourite bit – has to comply with the Commission’s technical specification as laid out in the Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 1179/2011 of 17 November 2011. I dare you to read through all seven pages of that!
There is a silver lining here. The Commission has actually developed open source software (and kudos to them for it being open source!) which already meets the technical requirements. However,

Organisers will need to ensure that the other elements of their online collection system – i.e. the hardware, hosting environment, business processes and staff – also comply with the remaining technical specifications of the Annex to Regulation (EU) No 1179/2011, namely: points 2.1, 2.2, 2.15 to 2.20.2 and 3.4.
Once their online collection system is set up and fully complies with the technical specifications, organisers should request the competent national authority of the member state where the data will be stored to certify the system.

Why the Commission doesn’t just run a central ECI signature site is anybody’s guess.
There is another issue with regards to the amount and nature of the personal data you have to surrender to sign the petition. Because signatures are validated by individual member states, each member state has different requirements for the data they would like from you. So if you’re Austrian you have to provide your passport or ID card number as well as (judging from the sample form in the guide book) your date and place of birth and your full address. If you’re Finnish you get away with just your date of birth and country of permanent residence, and no need for an identifying document. If you’re Belgian and live abroad, you have to have told the Belgian authorities about it. The rules are ambiguous, but a number of countries don’t explicitly state that foreign nationals resident in that country are eligible to sign. So if you’re Belgian, living in the Czech Republic and haven’t told your embassy that your permanent residence is now in Prague you may not be able to sign an ECI in either your country of residence or your country of citizenship.
The rather awkwardly named but otherwise very helpful Initiative for the European Citizens’ Initiative estimates that up to 20% of signatures could be invalidated by national authorities and advises to aim for collecting around 1,250,000 signatures rather than the 1,000,000 headline figure. With rules as complex as this, that is not surprising – but disappointing nonetheless.
Who can (afford to) run an initiative?
It should be apparent from the above that there are significant costs associated with running an ECI. Even assuming you can get your translation into 23 languages done by volunteers and get some pro bono legal advice on whether your idea falls under EU competency, you’re still likely to have printing costs for your publicity materials and signature collection forms, and significant technical costs for hardware, hosting and administering your online signature collection system. Given the number and nature of hoops to jump through, hiring an intern or three might not be a bad plan. So as well as getting people to support your idea, give up their personal data and possibly some of their time to help out, you are now suddenly asking them for money as well – which of course adds another layer of bureaucracy to the whole thing.
The rules state explicitly that ECIs cannot be run by organisations; they have to be run by individuals. Organisations can still support an initiative (including financially), but the initiative’s funding has to be transparent. In principle these are good ideas. They’re designed to prevent professional lobbyists from hijacking the tool for their own purposes. Yet the implementation here seems both heavy-handed and inadequate. There is nothing stopping organisations from nominating individuals to run the initiative – and while funding transparency provides some additional protection I suspect there are ways around it. Equally, “organisations” is a very broad term. There are plenty of civil society organisations which simply represent citizens, and arguably there is no harm in them running an initiative. I would for instance love to see an initiative on digital rights supported by the Open Rights Group, the Chaos Computer Club, La Quadrature du Net, various Pirate Parties and other similar organisations.
A number of factors come together here to make the ECI process even more exclusive. The Commission’s failure to provide a single signature collection website saves costs for the EU by outsourcing them to citizens running an initiative. This in turn pushes up the cost of running ECIs, making the process inaccessible to those without either money or serious fundraising skills. The “no organisations” rule exacerbates this further, while not necessarily being effective at preventing lobbyists from hijacking initiatives.
Where next?
As someone who self-defines as European above all else and who passionately believes in the European project, I think the principle of the Citizens’ Initiative is a great idea. I very much want it to succeed. Despite not being fully registered on the website yet, there are a few initiatives out there already. High(and low)lights include the Let Me Vote, the Gay Marriage, the Right to Life, and the Free Sunday initiatives.
I very much hope the Commission monitors the progress of these early initiatives and gets feedback both from those who run them as well as those who thought of starting an ECI and were put off by the bureaucracy of it all. Citizen engagement should be about openness and accessibility, aiming to make it easy for people to get involved. The ECI doesn’t quite hit the mark here – yet.

[Elsewhere] The Dragon’s Toes

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The overwhelming feeling I left this year’s ORGCon with was that digital rights in the UK had grown up. The depth and complexity of debate has come a long way since the last conference in 2010. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the two keynotes: Cory Doctorow’s “The coming war on general-purpose computing” and Larry Lessig’s “Recognising the fight we’re in”. Both painted, in broad brush strokes, a picture much bigger than the current digital rights space.
Read more at ORGZine.
This article has also been reposted on OWNI.eu.