LinuxChix Los Angeles

Great times, great friends, great talks. I’d do it again tomorrow.

Katherine Druckman

“This is what we have, and this is what we’re going to win with.” How to be a web developer, graphic designer, u/i research, sysadmin team, as one person.

• Plan and prioritize your site goals and organize your plan of attack accordingly.
• Version control is necessary (!) even as a one-person developer.
• Set realistic time milestones
• Accept and move on when you’re not PERFECT.

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Notes: Cheap and easy U/I feedback. Buy a bunch of non-geek friends a pizza and watch them tear your site apart. Find the community in which you can ask/receive help … LUGS, Regional events, IRC.

Pitfalls for the solo web team include featurtis creep … feature curve -> too many features can actually diminish usability.

Observation: Finding it easier as a female to ask another female for help. RTFM issues. Discussion on gender hiding, yes, it happens for various reasons.

Some resources: drupalchix, phpwomen, .51, women who tech.

Multidisplinary approach draws from resources in other fields. Quick poll … how many came from a non-tech field into tech? Many. (Flosspols point of interest … acknowledge non-coding contributions as just as valuable as code contributions as a way on increasing diversity.)

KD personal path … came from art field and followed inclination into web development, and here she is.

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Sarah Mei

Gender activitism in Ruby started with RubyCon in SF … presentation would have been different with 150 men/150 women as opposed to 292 men/6 women ration. Increasing gender diversity means changing the environment by changing the ratio.

1 year ago 2% women, this year 18%, target 50%

Process in Ruby community: Set goals, Do events, Cultivate people. All three necessary, most just focus on ‘Do Events’. Important to work on attainable goals, i.e, increase participation for monthly meetings. Picked specific target, 1) women who were not programmers, but worked at companies who were tech focused, and tech women who have been out of the workforce for a period of time and were looking to update skill sets.

Logistics tips: Offer childcare. Technical women are more likely to have a technical spouse (Anita Borg Inst statistic) and would be likely to attend same events. Just the fact that it’s offered sends positive message -> low cost high signal message. Social component important … after party incorporates women into wider community.

Visibility -> put name on events makes a difference, contribute to mailing lists, and do talks.

Expected outcome: After year more women have attended monthly meetups, and more women at events.
Unexpected outcome: mailing list activity has picked up with more signal than noise., more interesting talks, more women giving talks, and MEN are feeling more comfortable in not knowing everything. (Guess not wanting to appear ‘dumb’ is one of those universal traits , and events have become more newbie friendly.

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Rikki Kite
Pretty In Print
Associate Publisher, Linux New Media

10 Tips for Getting Published

1. Don’t be afraid!
2. Writing samples optional
3. Know your topic
4. Know your publication
5. Know your editor
6. Write
“Don’t try to be clever. You use Linux so you already are clever. Write about the trivial things . . .”
“Revise, Revise, Revise!” –Rikki Kite
7. Submit . . . & wait
8. Be clear on compensation
9. Know your rights
“Review your freelance agreement carefully.” –Carla Schroder
10. Repeat

Rikki Kite gave a beautiful and concise talk and actually intended this topic as a lightning talk, so it was quick but very informative.

Amber Graner … NTEU (Not Technical End User). A year in the life of an Ubuntu end user activist. BIG MESSAGE … you can be involved without being an application developer, you are a contributor even without coding.

Open source can change world, sometimes one person at time, one application at a time. Even small contributions to open source in whatever capacity makes a difference.

Open source is not a ladder with directional rungs, but a lattice. Any entry point leads to somewhere.

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Malakai Wade, Mirano Cafiero, & Saskie Wade
Ultimate Randomness–Girl Voices in Open Source

This was the first talk at WIOS and I am sure is going to be one of the best of SCALE 8X
All three speakers were enthusiastic young girls who talked about their experience in Open Source and Linux. The girls talked about creating artwork in the GIMP and Tux Paint and their use of the OLPC Sugar OS Laptops. They also presented us with their artwork created in the GIMP and Tux Paint and with a beautifully made slideshow with sound created in Linux. The slideshow was a whimsical stop motion piece of Barbies waking up in the Barbie Doll House. It was created in the style of an old silent film, complete with music and verbal cue slides. All the girls are geeks, enthursiastic. learning Linux and spreading the word of Open Source! Yeaaahhhhaaahhhh!!!!!

/JilliX

The main LinuxChix website is hosted by the fine folk at Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL), along with a host (pun intended) of other fine opensource communities like Apache, Debian, Gnome, KDE, and the LinuxFoundation. One of these, or any of the other communities helped out by OSUOSL, should give the encouragement you need to give $6 for 6 in honor of OSUOSL’s 6th year anniversary.

MIT. Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds. Free lecture notes, exams, and videos from MIT OpenCourseWare. MIT Education without the MIT cost. I’ve gone through both the Algorithms and Physics courses and just these two are well worth a small donation.

EFF is the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world. Protecting our digital rights is an ongoing battle and funds are needed especially when the financial belt feels tightest. If possible consider giving yourself the gift of EFF membership, or at least some EFF swag.

The rover that could, and could, and could year after year is stuck in a sand trap since this past spring. On Monday NASA will attempt to extricate the Mars Rover Spirit. You can follow the progress via news reports on the Free Spirit page, or the Mars Rover’s facebook or Twitter feeds.

And while poking around on the Mars Rover pages I found the Women on the Mars Exploration Rover team photo. What an absolutely uber cool project in which to work. Go Team

The title is a quote by Cheris Kramarae which was subsequently quoted by Carla Schroder in her article “Sexism in FOSS” which appears in a Linux Today article. (Note: Carla is a managing editor of Linux Today and one of the current coordinators of LinuxChix.)

One of the comments to the article reads

Subject: An average male nerds take on this. “Hmmm…could it be that the low numbers of women in software in general is that most women, not persons, but women, happen to be not interested in this particular field?”

And I’m so freaking tired of “women aren’t in X profession because they are not interested,” horsesh*t. Eerily similar to this which “explains” why women didn’t need the vote.

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours. Grover Cleveland, 1905

Women ARE interested in open source development. Really. Women wouldn’t be so frustrated with, in its best light, the overall lack of gender diversity in the open source community if we weren’t interested in open source. Really. Women, and some men, continue to talk about the sexism that exists in FLOSS because sexism poses a barrier to participation by women in open source. Really.

Love this! Connecting to community through community. In the words of the Mozilla Foundation,

Mozilla Service Week is all about community – your community. We want you to find a way to use technology to make a difference in your neighborhood, your school, your library, your town, a fellow public benefit organization. We welcome any act of service, no matter how small.

How to participate? Visit the Mozilla Service week page for more information. Find a volunteer opportunity in your town, your city, your state, your country, or your world through the Idealist Mozilla partner listing of volunteer opportunities. You can search by location, field of interest, or desired skill set.

I’m off to see if someone needs a volunteer webmaster. I’ll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE 9/15: Issue is gone (I hope!). Everything I wrote about fsockopen, cURL, etc. forget it. It was a server firewall issue. The reason for the ad hoc creation of dynamic rules which intermittently blocked outbound http requests is still under investigation, but the installation of a firewall that had better integration with the backend web administration interface looks to have helped.
UPDATE 9/13: Issue is back. All outside connections, including rss feeds, are out. Damn.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Anita Borg Systers Pass-it-on Award applications for a financial stipend of $500-$1000 USD to women either in, or aspiring to be in, the field of computing. From the RFP page some possible uses for the stipend could include

• Small amount to help with studies, job transfers or other transitions in life.
• A broader project that benefits girls and women.
• Projects that seek to inspire more girls and women to go into the computing field.
• Assistance with educational fees and materials.
• Partial funding source for larger scholarship.
• Mentoring and other supportive groups for women in technology or computing.

Applications close November 4, 2009. More information and an application can be had here http://www.anitaborg.org/initiatives/systers/pass-it-on-grants-program

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages posted by James Iry is a wonderfully funny, and irreverent look at software development. My favorite?

1987 – Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

Yup, that’s Perl.

Makes me think of my history (herstory?). The first computer I ever worked on was the Apple IIe that included the C/PM card for the full 80 column computer experience. Ah, the memories of WordStar and playing Pong on that Apple.