project : Read The Feminist Manual

Read The Feminist Manual

description

The project Read the Feminist Manual is a re-appropriation of RTFM (Read the Fucking Manual) and addresses gender discrimination in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities and the lack of support in accommodating marginalized voices.

Software and hardware manuals often assume the programmer/engineer is a he. RTFM browser plugin replaces she and he pronouns with the neutral counterpart they. It does so by filtering webpage content.

Read the Feminist Manual version 1.0 of the plugin provides the following features: + A user input to enter one or more URL for filtering. Click the addon's icon to add hosts. + Replacement of he/she with they in bold. + A counting of all he/she occurrences found in the HTML text is added at the top of the page.

Along with the plugin, a zine is available from the project's page that includes information about feminist servers and the context of the project. The project was developed during an online fellowship at the Media Enterprise Design Lab of Boulder University of Colorado.