Tag Archives: Open source

Because sexual assault is more common than you think

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This is a guest post by Jacinta Richardson. Jacinta runs Perl Training Australia and is a strong supporter of making IT more friendly to everyone.

This is an edited version of a mailing list post.

The apology from the organisers about Mark Pesce’s linux.conf.au keynote caused much discussion on the linux.conf.au attendees’ chat list. The vast number of responders felt the right thing had been done with the apology and were happy, however there were a small number (5 or less) squeaky wheels that insisted that the talk was fine and that no apology was necessary.

This post is an edited response to my reply in a thread discussing whether the anti-harassment policy was too broadly scoped as well as possibly unnecessary.

Warning: this entry discusses sexual assault, rape and real statistics.

The anti-harassment policy that linux.conf.au adopted didn’t set an impossibly high bar for attendees or speakers, despite the complaints of a select few. As far as I know, all of the 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 speakers, and all but one of the 2011 speakers managed to adhere to professional standards in their talks
and not use images that did or would have caused the ruckus Mark’s talk did. At about 90 (official) speakers per conference and maybe another 90 mini-conf speakers per conference that’s about 899 talks which all managed this feat, and quite a few of those talks were challenging, hard hitting, world shattering and all the things that Mark’s talk was too.

However Mark’s talk relentlessly employed the language and imagery of sexual assault as a metaphor for the loss of personal freedoms, and this is inappropriate. For all that Mark’s theme was timely and valuable, the talk would have been so much better had it been delivered with respect for those members of our community who have actually been assaulted.
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Advocacy project for women in open technology and culture: The Ada Initiative

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Today, Valerie Aurora and I launched the Ada Initiative, a new non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media.

Valerie and I have 10 years experience in open source software, open social media, and women in computing activism with groups like Geek Feminism, Systers, and LinuxChix. The Ada Initiative is focused on helping women get careers in open technology through recruitment and training programs for women, education for community members who want to help women, and working with corporations and projects to improve their outreach to women.

Get involved

If you’d like to get involved, check out our contact page. If you’re really excited, write a blog post about us. We’re on Twitter and Facebook too.

Project ideas

If you have project ideas for the Ada Initiative, especially the kind of work that iis difficult for volunteer groups to do (that is, intensive and/or lengthy), we would be happy to hear them. You could raise them in comments here, or contact us.

Donating and funding

We are not yet accepting donations, but if you are interested in helping fund the Ada Initiative or putting us in touch with potential donors, please contact us.

We’d like to stress though that we do not think that women, inside or outside open technology and culture should fund the bulk of the Ada Initiative’s work; that is the job of projects and companies that make money from their work. If you are enthusiastic about the project and want to help with startup costs you will welcome to donate, but we do not expect you to, particularly if it would be in any way a financial burden.

Relationship with Geek Feminism

While both of the co-founders of the Ada Initiative write for the Geek Feminism blog, the Ada Initiative and the Geek Feminism project are not the same thing. The Geek Feminism blog, wiki and community comments on, critiques and builds geekdom as a whole and is far from limited to open technology and culture. The Geek Feminism blog is independent from the Ada Initiative and will remain so. Valerie and I will continue to write for the blog on various subjects outside of any work we do for the Ada Initiative.

Powerful people: Mark Pesce’s linux.conf.au keynote

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Warning: this entry discusses a sexualised presentation, and links to slides from that presentation. Images linked include stylised sexual violence.

Note to LCA2011 attendees and other members of the technical community: discussion at Geek Feminism is restricted by our comments policy. If you want to make commentary that does not adhere to that policy, you need to do it somewhere else. Discussion of Pesce’s technical content or the importance of his main subject matter is also off-topic for this post and will not be published.

…

On Friday at linux.conf.au 2011, Mark Pesce gave a morning keynote that resulted in complaints citing their harassment policy. I made one such complaint, here is an excerpt:

Dear lca2011 organisers,

Your anti-harassment policy at http://lca2011.linux.org.au/about/harassment
states that:

Harassment includes sexual images in public space.

This morning’s keynote by Mark Pesce included slides with the following
illustrations among others:

1. a pig and a duck apparently having sex
2. a black and white sexualised strangulation
3. a fetish scene with a woman in a mask spanking a man in a mask

Several of these were accompanied by a verbal metaphor to “being fucked” in
case the visuals weren’t explicit enough.

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Wednesday Geek Woman: Tabitha Roder

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This is a guest post.

Tabitha Roder is the leader of the One Laptop per Child volunteers in New Zealand. This is a group that meets every saturday in 3 cities across the country. This is the largest OLPC group, and their regular reliable contributions are a huge thing for the project.

One Laptop per Child is on a mission to give a laptop, loaded with education tools, to every one of the world’s poorest children. They’ve deployed millions of these laptops already to every single child and teacher across entire countries all around the world. The laptop goes to children who don’t have paper and pencils, who don’t have books. It is their education platform.

Tabitha formed the New Zealand group over three years ago, and has grown it into what it is today.

In November her contribution was recognised by the New Zealand Open source awards, where she won the prize for best contributor.

Tabitha spearheaded the OLPC deployment in Samoa in August 2010, spending two weeks in schools, installing the infrastructure, training teachers and handing out the laptops to every child and teacher.

Tabitha also organised the Education miniconf at the linux.conf.au 2010 conference.

She also contributes to the open source elearning platform moodle.

Tabitha is also an electric vehicle enthusiast, and is part of the team building an electric racing car.

Tabitha’s personal website.
Details of Tabitha’s nomination (and winning) best contributor.

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This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Re-post: Is requiring Open Source experience sexist?

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In anticipation of a December/January slowdown, I’m reposting some of my writing from earlier in 2010, for the benefit of new (and nostalgic!) readers. This piece originally appeared on the 9th April 2010.

Code Anthem’s Don’t Judge a Developer by Open Source (via Meg in the Open Thread) argues that companies that rely on Open Source coding contributions as a hiring criterion are both demanding a lot of their hiree’s free time and are sexist:

Open source is a culture. There are plenty of smart and passionate developers out there who are not part of that culture. And certainly there are plenty of dumb and curmudgeonly developers out there participating in open source…. There are there smarter ways to spend your time. The stereotypical open source developer works for a bumbling corporate during the day, doing dull work (but necessary to make money) and then comes home to work on his passion, OpenOKHRWUJ Framework…

Requiring open source contributions is sexist… Open source is dominated by men even more so than the programming community as a whole… it’s irresponsible to require your new hire developers to come from a male-oriented pool. Alas… “Underrepresentation breeds underrepresentation”.

I have a comment in moderation there in which I say that I think the stereotype is incorrect: that Open Source developers in my experience are either university students or other young people with a lot of free time, or they’re paid Open Source developers. (I know hobbyist Open Source coders with unrelated dev or other full-time jobs too, yes, but not nearly so many and their contributions are for obvious reasons usually not as significant. If nothing else, this group has a really high incidence of typing injuries.)

But that’s a side-note: I think the core point of the post stands. Open Source is very male-dominated, is known for being unpleasantly sexist, and is also a subculture whose norms (even where neutral as regards sexism) don’t fit everyone. Requiring these norms feeds right into the problem talked about in Being Inclusive vs Not Being Exclusive:

People who come from underprivileged minorities are usually very experienced in the art of being excluded. Sometimes it’s overt – “we don’t like your kind” – but many times it’s subtle. They’re told that they’re “not quite right”, or they “don’t have the right look”, or “don’t have the right experience”, or just aren’t told anything. At the same time, they are surrounded by all sorts of imagery and communique about how they don’t quite belong, about how they have to change themselves to fit in, about how they are undesirable. They do not see a lot of examples they can relate to; even the ones that come close tend to stick out for being “Exotic”, being a token. They already have a lot of barriers against them and are already of the mind that they’ll more likely be rejected than accepted.

If you insist on a lot of experience in a particular male-dominated sub-culture as a prerequisite for a job, that reads as “we prefer [a subset of] men, basically, or at least people willing to work hard to minimise all the ways in which they aren’t [part of the subset of] men” even if you didn’t intend it to and even if you didn’t want it to.

Code Anthem isn’t, as far as I can tell, thinking about Open Source paid jobs in that post, but they of course have this problem magnified. It seems vastly reasonable on the face of it: hiring existing Open Source contributors, ideally people from your very own community, means you hire people who are well-versed in the particular mode of development you do, in particular, the use of text-based mediums for communicating among a distributed team. Since Open Source (or more to the point Free Software) projects are at least sometimes associated with particular non-commercial goals and philosophies agreement with those seems desirable. But since most long-term Open Source developers need to be paid for it, it strongly feeds into this cycle of long-term Open Source developers continuing to be male and of a particular kind of culture, and continuing to overtly or subtly signal that that’s who is welcome in Open Source development.

Possible other posts of interest:

  • Terri’s Want more women in open source? Try paying them.
  • Dorothea Salo’s Sexism and group formation:

    A woman can be an honorary guy, sure, with all the perquisites and privileges pertaining to that status—as long as she never lets anything disturb the guy façade.

    It’s good to be an honorary guy, don’t get me wrong. Guys are fun to be around. Guys know stuff. Guys help out other guys. Guys trust other guys. And in my experience, they don’t treat honorary guys any differently from how they treat regular guys. It’s really great to be an honorary guy.

    The only problem is that part of the way that guys distinguish themselves from not-guys is by contrasting themselves with women.

Drupal Voices 100: Jack Aponte on Diversity, Power and Privilege in Open Source Communities

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Neville Park is a queer mixie nerd in Toronto. This post originally appeared at Wild Unicorn Herd.

An interview with Palante Tech’s Jack Aponte (a. k. a. Angry Brown Butch) on, well, diversity in Drupal.

Background: Drupal is a kind of CMS (content management system); it’s a particularly powerful and versatile platform for building and managing websites. It is free and open source, which means that you don’t have to pay to use it, and anyone can help work on it. There’s a very large and international community of people who use and work on Drupal, and like the wider tech community, it’s dominated by white straight cis men. Open Source people, and Drupal people in particular, pride themselves on having a “doacracy”—a community that values getting stuff done above traditional authority. This could create a beginner-friendly, non-hierarchical environment of subversion and experimentation. In practice we just have white straight cis men getting SUPER DEFENSIVE at the suggestion that maybe they got where they are not only by the sweat of their brow, and shouting down any mention of patriarchy, racism, or any other systemic oppression when people run the numbers and get to wondering why there’s so little minority representation in Open Source.

There is a nice summary of the podcast at the link, and my transcript is below the fold. I’ve added links to give context to some of the references Jack and the interviewer make.

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Plover: Freeing Stenography

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Mirabai Knight is a Certified CART Provider (realtime stenographer for the deaf and hard of hearing) in New York City. When she was 11, her older brother introduced her to the concept of free software. At the time she mocked him for being a soppy idealist, but the idea quietly took root, and now 18 years later she’s thrilled to be responsible for launching the world’s first free stenographic keyboard emulator.

Leigh: I’m very excited to be able to pick the brains of open source pioneer Mirabai Knight, whose project Plover just had their initial public release. Can you tell us about Plover and stenography?

Mirabai: I’ve been geek-identified and hacker-adjacent all my life, but never actually wound up learning how to code until, after years of frustration with the DRM-riddled $4,000 proprietary steno program I use in my CART business, I decided that the world needed free steno software, and that if I didn’t get it going, it probably wouldn’t happen. That might sound conceited, but the overlap between the stenographic and computer geek worlds is bafflingly small, considering how vital efficient text entry is to virtually every tech field.

Before Plover, the price of even a bare bones computerized steno system was around $1,500, so only people who intended to go into a stenographic career (court reporting, captioning, or CART) could justify the expense. There were no opportunities for amateurs, tinkerers, or dabblers, and it frustrated me, because I could see so many non-commercial applications for stenographic technology. That’s when I decided to start up The Plover Project. I knew I needed someone who could wrangle both hardware and software, and I was hoping I could get some elementary instruction in Python along the way. By a great stroke of luck, Joshua Harlan Lifton, a freelance programmer with extensive hardware hacking experience, was renting space two floors above my Brooklyn coworking co-op, and after noticing the call for a Python tutor/developer that I posted on the building’s elevator corkboard, he enthusiastically agreed to help out with the project. A little less than a year later, we have an actual functional realtime steno program that lets you type at 200 words per minute directly into any X window using a $45 off-the-shelf keyboard.

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Quick questions: women-friendly tech news, women-friendly open source projects

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These are Ask a Geek Feminist questions for our commenters.

Since these two are short and sweet and linky, I’m running them in one post.

Other than Geek Feminism, what blogs and sites do you follow for a steady stream of tech news? The best-known ones (Hacker News, Slashdot, Wired, TechCrunch) all seem very guy-oriented to me.

I don’t have a good answer to this. I tend to stick to sites where the articles themselves are fairly meaty and thus I don’t need to read or participate in comments. Thus, I read LWN for Linux and Free Software news, and, less often, Ars Technica. But LWN has had many a faily comment thread and I’ve never ventured into Ars Technica’s comments. Does anyone have better recommendations? Are there any tech news sites that have an enforced comment policy that’s feminist and so on?

Can you recommend an open source project I could work on that has a female-friendly community?

Some project leaders who want to be women friendly can be found in our post GF classifieds: Google Summer of Code edition, but I don’t think we’ve asked this question of Open Source participants and community members rather than leaders. If you, as an Open Source participant from occasional contributor to project lead, recommend your community to women, comment here. (Also, if someone recommends a project that you have not found to be women-friendly, you are welcome to reply to their comment.)

Quick hit: GNOME Outreach internships for women

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The GNOME project, the widely used Free Software desktop and applications project, has announced paid internships for women:

The GNOME Foundation will be sponsoring at least three internships for women from December 15, 2010 through March 15, 2011. These internships are primarily aimed at female college students from the Southern Hemisphere who will have a school break during this time. However, any woman interested in working on GNOME is welcome to apply, provided she is available for a full-time internship during this time period.

The internship is expected to be a full-time effort, meaning that the participants must be able to spend 40 hours a week on their project. Participants will work remotely from home. Because IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is one of the primary means of communication within free software projects, participants should be present on their project’s IRC channel while working. They will also be expected to communicate electronically with other project members via other means, including Bugzilla comments, mailing list discussion, blog posts, and personal e-mail. Participants will be encouraged to blog about their work and their blog posts will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.

The GNOME Foundation will provide each participant with a $4,500 (USD) stipend. $500 will be wired on December 17 to participants who have begun their internships, $2000 on February 2 to participants in good standing with their mentors, and $2000 on March 22 to participants who have successfully completed their internships.

More information is available at the program webpage, and here are the key dates:

  • September 7 – October 25: participants need to get in touch with at least one project and make a contribution to it
  • October 25: application deadline
  • November 3: the program will announce accepted participants
  • December 15 – March 15: internships period

With regards to the dates, Stormy Peters has stated:

We are targeting the southern hemisphere with this one and then we will run another round during the summer of of the northern hemisphere. However, anyone who is free during those times can apply, regardless of where they live.

I’m not involved in this project in any way, by the way, so while you’re welcome to use comments to discuss your application or make other comments on the program, this isn’t the right place to ask questions if you are intending to apply. If you are in that situation, please visit the program webpage for contact details.

Finding more women to speak at Ohio LinuxFest: success!

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This post is being cross-posted on Mackenzie’s blog.

Given Terri’s recent post about the same few women always being speakers, I thought this would be a good place to write about how one conference I help out with, Ohio LinuxFest, has tried to expand their array of women speakers. For those interested in pretty graphs, I’ve been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki. This post was co-authored with Moose J. Finklestein, the Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say “we didn’t get any submissions from women” to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How’d we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That’s a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF’s Women’s Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the “imposter syndrome,” where someone doesn’t recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren’t refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we’d heard before), so we explained the attendees’ demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it’s a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system — folks who don’t use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we’d like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.