Hi Sarah, hi @all, thank you, Sarah, for this new thread and thank you for sharing your activitities with us, I particularly like the teahouse :-)
> What about you? Online and offline activities, I'd love to hear about > how you've being proactive and what you're working on! at the annual meeting that picks up a 1920s Berlin tradition of lesbians who meet over the extended weekend of Whitsuntide, we met in Nuremberg (city of human rights) this year for another fabulous self- organized non-commercial bunch of worshops, plenary sessions, cultural programme and a manifestation in downtown Nuremberg - and all of this in 90% barrier-free arrangements, one of the acknowledged hallmarks of this meeting, called "LFT" (Lesben-Fruehlings-Treffen, lesbian spring meetings) for the first time, a Wikipedia workshop was held (initiated by me and spontaneously co-moderated by a visually-impaired translesbian colleague), with 8 participants after a highly relevant introduction to Wikipedia from the point of view of a visually-impaired person and web expert, we did an edit-a-thon on the article about the meeting :-) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesben-Frühlings-Treffen and I guess everyone is joining in again at next year's meeting in Munich where we will also deal with unconditional openness vs. realism (e.g. encrypting your emails) in the face of rising fascist activities in many computer science departments and more generally in neighbouring countries like Hungary and Russia where state-driven homo- and transphobia is rising dramatically and Roma people face no less than a genocide (in Hungary that is currently under a government that I call fascist, I visited Budapest again and met activist friends there just 10 days ago). for a short round-up of what "Lesbenfruehling" meetings are doing to promote transparency and openness also in other respects: the meeting also included a panel discussion on the current situation for lesbians in neighbouring countries like Croatia (to be joining the EU in July 2013), Poland (EU member since 2004), Hungary (EU member since 2007) and Russia (member country of the Council of Europe http://www.coe.int/ that is human rights- related), with Poland clearly on the upside, Croatia almost, and Russia and Hungary on servere downsides, with Russian regional parliaments having introduced explicitly homo- and transphobic bills that we are fighting against in international solidarity. By way of an example, our panel speakers from Croatia belong to the team who form the lesbian feminist mixed choir "Le Zbor" (www.lezbor.com) and the last song of their evening programme was from Russia and sung in Russian. We also had workshops dedicated more specifically to the situation in Russia and Hungary and in Germany, e.g. on an initiative to finally put up a specifically lesbian memorial stone on the site of the former concentration camp Ravensbrueck that was women only. At the downtown rally we read out the names of known lesbian individuals that died because of persecution during the Nazi regime (i.e. those who could not or did not want to leave the country early enough in those years). this is just to give you an example of how LFT meetings work on a culture of openness that I think is close to what Wikipedia is aiming at, too, thank you for reading this & cheers from contemporary Germany, Claudia [email protected] _______________________________________________ Gendergap mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
