Book Club: What should we read next?

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Attention constant readers! It is time to choose our next victim book!

Here are the three candidates left over from our original vote, plus one wild card:

bell hooks, Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice

208 pages

What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural and racial divides? By “writing beyond race,” noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination.

Biella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

254 pages

Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software–and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project–reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Exploring the rise and political significance of the free and open source software (F/OSS) movement in the United States and Europe, Coding Freedom details the ethics behind hackers’ devotion to F/OSS, the social codes that guide its production, and the political struggles through which hackers question the scope and direction of copyright and patent law. In telling the story of the F/OSS movement, the book unfolds a broader narrative involving computing, the politics of access, and intellectual property.

E. Gabriella Coleman tracks the ways in which hackers collaborate and examines passionate manifestos, hacker humor, free software project governance, and festive hacker conferences. Looking at the ways that hackers sustain their productive freedom, Coleman shows that these activists, driven by a commitment to their work, reformulate key ideals including free speech, transparency, and meritocracy, and refuse restrictive intellectual protections. Coleman demonstrates how hacking, so often marginalized or misunderstood, sheds light on the continuing relevance of liberalism in online collaboration.

Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination

179 pages

In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981-1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.

Something else altogether

You tell me!

What should we read next?

  • Biella Coleman, Coding Freedom (free download) (48%, 12 Votes)
  • Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind ($15.37 Kindle edition) (28%, 7 Votes)
  • bell hooks, Writing Beyond Race ($14.72 Kindle edition) (20%, 5 Votes)
  • Something else entirely! (16%, 4 Votes)

Total Voters: 25

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Syntax error: unexpected linkspam (16 April 2013)

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  • Science needs more women: “The bottom line is that many excellent female researchers across Australia do not encounter a set of sequential career rungs to be climbed, but rather need to navigate a complex game of snakes-and-ladders.”
  • Signs of Change: “Not everyone is on the same page, and there is still a lot of progress to go on all fronts, particularly with regard to the players themselves who congregate in gaming communities; it’s often these folks who will engage in the most abuse against advocacy for inclusivity, diversity, and equality. For the first time though, I feel that things are actually changing, that minds are being opened, and that the advocacy, the blogging, the speaking out that people have been doing for so many years-that all of this exhausting work is bearing fruit. There is a cultural shift happening in games, and I hope it continues to shift to a better place.”
  • ABA TechShow Has a Diversity Problem: “TechShow is a very good conference, even with all the white guys on stage. It is like a huge workshop, with something for lawyers who are still trying to use Word properly to lawyers trying to figure out how to gain an edge at trial. It would just be a lot better if there were a greater variety of voices on the presentation stages.”
  • Taking out tokenism: Why some people are changing their minds on quotas: “Lindy Stephens was convinced that quota systems were the wrong way to increase the number of women in positions of power. But three years after adopting a system of positive discrimination, the managing director of IT consultancy Thoughtworks Australia has changed her mind.”
  • MAKE | Where Are the Women?: “In our workshop, Hacking the Gender Gap, we present a brief overview of the published research on the gender gap and women’s history in computing. Then we pass out two different colors of large Post-Its and markers. On one color, we ask participants to write a story of a negative experience they’ve had with technology. On the other color, we ask them to write a positive experience… As a group, we read the stories and discuss the themes that emerge, and what could be done to encourage more of the positive experiences and prevent the negative ones.”
  • Girls Who Code: “The first GWC program launched in the summer of 2012 with 22 girls in New York City. Courses covered not only coding but pitching and presentation skills. At the outset, only one participant was considering a major in computer science; by the end, the entire class planned to major or minor in the subject.”
  • What we talk about, when we talk about fake fangirls: “The fake geek girl meme depends on the narrative of invasion. The particular battle at stake is women entering male space, and demanding that it change.”
  • The Last of Us Female Characters: “So here we see a pretty serious effect of how the assumption “women don’t play video games” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we assume that women don’t play, then we’ll never ask them what they think of a game, and it becomes far more likely that we’ll create a game that presents gender in a limited way, from a limited perspective, or even an offensive one. And then women will be less likely to enjoy playing our game, but that’s all right, because we know that women don’t play games anyway.”
  • Feminist Pax Enforcers: “My experience with PAX East enforcers is that they have created a self-perpetuating image: everybody believes that they’re competent and on top of things and so should be treated with respect, which allows them to be maximally friendly, calm, helpful, and communicative to attendees… which allows them to be completely on top of things, which means that everybody believes they are on top of things… and so on. So it does not surprise me one bit that some of them have gotten together, in the wake of a well publicized incident of a disruptive media attendee, to reassure female cosplayers and attendees that they’ve got your back. With a nerdy meme.”
  • Gail Simone Brings First Transgendered Character to DC Comics in Batgirl #19: “I’m sure it’s controversial on some level to some people, but honest to God, I just could not care less about that. If someone gets upset, so be it; there are a thousand other comics out there for those people.”

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

I prefer the fanon linkspam (12 April 2013)

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Upcoming open source opportunities: Google Summer of Code and the Outreach Program for Women

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Right now, there are two big initiatives going on for those interested in getting involved in Free and Open Source Software:

banner-gsoc2013

Google Summer of Code (deadline: May 3)

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. Students work from home, paired up with at least one mentor who can guide them through the process of collaborating with their project’s community. There are a huge number of projects suggestions available, and many projects also accept new ideas from students if you think you’ve got an idea that would be great.

The stipend is $5,000 (USD) for approximately 40h/week of work from June 17 to September 23, so this is a pretty decent short-term job.

The deadline to apply is May 3rd, but if you’re interested it’s worth getting involved now because it takes time to find an organization you want to work with, meet the developers, and get help from them in producing a really terrific application.

There are 177 accepted mentoring organizations, but let me take a minute to plug the two I’m involved with:

  1. I’m the org admin for the Python Software Foundation this year. As well as sponsoring development on the Python programming language itself, we’re an umbrella organization for a large number of projects that use Python, including my own favourite open source project GNU Mailman, a variety of scientific tools, development toolkits, and more. The whole list is here. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of the mentors in person at PyCon this year, and I’m really excited to be working with them, and I think you will be too!
  2. I’m also involved with Systers, which as you may know is an organization for technical women. As one might expect, working with Systers is a great opportunity to work with technical women on an open source project! More information can be found on their wiki.

I know lots of other folk here are involved with GSoC: please feel free to advertise your projects in the comments!

Outreach program for Women (deadline: May 1)

If you’re a woman who’s interested in getting involved in open source, you may also want to check out the Outreach Program for Women which is similar to GSoC but not limited to students:

Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships were inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code and by how few women applied for it in the past. This was reflective of a generally low number of women participating in the FOSS development.
…
By having a program targeted specifically towards women, we found that we reached talented and passionate participants, who were uncertain about how to start otherwise. We hope this effort will help many women learn how exciting, varied and valuable work on FOSS projects can be and how inclusive the community really is. This program is a welcoming link that will connect you with people working on individual projects in various FOSS organizations and guide you through your first contribution.

Here’s the poster:
opw-poster-USLetter-2013-JuneSeptember

Not a student or a woman but want to get involved?

For those of you who are experienced open source contributors:

Many projects are still signing up mentors for GSoC. I usually tell people that this is a 0-10h/week volunteer job (although you do get a t-shirt!) where you get a chance to work with a protégé for the summer and show them the ropes. It can be very busy at times (especially right now when students are just starting and have lots of questions) but it’s very rewarding. Even if your project isn’t one of the ones participating this year, you can still help other projects by doing things like hanging out on IRC to help students set up their development environments.

For those of you not in open source but would like to be:

While these programs are only open to students and women, now is actually a pretty decent time to get involved with a new project because mentors are available to answer questions and students are asking lots of the questions so you don’t have to. Go join a mailing list or irc channel and see if you can follow along!

For everyone:

Please advertise these programs to students and women who might not otherwise see them! Put up posters where minorities not usually represented in open source will see them, help encourage people who might be too nervous to submit an application, and help connect these folk directly to projects whenever you can.

Got questions?

Feel free to ask in the comments below. I believe we have plenty of folk here involved with both programs who’d be happy to help you get involved!

Wednesday Geek Women: Akirachix

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akirachix-flickr-user-cesarharada-cc-nc-sa

Akirachix at iHub in Nairobi. Photo by Cesar Harada, cc-nc-sa.

Based in Nairobi, Kenya, Akirachix is an association of women in tech. Through mentorship, training programs, and networking, they’re working to “inspire and develop a successful force of women in Technology that will change Africa’s future.”

According to the Akirachix website, women make up half of Africa’s workforce, but only 15% of the tech industry. Last December, American news service National Public Radio sat down with Akirachix president Judith Owigar, who described a state of affairs not far removed from the challenges we face in the Global North:

“You know you’re the oddball just because of your gender,” Owigar says.

It turns out that in Kenya, exactly as in Silicon Valley, the problem with getting more women in tech is that there aren’t more women in tech.

“There are probably other women in tech who are alone, and they think they’re the weird ones, but if enough of us meet together, you know, it won’t be so weird anymore.”

akirachix-flickr-user-dreamfish-cc-by-nc-sa

photo by Flickr user Dreamfish, cc-nc-sa.

So what are they doing about it? They’ve built a support network of two hundred women in technology. They’re hacking the pipeline with mentorship programs for high school girls and training programs for talented women, many of whom can’t afford the tuition costs of a formal degree. They run a mobile app competition to encourage local entrepreneurs to build tools for their own communities:

Africa has 644 million subscribers (approximately 11% of the global total) and this has powered a social and economic revolution. As more people get access to mobile phones and Internet penetration increases they will need applications and services to serve their need. African developers are well positioned to come up with applications for this new mobile user and serve the existing ones in new ways.

With grand funding from international development interests, they’re working to build a mobile social network, and partnered with Computer Aid International to build an open-source screen magnifier to improve visual accessibility.

Learn more about Akirachix on their website and blog, or follow them on twitter.

GF classifieds (April to September 2013)

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This is another round of Geek feminism classifieds. If you’re looking to hire women, find some people to participate in your study, find female speakers, or just want some like-minded folk to join your open source project, this is the thread for you!

Here’s how it works:

  1. Geeky subjects only. We take a wide view of geekdom, but if your thing isn’t related to an obviously geeky topic, you’ll probably want to give a bit of background on why the readers of Geek Feminism would be interested.
  2. Explain what your project/event/thing is, or link to a webpage that provides clear, informative information about it. Ideally you’ll also explain why geek women might find it particularly awesome.
  3. Explain what you’re looking for. Even if it’s not a job ad, think of it like one: what is the activity/role in question, and what would it involve? What is the profile of people you’re looking for?
  4. GF has international readership, so please be sure to indicate the location if you’re advertising a job position, conference, or other thing where the location matters. Remember that city acronyms aren’t always known world-wide and lots of cities share names, so be as clear as possible! (That is, don’t say “SF[O]” or “NYC” or “Melb”, say “San Francisco, USA”, “New York City, USA” or “Melbourne, Australia”.) And if you can provide travel/relocation assistance, we’d love to know about it.
  5. Keep it legal. Most jurisdictions do not allow you to (eg.) advertise jobs for only people of a given gender. So don’t do that. If you are advertising for something that falls into this category, think of this as an opportunity to boost the signal to women who might be interested.
  6. If you’re asking for participants in a study, please note Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net, especially the “bare minimum” section.
  7. Provide a way for people to contact you, such as your email address or a link to apply in the case of job advertisements. (The email addresses entered in the comment form here are not public, so readers won’t see them.)
  8. Keep an eye on comments here, in case people ask for clarification or more details. (You can subscribe to comments via email or RSS.)

If you’d like some more background/tips on how to reach out to women for your project/event/whatever, take a look at Recruiting women on the Geek Feminism Wiki.)

Good luck!

On the Geek Feminism wiki: from Creeper Move cards to women in speculative fiction, and more!

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This is the start of a series highlighting work on the Geek Feminism wiki.

Featured article: our new feature is the article on Karen Spärck Jones, British computer scientist, which will be featured until the end of May. BlogHer is up next (June to August) followed by Ada Lovelace Day (September to November), help getting those up to scratch would be greatly appreciated, especially any Creative Commons BY or BY-SA pictures you can supply!

At the moment, as you can see, we’re only doing four featured articles a year; that’s because I handle the whole process. I’m happy to go faster if more articles come up: have a look through Proposed feature articles to find articles that are on good topics but often don’t have all the content they need. Add your fixed-up article to the featured schedule, and if it blows out into 2014 we’ll go through them faster.

Popular content: we’d especially like to make sure that people hit high quality pages on our most-visited content. Our top 5 pages at the moment are Creeper Move cards, Nice guy syndrome, Trigger warning, Privilege and Intersectionality. The last two in particular could use a lot more detail and resources.

New pages: we’ve had lots of new pages in the last few months. A very partial selection (no more than one per editor) includes: Finkbeiner test, a test about whether journalism focuses on women’s work, or their identity as women); Broad Universe, an international non-profit promoting women writers of speculative fiction; Lewis’ Law governing how comments on articles about feminism justify feminism; and List of women groups in technology, aiming to comprehensively list groups for women in tech.

Say hello! We’d love new editors, have a look at the Community Portal to get started. Are you joining the wiki now or re-joining after a break? Come and say hi on the welcome thread for this post!

Wednesday Geek Woman: Mary Robinette Kowal, author and puppeteer

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Mary Robinette Kowak, by Eric James Stone, cc-by-sa

Mary Robinette Kowal, by Eric James Stone, cc-by-sa

Mary Robinette Kowal is an award-winning author of Science Fiction and Fantasy. She has a lot of work available for free online, including Hugo award winner “For Want of a Nail,” Nebula nominated novella “Kiss Me Twice,” and my personal favorite of her shorter works, “The Lady Astronaut of Mars.”

without-a-summerShe’s also got a brand-new book out this week: Without A Summer. It takes place in London, in 1816, the real year without a summer. If you enjoy Fantasy novels and the works of Jane Austen, and especially if you enjoy fantasy novels revolving around women, I definitely recommend adding this one to your list–I got an early look at it, and loved it to bits. The most important actors in the story are women, the central interpersonal conflict is between women, and while all the main characters are white, it’s nice to see a Regency novel that acknowledges that there were, in fact, people of color in 19th century England.

Over on John Scalzi’s blog, Kowal talks about the roles class and social upheaval play in the book, and about writing a Regency heroine who’s facing her prejudices on matters of race and class.

Kowal is also a professional puppeteer–her twitter feed is a goldmine of funny-out-of-context nuggets about puppet-making. You can also catch up with her over on her blog, or at the writing podcast Writing Excuses.

The linkspam is in another castle (2 April 2013)

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Now we are linkspam, destroyer of worlds (29 March 2013)

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You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so). Thanks to everyone who suggested links.