Category: Diversity

The importance of supporting diversity

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Diversity RDF W3C

The intent speaks louder than words

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I was thinking about taking a shot at writing my own use case or use cases for RDFa in HTML5 until I spotted the recent entry at Last Week in HTML. The site posts an excerpt from an IRC discussion related to the ongoing exchange about RDFa and HTML5.

* hsivonen is surprised to see Shelley Powers use a pharse like ” most pedantic specification ever derived by man”
hsivonen: (the “by man” part)

annevk: hsivonen, what is special about that part?

hsivonen: annevk: she has a history of pointing out sexism, and expressions like “by man” where ‘man’ means humans in general are generally frowned upon by English-language feminists

annevk: oh, didn’t know that

Rather than respond to any of the arguments and concerns expressed in several comments at Sam’s, or my own long writings on the issue of RDFa and HTML5, the only part of my writing that’s mentioned or referenced in this ongoing discussion is the fact that I used the generic “Man”, to represent humankind.

Actually most English-language feminists aren’t necessarily uptight about the use of “Man” when used in the generic sense, such as in the common phrase, “known to Man”. Or, at a minimum, the use of this common phrase isn’t one of our more pressing concerns. We’re more uptight about our work, writings, and opinions being undermined via the use of irrelevancies. To the true feminist, intent means more than words.

So, to return to the use case: I could spend a considerable amount of time trying to recap the issues related to Qnames and CURIEs, technical concerns versus biases, and generate a longer, thoughtful use case, but unless I use a Word in it, or perhaps a humorous misspelling or funny use of grammar, the work would most likely be disregarded.

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Diversity Technology

Respect

I have spent too much time worrying about specifications managed by people who, frankly, don’t have a lot of respect for what I have to say. I am not a browser developer, specification author, nor do I fit within the narrow parameters of “people who are seen to be contributors”.

Years ago, I defined the term Coders-Only-Club, to designated the seeming feeling of being an outsider, unless one acts a certain way, or does a certain thing. I can definitely say unequivocally that writing books or weblog posts does not ensure entry into the Coders-only-Club, or perhaps I should term it, “Contributors-Only-Club”. To be honest, writing simple tutorials or examples, helping people, or answering questions doesn’t gain one entry, either.

What’s absurd about the whole thing is I’m fighting for something I don’t really need, because I do have viable alternatives I can use with my own work. I deliver every page at my web sites as application/xhtml+xml, which gives me singular power to accomplish wonderful things. I doubt, very much, that any browser is going to drop XHTML support for many, many years to com, so I can continue to incorporate SVG, or RDFa, or any number of new vocabularies that haven’t even been invented yet.

Frankly, I’m just wasting my time worrying about things I can’t change.

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Diversity Technology

Women in Tech: Maria Webster

Virginia DeBolt has posted another in her series on Women in Technology, this one about Maria Webster from .51. It’s a terrific interview, and appreciations to Virginia in her effort to promote more awareness of women in tech.

Maria is an Über geek, with interests that cross the lines from computers to electrical engineering, ham radio, to physics, and all points between. And Tron, which reminded that I hadn’t seen this movie in years.

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Diversity

Men do big ideas, women write stories

3quarksdaily points to a Guardian story where the author, Alison Flood, wonders if there’s a gender divide between writing books on big ideas, and writing stories:

Julia Cheiffetz, blogging at publishing website HarperStudio, dubs the genre “big think” books – making serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular. “The point is, all of them promise access to a club whose sole activity is the exchange of ideas; all of them promise, however covertly, to make us feel smarter. And all of them are written by men,” she writes, also singling out The World is Flat by Thomas L Friedman, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

“It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I’m thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup.”

The real story to this post, though, is happening in comments. Commenters have proposed explanations for the seeming disparity ranging from women are not encouraged to speak out, to publishers being less likely to accept a “big think” book proposal from a woman. Additionally, commenters have also pointed out “big think” books in the bestseller lists by women, that the Guardian article author “seems” to have missed in her cataloging of big books.

From what I can see in weblogging, I would say that the commenters to the story have the right idea: not encouraged, not seen. Sadly, also as demonstrated in weblogging, pointing out the problems doesn’t bring about any change, either.

Then there’s my recent look at Seth Godin’s Tribes. I know that a fairer review would come from reading the book, rather than just the Kindle sample, but from looking at a video Godin gave in reference to his book, I also know my opinion of the book wouldn’t change. These books may typically be written by men, but I don’t think that’s necessarily an insult to women, or a flattery to men.

A positive side effect to the story is that I now have several new books to try out, starting with Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. I also found Bookninja.

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Diversity

Another WIT from Virginia: Addison Berry

Virginia DeBolt has another Women in Technology series entry, this one on the Drupal community’s Addison Berry.

Addison demonstrates something I’ve noticed: Drupal attracts the women in technology. There’s something about the Drupal that has made the Drupal community friendly and encouraging to women. Other applications/companies/organizations should take note.

The interview with Addison is excellent, a lot more positive and upbeat than mine was.