Category: Connecting

Categories
Connecting

Ripples

Being woke from a half sleep, I read the following over at Dave Rogers, about his finding out that a neighbor of his had died:

So here’s this guy, 35 or thereabouts, who’s going through some tough times, and he’s pretty well off financially, I guess […] He lived probably 50 feet from where I’m typing these words. And not only did I not know him, or know of his problems, I didn’t even know he died until my daughter told me.

But here I am. I know all about Doc Searls’ sore back from getting ready to move into yet another house (What’s up with that?), I know about Dave Weinberger’s Office files being unavailable or something, I know that Halley Suitt seems to want to know how other people manage. (Halley, apparently some don’t.) I know a lot of shit about people I’ll never meet, and I don’t know a damn thing about this guy who died all alone less than 50 feet from where I sit; and was dead for four days before anyone cared enough to get off their ass and knock on his door to see if he was all right.

I don’t really know what that says about me. Nothing good, I’m afraid. I don’t know what it says about my community that none of my neighbors mentioned it to me. I don’t know what it says about our society that a guy can die and we can efficiently collect the body quickly enough that most people won’t even notice. Of course, I’m absolutely certain at least a few people will deign to opine that if the guy had only maintained a weblog, he’d probably be alive right now. The guy must not have gotten the memo or something. Must have missed the ClueTrain™, I guess.

Anyway, just another reality-based data point for those of you who like to wax rhapsodic about certain consensual delusions regarding this being an “intimate planet.” Chances are there’s someone within a stone’s throw of where you sit who could use a little intimacy of some kind right about now, and you don’t know it. Worse, you never will.

(ed: Sorry, long quote. So sue me.)

In the town where I grew up, one boy I knew died when his car was hit by a truck, and another died when a rock slide hit his car; another drowned, and a fourth died of cancer. I would wrestle with one, and exchanged kisses with another, and wished I had with a third, and only knew the fourth because everyone knew everyone in the town but I think we crashed into each other during Red Rover, once.

The manager of our apartment complex died in a car accident last year; the husband of one of my roommate’s co-workers died of a heart attack a month ago. Unfortunately, a few dozens of people died in Iraq today because of a horrible mistake.

I didn’t shed a tear when I heard of any of their deaths because I only have the capacity to connect intimately with a few. Oh, I can sympathize and tsk tsk and shake my head at how young some of them were when they died, and even get angry at the waste; but I don’t feel their deaths intimately. Frankly, I’m glad I don’t, because we only have the capacity to care so much. We can either choose to care for many, thinly; or a few, deeply.

Intimate. The definition for intimate is:

adj.

1. Marked by close acquaintance, association, or familiarity.
2. Relating to or indicative of one’s deepest nature: intimate prayers.
3. Essential; innermost: the intimate structure of matter.
4. Marked by informality and privacy: an intimate nightclub.
5. Very personal; private: an intimate letter.
6. Of or involved in a sexual relationship.

n.

A close friend or confidant.

A close friend or confidant. How close? Ten feet? A hundred? 265 days?

Funny, aside from the sexual relationship, there’s nothing in this to denote there must be a certain number of feet–or a certain number of minutes–between the object one is intimate with and ourselves. And if one is creative, it doesn’t have to matter with the sexual relationship, either.

I disagree with you, Dave: this is a very intimate planet. But intimacy has a price. More importantly, its one price for all: no long distance charges apply.

Now, I’m going back to bed before I blather irritably some more.

Categories
Connecting Weblogging

When the tilt in pinball is a good thing

Stavros the Wonderchicken returns in true style:

I hit post, now, dear lost readers in their thousands, not sure if this is resurrection or coda, but hoping a few diehard outliers of the wonderchicken army are still out there, and when their newsfeed ticks over from that limp and dusty (0) over to an erectile (1), that they’ll put the word out: ‘Wonderchicken returns, brethren and sistren! He returns! Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy!’.

But having turned my back on the webs and the logs, on the adsense whores and their corporate pimps, having peed in the pool and pooped on the flag, having committed the unpardonable sin of dissing the digerati, I’m probably on the ignore list again.

Never with me, my friend. Never with me.

Categories
Connecting Diversity

Looking outside of self

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dori Smith writes about putting together conference panels made up exclusively of women.

Coming up with panelists for SxSW was easy. As Shelley gave away a few days ago, she, Kathy Sierra, Virginia DeBolt and I are going to be on a panel together, and I think it’s going to be a blast. I asked three women, they all said yes, and life’s been easy.

But I also agreed to come up with one for Macworld Expo in SF in January, and that’s been a different thing entirely. I have asked probably a couple dozen women so far, and I’ve gotten one to say yes (after I twisted her arm). I’ve asked about 40 guys to send me their recommendations for women, or to pass along my search for same, and I’ve gotten nobody that’s willing to do it.

First of all, clarification: I ‘gave away’ the panel discussion at SxSW because I had an email from the organizer who said he was featuring our recent discussion about getting women into conferences on the front page of the conference weblog. (It was in the sidebar, which is not archived, so the entry has scrolled past.)

And to be honest, I had hesitated to speak on the panel at SxSW and there were a couple of reasons for the hesitation.

The first is that if I speak at a conference, my preference would be to speak on the topics covered in the conference, and my hope is that I’m asked because of my expertise on a subject (or interest in same). Because of this, I hesitate about speaking about women at a tech conference, the same as I hesitate on speaking about tech at a conference about women. However, this panel promises to be more than the usual, because those of us on it do disagree, even strongly, on many of the issues related to women in technology. This is not going to be what passes for a panel at too many tech conferences–where people use it as an opportunity for free marketing and nary a dissenting word is heard.

As to the second reason I hesitated: I don’t want it to ever seem that I’m fighting the battle for more representation of women in the tech community, as a way of advancing myself or my career. I have actually seen a person who has also fought this battle being accused directly of this. If we’re perceived as using this platform as a way of advancing our own careers, then we’ve lost credibility. For the little difference we’ve made at times, we have made a difference: small, but present. If we lose credibility, we’ll have lost even this difference.

As for the difficulty Dori is having getting women for her panel at the Mac Expo, I don’t know of many women or men heavily into either Mac development or administration to recommend anyone from either sex. I do know, though, that one instance of having difficulty getting women for a specific panel in a specific city (that is expensive to visit, and no costs are covered) should not be used to extrapolate to the whole. I myself an working with the folks at XML 2005 about expenses for giving the tutorial at Atlanta in November, and this is a very real issue for me.

In addition, not everyone is comfortable on a panel. A panel requires a certain mindset. Frankly, it also requires that a person be proficient at debate, and very comfortable being put into a position of having to defend a viewpoint in front of what could be a large audience. Panels are not for everyone: men or women.

As for women saying that they don’t feel qualified to participate, then it’s our job to help give women confidence in order to speak. This isn’t catering to some view that we have to provide a ‘nurturing’ environment just for women (though why having a nurturing environment is seen somehow as weak or deficient is a worthy topic for much debate); this is working to help women realize that for all the bluster and pontification that men do, they most likely don’t have any more of a clue then we do, ourselves. The men are just better at tossing around BS; oh, and believing it, too.

We have to make a decision not to adopt the persona of that which is acceptable in the tech community: the arrogance, the intolerance, the embrace of competition, and the disdain of being supportive. These personality traits are embedded and imbued throughout technology and engineering, like flecks of mica in granite, precisely because the field is so heavily dominated by men without the necessary balancing influence from the female side of the human race. In my opinion, it is this that led to the first dot-com, with such promises of fame and glory the technology couldn’t possibly support; it is this that is leading to this new dot-com explosion, with no doubt the attending failures and disappointments once the current round of buying has stopped, and the bill is presented.

I wrote a cryptic post this week and immediately pulled it (not realizing it was still in my syndication feed, which is statically generated). I wrote “I give up”. The reason for this is what I read in another post of a weblog of a woman who is a leader in the community of women in technology. She’s a person I had admired for years, even before I started weblogging.

This person (who I am not identifying for reasons I don’t want to get into) had been at an invite-only event lately that had very few women present but immediately, without any hesitation, absolved the organizers of their part in the lack of representation: hard to understand at a invite-only conference, especially one where women had asked to be part and been rejected. Instead, she focused on how we have to get more women in the field, which means more outreach for young girls.

What particularly disappointed me about the comment was the fact that she had completely ignored all that we’ve been trying to do to bring about change in the industry, in favor of an answer that absolved not only the organizers but the industry itself from complicity in the problem. From any woman in tech, it would be a disappointment; from a leader of women in tech, it was massively discouraging.

Let’s focus this discussion on matters of self interest for both women and men: providing opportunities for women in tech also provides opportunities for men. If women reject the 16 hour days, obsessively hunched over a computer, while competing constantly with your co-workers for the opportunity to be skate board down a hall for that free Red Bull, I can’t imagine that we are so different that most men wouldn’t want to reject this, too. Men have families as much as women; men have lives as much as women; and men have insecurities, doubts, and need to have support just as much as women.

(Not to mention that not all of us skateboard, like Red Bull, and walk around with cellphone stuck in one ear, iPod ear bud in the other.)

Ours is a particularly unhealthy industry; it would rather hire young men from other countries, or offshore work than adjust and adapt to a climate that is beginning to finally look at the greed of the few and the manufactured ‘need’ for gadgets and goods and perhaps decide that quality of life is really more important than fame and fortune. To make this environment healthy for women, I like to think I’m working to make this environment healthy, period.

There is a third reason I hesitated on the SxSW panel and that is because I’m fighting my own self-doubts about my value in this field. Does writing this make me seem to you to be weak and deficient? If so, then question why you feel this way, and the answer you’ll find is what I’m fighting.

I hope that Dori finds her members of the panel, but if she has problems, I’m not going to absolve the industry because of it and be willing to dump the problem on the women.

Categories
Connecting Technology Weblogging

Neighborly news

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Jerry’s electric car weblog, give it a glance. In the weblog, Jerry is chronicling the process of converting a gas burning Ford Probe into a sleek, clean, electric car.

Jeneane was on the radio today talking about blogging. Nifty Jeneane. Now, we gotta get you off of Blogspot.

Sheila Lennon writes about Sinead O’Connor’s new reggae focused album. I really like reggae, and I appreciate O’Connor’s conversion to the Rastafarian belief, but what she sings is not reggae. It may be the words, it may be the notes, but it isn’t reggae.

Sheila also mentions that Carly Simon–the lady in the gauzy, see-through hippy dress who sang the weblogging anthem decades before weblogging itself was invented–has turned 60 and released a new album. It is also a disappointing bust. I like the type of music, but she doesn’t have the voice to do it justice.

Carly Simon. Brings back memories. Decades ago she was an earth child/sex kitten with a sultry, folksy voice–not an easy combo of image and tone. I remember once buying a see-through dark green patterned gauzy peasant blouse to wear, trying to capture a little of that Simon persona. Every boy I knew back in the early 70’s was in love with Carly Simon. Yup, many a boy fantasized over one or the other of her album covers.

Why, one such boy might have been Dave Rogers, who just returned from a class reunion. Dave points out a the new anti-tech column at Wired. In it, the author, Tony Long, writes:

Anything that diminishes the value of a single human being poses a threat to a rational, humane society. When technology can cure a disease or help you with your homework or bring a little joy to a shut-in, that’s great. But when it costs you your job, or trashes the environment, or takes you out of the real world in favor of a virtual one, or drives your blood pressure through the roof, it’s a monster.

I can agree with the author, but I’d have to add a caveat that it isn’t the technology or even the technologists who are the monster. Follow the promises scattered like so many broken bits of white plastic until you bump up against those with a gleam of silver and gold in their eyes if you want to see the many headed hydra of tech. Still, this promises to be a very interesting column–if only it had a syndication feed, so that I could read it on my computer while I’m at the coffee shop talking on my cell, all the while eying the freaky poet chick and thinking I should get a picture of her for my blog.

Speaking of local hangouts, Karl has written a thoughtful piece about his hangout at PhillyFuture and what he’d like to see in the future for the publication, but he can’t do it alone. Community sites need community.

Well, you do unless you have an aggregator. Oh, and comments. Trackbacks, too. Wait a sec–don’t forget the wiki. And you’re not hip if you don’t do OPML. By the way, is that iPod of yours really six months old? And it still works?

Categories
Connecting

A habit of giving

As AKMA reminds us, new disasters have happened recently–Hurricane Stan and the earthquake in Pakistan–that seem to have fallen below the blogging radar. This is in addition to the longstanding disasters such as the continued mass starvation in Africa.

With environmental impacts due to global warming, and an increased population that is both more widely distributed and more dense, the events of this year are more likely to become the norm rather than the exception. We have seen thousands killed from earthquakes, flood, mudslides, and storms; these join those who die more slowly, less dramatically, from continuous warfare and starvation. Next year will, most likely, follow the patterns set this year and so on as a population grown too large for the world moves into areas vulnerable to natural events–not to mention unable to support the numbers.

No one is to ‘blame’ for being in the way of catastrophe, and as we know, any one of us could be the next victim. There are no safe spots where nothing is likely to happen; no places of invulnerability. To help others is to help ourselves; the days of geographical isolation are at an end and we have a responsibility to each other regardless of country, race, or religion.

But if we react to each event in a frenzy, soon we’ll burn out and truly catastrophic events will go by with barely a blink. We’re seeing this with Pakistan: it’s not that people aren’t caring; it’s that we’ve just been through one cycle of frantic giving following another a short 8 months ago. It may get to a point where a country would gain help for having an ‘early’ disaster, as compared to a country having a disaster later in the year. Perhaps these countries could stage their catastrophes close to Christmas.

Rather than react impulsively (and stop reacting just as impulsively), we need to establish a habit of giving that will hopefully provide enough support for organizations that meet the needs of people in stricken communities. We should budget in a monthly donation, even if it’s only a few dollars, and contribute consistently: both to international relief organizations and those that are domestic. We should also look at organizations that help in the long-term: with education, family planning, support of basic human rights, and other means to improve overall quality of life.

We should also learn to apply filters when listening to much of the news. Stories from New Orleans match stories from Pakistan where the number of dead leaps by tens of thousands by the minute, and people searching for food in stores become tales of rampant crime and looting. The news emphasizes the worst in all matters, and it’s easy to either develop a sense of despair or disappointment. What’s important is getting help to people, and providing what support we can–facts will fall out later.

After careful consideration, these are the organizations I’ve decided to support: international and national, immediate need and long-term. I am in the process of putting together sidebar images to link to the donation page for each:

International:

The International Red Cross: This organization helps supplement local Red Cross chapters in case these are overwhelmed. I see the Red Cross as an ‘immediate need’ organization.

Oxfam: Oxfam helps not only in the immediate need, but also long-term.

Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)): Whether the problem is natural or political, this organization has never held back from helping regardless of risk to themselves.

World Wildlife Foundation and Rainforest Consevation, sometimes Green Peace: ecological

National:

The National Red Cross: As per above

Habitat for Humanity: I think this organization’s program to provide decent housing for those who may not be able to afford to buy a house is one of the most efficient and best run; as long as religious beliefs are not a part of the decision process about who gets a home, that is.

United Way and Planned Parenthood: Long-term efforts primarily. The United Way supports neighborhood efforts, including programs for kids and the arts. The Planned Parenthood is an organization too long under attack considering what it provides: pre-natal care, examinations for female-related cancers, counseling, and safe birth control. Abortion is only a small, albeit essential, part of what it provides; yet it is consistently penalized because of its unwillingness to give up serving all of a community’s needs. Considering that overpopulation is the number one disease in the world, I consider Planned Parenthood’s efforts to be essential.

The Sierra Club and the HSUS: Care for the environment and critters.

Amnesty International: I consider this local, because when human rights are at stake, we’re all close neighbors.

I also give individually to local organizations with memberships, such as the Botanical Gardens.

Again, I’m making what I call a ‘giving ribbon bar’ to put into my sidebar for permanent display. I suggest you do the same, as well as establish your own policy of giving.