BlogHer conference coming up!

blogher party
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry

I'm madly excited about the upcoming BlogHer conference - I'm on a couple of panels - Moderating "Does the Blogosphere need an intolerance intervention" with its somewhat ambiguous stance, and filling in at the last minute for Grace Davis on day 2 of the conference in "Blogging: The Voice for Silenced Communities". I really, really, love a good juicy panel discussion with a ton of participation and ideas exploding everywhere that send you off thinking and inspired. That's how it will be, the entire conference -- with the added torment of knowing that in the next room something else just as interesting is happening and you're missing it!

BUT THE PARTIES! Oh my god we're going to have fun.

And the strange pajama parties at midnight in our swanky hotel rooms (fancy yet crammed with 4 of us to a room) with laptops and compromising photos and books and cameras! Our silliness will not be contained and must spill over onto your internets!

And the hallways where I will park myself and geek out and get to meet people I have admired from afar and they turn out to be just regular people with shy smiles who are nice.

I think best of all I like meeting amazingly witty shy people who have gem-like beautiful blogs and are not scrambling after fame and fortune or trying to Optimize for Business. It makes me think of how I love to make little xerox zines and distribute them for free. It is still a culture of DIY and abundance and love.

But on another level all the businessy social capital networky things are also beautiful. The first BlogHer conference gave me a lot of confidence and belief that my weird useless literary hobby was appreciated. I met so many people who continue to be useful to me, not like I call them up and go "Give me a job, and I'd like my own Lear Jet to the conference, cause i am internet famous" but just in that we know we exist, in awareness of each other, and that is comforting and inspiring. Just that I know all the people I met at the first Blogher conference still amazes me. Instead of being a lone wacko in my garage transmitting ham radio waves into outer space (as I felt while blogging solo) I am part of this amazing community and I have professional and literary colleagues.

I looked at my Facebook social timeline and saw how it is basically an explosion of friends stemming from BlogHer 2005. That's so amazing. And as a feminist I appreciate, especially, the connections with other women, so often disrupted by capitalism, nuclear families, and all the pressures of our lives under patriarchy. BlogHer helps me live my life more the way I have always wanted to, with strong ties to other women.

Actually, Woolfcamp helped that too. And I still hope to see others do some decentralized women-blogging and tech meetups that are small unconferences, just get together with your laptops and start showing each other all your geeky stuff, even just how you blog and what tools you use. And I guarantee that among 3 or 4 people you will all learn something and be fortified and inspired. It is a sort of nucleation and sharing of information that makes everyone involved become bigger.

Back to the practical universe. I will be flying out on Wednesday, will stay with my sister-in-law and her family one night in Oak Park, and then off to the W Hotel. I am rooming with SJ of I, Asshole, one of my earliest blog friends. Actually I was her stalker for a while until she noticed me in her comments (as is so common with these blog friendships!). And with her friend Shauny who I don't know but who I'm sure will be fun. BLOG PARTY IN MY ROOM and you are all invited.

I will miss Grace Davis a lot and will be thinking of her and extending magic tentacles to her this week and next... and I will save up a lot of fun for her and when she is ready I will go and bring it to her house and pour it in her lap. I was thinking that a Woolfcamp in the park would be awesome. I will find a beautiful place with lots of nature AND wireless and we will all go and have a blogging picnic specially in Grace's honor.


Meanwhile, I am gearing up to write for BlogHer again. I took a 6 month leave, because I got a full time job and an extra part time job and could not handle so much work. But I am ready to get back to blogging about blogs by women from Latin America (including the Latin America that intersects with the United States, i.e. blogs by Latina/Chicana women). I miss all the blogs I used to read and the fun emails and am looking forward to getting back into it with a weekly post. If you have a favorite blog, in Spanish or English, and I will try Portuguese as well, please send me the URL and a description of the blog and blogger and I'll add them to my feed!

Geek dress code, Silicon Valley version

Skud blogged a very funny comparison of geek vs. non-geek dress codes. I think the geek code allows for a more fine-grained analysis!

THE GEEK DRESS CODE
With elements of clothing listed in order of ascending formality
================================================================

Shirts:

Tshirt your mom bought you at Kmart when you were in high school. Ill fitting; 80s colored; perhaps with abstract designs.
Tshirt for tech company, probably white, grubby, boring.
Tshirt for unboring tech company or science fictional thing.
Cool tech tshirt, black.
Cool tech tshirt, black, tucked in, with belt.
Snarky geek tshirt perhaps from threadless or Thinkgeek; tight fitting to show off boobs and/or muscles.
Snarky geek shirt with sports jacket; best multitool on belt.


Underwear:

Underwear worn yesterday, turned inside out.
Underwear your parents or s.o. got you for a utilitarian present.
Underwear that is actually cute and fits, that you bought for yourself.
Underwear with snarky geek saying on it. Impressive!

Pants:

Baggy pants, too short, bought in high school by mom; used to be either green, grey, black, or brown; now a greyish nothing-color; holes optional.
Jeans.
Jeans without prominent holes.
The "nice" jeans; no holes, no stains; they fit.
Black jeans!
Pants that are not jeans but are not quite suit pants either -OR- a misguided Utilikilt.

Skirts:

Long flowing hippie skirt, unfashionable, no underwear, or boxers
Skirt that is more current style of some sort.
Miniskirt and combat boots ( with snarky tshirt, multitool, and jacket, this is punk geek formal).
Ball gown of amazing ridiculousness, with sneakers.
Actual fancy dress that looks fantastic, with girly shoes (to be used sparingly).

Bras:

None.
Tank top.
Tank top with shelf thing built in.
Actual bra, scungy.
Fun colored lacey bra -OR- none, with Snarky geek shirt, tight.

Stockings:

Mismatched white tube socks.
White socks.
Black socks.
Fun socks.
Tights.
Ironic leg warmers.
Stripey knee socks.
Stripey thigh highs.
Fishnets, pristine.
Fishnets, artistically torn, with safety pins. Especially on guys. Guys, y'all are taking notes, right?

Accessories acceptable for dressing up:

Laptop backpack.
Laptop bag, fancy.
Laptop modded in any way; stickers; etching; plastic case.
A funky vest. (For hippie chicks or old unix sys admins).
Pocketwatch. (Sys admins ONLY).

We could keep going, I'm sure! I can't even begin to touch upon shoes.

Technorati Tags: fashion, geeks

"Community" needs women, badly!

Sometimes you just have to laugh. Apparently this conference, "Community Next", has been missing all the years of discussion in blogging and tech communities about gender diversity. Maybe it's too technical of a conference and women tend to go for the more "soft" skills like communities and social engineering and marketing? Oh wait, that's what the conference is about. Um! Maybe there aren't any women in tech who do community work? Or who know anything about viral marketing and web 2.0? Maybe they're not famous and notable enough, or don't know how to speak? Golly. Where are the women!?

Seriously, I looked at this speaker list and conference description and started laughing really hard. So many nice guys that I like and respect, but here, they dropped the ball.

Again.

Maybe danah was rly rly busy so they just didn't know who else there was to ask!

Or maybe if they put some pink in that web site design and a link to shopping, some of the wimminz might show up. (/sarcasm)

If there aren't women talking, I get turned right off of going.

On the other hand, some of those guys are kind of hot. Maybe they will wear their best really tight witty Threadless tshirts and make it worth my while to show up. Hawt!

(/really ending sarcasm now)

Pissed off cyborg in your face

New!
Originally uploaded by cdent

If this round of wheelchair use keeps for for much longer, then finally everyone in the known universe will have gone through their awkward reactions and I can stop having the most annoying boring conversation ever.

Here is something I wrote for WisCon. If only I could have forced all 1037 people there to read it.

A quick lesson in wheelchair manners:

1) Please ask before touching!
2) That goes for pushing the chair especially.
3) My lap is not your shelf.
4) I'll ask if I need direct help.
5) "Would you like help" is fine, good manners; "Here let me do that for you" while doing it already -- is not. I value my abilities.
6) Walking beside me is nicer than walking behind me; then I can see you.
7) Coming down to my level for conversation is extra polite, thanks! Looming over me especially from behind... not so much.
8) Think of the chair as an extension of my body or personal space, treat it as such.
9) Thanks for unblocking my path so I don't get trapped, much appreciated. Move your backpack out of the aisle.
10) Really, please don't move the chair! I wouldn't pick you up and move you, would I?
11) Please don't bump it either, it's annoying and often it hurts me.
12) Let's talk about science fiction and feminism instead of wheelchairs and disability and pain, once we get past introductory chit chat.
13) No I don't really want to listen to your process your feelings and fears about disability unless we're already friends.
14) No I don't want your medical advice unless I ask for it.
15) If I ran over your toes, my bad, I'm so sorry
16) I'm not here to satisfy the whims of your curiosity. Why do you need to know? Why do you want to know? Could you possibly put off finding out till you know me better?

Clip and save!

Because that was the polite part. Here is the rude angry in your face part:

What 's wrong with you? Why are you in the chair? Oh my god WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU? Is this temporary? Is this permanent? Did you break your leg? Did you go to the doctor? Did you get an MRI? What exactly is wrong? You sure get around well, how did you learn? When will you be out of the chair? Are you sure? I'm so sorry! Are you in pain? Are you going to die? You sure look comfortable. Wow lucky you, you get to sit down while we're all standing in line. OMG are you OKAY?

(Answers: Nothing, what the hell is wrong with YOU? So that I can get around. I was born and then grew up, what happened to you? I don't know. I don't know. No, but I can tell you really really really want me to have broken my leg. What do you think, do you think I went to a doctor, but that's not what you're asking, you're asking what my prognosis is. Do you want to help diagnose me? I don't know but I have some possibilities which we could discuss exhaustively OR we could have some other more interesting conversation. I learned last time I was crippled which was around 93-98 with varying degrees of disability, oh that surprises you, check your assumptions at the door; oh by the way you seem to get around really well for someone with their head up their own ass. I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry too, for your mama for raising someone so rude and boring, I'd rather be crippled than be a drip like you. Yes I am quite likely in a considerable amount of pain, and you know what, I also was in varying degrees of physical pain when you saw me walking around, why must you bring it up? Yes I'm going to die and so are we all and so are you, especially, about 5 seconds from now. If you want to try being as comfortable as I am I can beat you up right now and stab some daggers into your back. Uh yeah lucky me I have run out of sarcasm to even throw at this one, o falsely jocular person. Yeah, are YOU okay?

Hey you know what, world? Let's have a conversation about your painful struggle with your own hemorrhoids. Because apparently your head is up your ass. That must be really painful for you and I really admire how you deal with the challenge!

Every time I go out in public in a crowd I get totally fed up. I'm really sick of being the crippled girl. It was a relief last night to scoot over to the couch for a bit and have the pressure off me, the pressure of being looked at and stuck in that box in people's minds.

You can see their faces as they think "Wow... that could happen to me."

Pain is annoying and tiring and distracting, and I have very much valued the times it goes away (rare) and that it doesn't interfere with physical function too much. However, it is not new. It is also not the end of the world.

Limited mobility is annoying and distracting and inconvenient and sometimes isolating or frustrating but you know what... the worst part of it for me so far is the way it makes people act like dumbasses.

I'm off to write a really dumb Mary Sue-ish science fiction story where everyone slathers pity on the people who can't interface with the cyborg telepathic alien hovercraft symbionts and are doomed to dreary, unassisted, bipedal motion.

Pink and sparkly

Okay on the one hand, Geek Girl Bingo. Pink, sparkly, cute, colour choice, stereotype city. I am totally down with calling people on their constant application of these ideas to femininity.

On the other hand, I kind of want this. On the substrate of the pink and sparkly Hello Kitty laptop, I would add a million bad attitude stickers, and it would be glorious. I could mod my Hello Kitty with some green tentacles to make a Hello Cthulhu. It's kind of a problem.

Clearly my mind is not free from colonization.

Come to Wiki Wednesday

Well, I'm crossing over my day job into my personal blog here, but what the heck. I love my day job (and wikis) enough for it to merge that way! I'm turning into kind of a wiki fanatic, so much that a couple of months ago I realized I had the same sense of fannish belonging at our wiki meetup that I do at poetry readings, blogging meetups, and science fiction cons: the sense that I'm finally around other people who share some basic philosophy of reality that might not be quite mainstream. For poetry, it's, well, being poety. For blogging, it's that I don't feel like anything is real until I've written it up and posted it to the Internet and had 6 people link to it. For sf cons, it's that my brain has been steeped in the structures of alien societies since I was 5 years old, so much that I'm a Martian. In the case of wikis, that means that I want to collaborate on everything, and I want to be able to take everything back and travel backwards in time, and while I browse the non-wiki-ish Muggle web or even read a book, I get frustrated that I can't double click on the page to edit the page.

This month I look forward to bringing up my pet peeves about wikis. Talk about wiki interoperability. I flip back and forth between wikis all the time, from Socialtext to Mediawiki to PBwiki to Kwiki, and can never remember which markup is which. In one, I have to use double square brackets, in another, single square brackets, to make a link. Not to mention the problems with quotes, pipes, header markup, and everything else. Why can't they all just get along?


So here's my wiki wednesday invite:

June 6th will be Wiki Wednesday, with events in London, San Francisco, Montreal, and Vancouver. There's also a wiki meetup in Sydney, Australia, June 12th.

Anyone is welcome to give a quick presentation, demo, or talk on using wiki and social media technology. We have an interesting mix of developers, wiki entrepeneurs, wiki editors and administrators, bloggers, and consultants. I wrote up the last London and Palo Alto meetings, so you can get an idea of what happens at the event.

In San Francisco, we'll be meeting at Citizen Space at 6pm. Eugene Eric Kim is giving a talk on wiki interoperability and wiki ohana. He'll describe real-world end-user pain, concrete opportunities (especially ways Wiki developers can help the entire space by improving their own tools), and a practical strategy (WikiOhana) for achieving interoperability. This could lead into a great discussion! I'm hoping we'll hear as well about events at Recent Changes Camp Montreal (RoCoCo), which Eugene wrote up with some excitement in his blog, eek speaks. Check out his writeups of the recent Identity conference, too, he has some fantastic ideas. And just a heads up, in July, Eszter Hargittai will be our featured speaker for the SF Bay Area.

In London, Wiki Wednesday has become a large and vibrant get together. David Terrar has created a Ning page as well as a signup page on the wiki. The meeting will be at 18:15 at the Conchango offices.

In Vancouver, the event so far has a high amount of wiki software developers. Check the Wiki Wednesday page for details.

In Montreal, there will be a focus on continuing the discussions at Recent Changes Camp, but also there will be time for wiki project explanations and demos.

Please sign up if you'd like to come! You can sign in on the wiki page at:
http://socialtext.net/wikiwed

Or on the upcoming.org invite:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/200305/

Also, if you are interested in presenting at a future Wiki Wednesday, or would like to organize one in your city, please let me know.

Thanks a million to Wiki Wednesday organizers David Terrar, Luke Closs, and James Matheson, as well as to Tara Hunt and Chris Messina from Citizen Agency.

I leave you with this photo by George Kelly, because it made me laugh really hard:

Technorati Tags: blogging, conferences, wikis

Reunion ho! In which I reminisce, with real names

my friends under the stairs
Originally uploaded by Liz Henry

It's my 20th high school reunion coming up. I can't bear to give $39 to THAT WEB SITE OF EVIL which seems to control all information from the past. So, I figured I'd blog the names of people I might actually want to talk to from that time.

I went to a huge high school in northwest Houston, Cypress Creek. The graduating class must have been at least 500 people. The junior high, Campbell, was also pretty huge and I remember its weird 70s architecture with some fondness; the open ramps with the library in the center were kind of cool looking.

I was clued into this 20 year reunion thing by Thad Davis, who lived in my subdivision, Champions West. Bear with me for a moment while I provide context. Houston in the early 80s was expanding like a vast horrible pustulent tumor, or like gangrene. Malls, freeways, strip malls, and "subdivisions" which were housing developments of hideous sameness and no city-like infrastructure, were flowing like lava over the scraggly, piney woods and fire-ant-infested cow pastures. There was Huntwick, which was fancy and rich with a fancy country club, and there was Champions, which was marginally less fancy with a less fancy golf club. I lived in basically the scungiest one, Champions West, and by scungy I mean that not all the houses were two-story, I guess. Oh also you could measure scunginess by whether ditches were in the front yard or whether people had paid to put in a culvert and soil over the ditch. We had a ditch, which I played in, and we did not belong to the golf club.


It seems so exotic and strange, looking back...


Back to our story! Thad and I rode the bus together, played D&D together, and were in a lot of the same classes. Also in the early 80s, tracking was "in" but was ever so slightly masked. So, if you were regular you were in "L' level classes. If you were somewhat smarter you could be in "K-level". And if you were considered "gifted" then you were in "H-level" or "Horizons" classes as well, one extra every year. So in 5th grade I think the Horizons class was... Oh well I don't even remember. In 6th it was Study Skills (joy...) and in 7th maybe it was English. In Horizons classes you got to be kind of flaky and genius-like and creative, but the main benefit of it for me was that I could tell who the other super smart people were. At any one time there were around 30 of us in this program.

In junior high, I would check out 2 books a day from the library, read them, and return them by the end of the day. And I do fondly remember seeing Thad's name in many of the books I would read, and wondering what he thought about them and what he was "really like", but I never found that out. Anyway, the two of us must have read through the entire junior high library.

The elementary school, Yeager, I only went to for one year. It was major culture shock. People called me a damn Yankee a lot, because I had moved to Texas from "the North" -- from Michigan. I found out that the Civil War was not over. Being a damn Yankee basically meant you were accused by white kids of not being racist enough. I was also besieged with demands that I be more properly gendered. Apparently I was doing something right, because they called me "Liz the Lez". My friend Julie, who was 9 years old, helpfully explained what that meant. One time a howling mob of other 10 year olds chased me around demanding to know all the details of how I had gotten a sex change. What can I say? Don't raise your kids in Texas!

What a nasty place! And yet I am curious to go back and to see these people!

Onward, to list the other people I would be interested in seeing at the reunion!

Some people, I'd like to see just to see how they turned out, because they were really jerks! Like Trent Wallace! What was up with you, dude? You were a little misogynist and homophobe, always screaming at me that I was a nasty little twat and shoving me around in gym class in 6th grade! I didn't even know what that meant, but I had a good guess. In retrospect, I wonder how you got that way, so mean, so young. Have you mellowed? Did you go on to work at Enron?

But most of the people I would like to see were sweet. Or, they always seemed quite decent and yet I never really knew them. Elaine Lamm, Jennifer Lupa, Christy Clark, Sandy Alvarez, Karen Tesch, Kurt Muehlner, Heidi Neumann, Jill Blankenberg, Scott Harris, Jill Adams, Melissa Jones, Peter Duggan, Elisa Dingsdale, Greg Dean, Greg Magyar, Kent Kornett, Lara Rupf, Jeff Darin, Holly Volek, Jeff Gallamore, Tereese Mangaroo, Jeff Smith (who I have heard from, lives in Seattle), and Jack Yee (lives in NYC, was fairly close to ground zero of the WTC on 9/11). Jack and Chris Deeves and Christi Redilla and I were often in competition... who would fail to get a 110 on the math exams... That was fun. Robert Dubose, who I've been in touch with, and who was always super nice, and who introduced me to Herman Hesse books at the proper age - 13 or so.

And then the people I played with when we were younger and yet lost touch with. Pam Berry, Charleen Handzel (we all 3 used to play Breyer model horses, obsessively), Susan Rickey, Julie Carter, and Samantha Medlock.

That's it for my list; I'm sure there are more. Now, if any of these people had ever cared to google me, I'm out there, but maybe they will vanity google and find themselves here and drop me a line!

liz - at - bookmaniac.net

Maker faire: Computer sculpture

I saw countless cool things at Maker Faire today. The Computersculpture.com booth was one of the coolest. The dude there, Andrew Werby, let me sit there and play with a demo for a while. There was a pre-defined 3-D object on the screen, a sort of smooth, soft, spongy blob. With a pen on an articulated arm, like one of those adjustable desk lamps, I could "feel" the object's surface and by pressing a button, push into it and sculpt it.

This was uncanny! The kinesthetic sense, the resistance in the pen in my hand, was just perfect. It was as if I was feeling and manipulating a real object. It was a bit like punching a blunt tool, a stylus, through thick foamy stuff; I thought of hot wire and foam carving kits.

At some point, I carved through the blob into the center, and the tool fell through into a sort of cave. I could feel around inside the object and visualize it in my head. There were multiple exit holes in the back, where I couldn't see, that other people doing the demo before me must have made. The sensation reminded me uncannily of the numb feeling of pressure that I have had during surgical procedures. The tool also looked like and behaved like an instrument i held in my hand -- except I could pass it through the object. So the tip had all the sensation and the handle was ghostly and non-existent. I had sensation, without having any hands. I could imagine surgeons really doing "Fantastic Voyage" type of operations this way. But it should also be a tool that game designers use for character and world building. I can't imagine artists not loving this tool!

I have never felt something on a computer, a thing that I couldn't see. My head exploded with thoughts of designing cool video games for visually impaired people. Mazes and thought puzzles and art pieces.

There was more to Andrew's set of tools; you could sculpt, and then 3-d print your objects. I was blown away so completely by the kinesthetic 3-d modeling, I didn't pay attention to the rest.

Vancouver hackathon tomorrow

I've been having a blast with my co-workers from Socialtext in Vancouver for our hackathon week. I've worked, had fun, and gone to a zillion meetings, wheeled around a bit of downtown Vancouver. Last night was the Vancouver.pm Perlmongers meeting, which I'll blog elsewhere.

On Friday - tomorrow - we're having a community hackathon at the Bryght offices in downtown Vancouver. 1pm to 1am. Sign up, and come by if you like!

Wiscon panels coming up, and some commentary on a game

Here's my panels for Wiscon! I can't wait!

Last year's flirting panel was a blast and at this year's followup I'm hoping to make a cool handout. Debbie says if I email her the stuff she'll make the handout, because I have too much to do! One good technique "touch/don't touch" is actually playing out mini scenarios and then switching roles, so that you get to do the no-saying and the no-recieving and get practice doing that gracefully on both sides. (Something I learned in anti-date-rape workshops in the 80s.) Another super great idea I learned from Ian K. Hagemann - to always thank a person who lets you know a boundary, because they are honoring you by communicating it instead of letting you continue to cross it in ignorance.

I don't have any specific and book-focused panels this year - no time to prepare properly for that - But I can't wait for the Karen Axness Memorial Panel where we all list great little-known books by women sf writers and there are always fabulous handouts that expand my reading list. I'm also excited to go to the cultural appropriation panels.

Speaking of cultural appropriation! I can bring a copy of this: Bone White, Blood Red: a roleplaying game of the Pueblo Revolt. It is written in the voice of "Spider Grandmother" and "Worn Pot" who teach Bear, Coyote, Wren, and Badger how to play the game. My immediate reaction is basically, "huh" and a stance of automatic suspicion against what I think of as Cherokee hair tampon syndrome.

The game would be rough for me and I would rather just have character sheets with the beads and string as a metaphor or an optional visual aid, as I could never remember all the details of which bead meant what without written notes. But I would certainly give the game a try and the difficulty of remembering stuff would be part of the point. (Would that difficulty be fun, though?) As the fictional in character bits in roleplaying game books go, this one is not bad at all.

So is it cultural appropriation? Well, yeah. Does that make it awful? It's not a yes/no on/off answer. It means that it is open to some criticism and commentary, which game authors as well as book authors should listen to with an open mind and some humility, as the Spirit of the Century rpg authors recently did.

In other interesting gaming news, you can download and playtest Steal Away Jordan. The players all play slaves in the U.S.

Your name
Your name is not your own. If you were born into slavery, your parents may not have had much say in the choosing. The name your master calls you may not be the name your relations use in private. If you run away, you will change your name. Therefore, the GM chooses your name, but you may pick a nickname.

That's pretty interesting! You can read a report and discussion thread of a playtest game on The Forge.

Anyway here's my Wiscon panels!

===============

Feminist SF Wiki Workshop
in Caucus Room (Time to be determined)

Come learn about the Feminstsf wiki, learn what wikis are and how to edit them, contribute your ideas, creativity, and feminist vision to the wiki.
Equipment: projector that can plug into a laptop, and a screen
Length: 70 minutes
Laura M. Quilter, Liz Henry

Please Touch/Don't Touch (Feminism, Sex, and Gender)
Friday, 8:45-10:00 p.m. Friday, 8:45-10:00 p.m. Friday, 8:45-10:00 p.m.
One of the many qualities which sets WisCon apart from most other SF conventions is the perception that, for one weekend a year, the Concourse is a safe and inclusive space for SF fans of all genders, orientations, identities, races, and religions. Many people have commented that this extra level of comfort seems to create a very "touchy-feely" environment, with a lot more casual physical contact between old friends and new acquaintance, and a very different, (more open?) environment for flirting and hook-ups. But not everyone is quite so comfortable with such a relaxed atmosphere... Where do you draw the lines between casual and significant, affection and flirting, too much and not enough? How do the conditions change from situation to situation? And how do you tell someone to "back off"... or deal gracefully when someone else lets you know that you've crossed a line?
Karen Swanberg, M: Debbie Notkin, Mary Kay Kare, Liz Henry, Jed E. Hartman

Let's You And Her Fight (Feminism, Sex, and Gender)
Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m. Sunday, 10:00-11:15 a.m.
This year there was a panel about how to flirt at Wiscon. Next year I'd like to see a panel on how to fight at Wiscon. It's not bad to want to get along; but it is when that urge causes us not to speak our minds in public, and leaves us gr umbling in private. How do you speak up and explain that you think the respected panel member is talking out of her hat, while maintaining a friendly attitude towards someone who is, after all, a fellow feminist and fan? Ideally people will get a chance to practice. I would particularly like to draft Steven Schwartz for this panel.
Steven E. Schwartz, Liz Henry, Joan Haran, M: Alan Bostick, Lee Abuabara

Technorati Tags: conferences, rpgs, sciencefiction

(Not so) fascinating, Captain

Wifi was spotty at the Web 2.0 conference, but I enjoyed meeting people and listening to talks in the Web2open part of town. My coworkers Luke and Kirsten and I gave an off the cuff demo and talk about wikis, blikis, and various ways of looking at wiki content. I came away thinking further about measures of wiki health, tightness, outward or inward-lookingness, and the idea of a wiki having periods of growth or pruning.

I caught part of Rashmi Sinha's talk, "Massively Multiplayer Object Sharing" and am hoping to hear more on the same themes of designing for large systems. It's such a pleasure, because I have been thinking and talking for a while now in an amateur way about having many different metrics and algorithms to rank and measure value - in order to counter some of the flaws of complete democracy. I just talk about it, while people like Rashmi and Mary Hodder actually put these ideas into practice!

The only other talk I caught was part of the "Invincibelle" demo. While it is a lovely idea and I'm all for it, I was somewhat turned off by the line "After all, women love shopping..." Yeah okay, er... Did I really just hear that! But I'll put that aside. Invincibelle has some great interviews with interesting women working in tech. It is a great idea but I have some (I hope constructive) critiques to offer. The site needs good navigation and stronger linking between people. Why not make this an actual social network site? So far, it's just a custom-built blog with good interviews, a forum, and an rss feed of some job postings. Another thing that could be improved - how about adding some links to the women featured and their web presence? They have companies, blogs, contact info, presumably - but I can't find that in the interviews. Why not make a nice sidebar with feeds from all the featured women's blogs? Then their voices would be heard even further! Scalability is another concern. I would love for this site to grow. But when it grows what will it look like... where is a coherent directory of the people of this network - for example I would like to be able to click on profession titles and read about all the chemists or physicists or programmers and perhaps also by country, as I imagine people from particular countries might like to find each other. Maybe those features will get added and the site will move a little further into the "2.0" philosophy. I could say the same (a critique, with suggestions, and with love) for sites like el Salón de Belleza which has similarly inspiring portraits and profiles and interviews with amazing women (thought not focused on tech.)

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far far away, across the Expo hall, someone from this company was asking the audience for its demo, "should we search in our social software for swimsuit issue models, or victoria's secret?" Apparently a segment of the audience indicated its preference for lingerie soft porn over bathing suit soft porn. Some women walked out. Maybe some men did too - I hope so. The subtext is not subtle to me. Who did the speakers think they were talking to?

In the context of all the years of discussion about "how to get more women at tech conferences", this was an amazingly ignorant thing to do in a professional talk. I like many of the comments from my fellow geek and techy women in the comments here, for example, the calmly and neatly expressed simple statement by Nicole:

As an engineer and woman who uses the internet daily for work and personal I am still blown away by these ridiculous portrayals of women as objects in tech ad campaigns.

Some more on this, a quick roundup:

Ah! Here's the women of Web 2.0!

Men (and a few women) of Web 2.0. This is so odd; it's a photo of the crowd for a keynote, and the crowd is overwhelmingly male.

Meanwhile, Christine Herron posts about the gender ratio at the conference. This year, women made up 18% of the conference attendees.

I was on the Web2open side of the conference all of Tuesday, there were a ton of women, I didn't feel outnumbered or out of place, and quite a lot of the speakers and presenters were women; in fact, more than half. I have a few thoughts on why this should be so. One is that women might be more likely than men to not be able to afford to go to the main conference if the fee was not paid for by their company. On that note -- info I can't source at the moment but that I've often read -- women in companies don't push to be sent to conferences while men do, because of self-judgements of level of expertise (Eszter Hargittai has some good research data on self-perceptions of competence and expertise in tech, though). Another crucial element that helped the gender ratio at Web2open; Tara Hunt actively recruited - repeatedly - women in online forums, in public and private, to participate, and pointed out the other women who were coming. That level of active outreach is very important and is part of why SXSWi had such success in increasing participation by women in the industry.

And back to the annoying lingerie model issue: I'd like to point out that O'Reilly's screenshots were interesting and demonstrate the cleverness and interest of the product in the exact way that the demo didn't. Doing a beavis and butthead style sniggering soft core porno "women as consumable objects" search only revealed what will end up being the ugly side of identity aggregation and search sites; using the web creepily to stalk & harass women. When this happens it won't be the fault of the software or of the internet, it'll be a mirror that exposes what goes on at all levels of society.

One more post, from SFWoW:

unbelievable that MCPs are still willing to show their stripes in SF these days; but there is no accounting for cluelessness among the supposed-Digerati.

Yeah there is some anger out there. And as anyone with half a brain should know by now, it is unsafe professionally for women in the field to indicate (even very calmly) that they are annoyed (even very mildly) by sexism.

I think some of the anger comes from our (speaking for women in tech) high expectations. We want to believe y'all utopian-thinking techie web 2.0 dudes are somewhat enlightened and we want to believe you see us as human beings. It is disappointing when those wishes and beliefs are proved wrong - over and over. I look forward to hearing more men say "actually that's not funny" to each other. I don't want to become the enforcer. The point is not for guys to watch what they say in front of women like me. That will only result in even less real communication. The point is to accept the criticism, to wipe the big green embarrassing booger of sexism or racism from your nose and say "oops sorry about that" and then move on from there. (YES please click on that link and read it - and then look at the defensive reactions every time women speak up and point out misogyny - for example what do men do but deny, claim they meant well, accuse women of being "too sensitive", and then find women to defend them and testify how non-sexist they are. The point is not that you "Are" the point is how you BEHAVED just now, which in this case, was dumb and sexist.)

How many times do we have to say it? Talk about our work and contributions, not about our looks. Link up to and highlight women's thoughts and writings, respond to the substance, rather than just going "har har har, beavis, of course we want women at our conferences (so we can hit on them)."

I would like to close by mentioning, for any geeky women reading this, systers and the Anita Borg Institute once again. They rock, there is no nonsense about nail polish or whatever, it is just a very practical network and resource for women in tech.

Technorati Tags: conferences

Let's get naked

Wouldn't it be awesome if this were true? If some techie magazine had an article about being "Naked" or transparent in business practices, and in the article featured a bunch of men, and used a naked photo of one of *them* on the cover? Or a whole office full of cubicles with naked people? Since the article is all about guys anyway, and since it's a tech magazine not Cosmo, and since there seems to be a dearth of women on its covers in general... WHY go this route?

How can a woman get featured in a tech magazine? Be eye candy.

Even better... be a naked secretary.

How annoying!

I've been watching many of my female colleagues get mad about this for weeks. Reasons for *not* getting mad (or for not showing it to male colleagues even if you do get mad) include, as usual, "If you show them that it hurts you, they'll do it more." All very well to say when dealing with anonymous trolls, but over time, this is not a productive strategy. It is also not effective when dealing with institutions or organizations more powerful than you are. If it annoys you or you think it's not funny... say so!


And to guys who ask their female colleagues (or their girlfriends) for confirmation that they're not sexist... Do you really think you're going to hear it from them if you are? They already put up with you. They're not going to be the ones to let you know. They might even have a heavily vested interest in letting you think that you're not offensive. If they called you on your behavior, you might dismiss them as one of those crazy feminists...

People really aren't getting the point that it's about context, and objectification, and exploiting women's bodies while devaluing their experience, knowledge, and contributions to the field -- it's not about prudery or censorship.

Arrrgh! Why not just throw in a Math is Hard Barbie and some B-list porn stars pretending to install Linux while you're at it?

Stephanie Quilao puts it really well:

Okay, I get that corporate transparency is an important trend, but why do you have to put a naked woman on the cover to make your point? Why not put one of The Office guys naked on the cover? Oh that's right! {hit myself on the noggin} It's because no one wants to see a naked guy on the cover of a business magazine. Naked guys on covers isn't showy. No it's gross. But naked chicks, weeell that's a different pad of sticky notes.

Frankly, I think you were not being creative at all in this cover. It's familiar boy's club crap. Yeah, just sex up the receptionist. Why didn't you throw in the pot of coffee while you were at it? Naked women on business magazines is just wrooooong, and that's why it's never been done before by anyone with class. For crying out loud, how can you be so progressive and backwards at the same time? It's ridiculous Wired people! This just has sexist bad taste written all over it. This is definitely showy but it is by all means NOT smart. I want to unplug you now.

And commenter Bianca Reagan adds in response to one of those standard defenses,

The fact that you don't have a problem with the historical objectification of women says a lot more about you and your complacency than it does about my desire to be seen as a human being with equal rights.

Right on Bianca!

If you'd like to sound off about the cover and have something to say about objectification.... Let the editor of Wired know.

Technorati Tags: feminism

Social Media Consensus Workshop, Liveblogged

I fell into this by accident because it was (surprise) happening in my office -- Socialtext's nascent co-working space, which is still under construction. So this morning I met Bronwen and Jim from Social Media Consensus. Other people: Stowe Boyd, JD Lasica, Britt Bravo, Pim Techamuanvivit from Chez Pim, Tom Foremski, Vincent Lauria, Sara Olsen, Eszter Hargittai, Julia French, and others.


Our first exercise was run by Pim. We split into small groups to look at a non profit site and react to it by brainstorming a list of words, then focusing down those lists and reactions. Sites were Global Voices, Change.org, Gimp Parade.

Notes on Global Voices, discussion led by Eszter.

* Noble goal and great idea, poor design and implementation
* hasn't quite taken off or had an impact
* low Google/Technorati rank. They're not even registered on Technorati
* navigation and having to scroll past the giant tag cloud; confusing

My own reaction to GV is very different; I think of it as useful and it comes up all the time for me when I'm looking for blogs and news (in English) from Latin America. I also think of it as a beginning, a small but extremely important start, in facilitating representation of voices from many different countries.

Stowe adds that it has unclear goals. Manifesto makes it sound like it's around activism. Bronwen's perception is that they influence NGOs like Amnesty International. Sara Olsen points out that the concept of free speech is culturally biased. Stowe tells a story about people's reactions to his tshirt that says "Stamp out free speech".

Other keywords: free speech, discovery, not interactive or intuitive.

Julia points out that the expectation of interaction is fairly new. Stowe says we require and need conversation, interaction, that the lack of it is as bad as it gets.


Notes on change.org

I was in this group. We had a very positive impression of change.org, with keywords like belief, people, community, identity, activism, progressive. I signed up for the site as we were talking. It was very clear what it was, what it was for, and how to use it. It is activism focused but also very personal and it's possible to differentiate many voices. (Or maybe Britt and JD and Pim and I are all the most optimistic fluffy-bunny optimists of the group today?!)

People are made of ideas, and ideas are made of people. We can move back and forth very seamlessly.

What if Global Voices could work this way? It would be scalable, expandable.



Notes on Gimp Parade

Critique of presentation and style. Based on Blogger. Enormous amount of information, difficult to navigate. Hard to access and tell what we were looking at. Bronwen explained what the site and blog and carnival are about.

What we want to see: the site representing its value, its status and value in its own community, its readers, who they are and what they think. The content is great, provocative, dynamic, emotive, genuine, authentic, has a real voice. Stylistically it's handicapped by being bland. Notes about subcultural immersion: you can drop in from outside that subculture and learn about it. Would anyone google and land on this site? Maybe not, you might come to it from links in from others in the community. When you hit that page, as an outsider who landed there from a google search, you would have no idea what it's about. Moving to better technology than Blogger and its About page capabilities would help. A question: is it looking bland in some ways because it's trying to be accessible to machine readers, etc? Is it really accessible that way?

Bronwen points out that people with disabilities are hugely more likely to blog than other categories of people. Re-forming identity online. (So true, and for me, disability drove me very hard into online identity, in the early 90s and then later when I was increasingly mobility-impaired, using a wheelchair and limited by pain and exhaustion.) Bronwen also brings up some disabled bloggers who left online communities because of the pressure of being tokenized and put in a position of always "representing" and losing their ability to have personal conversations.


Notes on Netsquared, led by Sam Perry

Positive aspects:
Negative: What is it? What are they doing? Not clear enough. We came up with verbs. Verbose. Confusing. Made our minds close. Remixing - two columns confusing. The sponsor validation is good but didn't link in to the rest of it. Where are they leading us to? Uninviting. Stopped us. Impasse. Hidden.

Rounded corners, we love rounded corners. Mission statement too fuzzy. We know what they're trying to do, but the site doesn't say that! Trying to do something social, but not getting there. We're professing to be social and have a social nature, but the tools aren't there. Stuck. If you know someone who's tied into it, you get it, but if not, you won't get it. The sitemap is good. Julia mentions being authentic and authenticity, and that's not happening here. It's hard to add yourself. The site is pretty though. Stowe adds that the DNS is misconfigured. You can't comment or add yourself or interact with it at all without registering. We want more visual, more people, more photos and video.

****

What I'm noticing here is that the sites we're talking about, other than change.org, are not social networks, and we want them to be. We all in this room seem to believe that social networks are inviting, welcoming, intuitive, and powerful.


***
After lunch: I missed some of the discussion, and had to be in and out of the meeting unfortunately, but these words were recorded on sticky notes:
usability, aesthetic, design, entertainment, accessibility, political, change, ego-feeding, constructive, progressive, community, global, international, action, people, beliefs, interactive, discovery, people (again) informative, activism, empowering, impact, identity, discovery, ideas, sustainability, sustainable business model. Combining all this up: impact -- joining people, campagning against/for, affecting change, bringing attention to something, activation point rather than tipping point, engagement---- policy critical/cognitive, analytic, social impact. The point of these lists of words and the discussion around them is to figure out what things need to be measurable and measured for SMC's indexes.

Eszter points out there's decades of research into points of social change. Polls and getting background information on people, which is tricky to do when you have aggregate data on the web, there isn't standard data form for social scientists. This is crucial for measuring social issues and representing everyone, not just elite groups. (***fangirls Eszter***) (***invites Eszter to come speak for Wiki Wednesday***)

Technorati Tags: blogging, nonprofits, social justice, social networks

Increasingly upset about the mean kids

This keeps getting worse and worse. I had read in several places that Maryam Scoble was "mentioned in meankids.org" but that's got to qualify as one of the worst euphemisms ever. "Mentioned"? For god's sake people. It's one of the nastiest pieces of racist, misogynist, cruel, psychotic garbage I've ever read. It's not snark and it's not satire.

I'd like to know exactly who wrote it. I'd also like to know who thinks it's funny. Go on, sign your names and stand up proudly to defend your brand of humor. Cowards.

What a fucking outrage. I keep trying to calm down and have perspective, and to say what I've got to say about being fearless and not letting this panic people into demanding more closed spaces and less free speech, and I still think that, but then I get mad all over again, and am feeling in the grip of that particular internet outrage obsession where I want to check technorati every 15 minutes and see what else has been revealed, and now that I've read this I'm back to square 1 of boiling over with rage.

I'm going to go read Pandagon and poke around in the feminist blogosophere because I think I'm only going to find the rage I need to inhabit there. Maybe Twisty Faster will write something. Tennessee Guerilla Women... zuzu at Feministe...

I know that there are people who wish this would blow over. But I think we need to look at the ways racism and misogyny are connected here. I'd like us ("the blogosphere") to reject racist hate speech very firmly. Fine, let there be free speech and let it exist in some nasty little dark corner of the web where the white power insane-o people lurk. But not anywhere that we approve of and link to, not in our own tech blogger communities.

I think it's fine for us to do this. I am a harsh critic of my own community as well, as you can see if you look at my calling-out of misogyny from people who came to BlogHer when a bunch of women I consider friends and colleagues talked misogynist smack about the BeJane women from some Microsoft blog, using the rhetoric of woman-hating against them. That wasn't okay with me either, so I pointed it out.

I've been the target of dumb internet name-calling and yeah it bothered me and I whined to anyone who would listen. Yet at the same time I was kind of amused. It never crossed the line into completely cruel. It was just a bunch of people calling me a dumbass. And there was a level on which I not only didn't mind, I kind of admired them on the principle that I like polemics, I engage in them, and it's only fair that I be the target of them sometimes, and without polemical writing everyone would be wishy washy and boring and there'd be nothing to take a stance against. However, the instances I've seen so far from meankids.org cross the line from satire, humor, and polemics into actual insanity.

Here is a further thought.

Rage and powerful writing can combine to create calls to violent revolution. For instance, the SCUM Manifesto. Calls for violence attempt to justify extreme actions. I don't agree with violent revolutionary methods. Yet in then 90s when I was about 20, I re-published, in a tiny xeroxed zine form, The SCUM Manifesto, because I felt that the rage that led to that call to revolutionary action was important and should be heard, though I arrive at a different conclusion than Solanis did and would like other people to agree with me and NOT to go off shooting. Yet I think that reading it has value; it can help people to understand a particular moment in history, a rant and a manifesto that was important, and a rage against injustice. Reading it helped me understand my own feminist rage against injustice. I realize that many people might disagree with me here, but I feel it's important. The point now of my own linking to the archived version of the racist hate-filled diatribe against Maryam is not to promote it or to harm her. It's to document a phenomenon, now, that many people don't understand exists. I've heard so many white guys and some white women say that there is no particular racism or sexism in the tech industry. What a laugh! There totally is. The people who think like this, we have to expose their hate, and "name the problem", so that we can resist them with firmness and unity.

I would rather that the post about Maryam had never been written, and I feel sorry for the hate-filled, bitter loser who wrote it. His rage, I'm guessing, must be against people like Kathy and Maryam because they're popular. How shallow! Get over it! Some people are popular because they're nice, funny, fun, warm, and did I mention nice? To look at someone who is loved, and full of love themselves, and to feel the need to tear them down -- for no reason other than perhaps the suspicion that others might be nice to the "popular" person in an ass-kissing way and might not critique them honestly on a professional level -- is cruel and evil. It is not in any way "speaking truth to power" -- the illusion I suspect that misogynist person, or community, was entertaining.

Technorati Tags: blogging, communities, complexity

Patriarchy exists and we're kicking its ass

My blood is BOILING WITH RAGE from reading about the threats and extreme harassment that people made against Kathy Sierra.

And I wish I could ride in on my warhorse and help fix it, but I can't. I'm not even surprised at the threats and harassment. That stuff and real life acting out of it happens every minute of the day. The surprising thing is someone speaking up *in public* in her own voice, unmediated.

Kathy rocks for speaking up. She rocks for calling this out and exposing it on her blog. She rocks for calling the cops and the FBI, and for saying so. She wasn't shamed into silence or afraid of being called "too sensitive" or "humorless", two things which often stop women from speaking up. I admire Kathy's strength. I imagine the moment after she wrote that post, when she was looking at the "Publish" button and wondering whether to push it. I'm glad she did. I'm inspired, and I take her public response as a good example.

My immediate, visceral reaction is this:

You know what, jerks, bring it on. I'm not afraid and none of that shit will ever, ever, shut me up.

I really like what Dannie Jost said in Kathy's comments:

On the grand scale of things, this is very unfortunate and totally unacceptable, it is however necessary to continue the fight which is nothing more than a fight for human rights and dignity. Learn to deal with your fear, do not let them win...

Molly Holzschlag added in the same vein:

I've always believed this is a self-correcting community. Well folks, we need to correct this absolutely unacceptable, abusive, illegal and heinous behavior.

Kathy, your community is with you. Your abusers will not win this one, oh no, unless they are ready to take on the rest of us, who greatly outnumber these sick and twisted people who are obviously jealous of your success.

Keep being yourself, don't stop and let the bastards EVER win.

Thanks for those thoughts, Molly, I knew I liked you!



I'd like to link out further to reclusive leftist, who describes the exhaustion we experience as women bloggers:

Every time I read somebody saying that patriarchy doesn’t exist anymore, feminism’s won, etc., etc., I think, try being a feminist blogger for a while. Or if you already are a feminist blogger, wait a bit until the shit finds you. Or try doing online research on anything connected to feminism and find yourself shoulder-deep in a slime pit of woman-hating so toxic it makes you want to weep with fear and despair.

I do feel that fairly often -- but in this case, am more angry than despairing.

Some commenters mentioned a book called "The Gift of Fear" which sounds interesting but also maddening. I get the idea it's to tell women that if they start feeling afraid they should pay attention to that and get the hell out of dodge. SCREW THAT. Like we need any more "chilling effect"? How about a book called "The Gift of Total Rage" or "The Gift of Collective Action To Overthrow Patriarchy," suckers. To hell with fear.



Now let's kick some ass.

I'd like to make a call to action. When this kind of shit happens, we'll call it out and document it in public. Call it in the moment. Call it in front of your coworkers. Call it if it's major or if it's minor, it's all part of the same spectrum of misogynist behavior. How about just saying, once in a while, right in the moment if you can, "That's not funny," when it's really not. Say it crosses your boundaries. Say it's not acceptable to you. This takes practice, but with time, we can all do it and find strength in numbers.

Update: Really good post from Min Jung Kim, It's awful, yes. I'm happy to see people like Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington speaking up in support of Kathy, and considering the times they didn't speak up. So I hope they hear Min Jung's points about the pressures on women to be anonymous online, and in particular, Asian American women:

it is also important to be quite clear that this is not the first time this has happened.

It’s just the first time it’s happened to someone that you know.

You see, I’ve known several other women (specifically Asian American women bloggers - Comabound, BadGrrl, C., A., J.,N, etc) who have had to pull down their blogs, shuttle from one domain to another, remain utterly anonymous, password protect their sites, or give up their online communities altogether. The list is longer than I’d like.

Why? Oh yes, stalkers. Rape fantasies. Obsessed emails. Comment trolling.

Threatening notices. IM harassments. Flowers sent to your work office. Etc.

I’ve gotten them all too.

This is NOT NEW.

We could also do well to think about the reaction to this situation and what was the blogosphere-wide reaction to that dude who was harassing Lynne D. Johnson so bad a couple of years ago? (Here's some links on that incident: Hip Hop Hates Me; krispexgate; That damn lesbo; xxl mag online.

My own reaction at the time? Did I say anything? I can't remember. Makes you think doesn't it?

Technorati Tags: blogging, women

SuperHappyDevHouse: Serial enthusiasm

I'm at SuperHappyDevHouse cussing up a storm as my wireless connection goes in and out. I've been messing with Kayuda, with Pipes a little, writing up notes, and talking with people who are all showing me nifty software. I just tagged about a dozen mindmapping and brainstorming apps in del.icio.us from my conversations with Ben Suter and David Montgomery. Tried a few of them... Ben showed me his Narrator software, which does something mysterious with architecture mapping and has a component that generates diagrams that then can be viewed as 3-D models. But with a mindmap-like interface, drawing and defining links between objects. When I got him into trying Kayuda he squeaked with glee.

Tantek and I talked briefly about wiki gardening. I also got into a conversation in the line for the bathroom (before I discovered the secret bathroom) about it. As more and more people get into wikis, as they have been doing with blogs, we'll need more and better wiki gardening tools. I need them right now for multiple wiki platforms, and I don't have them, and I don't think anyone does. I wonder if there will be interesting visual representations of wikis as networks, and ways to fiddle with that, and better batch editing of wiki pages, and ways to run stats that will hook straight into wiki manipulation and administration tools. This could also have a crucial social and community component; ways of representing stories about the ways people are interacting, patterns and clusters of interaction exposed could give ways to deal with problems of group dynamics that arise on wikis big and small. A bunch of people talked with me tonight about throttling down the speed of web interaction, adding limits to the volume people can contribute, maybe especially toning down "noisy" people, adding "friction" -- same stuff Kaliya Hamlin was talking about at SXSWi.

A ton of people are here from startup school. They're all starry eyed right now so it must have been some super powerful koolaid over there.

Whump and I and Les Orchard were talking about people who are serial enthusiasts. (Us.) We love some nifty new software for a week and talk about it all over the place and blog it and poke it and then run off after something else. I wonder what our actual rate of new-software-adoption to "ooo shiny". I accused whump of feeding me a constant stream of interesting new things and of knowing everything about new stuff AND actually using a high percentage of it and knowing it in more depth than people who burble about shiny new things usually know. He denies this and feels ashamed of his inability to adopt all nifty software orphans. Les says he is known for being the person to ask if anyone wants to know, "Hey, is there a Web 2.0 company that does X thing?" and he always knows, because for a while he was reading 1000 feeds. That's what happens if you snap your achilles tendon while getting off the bus. I pointed out that "evangelist" might not stay in vogue forever as a job title, because the oo shiny people who get hired for that, well, if you're that way, can you possibly sustain that feeling about a single product for years? So we all three were sitting here wishing there was a job for serial enthusiasts, who are maybe an intersection with early adopters. My theory is that there are people who have excellent "nifty filters" and are tormented because they recognize niftiness unusually well, so well that they notice the potential and niftiness of so many things that it's not humanly possible for them to use all of those things. This might also be seen as (or might be) sluttiness, or a lack of discrimination and ability to recognize what's truly nifty and useful as well as the lack of going deeply into those things. Perhaps both qualities combine to make the deepest serial enthusiasts. A level of quick insight and holistic grasp of possibility is good, as well as the ability to generate different idea-pathways quickly, like a chess player foreseeing future developments. Whether or not that sort of person is useful in the real world, I value that quality in people.

(Somewhere in here I looked at Rohit's Angstro thingie, challenged a bit of the "what would be useful" concept of it, marvelled at Plasma Pong's silliness and beauty, and talked to a dude who's part of a Linux TV company which I've forgotten the name of but he was screaming with delight about Angela (?) something, his CEO, who rocks and is an enormous genius, and how they're a tiny quiet company that is about to take over the world; and at Eric Tiedemann's Monome tuning application which he nicely explained to me though he could barely contain being appalled that I didn't know anything about the mathematics of tuning; and I started installing Planet Venus on my server, and then went on an extended bitter rant to Whump about how and why nowhere ever exports me a decent opml file, or imports it right, and all my effort is lost when I switch platforms or accounts, so I've become disheartened about feed readers. Whump had a neat setup that he promised to write up later in his blog, with Planet Venus running every once in a while and then pushing up to a server. Later in the night, I looked at the sort of messy tangle I made on Kayuda and I think that it's not a good representation, and it might not even be useful, and I wonder how to restructure it so that it would be. Strict limitations on number of nodes to convey a central idea, with baroque flourishes and digressions allowed in a sort of overlay? )

I can't believe how many people are crammed into this house. It's nuts. But I have the feeling I don't want to leave... it's all cosy... I have a spot on a couch... the network is working again so I'm all happy. I have contradictory impulses to go talk with people and then on the other hand to lurk on the irc channels and "talk" the way normal people do, on the internet, without this weird "moving your mouth" or "looking at people in the face" component to it.


Some dude came up to me and said "This is your house, right?" "No... why do you ask?" "Because... uh... because you're cool?" I think that was either meant to be several layers of irony more than it came off as, or else he was a bit drunk...

Okay, it *was* all cosy until I read some really gross and annoying posts on Valleywag about SHDH and women. At least there are nice people like whump and cyn and Ben and Tracy. That don't make a person feel like there's women who count as human, and other women who don't, and as if there are only a few slots for the humans and a perpetual struggle to prove oneself worthy, and the perpetual need to represent for one's entire gender... at all times... It's a bad way to set up a frame for the universe. I get so pissed off reading stuff like that and want to respond in kind, or at least by regendering it or being "funny" right back by objectifying guys, which doesn't work anyway because the power dynamics are different. Anyway, grrrrr.

My uncle just got home - he went to the Mermen show at 12 Galaxies and loved it and also loved the Extraordinaires. Maybe I should have cut out early from shdh when I stopped being productive, and gone to the show.

Technorati Tags: events, superhappydevhouse

SXSWi: Open Source business models

Alan Shimel, Fischer, Levin, Jarrell, Cavazos.


Questions and statements from the audience.

Alan Shimel: there's two categories of open source community members: consumers of open source. A company who wants to use open source. using linux, php, to develop their web site. Not developers. The restrictions and licensing issues are less of a hassle and not a focus. The consumers don't care which license it is. People who use open source as components of their products are a different category. That's where the excitement is. Is that company who uses components and sells a product a parasite on the community? It's this category who is the focus of recent licensing changes, the people who are selling and trying to make a profit. If you're profiting from my work, I should profit as well. It's useful to break it down into those two camps. I'm on both sides of the table. We use the snort engine, etc. And we have a new product coming out which is open source.

Cavazos: The term open source license doesn't give you enough information to have a meaningful discussion.

Fischer: ... creating a level playing field with alliances, standards. Can you have a kind of Microsoft gigantic Office situation? The answer is no. Leveling the marketplace. Not gigantic market share. But you can do very well. That's one way to play open source. 2nd aspect, companies who do customization more than open source. There's Second Life, for example. Look at how much open source software is very very good. It wouldn't succeed if it wasn't. In-house lawyers do need to look at the licensing because it often enforces generosity.

Cavazos: Why would we do this instead of keeping it all ourselves? Models that involves customization or consulting. We're going to bet on ourselves. We're okay, we're fine with allowing the core to be out there. And we're going to take one step ahead and use our expertise. We have the smartest people and the most creative innovators and we can create a business model around that. Consulting and customization.

Levin: VP of product strategy at Socialtext. Open source has been our model from the beginning. We used an open source product called Kwiki. A lot of our developers come from the open source community and they have their own projects... Open source for us is kind of like weather. We shouldn't fight it, we have to live with it and work with it. My personal interest is not in licensing expertise, my interest is with respect to business strategy. How does this help my company, how does this help our customers be more productive. The question from the audience was "How can I sell this to my customer base?" That goes to one of the value propositions around open source. You're reducing your customer's risk. If you're a relatively small development shop, there's no guarantee you're going to be around in 10 or 15 years. You're not lockkng them in. The open source community will be there in 10 years. You're helping your customer. That's very valuable. It's not just the software itself. My company has a variety of models which reduce cost for the customer of maintaining the software. And we also offer an open source download.

Don Jarrell: I worked with proprietary companies. Open source offers the freedom to cooperate. ... Beyond a layer of adaptation to an integrated product. Proprietary companies who make a companion product and break down the price point. So there is an open source version with a proprietary companion product. Comparable to making a "Lite" product. The open source part can be free. Can gain market share, can participate in the open source community, and have a viable model. A variety of proprietary companies are using this, for example, Compiere.

Alan Shimel: Linux as the most successful model. The core code from ... 20 people. 60 companies. There's a relatively small amount of people contributing the core code. The vast amount of users use it, find bugs and fix them, maybe 80%. In security, that's the last thing on the budget. Open source kind of filled that vacuum very quickly. Linux and security. It's not free though. We see a ton of companies who are commercializing that space. There's something like 1.4 billion dollars invested in open source.

Mark Fischer: If anyone here has any of that 1.4 billion dollars I think we'd all like to have some of that... (audience laughter) The number of people writing sophisticated OSS is very small. The contrast between that and wikipedia is very sharp. Every 12 year old can write text. Not every 12 year old can write sophisticated code under a licensing model. Like Second Life and its server software, is this realy open source or is it user customization? The mix and match model is one of the ways you can make money off of open source. Add something valuable to it . Like the music indstry, in a world without DRM, making money off the addon stuff like backstage passes and tshirts. If you say everything's open source and give it away, then it's not going to work. You have to add some value to commercialize it and to build a base and attract investors. Not everything can be based on advertising.

Cavazos: We can look at open content models and think about that in relation to open source software business models.

Alan Shimel: Does Flickr have a right to those photographs? Does Delicious have any right to the content there?

Fischer: The free software model is fantastic but it's not for everyone. Do you make every user a creator and they get a revenue share? The next frontier is users as creators. Open community but with revenue share for (some) users.

Adina Levin: Socialtext itself and some of our customers has.... Interestingly enough our documentation isn't open. But we have sites with best practices information and documentaiton that we have open. We have customers using wikis for that kind of public information, especially to support best practice information. It's less around how to share the revenue, but how do I reduce the cost of producing it while maintaining the quality of it and issues around control. A lot of people who have a traditional approach are concerned to lock it down to maintain quality. And then we try to explain to them that it's valuable to open it up and get more contributions. And then spend more energy on the monitoring side and less on trying to prevent contributions.

Cavazos: The elements of community, what does it take to get critical mass and get the quality of development up. The communities of contributors are much smaller than you would think. It's a small community, but the rest serves a viable part in that quality control. They're vetting, calling it out as bad when it's not good. And that's what I that plays into what Adina said.

Alan Shimel: 92% of the people in the community don't even play with the code. We have a freeware version of our code that's not open source. People are still downloading it and using it.

Cavazos: How many people actualy read the licensing..

Adina: I'm glad to hear that Asterisk... we use Asterisk at Socialtext and we are not locked into one service provider, and as a software development company we can customize and build extensions. Basic use, basic quality deployed to a number of applications, and then the steps after that might include extensions. The ability to do that is of value to us.

Alan Shimel: I think you just described what a lot of people do. "It's nice to know I could do it if I wanted." But how many people actually do?

Adina: You're paying for risk reduction and no lock-in.

Alan: I know, but how many people actually take advantage of that...

Jarrell: we started this conversation about business model. "Open Source" label but what we're touching on is other segments like managing contributions, release, thinking very carefully about stuff other than the distribution model. We should turn our attention to some of those things.

Cavazos: ...

Alan Shimel: Important to clearly, sharply define, where's your value added. Especially if you're combining open source with propriety. On the dual licensing, it boils down to this. If you're using that software for your own company it's okay, make your changes, contribute back to the communiyt. If you're turning around and using that component and profiting and selling it as a component as a bigger package, you should be, the people who contribute that component should be compensated for that.

Audience: Why should that be a distinction? Every use is a profit motivated use. If you're using it internally why aren't you also obligated to give back?

Shimel: Explains the distinction with Asterisk as a model.

[Right, but why is that different, really. ]

Technorati Tags: open source, sxswi2007

SXSWi: Non-developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell me why I care

Elisa Camahort is moderating. Annalee Newitz, Dawn Foster, Erica Rios.

Annalee Newitz explains the entire complicated insane definition and history of the Open Source movement in less than 3 minutes. Free redistribution, available source, derivative works okay, no restrictions on tech or users (http;//www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php) Licenses: gpl, MOzilla public license, BSD License. Commonly used open source software (oss): Firefox (MPL), OpenOffice (LesserGPL), GNU/Linux (GPL), BSD (BSD), WordPress (GPL), Apache (Apache License), Rails (MIT License), PHP (PHP License). The GPL is viral and powerful. Anytime you use software that uses GPL that you intend for redistribution, you have to release under GPL.

Elisa: I know some of the names of this software. But Rails? Apache? Okay, well, really I know what Apache is. But why does this matter to me?

Dawn Foster talks about OSS structure and leadership. It looks chaotic from the outside. Random people contributing code. How in the world can you end up with anything reasonable? But that's not how it is. You'd be surprised how hierarchical it is. OSS community structure.
Users.
Bug Reports: Community members submitting bugs to improve the project.
Contributors: Community members contributing to committers for review.
Committers: Trusted community members with access to modify code.
Maintainers: Direction and decisions for a portion of the project.
Leaderships: Strategic decisions, project direction.

Elisa: So, I'm not the only one who had no idea that all this existed behind the idea of open source. Erica is going to talk from the point of view of a company using open source software.

Erica Rios: My role at the Anita Borg Institute is to maintain the technical aspects of the organization. We use WordPress, for example. I see myself as a customer for these tools. I want help with installation, configuration. Is it going to have an impact on my server maintenance, what cron jobs I should run, what about backups, patches. When I hire people I need to know what kind of time and money I need to invest to maintain the software. What kind of customer service support do I get from a tool? The staff, my users, who are also the customers for this software. Does the tool do what they need it to do? Is it easy to use? Are they going to be able to figure it out, with or without support? There's a self-sufficiency question. Will everyone be coming to me for that help? I think of it like hardware. We're lucky enough to have HP Labs donate space to us. Our machines are still on warrantee and I can get service. Do I always need to know the details behind why something's not working? Is the community "friendly"? Am I going to go looking for help and be told RTFM? Because I've already tried.

Elisa: When you were looking at open source tools, was that part of your due diligence, did you look at the friendliness of that tool's open source community?

Erica: Absolutely. And it doesn't have to be a hierarchical traditional manual or documentation scenario. The community is so robust that I can type my question into Google and get an answer right away.

Guy in audience gets up and takes a mic. A lot of people don't realize some open source tools and projects offer paid support. Ubuntu, etc.

Dawn Foster talks more about open source and paid support.

Erica Rios. Developing friendships with other users and developers. If you have a personal relationship then people are much nicer in their explanations. With documentation, when it's written in plain language, it's more helpful. I have a degree in computer science, but I appreciate documentation in plain language, and it helps me communicate to my less technical users. Quality community can demonstrate their intelligence through the quality of a product but not feel ego-driven to demonstrate it in their documentation.

Elisa invites questions from the audience.

Same guy from audience: Questions about where the open source software came from. Fear of patent suits from big huge companies, etc.

Annalee Newitz: I've heard people talk about their management saying "You can't use an open source code because it'll creep into our code and we'll be sued." People need to be educated about the legal ins and outs of open source licenses. For example the GPL is one of the most radical ones... A company lawyer is good to go through the license and explain to management. There's a lot of online explanantions written by lawyers, for example through the EFF or some from Creative Commons. It's sad that people move away from the GPL but from a business perspective it makes a lot of sense.

Dawn Foster: It's less of a risk, because if there's proprietary code in there, someone's going to have noticed it. Or they can notice it. It's not really that different.

Annalee: I would strongly agree with that. The fact that you can look at the code means you can tell if there's a problem.

Audience member: Myth of putting it al out there and it being exploited.

Dawn Foster: I tend to worry less about being exploited by open source Eric Raymond "with enough eyeballs... all ... are shallow" I worry about backdoors and things in proprietary code, that I'll never know is there. The empowerment of being able to look at the code

Annalee: That's why you hire security auditors, etc. BSD, used by the miliatry, you can lock it down.

Liza: I'm going to be the downer here. THere is a cost for making it useable for people with no technology background. For example WordPress, it's so beautiful! But it's hard for people to use and to understand. So, users assume that level of customer service is free and that it's going to be free and that there's no cost to maintain it. And this makes it hard for developers and consultants to monetize what we do. Upgrading, security issues, etc. People coming into open source, think that it's going to be free .

Dawn quotes Richard Stallman, Free as in freedom, not free as in free beer. There are costs, time and money.

Annalee: When you're looking for a return on investment, long term will it be more costeffective to have this invest in maintaining this rather than paying Microsoft for a new license every couple of years? So yes, the long term costs are way better.

Erica Rios: We look at it that way at Anita Borg Institute. That's one of the key philosophical reasons I put to management, the flexibility we get.

Kimberly (from audience): Speaking as soneone who once upon a time had all sorts of Microsoft certifications and has now gone more into open source, there is more flexibility, there is very little barrier to entry, it's really a meritocracy. They can contribute and there's opportunities for them, they can build stuff for non-profits. To get Microsoft certified you pay a lot of money and yes there's support and community but open source has way more opportunity.

Elisa: Is there a way in open source to validate what level they are in an open source community?

Kimberly: I've had people use me as a reference

Woman in back: It depends on the community.

Erica: Now that I've gone through this process I look at how much a person has contributed and how much of it has been accepted in to the main trunk fo the software.

Dawn Foster: It's good for companies and hiring and companies can see people's code and status in a community before hiring them.

Frank (from audience): Reliability and continuity. You can always get someone to maintain it because it's not proprietary. Voting machines and cryptography. If the source isn't out there there's always someone out there who is so clever they can't see their own mistakes. But a community can see it and can find the broken places. As American people we need to get the source out there so we can rely on our voting machines.

Elisa: Thank you so much for bringing that up and articulating it. Let's talk about the philosophy and the reasons for supporting it. HOw many of you buy organic food, and free trade coffee? (Show of hands) We make economic decisions based on philosophical, emotional, ethical reasons. How many of you make technological decisions based on that? (Show of hands, a fair amount)

Guy in grey hoodie: (question)

Elisa: Kaliya Hamlin, getting non developers involved with open source communities. It's extremely intimidating, I can tell you. I'm a wannabe, but there's an idea that it would contribute to the greater good. Anyway, what's the ethical reasons to use open source?

Annalee: Oviously there's a lot of technical reason to choose it. And that's an ethical choice too, to make the technical choice that would benefit the most peopl.e But when yo have a product made by people donating their time, or a company is giving 20% of their time to give back to open source, you simply get a higher quality. People are working together. They own it. When people own the stuff they produce, it will be better. When you produce software that is proprietary and your company owns it, you are alienated from it. But with open source you put your love into it. You can play with it, deploy it, use it with your friends, fix its security holes...

Erica Rios: analogy of the free library. If we can't contribute and have free access to intellectual knowledge, we undermine democracy. Women and systemic reasons why girls and women often drop out of technical fields. Access. Open source is a unique opportunity for all women to have access to knowledge. If all software code was proprietary, I would never have looked at a pice of code in my life. I couldn't have afforded it. Period.

WOW

Erica: Dr. Fran Allen, just announced as a Turing Award winner, first woman to be granted this award. It's highly likely that a girl at the high school level right now, who has access to open source code, may achieve something as great as Fran. It gives other people access and opportunity and to contribute at higher levels. It's a key consideration in us achieving equality between genders in technical fields, and as we increase participation, we'll increase innovation.

Jory Des Jardines (audience): The Wisdom of Crowds. Ran an open source business project, because people didn't ahve the motivation, aka, pay. Does money mean motivation? Money makes it easy to commit, people are flowing in and out of this project. The explanation you're giving explains the structure, but what is the motivation for an engineer to bother?

Annalee Newitz: There are other rewards that people work for. We're at a conference where there are artists. They're hoping to make money, but they want people to appreciate their work. They want to create something beautiful and be acknowledged for it. Why do people want to have a higher reputation on Digg? They're not getting money for it. Well, some of them are. (laughter ... re. crowdhacking prank.) But there's a point, Hey, I've spent 4 years doing this kickass thing, now pay me.

Dawn Foster: Contributors to the Linux kernel. They pay people fulltime to do nothing to contribute to those projects. Those companies are motivated for that software to be good.

Guy: Dispel that there's anything anticapitalist about open source. More of them are libertarian than anti-capitalist. And about self interest and profit, my company went to open source, time, energy, money chasing clients on IP issues, waste of time. We got a better rate for our time to offer consulting services around it and provide the software as open source.

Erica: Who is mostly willing to work for free? Women. the motivation to work is there. There's a lot of stereotypes that we default to when we look at what it is that isn't working. There's probably a lack of supportive culture. Asked by Mozilla to tell what could help keep women developers. My answer was I don't know, ask the ones who are there and ask the ones who are leaving.

Woman with short black hair in audience: Ideals, but as a business manager, of a sucessful open source consulting and educaiton company, we charge a fair amount. It's a myth that keeps developers away from open source. Like it kind of smells like patchouli a little bit...

Elisa: You will not find musicians in an orchestra playing for free. Actors will do it for free. Bloggers used to do it for free but that's changing. Now we have blog consulting. People had passion that seemed to translate into not getting paid, Oh if I love doing it i shouldn't get paid. Open source has that too, if I'm passionate about it I shouldn't charge.

Annalee: You don't have to do it for free, just get your boss to let you spend 50% of your time doing it because it helps improve the product.

Guy in audience: I'm not understanding, please explain, what is the distinction between building proprietary products on top of open source software.

(Well, it depends on the license! )

Annalee: that's a good question and it gets debated a lot in open source communities. They are spelled out in the licenses. For example what will happen with Google and the GPL license. People need to be a little bit geeky about legal language and licensing.

Audience: How geeky do you need to be to say you're into open source?

Erica: For example our crm system....Not important for us to customize that part. But to customize web solutions is very important. If we don't need to hack it, let's not do it.

Technorati Tags: conferences, liveblogging, open source, sxswi2007