Tag Archives: fsf

Is there honour among linkspammers? (4th August, 2010)

  • “CAUSE I’M NERDCORE LIKE THAT: Toward a Subversive Geek Identity: In the meantime, subversive nerd subcultures form communities and alliances, fostering a collective cultural cross-fertilization that is strengthened by our multiple intelligences and identities.
  • reaction rant: First of all, it can’t be simultaneously true that women and men are equally suited to technology jobs and also that women have specific immutable characteristics that need to be catered to. Sure it can. Some characteristics that may need accommodations are not related to one’s actual skill in programming. But more to the point, some of those common gendered characteristics are in no way immutable; they’re cultural.
  • Soil change for our larva: women and wiggly things that live in dirt make for an exciting day.
  • The FSF reminds me of PETA sometimes: deborah is angry at a thread in which Richard Stallman advocates compromising accessibility in favour of Free Software.
  • Woman in technology: Stubbornella responds to criticisms of grants for women: I resent the notion that women are inferior and that is why they are getting grants. Google is correcting for women being less likely to stand up and say “me, me, me!”, not for their technical skills or development prowess.
  • How privileged is a geek girl, anyway?: Deirdra Kiai reflects on her privileged access to computer skills: I suppose that when I remarked that making games isn’t really that hard, what I really ought to have said was that making games shouldn’t be so hard. I need to be helping to create a world where anyone can have access to a computer at an early age…

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Quick hit: FSF Women’s Caucus recommendations

The Free Software Foundations Women’s Caucus grew out of the September 2009 FSF mini-summit on women in Free Software. The Caucus has now released their initial findings and recommendations, here’s an excerpt:

We identified a number of barriers to women’s participation in free software and strategies for overcoming these obstacles… Women who are not already involved in free software often don’t feel invited to join free software groups or projects. We have identified strategies for groups who are looking to grow and diversify their membership… We noted the relative invisibility of women who are already making significant contributions to free software…

What do you think? (Remember that I’ve only posted an excerpt, do read the whole thing.) Has the Women’s Caucus identified new ideas and strategies that would be widely useful in women-in-computing or women-in-STEM advocacy? Have they missed significant first steps?

Organic freerange sustainably harvested linkspam, 28 February 2010

  • In multiple posts, Lucy Connor continues thinking about possible costs of diversity
  • N.K. Jemisin considers how she accidentally wrote a postfeminist protagonist in her new fantasy series
  • Maura McHugh, aka Splinster laments the SF industry’s failure to ask women’s opinions:

    In the article the magazine asked 34 directors, screenwriters and authors to name an obscure or under-rated cult horror that deserved better recognition. Yup, you guessed it, not a single woman was asked for her opinion.” What’s more, in a plot twist worthy of any novel of the genre, the SFX publication comes smack dab in the middle of Women in Horror Month, set up to raise awareness of and give recognition to the genre’s many female creators.

  • More event backchannel inappropriateness, this time in the PHP community.
  • There’s been some discussion about Silicon Valley diversity of late. See what Techcrunch and Mercury News had to say.
  • Maybe this article about meritocratic hiring could be insightful to startups wanting to avoid non-diverse hiring pools:

    Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. The first time I did this experiment, I felt a strange feeling of vertigo while reading the resume. […] And, much to my surprise (and embarrassment), the kinds of people I started phone-screening changed immediately.

  • From the compare-and-contrast department: How the gamer stereotype stacks up against reality.
  • An unscientific survey of MIT students indicates that geeky students are a typical subset of society with typical sex lives as opposed to the stereotyped socially awkward folk. But we all knew that already, right?
  • Not all countries have the same gender disparity in Tech. Stanford Uni’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research examines gender roles regarding Technology based careers in Malaysia, where women reign supreme.
  • The Free Software Foundation is seeking donations to help sponsor more attendees for their Women’s Caucus at LibrePlanet 2010 next month.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

A linkspam stole my baby! (November 6th, 2009)

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Write linkspam on it (26th September, 2009)

Update (by Mary, 28 Sep): misskinx told us in comments that the workshop on dating violence is not a Carleton University event, it’s organised by the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women (OCTEVAW) and the Sexual Assault Network (SAN).

FSF mini-summit: were you invited?

Just how “mini” is this FSF mini-summit on women in Free Software anyway? We know that Deb Nicholson, Hillary Rettig, and Stormy Peters will be there, but who else will be?

I wasn’t invited. I haven’t heard of anyone else who was invited. Have you?

If you have any information, post it in comments and I’ll update this post with a running list.

Update: Christine Spang was also invited.

Quick hit: LWN discussion on sexism, social skills, and autism spectrum disorders

As I mentioned in the link roundup, the LWN thread on the Free Software Foundation’s women in Free Software mini-summit will burn your sanity points. But there’s an interesting comment thread involving Matthew Garrett (mjg59) and Bruce Perens about Asperger’s and high functioning autism and what can be expected from people with Asperger’s if they are critised for sexist behaviour or otherwise offending people.

I wanted to highlight this discussion largely because “(s)he can’t help it, (s)he’s autistic” and the more disturbing variant “if geekdom just tossed out all those non-neurotypical folk, all the nasty sexism would go away” pop up fairly commonly in geek feminism discussions. (I don’t observe this much from geek feminists themselves, although being neurotypical I won’t be as alert to it, but certainly in the discussions.) I appreciate the considerably more nuanced discussion on this.

Note for commenters: While the LWN discussion started by talking about Richard Stallman (RMS) and the EMACs virgins incidents, statements about Stallman being neurotypical or not seem to be a matter of speculation only. Comments on this post making blanket assumptions about all neurodiverse people being unable to function in society or perform certain social tasks, or presuming that any individual is or is not neurotypical without that person’s self-identification being known, will be deleted.