Categories
Diversity

Pop!Dicks! Oh, I mean Pop!Tech!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

In the comments to Frank’s post at the Kitchen, Barbie Baywatch (Sherry), writer of Stay of Execution, wrote about attending the Pop!Tech conference, and how there was one woman presenting out of 30 presenters. She also details the experience in her weblog .

Since yesterday afternoon I’ve been pretty troubled by a pattern emerging from the speakers. First of all, our speakers this year are overwhelminly male – only one of 30 is a woman. This wasn’t intentional, but feels worse now that the program has begun. Because the male speakers have had a bunch to say about women, and I’m getting really depressed. I’m desperately wanting to see some strong women onstage (there are some really cool ones in the audience) but that’s not to be. As the program shaped out we as a group noticed that the speakers and performers were overwhelmingly white and male, and our program director worked to shift that, but didn’t make it a central factor in inviting folks.

I can’t help thinking that if gender or gender issues were featured prominately in this conference, this would become a central factor driving out the invitations. As it is now, you have a guy standing up at the front of this room talking about alpha male chimp behavior, and another about how we’re not having enough babies. If Sherry was depressed, two guesses as to how I would be reacting – and the first doesn’t count.

Interesting, but from her comments it would seem that of the ten women who were invited, nine had to decline. But then, if several men also declined, and they still managed to get 29 men, this shows that the conference issued several times more invitations to male speakers than women. Perhaps if all these conferences wouldn’t invite the same ten women, they might get more acceptances. Or gosh, be daring and maybe even invite eleven. Or even go all the way and invite twenty!

One weblog that responded to Sherry was Anthony Citrano who says that we shouldn’t be angry – after all, true inequality exists in Saudi Arabia. He also wrote:

What I want is a world where men and women have equal opportunity and (of course) equal rights – but we all need to realize that our gender differences are as special as our interpersonal differences. Men and women have very different physiological/psychological skills, desires, and priorities. They are fundamental, they are the reason we are all here, without them the species would have died off long ago. Now, to appreciate our biological differences does not mean we should be limited or trapped by them. We must accept our limbic differences – we cannot change them – while also growing upon them and using this fancy new cortex we grew recently. Men & women operate from very different perspectives, are generally better at some things than the other gender, and prioritize very differently.

Getting respect. Paid equally. Getting respect. Having access to opportunities. Getting respect. Receiving invitations to speak. Getting respect. Control over our reproduction. Freedom from stereotypes. Choice of roles and vocations. Did I happen to mention, getting respect? Now, which part of these is specific to men, and which specific to women? In what way are our priorities different?

Or is the male/female thing role dependent, and why don’t we all face it: technology is a guy thing. So is politics. But women make great nurses – so compassionate.

The topic of “Where are the Women” is featured the last day of the Kitchen: How to Cook a Weblog clinic (on November 5th), which also features the topic weblogging ethics among others. Should be a smash ending.

A must-read writing on Pop!Tech by Mary Hodder:

Oh wait, again. A speaker just announced that for Poptech 2005, Caroline Porco, Dame Julia Pollock, and some space ship guy have agreed to speak. Well, they just doubled the number of women from one to two, at least in announced speakers for next year over this year. Bravo. But I think they need to work a little harder to reframe the world as both masculine and feminine, in order to even attract women, because who wants to speak at an all male party, were the world is framed in male dominated power structures? It’s demoralizing. It’s like a liberal going to a conservative party. The liberal will never be taken seriously there because everything will be on conservative terms.

Categories
Photography

A bit of fall

Despite the clouds and a threatening storm, I could no longer delay my lookout for Fall color. Since the price of gasoline is outrageous, I stayed local, and went to the Missouri Botanical Garden.

I rather like the mix of colors and scenes I was able to discover, so this is a bandwidth killer.

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I was asked recently about why I don’t take more photos of people. I do have some that are favorites of mine. I have many other photos of people, including several from the Pumpkin Patch last weekend. The reason I don’t publish them is that I usually don’t care much for them.

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In fact, I usually don’t like people around at all when I’m taking photos, unless I’m taking photos of a specific event. It’s not that I’m adverse to taking photos of people; it’s that I take them from the inside out. I take what people see, and if I’m lucky, very lucky, what people might feel when facing a specific scene.

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I like color and shape and an emotional context. Sometimes I’m able to grab photos that have all three; other times, I have to settle for one or two out of three. But that’s okay, I love the search as much as the discovery.

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There have been times I’ve wanted to take photos of people, and have hesitated because I didn’t know how to approach the people, or the opportunity just wasn’t there. One of my favorite photographers, Walker Evans, is famous for his photos of people–on depression-era farms, subways, and on city streets–but was uncomfortable approaching people directly. When he photographed people at the farms, he would set up his camera and then just wait until the person formed an expression he wanted.

He would rig hidden cameras under a coat for use in the cities. Maybe I should try something like this.

That’s not to say I want to take photos like Walker Evans. No, he had his unique and wonderful style and I couldn’t duplicate it, and wouldn’t want to.

There are several professional photographers (retired or still active) who weblog and who I admire, as photographers, writers, and people, but I wouldn’t want to photograph like them, either. I would listen to their advice, and welcome it; but they have their own style, and I’m still finding mine.

In the meantime, I look for color and shape and emotional context–whether I find it in a kid playing as a dove in a town square, or in a fall garden on a misty, cloudy day.

Categories
RDF

Now that’s funny

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I haven’t been able to post much here because of the work on the Kitchen (BTW – it sure would be nice to see more technical people involved with this. Hint. Hint.)

Anyway, I don’t much care for IRC, but this snippet that Danny broke out of the FOAF IRC channel was extremely funny, and more than worth a link.

For those curious, smushing is a highly technical term meaning: squishing many FOAF files together. I believe.

Now squishing means…

Categories
Stuff

Red Sox meet the Cards

Red. Meet Red. We coming to kick your butts, boys.

Of course, it would have been funnier if Houston went on to meet the Red Sox. I mean, think of it: A Texas team competing against a Massachusetts team. Sound familiar?

Categories
Weblogging

Wiki etiquette

Jeneane responded with her opinion about the statement that many more men weblog than women. I think that we can safely assume that she doesn’t quite agree with this statement.

Jeneane is also one of the happy, hardy volunteers for Kitchen duty, and is coming up with some interesting sounding ideas. Damn interesting in fact. She asked about where to focus her writing, and whether to write to the wiki or the weblog, and I thought a comparison between the two might be good for a weblog post.

Of course we know what a weblog post is. It’s a long-form, short commented link, featuring photos, not having photos, written, spoken, seen, commented, not commented, about one’s cat, and about anything but one’s cat. Well, maybe if we’re really honest, we don’t know what it is; other than I think we can all agree that it has a unique author, and it’s rarely edited after publishing. These are the key differences between a weblog and a wiki.

(And that anyone can usually sign up for a wiki user account, but most weblogs only have invitation only author list. The Kitchen, however, is completely open – anyone can sign up for their own account, and start writing as soon as they do.)

In a weblog, you identify the author of a post. The author may be writing under an alias, but there’s still (usually) one author. A wiki, on the other hand, actively discourages identification of an article with a specific person. In fact, following traditional wiki protocol, names are usually removed from contributions to a main wiki article page.

(They are, however, encouraged within discussion pages associated with the article, if the software supports this. The software we’re using does. To sign your name, sign up for a user account, login, and then when you want to add something to a discussion page, just type in four tildes: ~~~~. This puts in your username, a link to your user page, and the timestamp of the edit. )

In addition, the writing in a wiki article page is open to editing. Weblog posts are edited by their author, but usually not edited after posting. Wiki articles are continuously edited, and usually not by the original contributor.

Now, wiki discussion entries are not edited, or in my opinion, shouldn’t be edited; because these are comments and notes made by contributors, or readers, about the contents of the ariticle. If you want to see a good example differentiating between material in a wiki article, and the discussion associated with an article, check out Wikipedia’s George Bush page, and it’s related discussion pages. Right now, the article is ‘protected’, and under mediation to discourage vandalism (see Wikipedia’s fascinating discussion about protecting pages).

I will be following the procedures and guidelines established by Wikipedia because, frankly, this site and the people who maintain it know what they are doing. Which means encouraging multi-author contributions in the articles, discouraging editing of comments in the discussion, and protecting pages that get too hot to handle, until the participants cool down.

For the Kitchen clinic, I will be writing essays daily to the weblog, and most likely will be copying the contents of the essay to the appropriate page in the wiki, in order to hopefully jump start topics not already started. If a topic has been started then I may only add a link to the essay in the weblog.

Now, my enthusiasm for this wiki in this circumstance, doesn’t mean that I’m enthusiastic for wikis in all group efforts. In my comments, Sean Conner brought up the obvious enthusiasm I have for the Weblogging Wikipedia as compared to my oft stated reluctance and criticism of the wiki-driven effort with Atom.

I felt, and still feel, that the Atom effort didn’t suit a wiki. In fact, it didn’t take long before most of this effort left the wiki and became focused in the mailing list associated with the Atom syntax.

Atom was seeking to create a new specification in an environment that had been heavily contentious in the past. As such, it tended to attract fairly aggressive participants who would barely wait for the ink to dry on the paper before going in and editing whatever was written all to heck. Wikis should encourage editing, but not at the expense of each person having a right to have their voices heard. If a wiki is dominated by a small group of very aggressive editors, much of the beauty of the community participating in the wiki is lost.

In addition, the Atom effort was to form a specification, not necessarily to document existing information. In my opinion, and people can and probably will disagree with me, that a wiki is better suited to documentation and dissemination of information, than resolution.

In addition, as I’ve said previously, a wiki is a great way to document the ebb and tide of this very transitory medium we call weblogging. In fact, I had an email today asking for a summary of the weblogs.com contretemps that happened earlier in the year; the person wanted this for an article he is writing. This is the perfect demonstration of the benefit of the wiki for weblogging because once the event is documented, and all links scouted out and linked in, in cases like this, we just point the person to the relevant wiki page.

Only thing now, is I have to decide if I should add a new category to handle it: weblogging warfare.