Oversharing What’s Overlooked:

Creating a Mutual Aid Service with Kaggle & Code

My 2021 Kaggle BIPOC Data Fellow Mentee Blog
-by Jianda Monique

When you find your own lack of faith disturbing…you find ways to sally forth!

Mutual Aid Project in Progress Link

I’m creating a mutual aid site for folx like me with the help of coding, data science, and my own resilience. Here’s how I came to this decision.

Representation matters: we hear it all the time. We mean it.

I’d been whittling away at code since I got my childhood hands on my first keyboard. I transcribed using old school typewriters (where I first learned to work backwards and discovered troubleshooting), and remember marveling at BASIC. Running things, making cute executable programs, text-based games, and ASCII animations and images.

Yes. Representation matters. Growing up, I didn’t see images of people who looked like me or moved about in space like me on the screen. If I did, they were unicorns — rare, lucky, extremely gifted and always aware of it, wealthy, or ongoingly mentored. Something “special.”

Representation’s also about what you hear: “You talk funny, you sound like you’re not supposed to. You’re not supposed to be here. You don’t know math. You suck at logistics.” Over time, empathically, you internalize the ideas. Soon, you’ll find you’re tripping over your own feet. That’s the idea: give any system, any “body” a command, and it will go ahead and run the executable.

Soon, it’s even iterating on its own: you think you don’t belong, and you can’t do things, you conveniently forget you were coding while you were still learning reading comprehension, and you were enjoying it. You think you’re imagining things, until you read about Naomi Osaka, who opts out of crazymaking scenarios.

You hear her say, in her own words, how she needs to get her own thoughts right about her worth and abilities rather than succumbing to the powers-that-be trying to muck things up for her. You see ABC News and a multitude of caring souls back her up in these ideas: “Naomi Osaka withdraws from Wimbledon amid mental health struggles.”

You realize how representation matters even if it seems like you’re not “winning.”

What do you do once you get in the room? Let’s say there’s no seat at the table for you — and you’ve brought your own. How will you be treated once you get there? Will you be met with lip service, hostility, passive-aggressive derailing? Collegiality?

I’d worked at a prominent university as a Jr. Data Scientist and was apprenticing with a coworker who was also exceedingly abusive (verbally, mentally). Synching up the tutelage with the abuse/feigned apology cycle got in the way of my learning and my self-esteem. It nearly derailed future opportunities for me as well. I’d tried to ask him to tone it down, and he’d play up the performative allyship and buy a gift card, taking actions that seemed collegial but were actually detrimental. The more I spoke up for myself, the less work he seemed to have available for me, until eventually my services were no longer of interest — I’d started asserting myself too much.

We’re not born to be self-sabotaging…, we’re here to unlearn such object lessons never requested. Support. Access. It’s what’s motivated me in creating this project, which-like myself — is a work in progress. The project I’m working on involves data science — research, coding, ethical hacking (surfing for information and metabolizing it into code). I’m creating a Mutual Aid Site for artists. Here’s my vision of it in media res:

• Github Pages Landing Page charting its progress: jiandamonique.github.io/kaggle-google-mutual-aid-devpage/
• Google Drive Holding the elements of the vision: drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1QodJ016_nw7tzJJ9T8KN6AYhJN0JRI_P
• Google Spreadsheets My project planning worksheet
  docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qa0k9GAJCDqRSgwRUhZIDm-T1k7uQt0bs3ByoUdvzpU/edit?usp=sharing

Kaggle/Google’s BIPOC coding mentee program helps to provide opportunities for us to engineer our own successes. Solve problems with code. It’s helped me inform my own experience and to decode the things that had me gatekeeping my own access to opportunity as well.

As a grateful mentee, my work-in-progress project for Kaggle has to do with creating Mutual Aid opportunities for folks Like Me. BiPOC artists who fall somewhere in the LGBTQ+ spectrum, and our creative allies. A year ago and some change, a pandemic and lockdown coming upon us, reshaping our lives, turning us inside out, also unbidden, forced us to reassess and reprioritze what health means (including mental health). Mutual aid programs and efforts helped us get through — each one, reach one, each one, teach one. I want to pay it forward.

Though the mentorship period has passed, I’ve made lasting connections with peers and a kind mentor, and my buddy who teaches coding to veterans suffering from PTSD is going to check my work moving forward, until launch.

Fundraising
I aim to keep sharing behind the scenes “feels” and learnings about coding, and about the building of this site. About paying it forward and keeping self-care and community care aligned. I’m fundraising to help support myself during my efforts to launch the project and care for my sustenance/health needs — if you are so inspired, please share my story, and support!

On Github (my application is pending for a fundraising button)
github.com/jiandamonique
Venmo: venmo.com/jayevajohnson

PayPal: paypal.com/paypalme/jmcommunity
GoFundMe :gofundme.com/f/help-me-develop-artist-mutual-aid-site

My project page:

jiandamonique.github.io/kaggle-google-mutual-aid-devpage

I’m deeply grateful for your energy. Thanks for your time, support, interest, kind vibes! Art heals! Let’s support our fellow artists (this includes coders).

Thanks so much to Kaggle — I’m grateful to better my data science and coding skills in a caring community!

The 3 months of mentorship and fellowship helped me build confidence and hope, more than my past experience in the workplace did — I’ll be able to take that into any workspace or educational space. It’s a lifelong gift, and I’m grateful for it!

Prasun Mishra, thanks for your patient mentorship and guidance, and patience with my changes. With your moral support, and patient teaching, I’ve completed some framework and the project is still in development. Take a look! :)
https://lnkd.in/dDUdC98

Julia Elliott and all the other staff and students helped me indelibly. Thanks to everyone! :)

#kaggle #kagglebipocmentee #datascience #codingisfun #codinglife #codinglove #community