Category: Uncategorized

I’ve had several discussions recently with people interested in the why-so-few-women-FOSS-developers problem (pimp: it’s a problem talked about a lot now, got links for the bibliography I maintain?) specifically as it relates to LinuxChix. The general starting position is this: where is LinuxChix in the creation of Free Software? Well, while individual members are here and there, that tends not to have much to do with their participation in LinuxChix. LinuxChix is a user and social community, and further, it doesn’t seem to ‘graduate’ a lot of people into the big bad world of FOSS development. (Note that some chapters, particularly LinuxChix Brazil, operate pretty differently.)

This has come up in a few places online. I don’t know if Fernanda Weiden was thinking about LinuxChix when she wrote this, but it’s a good match for some of the more negative opinions:

That’s the role of the women’s groups, to offer a friendly interface for women to get their feet wet and then join the community. The problem is when these groups don’t have a clear target, in the end they turn in Barbie worlds that don’t exist in reality. Instead of integrating the women into the community, they serve as ghettos, re-creating existing groups in the community with the only objective being more friendly for women.

Máirín Duffy writes:

LinuxChix gets a lot of mention in the essay is referred to as being an open source development community, but I feel quite strongly that it is not. Some of the motivation behind my pushing for GNOME Women was borne out of frustration with LinuxChix. LinuxChix is really more of a Linux User’s Group (LUG) than an actual development community.

I raised this on a LinuxChix list today and got an interesting response from Carla Schroder. To paraphrase greatly, the upshot was that Carla draws a distinction between not being an open source development community, which pretty much everyone agrees that LinuxChix is not, and not being an activist community.

LinuxChix is pretty broad brush, but some of the things it is active in are: providing a forum for answering technical questions from women and providing skills education to women. And that’s only the more formal stuff. Behind the scenes, there’s a long tradition of discussing technical careers and related things (interviews, salaries) and working on giving women recognition for their technical accomplishments (within the community, mostly). Carla also pointed out that while there aren’t masses of FOSS developers emerging from the community there are quite a lot of women technical writers and a huge number of women sysadmins who’ve derived a substantial chunk of their career launch from LinuxChix help. It’s not a ‘ghetto’ in that sense.

LinuxChix is not active politically, and it’s not a development community. (It helps coders, but it doesn’t have a coherent project.) It does suffer from being seen as the one-stop-shop for women-in-FOSS when it’s actually not doing some things that women would like to do and it’s particularly not doing work to produce women FOSS developers. But that doesn’t mean it should be mistaken for a sheltered workshop, it just means there’s a difference between reality and publicity that could use some work on one direction or the other.

Andrew and I have been talking about what makes a good technical community Planet. Here are some thoughts about what the best planets have, keeping in mind that it is probably not possible to achieve this by any other means than luck:

Critical mass

This seems to be somewhere around about the twenty or thirty writers mark, just in order to achieve content that changes regularly. This seems to be the major failing of Planet Twisted. You might get regular content from as few as three or four people, but it will get same-y.

Community leaders

It’s most interesting to see actual decision making discussion happening through entries themselves, but after the fact analysis is nearly as good. But you won’t see any of this if you don’t have key decision makers or at least opinion makers blogging about decisions and direction. I see this as one of the big advantages Planet Debian and Planet GNOME have over Planet Ubuntu. My primary interest here is for interesting reading, but this has a bonus side-effect of greater community transparency: a lot more relative outsiders scan Planets now than scan development mailing lists.

Expert writers

It’s useful to have a significant set of regular writers who write in some area of their personal expertise, be it user interface design, translation, programming or cat herding. This decreases the sense that you’re reading uninformed and predictable reactions to technical decisions and increases the chance that you’ll learn something new by reading.

It adds a bit of spice to have some of these writing about project irrelevant expertise (climate change, workout programs, photography techniques) because it increases the “smart people who I’d love to go to dinner with” vibe. It can be overdone though: while it’s likely that your writers are the best there is to offer on technical subject X, it’s less likely that they make as universally interesting reading on their other interests, because it’s less likely that they’re the people worth listening to and it’s less likely that their interests overlap with those of the readers. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t.

‘Journal’ blogs are hard to pull off on masse: it’s both a tempting format and a difficult one to make work for readers who have no prior interest in the writer’s personal life (ie, everyone who isn’t friends or family). These blogs are much like outside interest ones: considerable payoff in community spirit if they work, risking uninteresting reading in many cases.

A Planet community

The best Planets are full of people who actually read the Planet and let it inspire their entries. I also find that planets from a focused technical community have an advantage over planets from a user or random community because they’re more likely to make for coherent reading with common threads.

Inter-entry conversations

Once you have a Planet community, the best Planets start having extended inter-blog discussions during which you can see opinions being formed, revised and finalised. This is the Planet zenith.

So-called memes (standardised entries based on quiz results or a common entry template, which tend to be quick and fun to write and therefore highly contagious), as in all other blogs, generally are the most common and most boring kind of inter-entry conversation. There’s not a lot to gain as a reader from knowing that someone is more like Bilbo than they are like Sauron or which countries they’ve visited unless this is used as a platform to make some kind of debatable point (almost every opinion that’s actually interesting is debatable) or to tell a story, and people do this too seldom.

I need to pay more attention to DebSIG I think. How did I miss Conrad Parker on What can Free Software teach Free Media? This is what comes of being the only geek in Sydney who doesn’t like beer or pubs, I guess.

del.icio.us is rather old hat really, but I wanted to copy my comments here from dria’s blog about why I like it.

For those who haven’t heard of it, del.icio.us is a bookmarks site. Once you create an account, you can add a little pop-up button to your browser toolbar, and when you see a site you want to store for later reference, or recommend to someone else, you click on it, it loads up a simple page for you to enter descriptions and tags, and then its stored. You can get to it from anywhere.

It also has a so-called social software component in that it shows you who else has bookmarked that URL thus potentially introducing you to new people who have the same taste in links as you do. See for example [people linking to me]. (Why md5 for the URL hash, I wonder?)

Here’s what I like about it:

• a fairly flat site for bookmark storage where things are tagged rather than buried in folders. I can find my bookmarks more easily on del.icio.us than I can in a web browser’s bookmarks menu;
• bookmarks accessible via my del.icio.us user page from any web browser (the Hotmail advantage); and
• the handy provision of the ‘remember this’ bookmarklet so that I can click “pop up post to del.icio.us” in my taskbar at any time and post a link to the page I’m looking at for later reference.

I’m actually more or less neutral about the social aspect of it. Links tend to divide into three categories: links chosen by several hundred users; links chosen by a few users and links chosen by me. There doesn’t seem to be a query engine that allows anything more sophisticated than who else linked to this one thing? I can see myself asking who links to things I’ve tagged politics? or who links to some of my less popular choices? as ways to find bearers of fresh links, but the fact that we have one chosen link in common is uninteresting to me.

Related links:

• de.lirio.us, like del.icio.us but Free (via Beth Skwarecki); and
• CiteULike, like del.icio.us but for academic citations (via Liam Hogan).

I’m really enjoying Bazaar 2.0 as compared to GNU Arch. There’s a lot of things I could say about Bazaar 2.0 as version control, but let’s leave it as ah, that’s why I originally liked the idea of distributed version control.

Now that that’s out of the way, I have something more pressing to communicate! Bazaar 1.0 has a commandline program baz, pronounced like the first syllable of bazaar (I note in passing that until I saw that commandline, I thought that it was called ‘bizarre’ and am still disappointed). Bazaar 2.0 will have bzr. Now, people, you can’t seriously be expecting me to pronounce the latter as bazaar can you? C’mon, … try saying it. bzr. bzr. BZR. It doesn’t quite have the Australian neutral vowel in it, but I’m determined and ready to fight for it to be pronounced buzzer. You can have all kinds of really nerdy jokes about hitting the buzzer. Now get with the program.

My theory on this is that you should:

• pick an implementation language;
• pick all the surrounding software (mailing list manager, revision control system, CMS for the website if necessary);
• write and release something that works (or is pretty).

Only then do you indulge in even the smallest bit of community building.

Then you can avoid the six month long startup argument about which tools to use to write the vapourware. These arguments even trump the ‘what features should we do first’ arguments!

Rusty Russell is not happy about John Quiggin’s embrace of Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.1 Australia License as a kind of a good default for allowing other people use of your creative work.

Russell slams Quiggin:

That Quiggin takes this path despite training as an ecomonist [sic, original author’s emphasis] demonstrates either a lack of deep thought on this issue, or that he uses economics to justify his leftist dogma, rather than to examine issues. (This paragraph was about as polite as I could make it).

I can’t say that I’m too much of a fan of the phrase “leftist dogma.” It’s about as meaningful to me as saying “fropbutz dogma” — ie I tend to prefer attacks on political positions on a particular issue rather than attacks on them because of other political positions that they’ve been known to be associated with. (What are the pragmatics of the word ‘leftist’? I read it as having exclusively hostile connotations, that is, that a position or group of positions is only described as ‘leftist’ — as opposed to ‘left’, ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ — by people who oppose it.) To be fair, this is what the rest of Russell’s piece does, I’m just having a go at the ‘leftist’ ending.

But that wasn’t what struck me enough to write an entry about it. I was struck more by the emphasised part: “despite training as an economist”. This strikes me as a cutting line indeed. Quiggin’s relationship to economics isn’t that he trained in it: it’s that he is an economist. Russell is implying that his economic positions would be foolish from someone with an undergraduate major. It would be like saying that Russell is a remarkably bad coder for someone who’s met a few kernel developers.

Thanks to Linux Australia we have some grant money for the Sydney Twisted sprint being held in two and a half weeks. Check it out if you’re coming:

• airfare subsidies;
• accommodation subsidies; and
• a sprint dinner.

I remember years back when my only exposure to the hackergotchi was Jeff’s head, which was his custom icon for his desktop “Home” link and I think the subject of an abortive perkypants redesign.

Then there was Planet GNOME and hackergotchis took off and now they have their own Wikipedia entry. This leads to the question of which is now more relevant to documenting geek culture: Wikipedia or the Jargon File? Mind you, I might not be the best judge: Wikipedia actually gets bonus points with me for being about other stuff too.

Also, for the first time I feel bad for having my near waist length hair cut off three years ago. I can’t be part of the new experiments in long haired hackergotchis. This problem has several solutions, and no clear winner amongst them:

• the ‘crop the image’ solution: Katie and Claudine;
• the ‘put the hair up’ solution: Erinn and Hanna (I’d be interested to see a male version of this…);
• the ‘my hair has equal status with my face’ solution: gicmo;
• the ‘my hair is more important than the image size limit’ solution: Amaya; and
• the ‘noone’s volunteered any recent photos anyway’ solution: Andrew. (Actually, I have a good one of his face obscured by SCUBA that I took about 15m underwater, but unfortunately I was too close and didn’t get a complete head.)

There’s been some fun and games in LinuxChix lately with a particularly violent sounding poster calling himself MikeeUSA posting variations on the phrase “Death to women’s rights” interspersed with some obscenity laden mails.

He’s been posting to Debian Women for a while longer and a bit more extensively. From what I gather from them and from Google his purported beef with women’s rights is that either:

• increasing rights for women reduces the pool of submissive women suitable to be his mate; or
• horrible controlling women not suitable to be his mate are invading every aspect of his life including his Free Software hobby and are actively attempting to steal all the credit for them, eg by claiming that women built Debian or something.

Some random places to look include the bug he filed against <!—->Daniel Stone<!—-> for being a “a woman disrespectful of men” (<!—->Daniel<!—-> claims to be neither a woman nor the Debian xorg maintainer, but has not yet to my knowledge stated in public that he respects men, so I consider this case open) and the by now rather well linked post to debian-women. With some small ingenuity with Google you can find him getting banned from games forums and Wikipedia for similar activities. It all gets a bit nastier later on with him posting fantasies about the violent deaths of the women reading, and harassing people’s teenage daughters off-list and stuff. Suffice to say that I disagree with his purported premises really quite a lot (if nothing else, he doesn’t strike me as being that attractive pre-feminism either: just because women earned less doesn’t mean that they didn’t know stark raving madness when they saw it) and with his methods so strongly that I can’t think of a good way to express it.

What I have been considering is the correct response to this.

Conventional wisdom about trolls says “don’t feed them.” Ignore them and deny them the precious coin of attention, and take especial care to avoid actually engaging with their arguments even as an antagonist. This has some merits, although it’s actually quite difficult to accomplish: the work of 499 people in ignoring the troll is more or less undone by the one person who responds. It’s pretty rare that I’ve seen all 500 people respond with silence.

The initial Debian Women post got a response that I (and Anarchogeek) considered quite bizarre: someone attempted to engage with whatever sanity lurks beneath the madness and honoured MikeeUSA’s need for recognition as a software developer. The only reasoning for this I’ve seen was in the Anarchogeek thread, in which commenter Jeevan argued that it was an appropriate decision because “Don’t you think the reason one person on the mailing list thanked him for the software is because it’s a Debian mailing list and not a human rights (or something equivalent) mailing list.” I appreciate that some members of the Debian community have different social norms to me, but I don’t quite understand how the mere mention of doing FOSS development entitles you to a free ride on such matters as making death threats against a group of Debian community members. However, Jeevan seems to think so, and therefore the option of “giving them the respect that they so manifestly deny you” is placed before me. Let’s move on from that one without further comment.

I may be missing a thread, but as the mails from this nut job continued I believe the next response from Debian Women was a month later, and here it is. It’s much closer to what I did on LinuxChix.

My decision on LinuxChix was to do the following: wherever this guy appeared, I would respond with a post directed at the list saying that this blatant violation of the “be polite, be helpful” list rules was being responded to by banning. After a few more episodes I posted a warning to people about avoiding direct interaction with him where possible. (Given the reported incident of harassing someone’s family together with the hysterically violent emails, I think it’s possible that he may pose a danger to people, if only by upsetting their family. I’m shocked not to have gotten a direct contact from him yet.)

My reasoning for doing so was as follows:

1. it’s not acceptable behaviour on our lists, and we generally call people on considerably less outrageous nonsense than this;
2. LinuxChix is a community which is always partly composed of people new to online forums and new to the related forms of bad behaviour; and
3. some of these newcomers, in addition to possibly finding the nastiness frightening, would interpret silence as implying that that behaviour was either unremarkable or acceptable (as might readers of the archives).

Hence I wanted to show clearly that that behaviour was not acceptable.

I later thought of a further point, which is the Broken Windows theory.

In its standard formulation, this theory goes that minor signs of urban decay such as broken windows that are not quickly repaired lead very quickly to other decay and then to a failing of any kind of civic feeling.

My particular variant of this for this case is that by not clearly having someone with some notional authority about to state clearly that violent harassment is unacceptable has two negative consequences:

1. it encourages a feeling that violent harassment may in fact be acceptable; and
2. it encourages a feeling that whatever we might say is unacceptable doesn’t matter, because we’re not around to stomp on unacceptable crap when it happens.

In other words, nastiness that’s not publicly identified by someone with authority (in this case, I chose to use the authority conferred by my list admin status) who asserts community norms, is like a broken window in a community.

In many ways I imagine this matters more on LinuxChix, where blatant trolls are now rare, than on Debian Women which is still waging the odd flamefest with some Debian developers who have only slightly more moderate opinions than MikeeUSA’s, and which probably has a different position on trolls. (LinuxChix is not as ban happy as this post might imply, but people who the list admins consider purely disruptive will be booted: this happens once a year or so). I think following the standard prescription on trolls, while useful when individually targeted or when you realise that you’ve got into a discussion with one, is a potential broken windows disaster from a community’s point of view. The troll doesn’t care, but the rest of the community is likely to be pleased and reassured to see agreed standards fairly enforced.