Each year at the Conference to Restore Humanity, one of the keynotes is by a student group.

IowaWTF is a community of students fighting against hateful and harmful legislation in Iowa. I like how they organize.

Competency Networks

I’m not an expert on everything so let’s say I need issues on understanding something regarding gun rights or gun advocacy, then I would go ahead and contact someone within that Network.

Keynote: A Paradigm Shift in Activism, Fighting for a Just Future – Iowa WTF | CTRH! 2023 – YouTube

Yes! Create and nurture competency networks.

All healthy and resilient institutions have a well-functioning competency network (Laloux 2014; Wilson 2015). A good way to understand competency networks is via the notion of trustworthiness and the nurturing and maintenance of trusted relationships (Bettin and Elliffe 2016). A competency network can be formalised as a directed graph of experience-based pair-wise trustworthiness ratings in relation to various domains between the members of a group. You can think of it as the gifts that people bring to life by relating to each other.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Passion and Values

Know what you’re passionate about, and know your values.

Keynote: A Paradigm Shift in Activism, Fighting for a Just Future – Iowa WTF | CTRH! 2023 – YouTube

We like that distillation.

We don’t hire based on culture or select candidates because we’d like to have a drink with them. We hire and reward team members based on our shared values as detailed on this page. We want a values fit, not a culture fit. We want cultural diversity instead of cultural conformity, such as a brogrammer atmosphere. Said differently: “culture add” > “culture fit” or “hire for culture contribution” since our mission is that everyone can contribute.

GitLab Values | GitLab

What we know about successful human beings is they take an interest and they make it a passion and they take the passion and they make it a sense of purpose and they take the sense of purpose and they build a pathway.

Lab School Lecture Series

“Passion-Based” puts kids and their interests at the center and changes “teachers” into “educators” who are resourcers, advisors, and supporters.

When we reach Passion-Based Learning we are adding content to context, taking the natural curiosity and interests of kids and making education conform to those individual dreams.

Real Maker

When learning is allowed to be project, problem, and passion driven, then children learn because of their terroir, not disengage in spite of it. When we recognize biodiversity in our schools as healthy, then we increase the likelihood that our ecosystems will thrive.

To be contributors to educating children to live in a world that is increasingly challenging to negotiate, schools must be ​conceptualized as ecological communities, spaces for learning with the potential to embody all of the concepts of the ecosystem – interactivity, biodiversity, connections, adaptability, succession, and balance. 

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Community Saves Lives

Chasten made an important point in the keynote: “Community saves lives.”

What I have always been hoping to accomplish is the creation of community. Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Design is Tested at the Edges

Those were very simple questions that could have been answered when just talking to us the students within those schools.

Q&A: Fighting for a More Just Future w/ Iowa WTF | CTRH2023 – YouTube

This reflects an important insight: design is tested at the edges. We must design with, not for while always respecting “nothing about us without us“.

What Lorde and other black feminists … realized was that the more dehumanized groups a person belongs to, the more their experience forces them to understand about the way society is structured: what and who it takes for granted, the truths about itself it chooses to ignore, who is doing the truly essential work.

Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

The insights of intersectionality, the social model of disability, and design for real life help us design and build for these truths and do the “truly essential work”:

“No one knows best the motion of the ocean than the fish that must fight the current to swim upstream.” “By focusing on the parts of the system that are most complex and where the people living it are the most vulnerable we understand the system best.” “When we build things – we must think of the things our life doesn’t necessitate. Because someone’s life does.” “That’s why we’ve chosen to look at these not as edge cases, but as stress cases: the moments that put our design and content choices to the test of real life.” “Instead of treating stress situations as fringe concerns, it’s time we move them to the center of our conversations-to start with our most vulnerable, distracted, and stressed-out users, and then work our way outward. The reasoning is simple: when we make things for people at their worst, they’ll work that much better when people are at their best.”

Just Be Punk Rock About It

Just be punk rock about it. That’s what I say.

Patty Schemel

BTW, WTF in IowaWTF stands for what you think it stands for. So punk, and necessarily so.

The First Rule of Punk: Be Yourself

Our Second Rule of Punk: Reframe

When we reframe, we perceive others such that they too can be themselves.

Hey girlfriend
I got a proposition, goes something like this
Dare ya to do what you want
Dare ya to be who you will
Dare ya to cry right out loud
"You get so emotional, baby"

Double dare ya, double dare ya

Double Dare Ya by Bikini Kill

We have protests to stage, driven by the fuel of our righteous anger. We have speeches to make, written from the soaring pleas of our individual and collective trauma, and our wildest dreams of joy and freedom and love. We have cultural narratives to rewrite because they really do hate us and they really will kill us, and if we’re going to rewrite the narratives, then there’s no reason to hold ourselves back from our most radical and defiant rewritings. We have autistic children who need us to support them as architects of their own liberation against the schools and clinicians and institutions and police and prosecutors who would crush and destroy them.

We’re going to need our anger and our public celebrations of stimming and our complicated, imperfect, messy selves for this long and hard road, because we need all of us, and all of our tactics and strategies, to keep a movement going and ultimately, to win.

Autistic Hoya — A blog by Lydia X. Z. Brown: The neurodiversity movements needs its shoes off, and fists up.