Red Phone
Co-Founder/Organizer with Miki Foster
Founded in 2015, Red Phone is primarily a closed queer emergency network. The network is based on 100% trust. Red Phone seeks to create sustainable structures of support and address crisis through education and community engagement as a means to more directly address the issues of precarity and violence outside of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and Prison Industrial Complex.
This project engages local health care providers and healers, social workers, community organizers, youth mentors, artists and other care takers and support.
Past Workshops:
Allied Media Conference 2016
Radical Networks 2015
The Queer Red Phone: Designing Interfaces and Community Accountability Networks through Mesh
The idea of a batphone - the red phone that Commissioner Gordon had a secure line with Batman - is that the user has a secure connection used in critical situations or emergencies. One of the interesting possibilities of a closed network coupled with a bit of cryptography and an alert system is that we can create a means for designing a user experience that is easy to access, can serve multiple critical functions within our communities and is built/maintained from the ground up by members of the community who are committed to the privacy and anonymity of all users.
Let’s say that we wanted to distribute the responsibility of responding to a critical situation or emergency to not just one person or a bunch of people. We can send out the equivalent of a bat signal - we can encode a message that gives more specifics that allows respondents to prepare for the situation and engage with each other (if needed) in order to strategize. The question is can we build a network that uses grassroots organizing, trust and accountability structures to create a digital framework/community that addresses emergencies, critical situations, and distributes care and resources within our communities without (or at least minimizing) surveillance? What would this network enable us to do and how would we encourage others to use it without compromising its integrity?
In this workshop we will imagine and design as a network and community of queers. Participants need not know anything about mesh networks in order to attend but rather come with a willingness/openness to think about both the social and technical limitations/possibilities of creating a community.