LinuxChix Los Angeles

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.

====================================

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.

Senator Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee overseeing Medicare and Medicaid reads the Riot Act to software vendor over closed source tactics for Electronic Health Records.

These include a “hold harmless” clause – shifting any responsibility for system errors onto the physician and “gag rules” to prevent public disclosure of system defects.

Can it get any more un-open-source than that? Looks like another argument in favor of Open Source software for healthcare.

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

The latest posting at LinuxMedNews seems to indicate things are heating up a little.  What has been getting interesting has been a rising tide of voices including politicians both in the US and Canada as well as OSS vendors. Now there’s an Open Source Letter to President Obama online where the general public is invited to add their comments.