Author: Mary

I suspect that Ten easy ways to attract women to your free software project will do the rounds pretty quickly, but I at least hadn’t seen it until this morning. It’s a list of project management decisions you can make that would arguably make it more likely that women will be involved in some kind of development. They’re largely only ‘easy’ for a new project which is when many of these decisions are still open, but for what it’s worth, some of them are:

• Use forums instead of mailing lists
• As much as possible, use wikis instead of version controlled archives
• Don’t discount what women do [‘what women do’ here used as ‘community management, documentation and similar activities’, via Geek chicks: second thoughts]

The justifications are reasonably lengthy and are in the linked article. I’m not going to comment extensively on what I think of the article, except to wonder about whether these are women friendly measures or people friendly measures. (A loose analogy: writing prose in such a way as to be accessible to non-native or non-fluent readers of your language is actually very helpful to native speakers as a side effect. I am of course hardly the first person to make the point that changing environments to suit women’s needs may suit men as well, it’s commonly made for workplaces.)

Instead, I want to talk about forum software. I can’t say whether women in general might prefer it, perhaps they do, but gosh, what a pain in the neck. I would never be casually involved in a project that ran over a forum. (If I liked the project enough, I might be deeply involved.) Here’s what’s involved in using a forum:

• Thinking of a user name (very few have a tradition of mostly using full legal names, like email does, which means finding one that is unused etc etc)
• Thinking of a password, storing it somewhere for later use etc (I haven’t seen forum software supporting OpenID yet)
• Picking some kind of avatar for myself.
• Learning how to use this new piece of software, how do I search for things, how do I post new things, how do I reply to things, how do I find replies to my posts?
• Having to use my web browser’s text input tool as an editor. Argh, oh, my hands, my brain!
• Dealing with the inevitably poor accessibility decisions of web forum software. (I don’t know when people over the age of 50 will be targeted as the next under-represented demographic in Free Software development, but the time of the hyperopic will come.)
• Not being able to deal with anything to do with the project when not connected to the Internet. (I am something of a last woman standing here, but I do a lot of offline email work, it’s quite productive to sit on a train and plow through it.)

In my email client, I either don’t have to deal with any of these things or I’ve overcome them already and I deal with them the same way for every bit of email I deal with. I can casually join 30 mailing lists. I can’t casually lurk on 30 forums.

At the same time, the argument in the article is that forum software destroys the perception that everyone in the project is equally important, which both lessens the problem of one or two loud voices being perceived as in control, and motivates socially-oriented people by giving them some visible measure of reputation, etc. I hope at some point in the future forums, Usenet and email breed some kind of hideous yet effective love-child: protocols and software that allow more subtly moderated communities that nevertheless do not require that I use a different piece of software for every community I am in.

Note that I am not writing this entry seeking advice on how to organise things, with one exception, which is if people have systems for keeping track of academic literature I’d be interested to hear them. Otherwise, I’m just toying around with self-recognition. If you want to talk about your own bulletproof self-organisation strategies, please do so in your own space and I’d be happy to receive a link.

Jonathan Lange admits to some serious Getting Things Done violations which, although I am not a GTD user — in fact I have only skimmed the book — sparked some thought in me about my own organisation practices, or lack thereof.

First off, I mentioned this to my mother this afternoon and she said face it, you’re not an organised person. This is only partially true: she’s thinking of shoes, keys, wallets, pieces of paper and getting out the door on time, all of which I was hopeless with when living with her, and I’ve only improved dramatically at the timing thing. I am bad with physical objects.

I am, on the other hand, good with data. Part of the reason I can maintain certain amounts of physical chaos is that I have a good memory for names, dates, times and commitments. I am good with organising things inside my computer, occasionally a little too good in the I know I put this somewhere sensible but where? way but usually good.

What’s working for me:

• Using an online calendar for anything I can attach a time to. It took about six months of occasional flesh wounds until Andrew and I were both fully converted to our new insanely scheduled way, but since around the end of 2005 we’ve been going strong. I can look at my calendar and 99% of the time it really does reflect every firm time commitment I’ve made to anything. And when I haven’t spent a weekend entirely at home since July, that’s important. We used Web Calendar for a long time until its faulty repeating-events logic drove me into the arms of Google Calendar, which works like a charm although in principle I would prefer to own that data entirely.
• Email. It is highly procmailed and I am trying to add new rules all the time as an empty-ish inbox makes me happy. I’m not really trying for inbox zero, but inbox close-enough is OK. In most cases, my inbox contains only stuff I need to act on.
• Scanning my snail mail to PDF. This probably doesn’t sound ideal because it’s not searchable, but neither is paper. And as previously established, I am better at electronic stuff than paper.

Obvious improvements I could make:

• Carrying my calendar around with me. This would mean synchronising it to an electronic device and/or updating it on the road via mobile Internet of some variety. The reason I haven’t is that I am a cheapskate on the subject of both small electronic devices and paying the current (I believe outrageous) mobile data costs. I’m sure this will happen eventually, once it slides under my cheapskate threshold or I get a job which bundles it.
• Better searchability for my email. Mairix is the most obvious solution (I have, for reasons not worth discussing, approximately zero interest in moving to Gmail), but I haven’t got around to hacking it up for my many copies of my mail on various computers and, also, I archive my old email to gzipped mboxes, which need a different solution.

Things I’m staying on top of, usually:

• Photos, barring the photos of our November 2007 scuba trip to Thailand that I promised would be online in December. (Luckily, I promised it to people who do not have my email address.) No solution there: scuba photos need post-processing. We’re still using a kludged-up joint f-spot database over sshfs deal. I’d look into web things if it wasn’t for the pain and expense of dealing with the 29 gigabytes of photos I already have.
• Music. We are oh-so-slowly re-ripping CDs to FLAC, but only because we are nuts. In the meantime, Squeezecenter finds us what we need.

Things I am totally at sea with:

• Returning library books. No, I’m really really bad. I think I need to be strict with myself here: only one book at a time, and if I haven’t started reading it within a week, or I’ve lost steam, back it goes.
• Long term lists of things I want to view or read. I have book and movie recommendations coming out my ears. I want to read more and watch more. I never keep notes.
• Paper notes. I never never never got on top of this after high school. I don’t think that I ever once reviewed my hand-written university notes for any course at all. I am also a sufficiently fluent writer that taking notes does not greatly enhance my listening: it just all flows out through the pen without much effort in understanding it in the meantime. Plus I lose them or leave them at home. Moleskines, lab notebooks, meeting notes, I’m hopeless at them all unless I immediately transcribe them and email them to myself. This was a more serious impediment when I was doing maths courses, which are difficult to transcribe, but it’s still a major problem for PhD meetings.
• PhD readings. This one is important and I need to solve it. I do not have a good system of filing (virtually, remember how I suck at paper?) papers that I will want to refer to, replicate or improve on. I am thinking of moving to some kind of wiki setup with a whole lot of folksonomy-ish tagging and notes aimed at enhancing searchability. (Our field’s major conference and major journal both are moving electronic only, but they are still PDF and still style guides aimed at printability rather than indexability and will be so for ever and ever.) I need to get quicker with my summarisation of papers, probably mainly focusing on the area, major technique employed, test corpus, and indicative percentage accuracies, rather than full summaries.

I have just given into creeping adulthood and actually decided to do something that I’ve been putting off for a year or so on the basis that it is totally insane and obnoxious: I have started scheduling free time, specifically, I am marking weekends in the calendar on which neither Andrew nor I will not commit to doing anything or going anywhere with anyone else. I’m aiming to do this once a month or so, because barring our trip to New Zealand (world’s smallest violin, I know) we haven’t had such a thing since June, and then before that April and only because I was in my post-recompression exercise and travel ban in April. And this is for me, a borderline introvert, and Andrew, who is so introverted that Myers-Briggs cannot distinguish him from a lifelong hermit.

Even sadder: the first weekend I could find to do such a thing is more than a month from now.

Also sad, although again more in a world’s smallest violin kind of way: even on those weekends, we’re talking about squeezing some scuba in, which may not sound like such a big deal, but it’s 90 minutes commute each way to the beach from here, and also I have to re-plan all my diving around DCS first.

Clearly all this is very indulgent, but seriously, I feel like I haven’t really had much of a rest in my life since about the time we started planning our wedding, which was from about February last year. (We married in May last year, but that didn’t help because we just moved onto new time consuming challenges.) Partly it’s because I want to vanish into a PhD thesis pit like I want a whole in the head, but partly it’s because I have problems with saying no. But once a month I intend to practice. ‘NO, NO, NO, NO, NO’. Seems easy, right? I’m on the case.

I’ve been, and am still, a member of various women-in-tech groups aimed at promoting women’s participation in or education about various geeky things. A couple of months back Melissa and I were discussing another of these groups (not one I’m in) which apparently has an IRC channel which is less women talking among themselves and more a place for men to come and talk to women about their personal problems.

We went on to discuss what a common problem this is: frankly it’s the major failure mode of women-in-tech groups that I know of (excepting just not doing anything, which is the major failure mode of every endeavour ever). It’s not so much about actual sex: if nothing else, it’s easier to get agreement among women members that your local supporting-women-in-tech arena is not supposed to be a place to pick up. It’s more about emotional vampirism: that is, people (especially men) who show up in order to have a place to off-load their emotional woes and pick up whatever cuddles they aren’t getting elsewhere. (Or, sometimes, men who don’t need emotional support but just want to hang with their women friends and shoot the breeze… who attract more men who are there to shoot the breeze with the existing men, thus resulting in a place that is called a women’s group but is in fact a bunch of men talking to each other. But at least the core participants will be more sane when you explain the problem.)

In women’s blogs apparently the problem is more reasonably well-meaning men who show up just asking if the women would mind breaking it down for them a little. I mean, please? Men yell stuff about your body in the street? C’mon. How often does that really happen? Is it actually a problem or is there just one guy left in the whole world doing this stuff already? (You can go here and find out more about that, by the way. The answer is: for a lot of women, it’s a hell of a lot. And also, the endless advice given to feminists and various activists about how to make their message friendlier and cuddlier and one day we promise it will be friendly and cuddly enough to be listened to we promise really this time for sure, that’s called concern trolling and I love that it has a name.)

Anyway, the reason this tends to be hard to deal with is that once it sets in many women participants do want to help these guys, occasionally to the point of wanting to explicitly re-purpose the group to do so. I mean, they’re there, they’re on board with the goals, they aren’t horribly rude (it’s depressing how many people have this as their acceptable standard of behaviour for good person worth hanging out with) and they, sometimes, actually are in need of someone to talk to and probably could do something with the love of a good woman, etc. Or, in some cases, they’re actually your friend from work who you invited because he’s a really nice guy and so wants to help. But meanwhile women are showing up wanting help with your C++ API, or to confirm whether or not the guy who has the keys to the ftp server really did say that about his wife and what to do about it and they’re finding a bunch of men all running their own woes past a bunch of women and a lot of them are thinking yeah, you know, I do that for enough men already.

And this inspired me to go out and provide a few resources if you’re thinking of founding a geeky women group, particularly one that is going to have social or semi-social spaces (you will almost never have an IRC channel that is anything else, by the way). I have wikied up a couple of statements of purpose (and codes of behaviour) that your group could hack up for their own purposes. I recommend doing so fairly early on in your group’s history.

A link that I’ve passed on to other people enough to warrant putting it here: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site by the Yahoo Exceptional Performance Team. They have a Firefox extension YSlow to identify likely problem areas for you.

There seems to have been a run of blog recommendations while I was away (Catie, Kirrily, Nicholas, Penny). And Blog Day is tomorrow. The time is ripe, and here are some newer things from my feed reader. If for some reason you want the complete, insane, truth, I can help with that too.

I’ll start out as I intend to continue, by flat-out cheating: The Dancing Sausage Web Journal and Gumbaby. Everything old is new again (even things called ‘web journals’) and so Gus cleaned out the spam from the DSWJ and is oiling the joints. People at uni were super impressed that I actually knew the person rescuing end-of-lifed dead trees and I didn’t even have to tell them that I once bought the t-shirt.

You’ll need to have a passing level of serious interest in MediaWiki-enabled Free Culture to enjoy Brianna Laugher’s All The Modern Things, but I have, and so, I do.

It might just be a passing fancy because I’ve found Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) such a… interesting experience, but I’ve been not-so-secretly enjoying the Linux Hater’s Blog.

I really do not care very much about Bill O’Reilly, but I started reading Marc Andreessen recently and except for the Bill O’Reilly it’s been pretty interesting. He’s probably the only blogger I read who has ever gone and asked attorneys for help with an article and it was well worth it.

Matthew Paul Thomas writes only very occasionally about software usability but when he does tech bloggers throw him parties.

I used to read Megan at From the Archives, where she begged and pleaded for a new commenting culture of loving kindness, and wrote about exercise, sunshine, dating and engineering. Now I read her with her friend Sherry at Rhubarb Pie, where they’ve given up on comments, and on the idea of addressing their readers directly, and instead are writing letters to each other. Sometimes they’re about exercise, sunshine, dating and engineering. I wish I’d had this idea first. And that I knew either of these women.

A White Bear at Is there no sin in it? thinks and feels subtly differently from me about just about everything: I’m not really used to subtle challenges to my thoughts about research and teaching and relationships.

Julia at Here Be Hippogriffs (and Mom Moment) has three children, two of whom are twins. She was pregnant in total thirteen times. Yeah. Eleven miscarriages. The first thing people ask me when I try and persuade them to read this is whether she’s totally mad. I don’t know her, I have no idea, but they did, for the record, know the cause of the miscarriages and the odds were better than that. Anyway, she had eleven miscarriages and has infant twins and a nerdy six year old, and she still has time to be gently, amusingly dry.

There are basically two feminism things I talk about with the AussieChix these days. One of them is Dorothea Salo’s Grunchy stuff (The sickening grunch: There it was—the sickening grunch as I landed involuntarily back in my body—and not my entire body, either, but specific parts of it.) and the other is Shapely Prose.

See also previous versions of these from me: Australian blog awards (2005) and Blog Day (2006). And PS, Martin, I still miss sourcefrog…

Public service announcement: I’m on holidays and effectively unreachable until August 29, unless you’re in the select group of people who I’ve already given emergency personal/technical contact details to. (Yes! The cool kids!)

If there was something I was meant to do for you before I left… to be honest it’s probably already too late to remind me.

I have reason to believe that some people don’t like this new sponsorship era of sponsoring people to do anything before they’ve actually done it (as opposed to just pledging). If you people are out there waiting to give me money for Dry July, I will observe that is is now August.

Quick recap: Dry July, do not drink alcohol in the month of July. Fundraiser for the Prince of Wales hospital. Sponsor me here, it’s a sure thing now that July is actually over.

I sadly can’t regale you with tales of the new perspective on life that doing this gave me, except that opportunities to drink are offered to me more frequently than I realised prior to Dry July. I probably had about eight active offers of a drink during the month (including the Tuesday night drinks I go to every week). Andrew and I almost never drink at home: I don’t think we have had a drink without guests over since New Year, so I hadn’t thought it was so many. In a normal month I would probably have turned down only four or five of those opportunities rather than every one of them. It is an annoying feeling, I remember feeling much the same during linux.conf.au, when I couldn’t drink because of a medication interaction.

I drank more on the weekend than I usually would: one glass of wine Friday, and then 600 mL of beer (it was a Bavarian beer tasting thing, three 200 mL samples) followed by a cocktail on Saturday. My tolerance for alcohol does not appear especially affected by the month of abstinence, which makes sense considering my low exposure anyway.

I intend to change my drinking habits not at all long term as a result of Dry July. But hopefully the hospital is a tiny bit richer.

Filed under ideas I don’t want to forget because I may act on them in the next month or two:

 <mary> I have been seriously tempted to write an irssi plugin that goes something like: <mary> "you have tried to input a URL into a channel, press Ctrl+K to confirm" <mary> and "you have tried to input what looks like copy and pasted IRC into an IRC channel, Ctrl-K to confirm"