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
Diversity

A sudden weight was felt in the room

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I find it, well, I have a hard time explaining the experience but I guess I’ll use ironic for now that it took a post by Anil Dash to push the issue of lack of diversity at O’Reilly conferences into the tech.memeorandum.com hot tech issues page. None of the other writings by women on this issue made it into the list.

I wrote a comment on Anil’s post; I find it unlikely it will be published.

Between the two, therein lies so much that is in my thoughts this week.

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
Web

Rosebud

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I didn’t know this post had actually published to my syndication feed until I spotted references to it in Bloglines. Since the URL is on permanent record now, I decided to provide something to fill the gap.

The best quote related to Web 2.0 comes from Nick Douglas at Blogebrity:

Web 2.0, says Jeff Jarvis, is made of people. As opposed to Web 1.0, which was made of spacer gifs.

Second best:

Like so many San Francisco buildings, it was old, and brick, and recently converted into brand-spanking-new office space. High ceilings and exposed beams and ductwork everywhere. An old black dog lifted its head off the floor next to the reception desk as I entered the roomy VC suite. He barked and grumbled. The receptionist was embarrassed and surprised the dog didn’t like me. I instantly liked the dog, but the feeling was not mutual. I kept my distance.

So I met with the VC. He just came on board at the firm; this was his second day. I already pitched to this firm 18 months earlier, at their old offices. He didn’t know that. Now he did. In those 18 months I’d raised an angel round and an “A” round from other VCs. While Jenny Ondioline played over and over in my head, we talked for a good while about my company and our plans. At the conclusion of the meeting we agreed to follow up in a month or so.

I wonder if the dog is their “invest” / “don’t invest” signal? If the dog excitedly wags his tail with the arrival of a visitor, give ‘em money. If the dog barks and growls, don’t. In a few months maybe I’ll know.

And his follow up is equally good.

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Doppleganger

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Through the various link services, last week I found that my RSS entries were being published to a GreatestJournal site. I’d never heard of GreatestJournal, and when I went to contact the site to ask them to remove the feed, there is no contact information. I did find, though, a trouble ticket area and submitted a ticket asking the site to remove the account. The following is the email I received in return:

Below is an answer to your support question regarding “/RSS feed on GJ”
(http://www.greatestjournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=22973&auth=xnjd).

FAQ REFERENCE: Can I edit or delete a syndicated feed?
http://www.greatestjournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=135

Dear MS. Powers,

Your RSS feed is open for use on your website, which means that the user in question does NOT violate your copyright.

You might wish to take your feed down if you don’t want people to use it.

GJ Abuse.

_________________
NOTICE: This correspondence is the intellectual property of GreatestJournal & may not be reproduced in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of GreatestJournal. Any reproduction of this correspondence on GreatestJournal itself, with or without this notice of copyright, may be grounds for the immediate suspension of the account or accounts used to do so, as well as the account or accounts to which this correspondence was originally sent.

Normally I won’t publish a private email without permission, but I found the company’s disclaimer on intellectual property and the email response to be particularly disingenuous, considering the nature of my request. Perhaps the company will delete the user account since I am publishing the response. Regardless, this is yet another reason not to provide full content within RSS.

First, a clarification: syndication feeds are NOT meant to be republished other than for personal use. I do not provide a syndication feed so that you can duplicate it in your weblog or site in its entirety. This would be no different than using a screenscraper to scrape my web pages and then duplicating them elsewhere. If a person specifically likes an item, or wants to comment on something I write, and quotes a post, then there is a human element involved in the effort and the use is selective; it is not a blanket replication of material, just because technology has made this blanket replication easy.

I’ve had my syndication feeds republished elsewhere, but never as anything other than a feed. There were no separate comments attached; nor name given that implied I created the site.

danah boyd ran into something of a similar nature recently when she found a weblog that was created from a mashup of several different weblog entries. I gather in weblogs like the one she points out, the results are based on searching on specific terms and then pulling together the returned bits from the search engines. A good example of this is a second post where one can see that “star” was the term used in searches.

There is little I can do about my writing being scraped and merged into a hodge podge of posts at some fake weblog; but there are things I can do about my syndication feed. I’ve blocked the GreatestJournal web bot so it can’t access the syndication feed. I’ve also returned to feed excerpts. An unfortunate consequence of this, though, is that when I link to other sites, these links weren’t showing up in any of the aggregators, such as IceRocket or Bloglines.

To counter this, I’ve gone to a rather unusual feed format: encoded to allow HTML, and with a linked list of references from the article. I use RDF to maintain this list of links, which also means that semantic web bots can easily find and consume this data (recognizing it as external links through the use of the SeeAlso relationship). I’m also most likely going to change the print out of this data to use microformats so that bots that prefer microformatted data can also easily consume the list.

Currently at Burningbird, I’m using my SeeAlso metadata extension to maintain these manually, but I’m working on a plugin that should be compatible with WordPress and Wordform, and which automatically scarfs up hypertext link marked as external links and stores the data into RDF files for each page (along with other metadata for a specific post). A second plugin than outputs the list and also the links manually input using the SeeAlso extension (which has already been converted into a metadata extension for WordPress); a third plugin does the same for syndication feeds. You can see the progress of this at my Plugins workspace. As you can see, it’s still a work in progress. Right now, I’m working on a way to access the current linked list count so that new links from an edited post start at the right number.