In both of my recent talks involving women and Free Software the audience has latched onto something I didn't expect. At OSDC it was the GNOME finding that they only got women applying for their summer of code projects once they created special ones for women. I think I expected people to have heard about that already, but they hadn't. (GNOME had zero applications from women for Google Summer of Code, and some hundreds for the Women's Summer Outreach variant.) There were probably a couple of things going on there aside from women responding to a specific invitation — in particular, computer science academics at some universities getting excited about being able to give their women students a specific invitation — but clearly invitations are part of what's going on.

There is a karmic debt to do some work already incurred by giving these talks, but since the work I do isn't Free Software and wouldn't be generally useful if I released it as such (I know a lot of people say this about their work, but I try and predict word usage based on the opinion of the document, this really is quite niche software) and I had a reasonable idea for a variant on this kind of talk, I gave a second one anyway, at the LinuxChix miniconf. It was titled 'Starting Your Free Software Adventure' and happened to use women as examples. The idea was to show people what the first steps look like. I conducted (extremely short) interviews of several women involved in Free Software or Culture or their communities, including Kristen Carlson Accardi, Brenda Wallace and Terri Oda among others. (I intend to make the slides available, but since I quoted the subjects extensively and directly, it will require gathering permission and then a bit of work editing them.)

As I noted previously this talk was a failure all up, because the wrong audience turned up for it. But one thing stood out and kept coming up all week: Terri mentioning that she had resisted at times working on things perceived as 'girl stuff'. In Free Software this includes but is not limited to documentation, usability research, community management and (somewhat unusually) sometimes management in general. The audience immediately hit on it, and it swirled around me all week.

This is a perennial problem for professional women: software development is by no means unique in having developed a hierarchy that goes from high status roles disproportionately occupied by and associated with men to somewhat lower status roles disproportionately occupied by and associated with women. (In the case of software, disproportionately occupied by women still means male dominated, by the way, at least in the English-speaking world.) It's difficult to disentangle the extent to which women and/or their mentors and teachers self-select for the lower status roles (and I would hardly argue that the self-selection occurs in a vacuum either) versus the extent to which they are more or less barred from high status roles versus the extent to which the association is actually flipped and professions and jobs within them have become low status because women started doing them. Other well-known examples, are, for example, the concentration of women in biological sciences as opposed to, say, physics, the different specialisation choices of male and female medical doctors and surgeons, and so on. Sometimes, as in the war between sciences, the status of a field is somewhere between a joke and real, to the extent that those can be differentiated, but often it isn't: there's a correlation between the male to female ratio of a medical specialty and its pay.

In all of these cases, a woman who is conscious of this problem tends to face a choice. Do the 'girl stuff', or not? (Of course, ideally one rejects the dichotomy, but no individual woman is responsible for constructing it, and if you are sincerely of the belief that one is not programmed to a frightening and unavoidable extent by one's social context we're working from very different premises and don't have a lot to say to each other.) And some, although I don't know what proportion, of women feel guilty about their choice, especially if they do choose to do girl stuff. Just go ahead and imagine your own scare quotes from now on, by the way.

It also gets messy in various other ways. There's the extent to which a woman who doesn't do girl stuff is invested in maintaining the status she has chosen and also the aforementioned loop where if women are doing something, it will come to be seen as not particularly hard or noteworthy.

Most concretely, I usually see this tension bubble away underneath outreach programmes promoting computing careers (you know what, I have my own status issues and I still resist calling it IT) to women. There's the people who want to go for yeah we all know coding is populated by weirdos, and male weirdos at that, luckily you don't have to be a geek and you don't have to code, phew! I tend to hear about that one only once my outreach friends have gotten involved and staged a coup, admittedly. There's the there's so many opportunities in computing, and yes, coding is one of them and its fulfilling and it's something you can do, but dammit, coders get all the cred and attention and dammit can we talk about something else? Women who admin/write/test/manage rock! And there's you know, women coders don't exactly rule the world yet, and furthermore isn't all this oh-yes-you-could-code-I-guess-and-that's-a-fine-thing but look! something for folks with people skills! talk basically a soft version of ew coding that's for boys, also, last I checked, math is hard?

I observe again that there's no right answer here in the real world right now. Women doing girl stuff have good reasons to feel dissatisfied that their hard-won skills are underpaid and under-respected, women doing boy stuff (scare quotes! please insert!) want other women to know that there's fun to be had over here, thank you.

One crucial point in my thoughts about this I stumbled on only after the conversation Brianna Laugher recounts, over Indian on the Friday night (the location of all major conference breakthroughs worldwide). She said — paraphrased — that she didn't feel that she should have a problem or be criticised for doing what she is good at, or what's so desperately needed in her communities, and have to be just another coder in order to be fully respected. And I said that while this was certainly true, women also need to have the opportunity, to give themselves the opportunity, to be selfish: if they want to code, or do something else they are currently either bad at or not notably good at, or for that matter which they are good at but in which they'd have competitors, they should consider doing that, rather than automatically looking for and filling the space that is most obviously empty.

I had a brief, but related conversation with Jeff Waugh at the Professional Delegates Networking Session — an attempt to formally recreate the Indian diner breakthrough environment —  at which he commented that he continued to find the invitation culture (the same one I discussed in my OSDC talk) of women in Free Software mystifying and frustrating. (Not his exact words, if you have better adjectives Jeff let me know.) I took that one somewhere else: specifically to invitation cultures outside Anglo culture and then to honorific use in the Korean language, but when considering the question of women I think this is intertwined with the be selfish thing: women are reluctant to enter places where they aren't obviously welcomed, and what better way to be welcomed than to do work that needs doing and not become just another person doing the coding free-for-all and delaying external validation for potentially quite a long time?

I have no answers. Just the perennial question of distinguishing what other people want, what other people claim they want, the genuine satisfaction of being of service to someone, and the genuine satisfaction of knowing you've done a good job of something hard. Take a look at where you're standing on that one occasionally.

Why does the terminal beep still exist? There are approximately six quintillion laptops owned by Free Software developers, and none of their owners have ever carefully muted the sound, proceeded to do something hugely important like a non-matching search in Firefox and got the evil eye from unimportant people like the lecturer grading the course for the series of loud humiliating beeps coming from their direction? Or you all have pcspkr blacklisted or what?

$ whois deathtobeeps.com

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

No match for "DEATHTOBEEPS.COM".

Implausible.

There are calls for blood donations after the bushfires have killed and injured so many people in Victoria. I am a long-time donor and armchair expert, so I thought I'd share some tips.

First, info for those who just need a prod:

• you usually need an appointment to donate blood in most places in Australia. Information at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service or by calling 13 14 95 inside Australia. If they can't get you in this week, donate anyway, severe burns victims need long-term treatment, and there will, of course, be other ill people later too.
• the Blood Service has some information about the process itself
• do check the health guidelines as to whether you can give blood now, or at all. If you are sick right now, wait until you have been well for a week or more.

Pressuring people indiscriminately to donate is one of my (many) pet peeves, since so many people are excluded for health reasons or due to risk factors and all it accomplishes is a pointless guilt-trip about who is or is not a better person by virtue of being able to donate. So I want to clarify: I know many cannot donate for any one of hundreds of reasons (including, by the way, phobias and so on: the Blood Service would actually prefer that you not donate if you are going to faint or need a lot of care!). I've been one of these people at times. If you cannot or would strongly prefer not to for any reason, go about your business with equanimity. This post is for the curious and the undecided.

If you have donated blood before and it was fairly easy, please consider a plasma donation. Plasma is a crucial product in treating burns patients and there's generally a strong need for it at all times. It's taken in whole blood (standard) donations too, but dedicated plasma donations supply more of it. If you have blood type AB (Rhesus negative or positive, it doesn't matter), you are a universal plasma donor, so you are a particularly good candidate for plasma donations. It needs good veins, so if you've had difficulty donating whole blood before stick to that. This type of donation takes a bit longer, and is done via apheresis. You can continue being a whole blood donor periodically and also be a regular plasmapheresis donor too. There are a couple of extra health questions for a plasma donation (because you will receive some anti-coagulants), so give the Blood Service a call if you are considering donating plasma for the first time.

Now for the ones who have trouble with whole blood. I am blood group O, Rhesus negative, a universal donor for red blood cells (excluding a few rare blood types). O negative people, while generous to others, can only be transfused with O negative red blood cells ourselves, so we are desirable as donors both because our blood is useful in emergencies if there isn't time for cross-matching, and because O negative patients specifically need it. I am also, last time I asked anyway, one of the pretty small percentage of Australian adults who has no immune response to CMV, which means I've never had it and I can't give it to anyone else. (Like chicken pox, it's a kind of herpes and the infection is permanent.) So my blood is like liquid gold, taken straight from me and rushed to O negative immunocompromised patients via a quick stop off to exclude infections, as best I can tell.

And this is the only reason I am still a blood donor. The difficulty I have giving blood would have caused me to be excluded by now otherwise, I have veins that are both buried deep and very slim. So I have some tips for others who have hard to find veins:

• if you don't yet drink a lot of water before donating, start doing so. A litre or so seems about right, and then another half litre or so every half hour or so if you need to maintain. You want to be over-hydrated, not just the normal good hydration that you want going about your day. (No need to go nuts, I was once advised to drink two litres down and maintain, but my kidneys started hurting in the middle of the donation! And drinking crazy amounts of water can make you seriously ill.)
• if you have ever had them actually not get a vein at all, or not get a full donation (this is known as 'Did Not Bleed' in your charts, I have it 4 times), go to the donor centres (not the mobile blood units) look your interviewer in the eye and calmly tell them you want to have the senior phlebotomist do your donation, please. I have this written into my donor record now, and I often get someone who has worked with palliative care or chemotherapy patients, there is nothing a blood donor's veins can do to them that will thwart them.

Spam is of course unsolicited commercial email, or at least any unwanted email obvious enough that we expect a spam filter can catch it. (They seem to regard filtering unwanted mail from senders we also get wanted mail from as outside their scope, which is probably fair enough considering that it's false positives that really drive their best-paying users up the wall.)

There are terms for the niggles that get through, especially by virtue of coming from a trusted sender: I introduced the term tofu to several people on Identica and Twitter yesterday: it's activist spam, those (usually manually sent but massively Bcc-ed) emails asking you to attend a meeting or a rally or sign a petition. (More alert activists send these with sorry for the tofu but... at the top.) I was in turn introduced to the term bacn, for email which is solicited in the ethical email marketing sense (you've subscribed to it) but which then becomes something to delete or skip.

Which brings me to a couple of types of unwanted email that need their own snackfood-related term. I suppose the bacn precedent means they're supposed to have four letters, too:

reminders to participate in something I agree is very important but that everyone knows about

One of the things I love best about compulsory voting in Australia (FAQ: how can you bear to live in a country that would gaol you for not voting? I have no idea, in my country it attracts a fine of about $20, think of it as like skipping jury duty except a lot cheaper) is not having everyone nag me by email, phone and finally door-to-door approaches to get out the vote for weeks, at best, before an election. Fund-raising can become equivalently aggressive. (By extension from compulsory voting I suppose I should argue for such high taxes that no one has to, or can, donate money to charity.)

calls for papers

Many academics, especially in computer science, receive endless emails to their individual address reminding them that the deadline for the International Conference for Synergistic E-Knowledge in the Wireless Classroom, etc, has a deadline coming up soon. They're somewhat targeted: I get a lot more to my .edu.au addresses than to my personal ones, and computer organisations like SLUG get them too. These should fall into the category of spam, since they're unsolicited and you have to pay for the conference, but they don't fall under the new definition of spam, stuff that spam filters actually recognise. (Mind you, at university I think the only thing Barracuda does reliably classify as spam is Mailman held-mail summaries, but it's especially bad at these conference mails and also at anything to do with watches.) I get several a week and by the do I want these people up against the wall when the revolution comes? metric of spaminess, it is time to have a word for this blight.