Black History Month - Letter from Stocksy

As we start the second month of 2022 commemorating Black History Month, a question lingers on many of our minds. What does this month mean? It’s personal, of course. For some, it’s celebrating our Black heroes' contributions and achievements. For others, it’s reflecting on how modern North America was built. And for many, it’s about how we show up, not just in February but in the past, present, and future. 

Recent important global conversations have started like shouts in a crowd only to dwindle into echoes and forgotten promises. But we’re still here. So what have we been doing to change the greater narrative, and what’s next? 

Part of who we are and what makes us keep going is our commitment to not just transparency (buzzword alert) but to being held accountable. We are doing the work to be better. We don’t have all the answers, but we’re taking strides in a conscious direction, making all sorts of mistakes along the way. And we’re thankful to have the opportunity to keep learning from them.

To celebrate Black History Month, we’d like to offer our update on the actions we’re excited to get underway to achieve better diversity, equity, and inclusion within our community, industry, and the media at large.

If you’d like a reminder of where we left off last, follow this link from our most recent DEI update from the CEO.

Stocksy Community

In our last update, we sought to develop recruitment strategies designed to invite new members into our community. The goal was to balance creative class representation and offer a Stocksy collection that reflects our incredibly diverse world with a multitude of visual perspectives. To that end, we have made improvements and increased our outbound program. We also launched a Contributor referral program to garner excitement and create member incentives to invite their colleagues and friends to apply. 

In addition to new member efforts, we’re delighted to continue our partnership with Authority Collective. Together, we launched several free workshops available across time zones focused on the topic of creating inclusive media. We can’t wait to learn from our community’s response. 

We have been reimagining and improving our hiring policies and processes on the employee front. This included a company-wide education on recruitment practice and a redesigned interview process. This new process prioritizes evaluating a candidate’s total value to the co-op rather than putting unnecessary weight on traditional educational titles and lists of accolades that often remain exclusively available and gated by privilege.

Strategy & Leadership

We shifted our board structure to include more diverse voices at the table on a leadership level and continue to evaluate the board and leadership composition at Stocksy.

Our North Star initiative kicked off this year - and initiative to invite the knowledge and perspectives of the entire co-op to the table. The elected group of members develop and lead visioning exercises conducted with various teams and members of the co-op to amplify more Stocksy voices. This initiative helps us to contribute to continued growth and learning collaboratively.

Our DEI committee grew exponentially this year, moving toward more executable work after engaging in power mapping exercises led by our Curator In Residence and board member Tara Pixley. The results have reached company-wide and have led to a more integrated approach to DEI at Stocksy. This avoids siloing a specific team or group to direct the discourse in all departments, teams, and groups. We continue to progress this work forward in 2022. 

Partnerships

Last year we audited our active partnerships to ensure their values aligned and supported our efforts to create a more inclusive space for BIPOC creatives. We have ceased contracts with unaligned partners and are seeking out new and exciting collaborations. 

One of our new collaborations is with new media distribution platform co-op AfricanFuturistsArts (website to come). In this collaboration, we are offering consultation and guidance on platform co-op structure and governance and look forward to helping with their evolution and growth. 

Technology

In technology, we are focused on metadata adjustments. Our members currently tag all their assets themselves which can make for a heavy process, cause difficulties with language barriers, and create confusion around best practices. We are working on removing those barriers with AI machine learning tools for more equitable and accessible workflows. 

We do, however, recognize the various ways in which technology, algorithms, and language can be exclusionary and inequitable. To address that reality, we have hired a metadata specialist who conducts one-on-one educational sessions with members while we develop more streamlined technology solutions.

As a result of these efforts, in 2021 we flagged 690k keywords for removal and 165.6k assets in searches. We also investigated 1808 unique searches and worked with our curator in residence to identify over 500 potentially problematic terms and created policies for 90 of these terms so far. We continue to have conversations and work on policies to craft a digital space that fosters inclusive language and digital practices.

What’s Next?

There is a long list of hopes and dreams to achieve this year and beyond. For now, we do have some of the work underway to share, with statuses on those projects and plans to come in our next update.

• We are currently working on “What is stock” workshops and presentations. These are developed to better showcase the revenue stream possibilities and community opportunities for creators who may not have considered it or had access to the resources necessary to know the opportunity exists.
• We are developing education and webinars for access to data for the membership to better make informed and unbiased decisions.
• We are continuing our DEI strategy and policy work for improved research efforts by setting up asset curation exercises to establish baselines and correct for biases in our curatorial teams.
• We are workshopping ethical solutions to gather information on the composition of our membership to better understand where we are as a company and how we can engage with specific communities to amplify marginalized voices.
• We are improving our land acknowledgments and have begun connecting with local Indigenous organizations to gain a better understanding company-wide about the unceded territories upon which we live and work.
• We are improving our collection metrics to better understand our content categories and the diversity of perspectives within each.
• We are evaluating our ethnicity and gender representation in search, updating language and identity options.
• We are taking big steps in technology to correct for bias in all our machine learning initiatives.
• Our product team is working on removing the barriers in member user flows that hinder accommodating a global membership.
• We're improving client discovery to surface new assets that better showcase the growing depth and breadth of representation in the collection.

If you’d like some further information, below are some resources we have found useful:

Bias in technology, AI, and machine learning 

• Algorithms of Oppression - Safiya Noble
• Fighting bias in algorithms - Joy Buolamwini
• Race After Technology - Ruha Benjamin

Land Acknowledgements

• Native Land Digital

Professional & personal growth courses 

• HmntyCtnrd

Our internal company info for reference

• Our Content Policy

Thanks for being here and holding us accountable. If you’d like to offer your perspective or get involved, we are here for feedback, comments, and questions. Hit us up at support@stocksy.com

 All of us at Stocksy