FOSS Women

I've always worn a helmet, but have still been sort of sympathetic to those who say that it's not necessary and won't necessarily help you that much in an accident. Maybe. Depends on the accident.

A couple weeks ago I slid on some black ice making a turn onto the street where I live and BAM, pavement-kissing time. It had been rainy that day and the night temperatures had fallen just below freezing, making it prime weather for unexpected ice.

This poor helmet's been retired now after a job well-done. Note the crack in the foam and the road-imprint above it. I had a headache the next day, but was back up to 100% normal within 36 hours. One of those things that could have been way worse.

If I wasn't a helmet evangelist before, I am now.

I am wearing knitted socks. They are not perfect, but they fit me, and I made them, and I think I learned how to make them better next time.

Robby got a new cell phone today, after wearing out the one that was mine until I replaced it last year, which he had been using because his original phone wouldn't take a charge any more. Rest in peace, Motorola E815. You were a great phone for your time.

I don't know the model number on the new one, but I'm pretty sure it's another Motorola, a lot like the previous one but without the external antenna that Robby managed to break off and glue back together. He is hard on his phones.

Fun fact: VZW has a new corporate policy where if you buy a smart phone, they require you to get a minimum $10/mo data plan. So we made sure to get a dumb phone instead.

Other things we acquired today include a new mini Maglite because I managed to corrode the batteries in my old one; a cover for the outdoor grill Robby's parents gave us for Christmas; thermostat covers for the church (in spite of my dad's advice); and sunglasses for Will so that he could be, in his words, "ready to go to the beach."

Yes, it is spring break. I think we may make a one-night overnight trip south and a one-night overnight trip east. Lots of things to see, it's just a matter of how much time we want to spend on the road.

The other thing I have to take care of before we can go is my car. There's a slow leak in one of my rear tires, and I need to have it diagnosed. I was going to deal with that today too, but we ran out of steam after replacing the cell phone.

Here are my raw notes from Chris Messina’s session ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here? at SXSW. Like I said, these are raw notes, so there are bound to be some typos / mistakes. Also keep in mind these are his ideas and content, not mine.

Updated 3/13/10 with his presentation:

Notes:

Generative structures (rhizomes) – start with small constructs that move into very complex systems. Like in “The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It.” This forms the basis for activity streams.

What if every time you went shopping, you got an activity stream – like a receipt, but electronic and more available. You bank has this information and aggregates it to find useful information & a digital identity for you. He showed a clip from fight club to illustrate this point. Receipts are paper, crappy activity streams – paper-based way of comprehending information. Banks have this, but it’s in a format that suits them (pdf / paper / etc.), and not in a good format for analysis by their customers.

The news feed (Facebook) is the best example of an activity stream now.

Brief history of feeds

• 1999: RSS moves content from one format / place to another. Initially just titles, description & link
• 2006: Atom came a little later – similar idea, but it had author, id & updated. Still based on media consumption usage.
• Now: RSS more like a news feed, but still not all that complex.

Formats were designed to syndicate basic media content, and now we’re trying to pump a bunch of additional data through it. Format is still stuck in 1999.

FriendFeed problem – it was an aggregation service with a few additional features (comments, etc.) Brought everything together in one place. When it was acquired by Facebook, FriendFeed started to languish.

The solution? A universal format – this is where the idea for activity streams came from. More than syndicating an activity from one place to another.

Russians proposed something called activity theory for how they could make workers more productive with divisions of labor: Subject + tools = object / outcome (triangle). Later expanded by Scandinavians to expand it into communities with mediating artefacts, rules & roles.

In producing activity streams, we want to create meaning and make sense of the information.

If your goal is to produce meaning and culture, then you have a compelling framework for a compelling service.

foursquare + activity theory will help you understand why it has been so successful. It’s not just about the games, but is more nuanced.

Social objects - Jyri Engeström – “people don’t just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object.” Through those connections, people make meaning.

As you roll around the web, you collect all kinds of information. Look at YouTube – adds value to a social object with comments, ratings, etc. Flick is similar – comments, tags, etc. Some people create the content and others curate it by adding comments, rating, etc. Publishers vs. contributors.

Flickr makes it easy to tune the rules (configure licenses, search, etc.)

Control and rules can be set at system or personal level. Life streaming is more than just a news feed.

The Second Coming – A Manifesto by Gelernter (2000) talked about lifestreams as a sequence of all kinds of documents that are retrieved by search and not names or titles. Stream is concrete representation of time with now dividing past and future.

Now we live in an environment with so much information. It seems like information overload, but it’s really that we don’t have the tools to effectively deal with this information.

Mapping of behavior becomes interesting when you can look at your behavior along with the data that other people have about you. In 10 years, your kids could look back on the profile of your history via foursquare, etc. and see how you spent your birthday (example from Kevin Rose).

What if you could use your status information to train your computers to better meet your needs. Fitbit tracks behavior over time. You need to accrue data over time and compare it to other people’s data to make sense of it.

Look at Feltron annual reports. He collects information about himself and summarizes it (not real, but an example of what you could do?)

The solution to data overload is more data (metadata).

Take the basic construct of RSS and weave in some metadata about the data: Actor (author), verb, object & target – all are added to basic atom / rss feed info. It’s trivial to add these 4 elements to make an activity stream based on basic Atom / rss data.

Verbs & objects:
verbs: favorite, follow, like, join …
objects: article …

Process inspired by microformats. Why: Ask why you are doing this? Homework: Do you homework and document what you think. Propose: Bring it back to the community for input. iterate: Use an iterative process to make it better. Inter-operate: find ways to collaborate.

This looks similar to the semantic web, but it’s a little less ambitious. RDF is pretty hard to use.

More information can be found on activitystrea.ms.

Sharing is good

Here is a summary of links to my posts appearing on other blogs over the past couple of weeks:

GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily*

• 10 Tips for Enjoying SXSW
• The Dark Side of Freelancing

The Crazy Neighbor*

• Another Gargoyle in Portland

If you want a feed of all of my blog posts across multiple sites, you can also subscribe to my über feed.

*Disclaimers:

• GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily: I am a paid blogger for the GigaOM network.
• The Crazy Neighbor: This is a Fast Wonder LLC venture.

Sharing is good

A few weeks ago I went to The Story and listened to Cory Doctorow read aloud his The Story So Far, about stories, books, publishing and bookbinding:

She’d clearly bound them herself. Someone had taught her to really sew, her gran, maybe. You could see it in the neat stitching that ran along the binding and the spine, holding together the nylon and the denim, taken from a pair of jeans, a backpack. The end-papers were yellowed page three girls, strategically cropped just below the nipples.

About three nights later, I dreamt that Cory had given me loose printed pages of The Story and that I had hand-bound them together to match the binding therein described. The idea of binding books has been taking up space in my brain ever since. I’ve continued to dream about it, think about it, Google it, watch videos about it and Twitter about it. The idea won’t let me go.

Yesterday, I went to Falkiners on Southampton Row, a bookbinding store and stationers wherein I could quite easily blow my credit cards. The staff at the bookbinding counter, downstairs in case you’re wondering, were both kind and helpful. I’m always a bit nervous going into the inner sanctum of shops about whose craft I know next to nothing, but the chap who spoke to me was warm, welcoming and gave me the basic necessities to get me started.

I also got a couple of books about bookbinding and watched a few videos. (The chap at Falkiners actually recommended searching through YouTube as apparently there’s a wealth of help there.) Last night I finally got a chance to make a 16 page pamphlet, with a sewn binding and a simple card cover.

It turns out that this bookbinding lark is incredibly simple and yet also horribly difficult. What you have to do to bind a book is quite straightforward, but making it not look shit is a real art. This slightly rubbish photo, courtesy of my iPhone, depicts my very first effort.

I have a very long way to go indeed, but even though the journey will be long, my destination is an exciting one: I hope that in the not too distant future I’ll be binding copies of my own stories. A full end-to-end process, from the imagination to a physical artefact that I can hold in my hands. Maybe it’s just that I work too much in the ethereal world of the interwebz, but the idea of creating something solid and permanent makes the process of writing that much more attractive. I don’t just want to say “I wrote this”, but also “I made this”.

The first-ever Fedora Marketing FAD is gearing up as I type this – the others have done a better job of explaining the events (mostly Waffle House) of last night and a bit of what we’re going to do today, so I will simply link to the Day 0 (Friday) blog posts I’ve been gathering up and remind folks that we’re going to be on IRC all day transcribing in #fedora-fad if you want to stop on by.

On the agenda for the day:

1. F12 postmortem
2. What are our goals and thoughts for the future, both short-term and long-term?
3. OLE TIME BBQ (om nom nom nom)
4. Marketing plan
5. Market research
6. CAROLINA HURRICANES (wooooooooooo hockey)
7. The Late Late Show: David and Ryan teach everyone who’s still awake how to package PHP libraries. I suspect I will be playing the role of Obsessive Documenter once again, since I learn things by documenting them.

Everyone else is already up and about in the lobby, and I’m about to go join them right after I post this – I got my customary couple hours o’ sleep and then woke up before my 6:30am alarm, decided to spend the morning time jogging around the shopping center parking lot (discovery: Raleigh does not have sidewalks) and looking for hearing aid batteries (success!) and now… it’s time to go and join the party.

Rock it!

I really shouldn’t have brought so many books with me this month. And maybe next time a laptop and a docking station and a netbook might be… overkill. (I wanted a backup solution plus something with a webcam – what I should actually do is, however many years from now, just get a laptop with a webcam).

And glory do I have a lot of things to do. In order of priority (at least as my mind is thinking about them at the moment – the Flywheel of Momentum is still accelerating):

1. POSSE
2. Assorted CSEET followup
3. opensource.com/education article(s)
4. Marketing deliverables; I have been Slacky McSlackster on this lately
5. Marketing non-deliverables: FI status as well as the Summer Coding swap. Again, Slacky McSlackster.
6. SLOBs duties – for which I volunteered a bit this week.
7. taxes (one of the downside of having a less-than-stable life: they get more complicated than my actual income for the year 2009 warrants)
8. A bunch of overdue tickets in my RT queue
9. A bunch of Olin followup
10. Prep-tacularness for three weeks at Allegheny, coming shortly.

In other news, I’m back in gear. Yar! A giant thank-you to the Teschs this week for putting up with me – pictures/videos forthcoming, along with CSEET notes. I may at some point need to rent a car for the weekend and come down from Meadville to see the other Olin folks – I need to buy Bonnie dinner again, and Katie says there’s dancing in Pittsburgh, which I would very much like to attend (though I did not bring my dancing shoes) and Matt has offered to use his shiny new pilot’s license to take me up and – well, it’ll be good to see these folks again. Dellin and Aasted and Kristen are also thereabouts.

After a stopover in Detroit (apparently Michigan is between Pennsylvania and North Carolina), I’m finally in Raleigh once again, in the room I’m sharing with Robyn Bergeron for the Marketing FAD. Sleep is not especially predicted; the two of us are notorious night owls, a fact corroborated by #fedora-mktg timestamps. Everyone’s tired right now, though, so after the traditional “David Nalley arriveth” Waffle House run, we all slumped back to our rooms to be unconscious.

Assorted imagery from the last few days:

The Mr. Rogers computer terminal exhibit runs Windows, apparently. As evidenced by the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library crash.

Pittsburgh: it is extremely pretty.

Even during overcast days. There were both hawks and helicopters circling overhead – the city’s at the confluence of two rivers, there’s a football stadium named after ketchup, there is a church that turned into a brewery…

Yep. Church that turned into a brewery. See that up near the altar? Tanks. Of beer.

And then the dancing fountain that kept me entertained during my Detroit layover.

Not particularly eloquent or beautiful, but memory snippets that’ll help me remember what I was seeing and thinking during the week – most of my brain was incoherent for the past few days, so these are the bits that actually make sense.

Tummy all full with Waffle House now. Going to bed.

So in the last week I have read some stuff, seen some presentations, and visited some sites that I have really loved, so here they are to share:

Trollcats (this will take my power point slides to a whole NEW level) and here is one for all the free software geeks, in particular.

I finally read Manuela Carneiro da Cunha fantastic Prickly Paradigm press book “Culture” and Culture: Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Rights. If you don’t know jack about the thorny issues around indigenous knowledge an IPR, the first 2/3 provides a pretty darn good introduction rooted not only in an explanation of trade treaties, the limited repertoire available for indigenous groups to politically respond, but a great story about a specific frog that secretes a sticky film that basically F’s you up (if you let it seep in your open wounds). It is entertaining. The last 1/3 takes a far more theoretical turn and will be harder to understand for novices (it helps if you have like at least a BA, possibly MA in anthro, best if you have a PhD from her academic home, U of Chicago). It is there where she discusses the relationship between culture as “reflexive” (hey, peoples of the world, we have x, y, c culture) as lived unreflexively (the unconscious plane of norms that helps guide perception and action). I loved her theoretical somersaults whereby she explained how contradictions between the two are experienced as anything but a contradiction.

Ok so today I went to this conference Radars and Fences III (where I presented my anon/scientology talk for the first time 3 years ago!). I was not able to stay the whole day but I saw Ricardo Dominguez & Amy Sara Carroll from the Electronic Disturbance Theater present on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, which I knew about but did not know how infused it was in poetry, poetry that is, in fact, an integral part of its arsenal. Their presentation was fantastic and it reminds me the great political work being done at the interface of art and technology (and believe me, these 2 are rabble rousers. UCSD, who helped fund the project, are not all that happy they did and they also get not hate mail they get but the HATE mail).

Then I saw Laila El Haddad & Mushon Zer-Aviv present on an amazing project You are Not Here which is a bit hard to explain briefly but I will try (and their site introduces it as “an urban tourism mash-up. It takes place in the streets of one city and invites participants to become meta-tourists of another city.”

So basically there are two interlinked sites (NYC and Baghdad and Tel Aviv and Gaza) where you can be a tourist (though the physical place to follow the symbols are only in NYC and Tel Aviv). You need a map. You get a map. The map, once put up to the light shows two cities/places with symbols that indicate a special spot on the map. You find the physical spot, there is sticker or other sign with a phone number, you call, and you hear a story not about NYC or Tel Aviv (where you would physically go) but about Baghdad or Gaza and a story that pertains to the area of the map that overlaps where you are in NYC or Tel Aviv. We saw a bunch of examples and they were riveting and powerful.

My ISP is Telstra, cable. It's pretty darn good for most everything. Except youtube. The performance of youtube streaming video is really really shit.

There are people complaining about youtube on telstra in Wellington here and here and here and here and here and here and ......

Earlier this year youtube added a neat section where you can see the data speeds from your ISP, compared to others in your city, your country and the world: http://www.youtube.com/my_speed

It shows my ISP, telstra, sitting at between 30% and 70% of the average wellington speed. in other words, telstra with their superior cable network technology is being beaten by people with DSL, and being beaten a LONG way..but only for youtube. Telstra have done something to make youtube perform like shit for their customers.

I offer my congratulations to Dr. Danielle Lee on her successful dissertation defense. It got streamed live on the web which would have given me pause at my oral defenses (for my master's)! Her blog, "Urban Science Adventures!", seems really cool too. (via BoingBoing)

Author Info: Quixotess is a geek of wordplay, numberplay, names, history, easy logic puzzles, IRC, various works of fiction (particularly speculative fiction), certain aspects of theatre, and local geology. Not computers, though. She blogs at Reconcile and has an IRC channel which she would like you to visit.

This is the Suvudu [Cross-Verse] Cage Match, where we may vote on how characters from various speculative fiction works may fare when fighting each other, tournament style. The order and initial matches were chosen randomly.

I think it’s worth looking at, first because you all ought to have a chance to vote. Second, because of the dynamics surrounding the tournament that i think merit feminist examination.

Some questions: How many of the characters are women? How many of the characters are characters of color? How many of the authors are? Now, how many of those characters are winning?

I think it’s pretty clear that in some cases, as with the Jaime Lannister vs Hermione Granger match, the white male character is winning at least in part because of sexism on the part of the voters. Jaime’s a handsome man, oldest son of a great lord, and an experienced warrior (a very male-dominated profession) and Hermione Granger is a girl whose parents are dentists. In fact, look at what Jaime’s author Martin has to say about the pairing on his livejournal.

[Jaime's] opponent? Well, he’s really pissed off about that. He wanted Conan or Elric or Aragorn. Instead he’s drawn (they CLAIM it’s random)…

Of course Martin frames it as his character wanting to fight one of these kingly heroes (more on that later), but even if Martin himself didn’t care, you can bet that many of his readers–gritty realism fans, a realm also dominated by men–identify with Jaime.

Speaking of gritty realism, Martin’s written up a little ditty on how he thinks the match would really go [TRIGGER WARNING]:

He’s not going to waste time and effort swatting at birds with his sword, either. He’s encased in gilded steel. What are they going to do, crap on him? He’ll rush right through the birds, and go straight for Hermione. A sword is not a knight’s only weapon. While she’s watching the blade, he will slam his shield right into her face, knock her off her feet. Let her try and mumble those spells with a mouthful of broken teeth.

Martin’s well known for putting a lot of violence in his books, where it fits, but I find it shocking when applied to characters from another verse, especially a young woman. As this piece is written to convince readers that Jaime would beat Hermione in a fight, the effect is not so much “gritty realism” as “alarming glee.”

I don’t mean to pick on Martin (even if he deserves it) because I know that various fandoms as boy’s clubs is familiar to all of us. I see that pattern playing out here.

I think it’s equally interesting to look at those cases in which there is a genuine imbalance of power. For example, see Hiro Protagonist vs Gandalf and Lyra Belacqua (called Silvertongue) vs Cthulu. No points for guessing who’s winning those fights.

Look at how many of the characters in the tournament are gods, messiahs, patriarchs, or kings. I don’t know all of these verses, but I see Aslan, Dumbledore, Gandalf, Cthulu, Conan, Aragorn, and Rand al’Thor. The women and characters of color are likely to be knocked out in the first round here because they’re going up against characters who their authors made all-powerful.

How much we enshrine ultimate power! Most of those with unconventional powers are going down to a very male idea of strength or intelligence; those who win are those for whom sheer power is a big part of their characters. (for example, Arthur Dent lost, narrowly, to the Shrike.) Look also at how many of these characters have some sort of Grand Destiny–that trope which makes it okay to have been born a farmboy, or living in exile, because in reality you are still more important than others in the fabric of the universe. In this sense it’s worth looking not just at the characters’ demographics, but at their abilities and means of power, and the intersection thereof. I’m talking about the difference between conventional marks of heroes and villains–destiny or control over the cosmos–and unconventional powers–like access to information and lying, as with Lyra, or improbable luck, as with Arthur Dent.

Many people in the comments have complained about the inclusion of Cthulu in the contest, predicting that it will come down to a battle between him and Aslan, because who can stand against those two? They might be right, but why? What’s with our preference for these mighty male forces of nature or chosen ones of gods?

What do you think?

Some fics I've liked:

Erin Ptah's Colbert Report archive includes "The Thing With Feathers", the fifth time Jon terrified Stephen, and "In Time".
"Theories About Nuclear Winter" by hollycomb (continued in Part II), the best Calvin and Hobbes Susie/Calvin fic ever. The end still makes me cry.
"Second Verse (Same as the First)" by Friendshipper/Sholio. "The Marines call it the Planet of the Willing Virgins, you know." I don't know much about Stargate but this still kicked me in the gut (here's a warm-fuzzy chaser).

And recently I've tried out some Psych fic, most of my favorites centering on the relationship between Lassiter and O'Hara:

Elisa, these two reminded me of your discussion of useful vagueness in sex scenes, which reminded me of this analysis (caution, includes shoulder-biting).
Flirting. Possibly my favorite of all the tension-on-the-job stories.
Carlton almost majored in theater.
Someone has nothing to do on Christmas.
Buzz/Carlton? Sure.
There's a lot of schmoopy they-know-each-other-so-well fic. Exhibits A, B, C, D, E.
Do they comfort each other after trauma? Sure do!

I’m headed off to Boston (and then NYC!) next week for three days of free software love at LibrePlanet, March 19-21.

While there, I’ll be giving a speaker’s workshop – how to give talks at technical conferences. There’s not really a magical formula, just lots of tips and things to practice that will help you not only give great talks, but find excellent places to give those talks, be prepared for speaking to any size crowd, and have a good time while you do it.

I started giving talks at conferences about five years ago, and have been running my own conferences for three years. I still get the butterflies when I get up in front of people, but I’ve got a whole kit of strategies I now use to deal with it.

The workshop is scheduled for 3:30-5:30pm, and I’m sure we’ll all head out for dinner and conversation right after.

I’ve also got one free pass to the conference left, so leave a comment if you’ll be in the area and can use the pass.

Also, I’ll have some incredibly profane free software advocacy stickers on-hand to share. We’re free software activists, but we can still have fun, right?

Related posts:

1. Off to MySQL Con
2. PgCon in Ottawa – following people on twitter
3. Open Source Bridge speakers announced!

If so, a reader has a question about network connectivity:

Wellington Community Network (WCN) is a place for community organisations to host websites for free, powered by a bit of Joomla.

The City council has decided to shut down this community service. This makes me sad.

It is currently used by a HUGE list of diverse groups such as: (grabbed at random)
Friends of the Wellington Town Belt
Wellington Kidney Patient Network
Wellington RSAs
Diabetes Wellington
Lotsa sports clubs
Rotary
Wellington Association for Deaf Children
Lotsa Playcentres
schools such as... Wellington Hindi School and Wellington Sri Lankan School
Wellington Homeschoolers
Widowed Separated Divorced Support Group Inc
Wellington Somali Council
Pan-Pacific and Southeast Asia Womens Association
SeniorNet
Toastmasters
ESOL Home Tutors
lots and lots of Scouts and Guide groups
Lions clubs.
New Zealand Malaysian Society
Wellington Science And Technology Fair

and a couple *thousand* more.

and now a baby photo:

Part 3 and final of my series on configuring Ubuntu's new grub2 boot menu. I translate a couple of commonly-seen error messages, but most of the article is devoted to multi-boot machines. If you have several different operating systems or Linux distros installed on separate disk partitions, grub2 has some unpleasant surprises, so see my article for some (unfortunately very hacky) workarounds for its limitations.

Why use Grub2? Good question!
(Let me note that I didn't write the title, though I don't disagree with it.)

Monday saw the announcement of the International Women’s Day competition winners.

Well, most of them. Jono had unfortunately misunderstood what we had asked of him and hence promoted, and not drawn the second winner randomly. Oops! (We’ll blame it on his runaway glasses). Thankfully, being a man of his word, he has managed to right this. During his q&a ustream broadcast yesterday, he drew a truly random winner… Caterina Brigandi!

Congrats again to Elvira, Karen, Jen and now Caterina! Thank you all so much for participating.

There was a plug for an up and coming conference in my last post but it was a bit buried and it deserves a bit more attention: the Libre Planet Conference in Cambridge, MA. It is fast approaching but there are still spots, student rates, and funding for female attendees. Though I can’t go as I will be out of town, this seems like it will be a great event: excellent speakers, lots of interesting folks, and I am sure a fantastic set of discussions.

This is a guest post by Jonathan Lavallee. Jonathan spends his days toiling about with batch processes and overnight jobs, but in his other life he’s a game designer and a poet who is constantly trying to unpack his suitcase only to find more stuff he didn’t realize was in there already. You can find his blog at Gamish Designer and game design work at Firestorm Ink.

This is a question that came from the Ask a Geek Feminist post, which is still taking your questions. If you’re curious about something you think a geek feminist could answer, ask away and we’ll see what we can come up with. If none of the regular bloggers will pick up the question, they’ll throw it to someone for a guest post or open it up to the general commentating public.

That’s why you got stuck with an ally answering this enchanting question from Timm! (it’s big so I’ve edited it down a bit):

Many table-top RPGs feature a merit/flaw or asset/complication system where you buy little extra things for your character (assets or merits) offset by buying some kind of flaw or complication. It occurred to me that, among all those available flaws, there’s always a list of physical disabilities to choose from, things like blindness, deafness, missing a limb, etc, and this stuck me as potentially problematic. On the other hand, in games that don’t feature this kind of option, you essentially never see any characters who are less than fully able-bodied (at least in my gaming experience, YMMV) unless they have some magical/technological device that completely negates the disability (think Geordi’s visor in Star Trek) so merits and flaws at least encourage players to think about characters with levels of ability different from their own.

So my question is: are these systems problematic/ableist by nature? Or does it matter more how they are implemented from game to game or gamer to gamer? Does the mechanical underpinning of the system figure into this consideration at all? If these systems are inherently problematic, any thoughts on how to implement them so they’re not (as) problematic? Thoughts on RPG characters with disabilities in general?

It’s big, so I might take this apart and talk about it in pieces because there are a lot of questions there but they all pertain to ableism in RPGs, specifically in regards to the character creating process.

are these systems problematic/ableist by nature?

I don’t think that the advantage/disadvantage model (or how ever it is flavoured in the game) is inherently problematic or ableist. The concept is that you want a character that is not perfect, and as such will have to overcome not only external obstacles but internal obstacles. If you read a story where the characters are perfect all the time and there is no potential for conflict because they are perfect it’s going to be a pretty boring story. Like Timm! mentioned, systems that don’t have this kind of mechanic tend to have those perfect characters that go about doing perfect things.

Where the problem happens is when designers try to fill in the blanks for what would be considered an advantage and a disadvantage. The first game I ever ran into that had this concept was the Hero system which had great disadvantages like dependant non player characters (DNPCs) and Enemies and Limitations on Powers. All this was great, and if they stayed there the potential for ableism was lowered greatly because these are just people who depend on you, people you’ve pissed off and times when you couldn’t use your special powers. The problem happens when you get into things like physical and mental ‘disadvantages.’ This is where the ableism is so thick you shouldn’t be able ignore it. Doubly so because as a reason to take these ‘flaws’ the game gives you a carrot in the guise of more points to spend on cool stuff for your character. There are many people who play games with the desire to push the rules as far as they can, and in doing so will take those ‘disadvantages’ because it will get them points to spend without thinking about what that actually means.

Or does it matter more how they are implemented from game to game or gamer to gamer

This is two questions in one. When it comes to being implemented from game to game the answer is no, it doesn’t matter. If you want to use the advantage/disadvantage model, which as noted above I don’t believe is ableist on its own, and then add blatantly ableist material then it’s ableist regardless of what kind of spin they want to put on it. The problem is that they’re all lumped together with all the other negative traits like being vengeful, being intolerant, or any sort of other negative traits. That one isn’t that hard.

What’s hard is when you talk about it from player to player. As a TAB-gamer, playing a character that has a disability has its issues. Much like anyone from a privileged position who plays an oppressed character — a cis-man playing a woman, someone who is TAB playing a disabled person, a white person playing a person of colour — it can be incredibly problematic when done without thought, understanding and respect. This isn’t to say that such a thing can’t ever be done, but that the potential for appropriation and caricature are great, almost too great in that kind of setting. The reason is that unlike a novel where you can take a break and do some research, your answers are improvised and are based off of you, in that moment and that’s often when your privilege is going to show up.

It’s one of my biggest frustrations with the gaming community in general, this cross playing of characters, and I rail against it a lot when it happens around me in non safe settings (conventions being the biggest venue) because more often than not you’re left slamming your head aginst the table as you watch someone reinforce their X-privilege (X being straight, white, male, able-bodied, cis-gendered or any combination there of). There are plenty of guys who try to play, “The Hot Chick” or TAB-players who think that having DID* is fun without any regard of the inherent problems of doing so.

I have stories. Oh goodness do I have stories about that, but that’s for another day.

If these systems are inherently problematic, any thoughts on how to implement them so they’re not (as) problematic?

To keep this answer shorter, because I think I’m going to be repeating myself, the system itself isn’t inherently problematic. I can take an undesirable characteristic, like being vengeful, and attach it to my character to gain a benefit that can be applied elsewhere. The problem is when the designer gives you options that are oppressive. There the fault lies with us as designers to make those options as wide and varied as possible, to create a large number of characters and possibilities, without dipping our toes into frameworks of oppression. I know that I want to be as inclusive as possible to have more people who are able to enjoy the games that I make.

Thoughts on RPG characters with disabilities in general?

I’ve touched on RPG characters with disabilities being played by TAB-people above, so I’ll just make a general comment. The lack of characters with diabilities in role playing game isn’t unique to RPGs. It’s the systematic problem that exists in all media, which is kyriarchal in nature. You don’t see people with disabilities often in television, books, film, theatre and even then when they do exist they’re often caricatures, comedic relief, or done really badly. I remember reading the frustration of a lot of wheel chair users at Glee because people would just push Artie’s wheelchair around. When I heard that, having spent time around people who use wheelchairs, my jaw dropped because that was at best horribly rude. However, that’s how the Kyriarchy thinks, always from their perspective and so they don’t see a problem with any representation that fits within their world view.

RPGs are just another avenue for telling stories. It’s collaborative storytelling that runs into the same problems that any storytelling method has. The storyteller, both as player or as GM or other if you play a lot of indie games, has to unpack and try their best to understand their privilege, otherwise their representation of a character that isn’t exactly them is going to be horribly problematic-ist.

For those in the comments: How do you feel about thoughts on RPG characters with disabilities in general? How do you feel about “cross-playing” as mentioned above?

*DID – Dissociative Identity Disorder, still called Multiple Personality Disorder by many RPG books!

So now that Fedora 13 Alpha is out…. have you given it a try? What do you think about the wallpaper? We want to hear your feedback, because there isn’t actually that much time to update the wallpaper for beta, I think a little over a week. We haven’t gotten much feedback about it yet, so we need to hear from you now!

You can give your feedback here in the comments or on the Fedora design team mailing list. How can you provide useful feedback? Here’s a little writeup on that, shamelessly stolen from an earlier blog post:

How to Provide Helpful Critique

Some folks understandably believe art and design are stuffs enshrouded in a mysterious haze of incense smoke without much logic or reason involved. I get it. I’ve been there too, and I think it’s easy to feel that way – discussions about art works sometimes get a bad reputation for being anywhere from fussy, to bizarre, to completely pointless.

You may find solace in the fact that there’s actually plenty of logical principles and elements and a vocabulary for them that can be use to discuss such works in a productive manner that doesn’t involve ‘invoking an embodiment of emotive symbolism’ or similar. I strongly recommend you explore some of this vocabulary, as not only will it help you more effectively communicate your critique but reading through a brief survey of basic design principles will probably even help you explain why you feel a particular way about an element of a work you’re critiquing. Some basic resources:

• Wikipedia: Design elements and principles
• Wikipedia: Composition
• Artwork Critique Form by Marvin Bartel

So…. let us know what you think! Also, here’s some shouts and greets to the rocketeers who’ve worked towards getting the Fedora 13 artwork ready to launch thus far:

Luya Tshimbalanga (bonus points kicking off the process and moving things along!), Charlie Brej, Samuele Storari, Nicu Buculei, Alexander Smirnov, Bogdan Bartos, Onyeibo Oku, Christo Petkov, Mola Pahnadayan, Mel Chua, Hristo Petkov, Kanza Aman, and Catalin Festila!

(If I missed you, get your artwork up on our F13 artwork wiki page! What are you waiting for? )

Filed under: artwork, fedora Tagged: artwork, fedora

From the Ada Lovelace Day blog…

There are just two weeks to go until Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and we still have a fair few bloggers, Twitterers, podcasters, web comic artists, and videocasters to recruit. We have 1114 pledgers and need 1958 more people to sign up. That’s a challenge with only 14 days to go, but if everyone recruits just two more people, we’ll still make it!

There’s loads of stuff going on around Ada Lovelace Day this year. We have events in London and worldwide (Copenhagen, Dresden and Montreal, with the promise of others to come). The London Potluck Unconference, to be held at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in Kings Cross, 6.00pm onwards, still has some places left, so please nab yours now, whilst you can.

We have T-shirts on their way – we’re just polishing off the design and hope to get them up and ready for you to buy very soon. We also now have an Offers page which currently carries a 10% discount from the lovely people at AdaFruit Industries. Again, we hope to have more there for you soon!

If you’d like to get involved, then our main need at the moment is promotion. We need to get more people signed up, and here’s how you can help:

• Send a Tweet, update your Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn status
• Write a blog post about Ada Lovelace Day
• Email your friends and/or relevant mailing lists
• Post an item on LinkedIn or Facebook Groups
• Encourage other people to do something to promote Ada Lovelace Day!

There’s more info on how to help, including a Tweet you can just cut and paste, on the blog!

We do have more goodies in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more news!

1 pass is now gone/wait! it's not too late to win!/but you must be fast

If you want to win/you must submit a haiku/or a limerick.

Twelve years ago I spent the month of March frantically drafting version 1.0 of the Mozilla Public License. That was a public process, a part of the launch of the Mozilla project. Approximately a year later we created the 1.1 version.

Since then a decade has gone by without any further revisions of the MPL. This is in part a great success story. At the same time, a decade is a long time not to look at something as basic as the license. Ways of working that were “best practices” a decade ago may not make sense today. FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) is far better understood today. When I wrote the MPL we drew upon the GPL v2 for many ideas, and on the MIT and BSD and early Apache license. Since then, both the Apache license and the GPL have been updated.

It’s time to look at updating the MPL. It’s time to see if we can make the MPL easier to use and incorporate a decade’s worth of experience. In particular I’m hoping to modernize and simplify the license while still keeping the things that have made it and the Mozilla project such a success.

We’ll do this through a public process of course. Here are the tools available, as of today:

• website hub: mozilla.org/MPL/
• commenting tool (where we hope to aggregate most of the comments re language and drafting): mpl.mozilla.org/participate/comment/
• newsgroup/mailing list (for comments other than language and drafting): governance-mpl-update

Over the years we’ve received feedback about the license, and we’ll use some of that, plus early comments here, to produce an early “alpha” version of what a new license might look like. Once we have published an alpha draft, we will have time for commentary, discussion, and further drafting, followed by beta and release candidate drafts. We hope to complete the process by the end of 2010.

The organizers of this effort to date are below. We expect this group to grow.

• Gerv Markham (who has been working with Mozilla licensing issues for almost a decade himself)
• Luis Villa (long time open source contributor, recent law school graduate)
• Harvey Anderson (assisted with MPL 1.0 and 1.1);
• me; and
• possibly you!

Today we launched a new initiative at the Linux Foundation: a merchandise store on Linux.com. These aren’t logo Ts that you get at every trade show (and probably use to dry your car.) The T-shirts, mugs, stickers and babies gear in the Linux.com store are truly unique and hopefully capture the irreverence, wit and attitude of Linux and free software.My personal favorites:

• FSCK the establishment 
• Free Your Code
• and Fresh Kernels

While I like these designs, I also realize that the minds of many generally produce superior product.  That’s why we’re also launching a community design contest. Just like the open development process has proven to develop the best code, an open design process will surface the best designs for apparel featured in the Linux.com Store. Make us laugh or gasp with your submissions. We’ll host the top 5 designs on Linux.com through June 6, 2010 for community vote. The winner will get to join us in Boston for LinuxCon as well as see their design on apparel in the Store. Get your designs in by April 11: http://www.linux.com/tshirt-design-contest.And please let me know your impressions of the store and the designs. We know there are other sites where you can buy Linux or free software merchandise, but the proceeds from this store go to maintaining the Linux Foundation’s programs and services. We hope to see you wearing these shirts at an event in the future to show the world what OS you support.

As some of you may know Foulab have relocated from Ultramount to Saint Henry last December. We are now well established in our new Hacker Space. Join us for an afternoon of Workshops and an evening of revelry.

The events kick off at 3 pm with the following workshops:

1. Arduino 2: "I got the LED blink, now what?" with fx and xsmurf (frenglish). Learn how to connect other gadgets to the Arduino to expand its capabilities.
2. LegionLab's Basic Electronics! (frenglish) Prepare to understand everything.
3. Web Security Snacks with gus and dataworm (frenglish). You're a web developer and you are worried about your application safety? gus and dataworm will introduce you to web security basics.

read more

We're both dealing with different churches that have cold people who crank up the thermostat every time they come in the door, triggering the emergency heat strips and sending the electric bill skyrocketing.

I asked if he could get us some lockable covers for our thermostats. His response? "We tried that. They pried them off."

He then told me his solution, which made me giggle: installed new, programmed thermostats just inside the air return ducts, where no one would see them, and didn't tell anyone that the old thermostats didn't control the heat any more. Everyone was happy.

I don't think we could get away with that at our church, but I have to admire the BOFH-ness of it.

Next Thursday, for our regularly scheduled meeting, we will be having a 9.0 alpha testing party!

When: 7 pm, Thursday, March 19, 2010
Where: FreeGeek
Who: YOU!

If you want to test it on your own machine, please download it ahead of time:

http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/9.0alpha4/

If you want to work on one of the P4 Lab machines, contact Mark so he can get an account set up for you.

Read:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/HowToBetaTest
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/release-9-0.html

You don't need a laptop to participate - we can do pair-agile-eXtreme testing!

Afterwards, as usual, we will have beer/crash the PDX.pm Hackathon at the Lucky Lab.

A friend was trying to get some of her laptop's function keys working under Ubuntu, and that reminded me that I'd been meaning to do the same on my Vaio TX 650P.

My brightness keys worked automagically -- I suspected via the scripts in /etc/acpi -- and that was helpful in tracking down the rest of the information I needed. But it still took a bit of fiddling since (surprise!) how this stuff works isn't documented.

Update: That "isn't documented" remark applies to the ACPI system. Matt Zimmerman points out that there is some good documentation on the rest of the key-handling system, and pointed me to two really excellent pages: Hotkeys architecture and Hotkeys Troubleshooting. Recommended reading!

Here's the procedure I found.

First, use acpi_listen to find out what events are generated by the key you care about. Not all keys generate ACPI events. I haven't get figured out what controls this -- possibly the kernel. When you type the key, you're looking for something like this:

sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000012

You may get separate events for key down and key up. It's your choice as to which one matters.

Once you know the code for your key, it's time to make it do something. Create a new file in /etc/acpi/events -- I called mine sony-lcd-btn. It doesn't matter what you call it -- acpid will read all of them. (Yes, that means every time you start up it's reading all those toshiba and asus files even if you have a Lenovo or Sony. Looks like a nice place to shave off a little boot time.)

The file is very simple and should look something like this:

# /etc/acpi/events/sony-lcd-btn

event=sony/hotkey SPIC 00000001 00000012
action=/etc/acpi/sonylcd.sh

Now create a script for the action you specified in the event file. I created a script /etc/acpi/sonylcd.sh that looks like this:

#! /bin/bash
# temporary, for testing:
echo "LCD button!" >/dev/console

Now restart acpid: service acpid restart if you're on karmic, or /etc/init.d/acpid restart on earlier releases. Press the button. If you're running from the console (or using a tool like xconsole), and you got all the codes right, you should be able to see the echo from your script.

Now you can do anything you want. For instance, when I press the LCD button I generally want to run this:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768

Or to make it toggle, I could write a slightly smarter script using xrandr --query to find out the current mode and behave accordingly. I'll probably do that at some point when I have a projector handy.

At the recently concluded pycon2010 in Atlanta, there were some discussions about diversity, women etc... I suppose, much of my energy would have been saved if I had published this mail earlier or even blogged about some individual sexist behaviors. Nah, its not fear, rather I try to avoid talking about evil creepy stuff on my blog which is personal. But during various discussions realized that many folks dont know what you experience on an individual level on *random-list in the floss community, unless you talk about it...its the first step.

Hi $PersonsName,

As i write this mail the words "Out the creeps publicly" uttered by a devel (who shall go nameless) comes to my mind and hence i'd prefer to not be anon and back my words under the pseudonym 'svaksha'. $PersonsName, do feel free to suitably trim my long train of thoughts and I wont be offended if it does'nt make it to your article as /self is too late in all probability -- my mental resources are wound up around a lexical parser atm.

Initially when i used to hear all the women speak about their experiences i took comfort in the fact that i am not alone in hoping for change. But i had not factored in the possibility that change is tougher when "clueless new idiots" follow in the steps of "sexist old timers". Over the years the attitudes towards diversity still remains sexist, especially within the Indian community where cronyism is normal.

My observations are largely India-centric salted with some experiences on international lists and sans a timeline ...

The usual personal mails asking for personal details under the guise of "i want to volunteer" or guised as a personal interview (since when did marital status become relevant to floss contribution?). Another peculiar one was a guy writing emails in different scripts despite my requests that i didnt understand them. It was when i requested a friend to translate them that i realised why -- personal questions in a non-english script meant fewer people would know he was asking personal questions.

Then there was this instance of a jerk trying to crack into my server when he became aware of my gender.  I was happy with the anonymity --- Very very few folks (i trusted) knew my location and real name but that changed when I founded the Ubuntu-Women project, was termed a "militant feminist" (a pejorative term for Feminazi).  This pejorative was echoed in the Indichix (LC-India) mailing lists in 2008 to avoid answering the question of 'controlling a woman's group by proxy' - cronyism and elitism is gender-neutral The personal attacks descended into personal life queries (hint:: the coffee, splenda thread) by one Indian male who subscribed to grrls-only mailing list by pretending to be a woman. Gah, so much for the "cultural_Indian" !!

Other experiences include an smtp header spoof of my mail id to send a sex-related email ; an indian devel in his interview wanted to be stuck in a lift with me even while he admits to never having met me. Another was the death threats from "mikeeeeusa" on DW which went off-list ~~ IIRC around 5 women were the initial targets but Clytie (an AU contributor) had threats sent to her teenage daughter too.

http://eaves.ca/2009/07/06/structurelessness-feminism-and-open/ has a point I could relate to viz.elites and cronyism -- both of which are true as far as the local Indian floss community is concerned. I've heard past incidents of getting cronies to use social engineering (a bully's crony will pretend to be your friend and find out where you work, etc..) and use pressure tactics (complaining to your superiors/boss@work --the easiest way to bully an individual who fears losing his/her livelihood) to silence disagreeing voices -- This may probably not be sexist as it happened to an indian male (who shall remain anonymous) floss volunteer, but i'm writing this to highlight a deeper and more serious problem within the fragmented Indian floss community.

Pretending to support women racks up the positive Publicity Karma (hence commercially lucrative) while one can continue to be being elitist and deny decision making power via "cronyism" (the elites will use red herrings and out-shout the newbies who disagree under the cries of "show me the code") on the side. A very subtle game that is hard to decipher on a superficial level.

However, when subtle aggressiveness is reserved for the local community members only very few folks outside that circle are aware of it. This small subset of highly aggressive Indian men will never exhibit this negative attitude on the international project lists and irc channels where they do participate, because it will permanently damage their reputation which is never good for business or landing a job in future. Also, international lists/irc/etc... have lesser bystanders[0] taking care of SEP[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem]

If readers are thinking its a malaise with the whole Indian community or a cultural baggage, its not. There is a lot of positive stuff happening thanks to many individuals who are polite and respectful and dont feel threatened by (wo)men. There are many men and women who continue their good work on an individual basis but unfortunately they are relegated to the  back-burner by pompous self-promoting jerks. I'm personally hoping to see a truly open community initiative like LCA or debconf (and others like it) happen in India.

Regarding including links and threads, i am undecided. The marketing gimmick "bad publicity is still free publicity" is another reason why I prefer to avoid blogging too much about negative behavior as it can acquire a cult-like halo and an easy way to fame for other men or newbies, especially when they see peers getting away with it. While technical (like a ddos attack,...) misdemeanors are punished quickly i've not yet heard an a$$hat being ostracized or boycotted from the community and this despite there being discussion and more discussion and protests about the said negative behavior.

Besides, the online world is so small that there is the danger of forming a mental picture of an individual and getting over-familiar via blogs, twitter, irc, lists, etc... Its possible that judging folks during real life meetings based on these preconceived assumptions is another cause of social behaviour problems.

I dont have any magic answers and have always believed that community action is the best way to solve the problem. Yet, getting women to speak-up openly against the negative attitude is a lot harder, especially when they feel they will not get any support as the lone voice, statistically speaking.  Few folks will want to waste their time tackling a regular barrage of red-herrings and logical fallacies. Ex. using the term "we" is (sometimes purposefully) misunderstood as taking over control and using "I" is interpreted as "the problem is singular in nature" and _one_ person is statistically too small to figure in change -- hence the status quo remains. This tactic works very well in situations when no change is desired.

Y'all probably are aware of all this so i'll stop as i've got to leave now.

ciao,
-vid

As you've probably guessed, the above was my mail sent to an unarchived women's list. I'm also reproducing (with permission) an exchange with another floss contributors who wrote after he read the above e-mail:

Devel: And you cant have a community of human beings and donkeys right? That's why I refuse to believe most of the Indian FLOSS communities are communities at all. I dont care and I dont bother.

Me: That is the scary bit...everybody stops caring. When I stop caring its just downhill then. Somewhere we have to make an effort to build the community, sustain it and grow.

Devel: You have to make sure the community is worth it.

One should not expect women to say *Stop harassing/stalking*. Given the low female participation, women are an even smaller number in the existing scheme of things and the lack of space to speak up within projects is another crucial point that gets overlooked.  Instead of telling women how to adjust to sexist bullying, men within a project must learn to speak up if they wish to see change. Most times that action is taken against those who manage to offend those in power, else in floss communities sometimes one can get away with any negative behaviour with zero repercussions.

In my years within most Libre software projects, the common thought that surfaces is the expectation that "change is slow" because positive results with respect to reducing sexist behaviour takes time. I disagree.  Is it that women have to be offended with negative attitudes or sexism for action to be taken? Why cant a lone individual (irrespective of gender, nationality or any other criteria) say "stop being a jerk" and get tons of community support. If there is a lack of community support, its due to apathy and a lack of firmness and strong action with low tolerance to negative behaviour by every person involved in the floss community.  This is not as easy as typing this blog entry was, since it needs impartial and strong leadership qualities. 

We need an attitudinal change on an individual level if we dont want a gesellschaft instead of a community where people care for others. FLOSS Communities are still made up of individual people who use the same technology they create. Women (add foo-group of choice) should not be the diversity tokenism card for spin doctors trying to prevent a PR disaster!

Revisions continue apace. Often, I think that using LaTeX is a bad idea because the compiles are long enough that I lose my train of thought by the time they're done. I am trying not to think about ways to solve this problem on account of that being really distracting. Instead, I am web surfing.

This is the most awesome thing I found yesterday:


see more dog and puppy pictures

A quick web search (for "mop dog") discovered that it is a Hungarian Puli Sheep Dog, in case you wanted to know.

Whilst I was quite happily sleeping yesterday morning, the International Women’s Day competition winners were announced. The popular vote prize went to Elvira Martinez “tatica1″. The second prize went to Karen Y. Perez, and Jen Phillips got an honourable mention for her awesome analogy-style story.

You can read all the stories and see the record of votes on the Ubuntu Women wiki.

Thanks so much to everyone who entered and voted (and Jono for announcing). The competition was heaps of fun to organise and now we have lots of stories to show that we forge our own paths to Ubuntu just like the guys do!

I worked on another mockup for the mockup collaboration tool I blogged about a while back – Josh from Isotope11 coined the name ‘Design Hub’ and I like it, so that’s what I’m calling it now.

I put this together for Robby from Isotope11, who has been rocking out on implementing a prototype of the application. (I saw a preliminary prototype last week and was really impressed with the progress! I’m hoping to carve out some time to CSS-ify it soon.) Josh has been doing a great job making sure the project keeps moving forward also, so I’m pretty pumped. (I have the usual post-hackfest ’shiny-ponies-flying-in-the-air-oh-I-want-them-all’ distractability lately so Josh’s patience & focus has been very helpful.)

Here’s the other screens that need to be mocked up:

• Mockup #1: the first mockup, the details page for a single proposal
• Mockup #2: The same as the project details mockup shown here, but in the mode where the project has been finished and the proposal that ended up getting used is highlighted.
• Mockup #3: A listing of all the projects going on right now. Maybe link to an archive of old ones. Each project should have a little preview of the activity going on ‘new proposal posted yesterday by jambalaya joe’ etc. Deadlines and status should be shown too.
• Mockup #4: submit a new proposal page
• Mockup #5: submit new project page</li

The Isotope11 folks I think need mockups quicker than I am going to be able to produce them. If you’ve any ideas or inclination to sketch out mockups for any of the above (or if you have ideas for other screens or want to revise the suggestions here) please have at it. The latest inkscape source SVGZ that includes the source for both the first mockup – the proposal details page and this latest mockup is available here:

Mockups Source SVGZ

I know at least four of you (hi pcon, Arkanis, Yannik, and Colin Z.! ) besides the folks at Isotope11 have expressed interest in helping out on the implementation of this project. I believe there is or will be a public git repo for it – the project is open source but we haven't really talked too much about sharing the code yet, I'll keep you posted.

Anyway, please drop a comment to let me know what you think about this latest mockup.

Filed under: Uncategorized

I have permission to include a few pages from the Definitive Guide to PC-BSD in the next issue of BSD Mag and could use some help determining what to submit.

Hundreds of millions of people rely on the accuracy of voting machines and the polling process to form our government. New voting machines are being developed, moving from paper-based ballots to electronic voting.

How accurate are those digital voting machines? How unbiased? Do they count every vote? Do they count every vote accurately and completely? How do they work? How tamper-proof are they? Is there a way to audit results? How good is the audit process? How would we know?

Right now it’s hard to tell. It turns out that how digital voting machines work is a secret. Voters are not allowed to know, to see or to test those machines or how they work. (I’ll speak of California here, as a result of talking to the California Secretary of State, but this is only an example of the problem.) We’re asked to “trust.”

The OSDV Foundation exists to change this. OSDV is a non-profit organization building open source voting machinery. This is important for several reasons:

• This allows voters to verify what our voting machines are doing. Like other open source projects, those of us with enough technical expertise can serve as consumer advocates and validate that our voting machines operate as they should.
• In voting, 1 or 2 percent is a giant amount. Many elections — at least in the US where I’m most familiar — are very, very close. A 1% to 2% margin of error may be acceptable in many business settings, but it is not acceptable in a critical election where it can change results. With open source products we can see and test and improve the quality, rather than simply trust that all is well.
• Casting and counting votes should not be a for-profit enterprise; it is the foundation of elected governments.
• Proprietary ownership of the means of voting IS a conflict of interest. According to the OSDV Foundation, right now something like 88% of the US voting infrastructure is owned by two companies, which will soon be one company.
• Good open source alternatives are likely to cause an improvement in the quality of the dominant (close to 90% market share) product offering.

OSDV is just reaching the point where its first products are just about ready for use. Having a viable alternative in the market is critical. Having a viable alternative that is open source and public-benefit is even better. OSDV is building a system that citizens can actually verify — a system we trust based on that ability to verify what is actually happening.

You can find out more about OSDV Foundation’s Trust the Vote project at trustthevote.org/background

Since Google Summer of Code is coming up again very soon Sven, Phil and I will be doing a short info session at the University of Karlsruhe on Thursday at 4pm in room HS -101 in building 50.34 (Infobau). We’ll be giving a short intro to GSoC and tell a bit about how GSoC works in KDE and Debian and of course answer lots of questions. If you’re planning to apply this year you should definitely show up Please drop me a short email if you want to attend at lydia at kde org.

If you’re not in Karlsruhe or anywhere near there are info sessions in other cities around the world listed in the GSoC calendar.

Tomorrow, Summer of Code opens for 2010. Going to be an action packed week; we're taking applications from mentoring organizations in less than 24 hours. Should be an exciting sixth year for the program.

Calling all drupalchix planning on going to Drupal Camp Nashville http://drupalcampnashville.com/ next weekend (Saturday 3/13). I'd love to meet and maybe have a BOF at the camp just for drupalchix. Feel free to reply here or contact me if you're interested ... or just find me next weekend!

Note to my readers: Its been some weeks since I blogged and had started this entry on 2010-02-19 21:43 (roughly two weeks) ago and I am less inclined to modify the older writing so its "as is" thought bits about my first pycon experience!! Thanks to Broadcomm bcm43x drivers which made me jump hoops and downgrade the kernel version, I was having wifi issues and could not blog or tweet much during pycon. Broadcomm, please be less evil.

I reached Atlanta after 4pm on thursday afternoon and Sylvia and me went straight to the Chicago room to volunteer for bag-stuffing and there I was rushing a guy ahead in line, little realising that it was CarlT who recognized me but I was so fixated on the task at hand that I didnt notice whom i was talking to. Yikes, assigning nicks to faces is not my strength!

Next, it was onto the swag T-Shirts and since Greg had just 2 PP templates we had only two teams taking a go at it. Sylvia, me and Wei (and later various volunteers) had a simple humanized-robo process to maximize folded shirts output per minute. This drew tons of pycon gawkers and many onlookers wanted to pitch in and have a go at folding t-shirts. Greg's wife and daughter came to watch too. Our efforts were rewarded with yummy pizzas (yeah they had vegan pizza too) and drinks. It was a lot of fun for my first day and its really heart-warming to see icons who should be UP there, stand and work with you. The simplicity and lack of pride is endearing.

Friday, (the first day of) the conference, was kicked off by Van Lindberg and Steve Holden introducing the PSF and its objectives and stressing on the PSF's focus on diversity. This was echoed by GvR who started off his keynote for Pycon2010 wearing a t-shirt that had the python logo and "python is for girls", sent to him at Google by an anonymous person. Hmm...I am curious to know who is the $AnonPerson@Google !!

GvR is one speaker that I enjoyed listening to, for the casual twitter-feed keynote and yet informative speaking style sans slides. And no, GvR didnt wax eloquent on the "state of CPython" although that was what was listed on the guide. For someone of his stature, the lack of vanity in his community interactions is endearing and if you are not already a part of this space, you'd be inspired to want to chip in and do something. Another noteworthy aspect, the organizers make no bones about pycon being a commercial event. Unlike "some" private and commercial Indian events, there is no BS about claiming to be a "floss" event with shady financial(s) that are not privy to the community that makes the event, and neither is there a cabal that controls and pulls strings from behind the scenes.  Their honest and transparent process is admirable, akin to other community conferences.

A round of snacks later it was over to many luminary speakers from the Python community and the first talk I attended was "The Mighty Dictionary" by Brandon Craig Rhodes and then I attended, Managing the world's oldest Django project by James Bennett who explained why it was such a bad idea to have different branches for each of your clients which will lead to an unwieldy and incompatible codebase over a period of time. Deployment headaches with each server-client network running its own software instance. Their solution was "hosted service". He spoke about unit testing, its importance and how they used spidering tools to test sites for all hosted apps. Saying "No" to customizations and instead creating re-usable customized apps from some requests. IIRC, his parting shot was "FLOSS, Internal code becomes external dependency. Floss jettisons legacy code."

The vegan lunch was fabulous but more about the post-lunch sessions. They were, Python 3: The Next Generation by Mr. Wesley j. chun ; Maximize your program's laziness by Dr. David Q Mertz ; The Ring of Python - Holger Krekel. The latter was a talk I simply loved so go and watch the videos which are online and linked via the pycon website. This is another aspect of pycon that I love --Sharing videos with those that could not attend pycon. They dont assume the worst about people, as in, people will not attend the event if talks are made available online (and hence the organizers wont make money when attendance drops), not including other arrogant (if not) silly excuses that I have heard from certain Indian events.

In 2010, attendance topped previous pycon's. It was announced that this year diversity was at its peak with 113.3 women attendees.  No, I am not sure how 0.3% women attended pycon :). Danny blogged and Guido tweeted, and wrote to the list endorsing his support and thoughts on "diversity, people representing other countries and minority groups". I did make it a point to thank him and all the PSF member/organizers that I could remember for the PSF sponsorship, enabling me to attend. GloriaW deserves a special mention and a BIG thankyou for handling hyatt reservations for a bunch of women who were room sharing.

I also met Noufal and Satya (who was our room-share partner), who were also sponsored by the PSF this year. Satya was telling us about her horrid experience with the legendary US B1-visa process in India and the running around she had to endure. Hmmm, why am i not surprised at the horrid experience she had?! It was incredibly funny to hear that the officer asked her to speak in python....doh!! My immigration officer was a hulk at 6'4" and the only intimidating question he asked me was "So, is python like C language?" and before I could speak he cuts in with "Never mind, I'd never understand what you'd say. You are good to go."

LOL, more later.

I like the Plustek OpticFilm 7600i SE scanner. Just wish the software had a better UI.

read more

New post to Geek Feminism, in which I try to get people talking based upon this link that bokunenjin pointed out:

"The biggest enemy of hackerspaces"

I think commenter Meg nailed the more interesting problem on the head by saying that the real question is how to adapt the hackerspace model so that it's useful to a wider range of people, including those who may have not as much time. It seems like dreamwidth has done a pretty interesting job of making the open source model more attractive to more folk, and I'd love to see this done for other geek pursuits...

I'm trying to imagine drop-in fees for hackerspaces. Perhaps do it like the yoga studio I used to attend, where rather than paying for x months, you pay for x classes (or x days at the hacklab). Or playgroups for adults with kids (although I suppose some of the things around hackerspaces are dangerous, it might be possible to make a play area and have parents take turns watching the kids). Or... Hm. I'm curious as to what people already do. Perhaps another post will have to follow later.

I've been getting a lot of eye-strain headaches lately, which have really been ruining my productivity, so I figured that it was probably a good idea to go for an eye test.

There's always that bit when they're taking your history and the Optometrist asks "so what work do you do, Danielle?" and that knowing look you get when you reply "I'm a software engineer". Yeah, you're screwed.

Sometimes I'm surprised there's not some long running class-action against IBM for apparently inventing the device that has ruined the eyesight of two generations of men and women. Like the tobacco companies of the information technology sector. [Sarcasm.]

The end result is that my eyes definitely have gotten worse. I think the Optometrist said they were now at the point it would need to be marked on my driver's license, except VicRoads already pinged me for that when I moved to Victoria and needed my glasses to pass their eyetest. Oh, and thanks to a machine that looks like it's straight out of a Roger Moore-era Bond film, apparently my headaches have certainly been eye-strain related.

Last week I packed all of my belongings in a storage unit and left my house of 10 years. I've been paring down my possessions so that when I left I could comfortably fit all that remained in a 5x5 ft (1.5m) unit. I stuffed all of my clothes, a few important books, and electrical gadgets in a duffel bag and carry-on. That is what I will live out of for the foreseeable future. I've chosen to roam and I don't know when or where I'll stop. I have some preliminary plans to stay in Europe for most of the next eight months or so, but who knows where I'll be when. I'm in Dublin, Ireland right now, will be at DrupalCon San Francisco in April and intend to live in Copenhagen, Denmark this summer. That's about all I have sketched out.

The last year has been intense in a lot of different ways. I've also been in a deep depression for most of it. No need to get into lots of details, but one of the casualties of all this was my relationship with Colleen. It ended in October, after nine years together. Needless to say, we are both deeply saddened, but determined to work out a lasting friendship. I stayed in the empty house for as long as I could while we figured out what to do with it. Neither of us has any desire to stay in the shell that used to be our home. Aside from the ghostly experience of living in the house, Maryland itself doesn't have much to offer me these days. Most of my good friends from the area have moved away. The house is a quiet place of trees and memories, which I do love, but it also makes me feel cut off, adrift. And sad. Maryland is simply no longer a home for me, and returning there makes me feel empty instead of comforted. More has changed here than my relationship in just the last few months (not counting all of the shit from last year); the deeply wooded lot next to me has been ripped up (every single last ever-loving tree!) for new houses, my cats moved out to live with Colleen, and my elderly next-door neighbor killed himself on his front steps (that image is forever burned in my skull). The time has come to move on. I feel like I am living in a parody of my "home." It has been a good home, a great home, but my definition of home is changing. Or maybe my definition is the same but there is nothing that matches it any longer. What it is changing into or from, I don't know, but I know "home" is no longer here.

So I'm heading back into the world of experience and exploration to see what I can find. I'm not even sure what I'm looking for, but I will try (try, try) to have faith in my self that I will know something when I encounter it. That I won't continue to make fatal mistakes (ha!). I will need to work hard to be open on this journey. I'm beat up, fed up, exhausted, and oftentimes not very amused by all of this muckity-muck when I had a perfectly respectable life going on. But there is also a flame in me that is fascinated and pulls me forward in hope, gasping at fresh air. There is excitement mixed with fear and (self-)loathing. I choose to believe this is a cocktail for discovery and growth instead of despair.

So. I am homeward bound but homeless. And I'm OK with that. Let the journey unfold.

“You’re doing it wrong.”  I believe is one of the most counterproductive statements a person can make.

First of all – that statement gets little accomplished.  Typically it makes the person that is “doing it wrong” dig deeper to defend their work.  Why – well they are WORKING CREATING ACCOMPLISHING.  Something is vested and so therefore I must defend that time and effort on my part that I have vested.  It is a natural and some what justifiable human response.

And it be honest, “You’re doing it wrong” is typically an inaccurate statement.  Instead it should be “I think that you are not creating what I think I want.” Or perhaps instead “you are not doing what I would do.”  And sometimes “you are not doing what 99% of the rest of the world would do.”  That doesn’t actually make it wrong…  I mean Feynman talks about science being that constant challenging of norms and experimentation.  When is something actually 100% wrong?

I strive in life to be the person that helps people figure out that instead of them both fighting over the orange.  One person wants the peel while the other needs the juice.

So I am working on this citability codeathon.  It is interesting to me that many view me as dictating a standard that is incompatible with whatever they are doing and therefore my project must be competition.  This reminds me when I was at the National NonProfit Congress and I had to facilitate a discussion between two Nonprofits that were angry that the other was “stealing their poor people.”  I view this as losing sight of the cause or the reason we do what we do.

Our mutual goal is to make data citable and therefore more accessible to the people.  There are many paths there.

For the codeathon, I have several groups that will be attending.  At first glance, it might seem we are at odds.  For example everyone assumes that Joe Carmel’s Legislink.org must conflict w Citability.  He and I talked for several hours.  They don’t.  Actually citability may make his job easier.  We both know we could never get all the govt sites to adopt citability and that makes his tool quite necessary.

Also the Coins and URN:LEX crowd, those datamarkup standards can easily be added to the citability markups.  URN:LEX isn’t for everyone since it must be created and maintained by a governmental body but there is no reason why we can’t add a special parser to citability to add those fields when they are available.  Same with the semantic web.  Citability only requires 3 things: A unique location, datestimestamp and granularity.   There is so much more to be added.  When it was created, we KNEW it wasn’t perfect.

I suppose when you start a project from a point of view where you know what you are doing is not the complete answer, it makes it easier to see adaptive solutions.

I consider what we are doing with citability to be a baby step.  I don’t consider it to be right and other ways wrong.  I typically find that if we can sit down and talk there are easily ways to make things interoperable.  I believe that citability is right for a small part of what we are trying to accomplish.  I don’t think it is perfect.  Far from it.  I think eventually we will have some fascinating structures to build folksonomies, taxonomies and ontologies on top of this esp where we can specialize for different documents etc.

I know that Tim Berners-Lee is doing a huge project in the UK with Linkeddata.  I think that is awesome.  But I’m not sure about that project being available for the City of Austin anytime soon.  I am working within some very limited constraints.  I really want him to succeed. It would make many things easier if he does.  But this doesn’t mean I stop doing what I am trying to do.  It doesn’t mean our way of doing things is wrong. Life is evolution.  We use HTML 5 and XML now

But for now, I am trying to do what I believe is right for now.  Doesn’t mean I think what you are doing is wrong.  Just maybe wrong for me.  But there are so few of us creating in this space… I find it sad to argue over someone stealing their poor people…  Instead, let’s talk and see if maybe you just want juice while I am eying that orange peel.  And yes you are INVITED to the codeathon to work on your project as well just make sure it is Open Source

The short version:
- Cook some rice the day before you're going to make fried rice. It really does work better; warm, the rice tends to break down and turn to mush.
- Take vegables, chop into small pieces. [Technically they should be uniform small pieces but we're not all rapier1 :-P.]
- Optionally, do the same with meat. Marinate first if you like.
- Optionally, scramble an egg or make a very thin omelet & cut it into strips.
- Cook the above seperately or in small groups.
- If you want sauce/flavoring, add it to the meat ond/or vegables
- FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS TASTY DO NOT put more than a few dashes of soy sauce, IF ANY, on the rice or the finished product.
- Once your vegs or meat & vegs are cooked, stir fry the rice, add the rest, toss, PIG OUT.



Yesterday I cooked up 2 cups (dried) of brown rice with the intent of making some fried rice.

Many years ago when I was a poor college student living in the depths of the Oakland section of Pittsburgh I lived a block away from a tiny food coop. It was great because you could go in and buy, like, 3 mushrooms, an egg and a couple of stalks of green onions for a dollar or two. I'd take that home and cook it up and add it to some rice. Simple and filling.

Today I was far, far more adventurous. First up, the chicken & the mushrooms. I forgot to take some of the frozen chicken¹ out to thaw, so this was my chance to thaw & cook the chicken and rehydrate the dried shiitaki at the same time. I put the chicken in a frying pan with some broken-up mushrooms and about 3 cups of water mixed with half a packet of flavoring from the "good" (nong shim) ramen packets & simmered it for a bit.

While it was going I spent time chopping vegetables that were not yet chopped³, in bursts, as my hands have been very bad lately.

Once everything else was in zipper-lock bags⁴ I moved over to the stove, with some bowls (both small & large), to start things up.

The chicken & the mushrooms were dumped, with the liquid, into one of the large bowls.

Frying pan was wiped, most of this was done on a medium high heat.

Next, the onion. I had a red onion, 2-3 handfuls went in to some hot oil in the frying pan. I really dislike biting into huge chunks of onion so these pieces were chopped relatively finely.

While those were starting to cook I started shredding the chicken, pulling it into small pieces, which went into a smaller bowl. Once that was done I tossed it with some dark soy sauce (the stuff with mole-asses in it) and oyster sauce. Then as time permitted between the next few vegables, I further chopped the mushroom pieces and added them to that same bowl.

Once the onion was starting to brown (you might prefer it less cooked) I tossed in half a chopped orange capsicum (bell pepper)⁵ and some chopped celery and took to stirring that up. When that was heated yet still crispy, into a big bowl. A couple of shakes of dark soy sauce and black vinegar went in, too.

Next up: the last of the gai lan. Chinese broccoli tastes closer to spinach than western broccoli, but has a mix of leaves and thick stalks. That went into a pan of a little hot oil, and after a minute, also got some of the chicken-mushroom-cooking liquid, enough to coat the bottom of the pan. This let the it steam more than fry. By the time the liquid had evaporated the gai lan was heated, vividly green and the stalk pieces still crisp with the right give. This went into the big bowl with the onion-capsicum-celery mix.

Egg: Really, egg-in-a-carton. About 2-3 eggs worth went into the frying pan, along with a little bit of (regular) soy sauce. There are usually two methods to this madness. One is to just pretend it's scrambled egg, the other is to make a thin omelet and then slice it up. I went for the former, then threw it into the bowl-O-vegables.

Now it all went together. Wiped the pan, added a little oil, reheated at a heat a little higher than before In went half the cooked rice - If I'd been using a wok, I realized belatedly, I could have done it all at once, but at the time I was only going to make half a batch. Ha. Anyways, the rice got stirred around until the grains started to separate. Then the chicken and mushrooms went in. Then, here's where I failed -- the whole thing of vegables went in. Turns out I'd made WAY more than what was needed for one batch.⁶

I wound up dumping that into one of the big bowls, "frying" the rest of the rice, then putting some of the big mix in, then mixing it all together in the big bowl [it wouldn't fit in my frying pan].

Let me repeat what I said above: FOR THE LOVE OF TASTE PLEASE! Do not add craploads of soy sauce to the rice or to the finished rice. It's like making a steak and coating it with so much steak sauce all you're tasting is the sauce. Sauce your meats & vegables, but don't make soup, and drain them if needed before it gets added to the rice (or it will get mushy). If you've done this right, you have a mix of flavorful ingredients and rice, and the flavors all mix together for yum.

[You may, however, add a dash of sriracha, if you're like me and it goes in everything but the coffee.]

Thus ends my tale of BUUUUUUUURP (excuse me⁷) my fried rice adventure.

------
¹And then I find #4 screw up from my last food chopping trip. 1st I found that the "shrimp & pork" dumplings I bought at the Chinese grocer was really "fish and pork" wontons (with soup base!). Then I discovered that the "pork & vegetable" dumplings I bought there were really "pork and cilantro"². THEN I found that the tuna cans I bought were tuna in oil. Today I found that the frozen chicken boobs are really frozen chicken boob tenders. And, yes, I shopped from a list!

²I'm one of those weirdos for who(m) cilantro tastes like soap. So I had two meals of tasty (blech) soap dumplings.

³It's not uncommon for me to decide I want some vegable I have fresh, chop it all, use some of it, and store the rest in the fridge or freezer.

⁴Dang I love zipper-lock baggies, but the dang zipper thing keeps coming off. I've gotten really good at putting the damn things back on.

⁵I find green capsicums too bitter and they upset my stomach [my dad was allergic to them, hmm], but I find that the deeper colored ones are sweeter and less upsetting. Purple ones are the most awesome but are of course absurdly expensive. I lucked into the orange one on sale.

⁶This is a common problem for me when I'm cooking on the fly. I always think I don't have enough of something and toss more in. End result: TONS OF FOOD.

⁷ Long live Stumpus Maximus!

In the past few years, the use of Linux in embedded devices has skyrocketed. Televisions, phones, cars, ATMs: you name it, it probably has Linux running in it. At the recent Mobile World Congress, Linux dominated virtually every product announcement: Samsung’s Bada, many new Android phones, the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo project, Palm, and many more. Embedded Linux today has been nearly as disruptive as Linux was in the data center in the 90s and 2000s as it displaced proprietary Unix OSes.

With massive growth comes the need for skilled developer talent. As many of you know, the Linux Foundation launched Linux training courses for developer and sys admins last year, and has been steadily expanding its offerings. This January we announced a free webinar series to help connect developers to the experts they need to advance their careers. Based on the demand we’re seeing in light of these recent announcements, we are announcing a new free training webinar on embedded Linux.

In this free webinar, you will receive the basics of embedded Linux development and get an overview of best practices. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn about a very hot area in technology. I hope you take advantage of it and find it useful for your career.

We also have a five day course on embedded Linux development for those ready to dive in on March 22 in the Bay Area. There are a few spots left so please register if interested. Those who attend the free webinar will receive a discount for the course.

This is something I did not know. The bitters used in lemon, lime and bitters are infact 45% alcohol by volume. Admittedly, you only add a dash to the drink, so there is practically no alcohol, but still some (if that's important to you for whatever reason).

Hat-tip to Lisa.

~

Saw Rosie Burgess Trio this afternoon with Steph and Jo. Claims of it being at the bowling club were a lie, as it was actually at the RSL across the footy oval. We walked around the clearly shut bowling club a bit first before trying the RSL out of desperation (she had posted to Facebook reminding people of the gig). The RSL looked really quiet too, but we noticed a tiny billing stuck to the notice board and eventually found it out the back. Hooray.

They played a double set to about 15 people (everyone else probably gave up after wandering around the bowls club?). They're playing in Collingwood in 4 weeks at the Bendigo Hotel. Why yes, I do believe we've become those fans.

People who are going to get smacked by me include:




- People who think that climate changes can't be real because of the snow storms and unusual weather in some places. [Whether there is "global warming", go learn about statistics and average]

- People who think {insert-diety-of-choice} is causing the snow, the quakes in Chile & Haiti, etc. I believe in God but I refuse to believe in a God that either micromanages people's lives or casually kills thousands because of a pissy mood about whatever we're doing on this planet.

- People who think the US government should never "get into" the health care business, implying that they've never been "in" the health care business in the first place.

- People who think that any sort of government run or managed health care system available to everyone in the US is really going to fix the health care gaps that exist now. See the above business they're currently screwing up.

- People who think the Welfare systems can be successfully replaced by private charities. Do you even understand where they came from in the first place? They came from a ECONOMIC DEPRESSION in which the private charities were folding because of lack of donations and those that kept going weren't able to keep up with the demand. Gee, let's see, what's our economy like right now... and what's the demand for relief like?

- People who insist that Bush acted alone to leave the legacy of economic mess, among other things, as if he was King of the US.

- People who are screaming for the removal of Obama because he hasn't fixed the economy or stopped the wars in a year. Go learn basic economics. Go look at what happened in Vietnam at the end of that 'offensive'.

- People who think the next nitwit will be any better than the last pile.

- People who insist that their tax money shouldn't be spent on {FILL IN BLANK}. These are the usually people who bitch about how much money is spent on defense spending and then turn around & whine about how our country isn't protected when bad things happen. These are often the people who complain about speed limits and scream for justice when accidents happen. These are commonly the people who want their local tax rates cut so that police & fire units lose funding and the roads have giant potholes, then scream bloody murder when their house is broken into, catches fire, or their car is damaged by the roads.

- Related: People who don't want their tax money paying for health care for the poor. If I go to the hospital right now, who do you think is paying my bill? The hospital? No, it's coming out of YOUR POCKET. From tax support, from hospital bills, from insurance payments. YOU.

- People who generally refuse to learn about or from history, often because the facts do or might conflict with other beliefs.

Did I mention I recently took one of those "Where's your political bent" quizzes? I came up with right-leaning libertarian. PONDER THAT.

MORE WHEN THE ANGER SUBSIDES, if there's any skin left on my hand.

We list on our Drupalchix page description that we have make up of 10% women, compared to Propietary/commercial software is 25% and Opensource at 1.5% from the audio file at DrupalCamp LA. Also good notes from OSCon presentation on Kirrily Robert's blog.

In DrupalCampLA they listed the make up "somewhere around 14-20%", yet only a small percentage of those women actively participate in the meet-ups, camps, code-sprints and other Drupal activities.
http://2009.drupalcampla.com/drupalchix

How are we generating these statistics? Is this attendance at Drupal events? DrupalCamp? Committers? Organisers?

I've been involved in organising two DrupalCamps in Ireland and I've never been asked to hand over any gender info. It wouldn't be too hard to gather this information from organizers.

How did we come up with the 10% and how did DrupalCampLA come up with 14-23%?

Над тези стръмни стрехи от железо
и тези булеварди от асфалт
поне един път няма ли да слезе
снегът от небесата като бял
и лъчезарен ангел? Аз не вервам.

Във този черен като въглен град
ще бъде зимата наверно черна,
незнайни - ангелите и снегът.
И ако дойде накога, без жал
жестоки ще го стъпкат със обувките си
стражарите и проститутките,
ще му почернят белите пера
димът на гарите и на комините...

Бял сняг ще има само във градините,
където са играели деца.

— Атанас Далчев