# 03 Jun 2014, 12:24AM: Collared:
I am more interested in actual vests than in stock options that vest. I presume I am but one of many dapper-aspirational women who eschew dominant startup culture in this way. (Also, Christie Koehler is my fashion icon.)
# 03 Jun 2014, 08:39AM: Choosing Older Or Younger Open Source Projects To Work On:
Larger, older open source projects have more people, more getting-started resources for new contributors, more name recognition, and sometimes more money to spend. (Examples: the Linux kernel, MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia, part of Wikimedia), Mozilla (the makers of Firefox), WordPress.)
Younger ones, with smaller contributor populations and smaller codebases, sometimes give new contributors more responsibility and power quickly, change faster in response to new ideas, and have more malleable culture -- and you can become one of the few World Experts in that technology more easily. (Examples: Tornado, ClojureScript, MetricsGrimoire, ThinkUp.)
So, while Mozilla, GNOME, Wikimedia, etc. have bigger budgets and more formal programs, and often have a larger worldwide impact, it could be that smaller and younger projects will give you more relative expertise faster. It's worth considering.
(You can use Ohloh to find open source projects on a particular topic, and see how many contributors they already have, and to compare projects. Take the statistics with a grain of salt, though; sometimes they're off.)
# (1) 05 Jun 2014, 09:20AM: In Conversation:
From yesterday:
- Frances Hocutt, my intern for this summer, finished her New York City visit and went home to Seattle. But not until we had schemed about writing documentation and improving client libraries for the MediaWiki web API to enable feminist analytics. With existing tools, folks made RENDER and some data visualization projects; what could they do if it were easier?
- Over its run, cookie-cutter sitcom Family Matters gradually became a speculative fiction soap opera starring a black scientist, and I think this is amazing and ought to be more widely recognized. Also, the series finale has the same plot as Gravity. In conversation with Leonard, I thus proposed several reboots of or sequels to Family Matters. Example: "Mad About You meets The X-Files and everyone's black." Leonard considered many of them derivative but promising.
- Leonard cut my hair. I now sport a buzzcut.
- Lyndsey and I talked about the reflex to diminish one's own past or current work. I dated myself by saying "Honey, I Shrunk The Accomplishment". We also noted that it's now easier than it's ever been to constantly compare your own work to that of the best people in your field. Lyndsey: "'Oh look, this person made 36% more commits than you did last month.' The problem isn't Quantified Self, it's Quantified Other People's Selves."
- Skud pointed me to "How We Organize the AMC Zine Vol. 1" which is an amazing conference organizing guide from the makers of Allied Media Conference.
Its contents offer theoretical vision, practical tips, and best practices that we hope will make the AMC organizing process as smooth and effective as possible, and will hopefully inspire other similar gatherings.
I suspect this, the OpenHatch Event Handbook, Hack Day Manifesto, and Community Event Planning (from the Stumptown Syndicate) overlap a bit, but are all valuable!
# (2) 15 Jun 2014, 10:07AM: Writing Between The Lines:
I'm trying to think of public speeches where the orator clearly does not believe what s/he is saying, and subverts literal or ostensible statements with tone, cadence, asides, body language, etc. I'm specifically interested in speakers going as off-script as they dare in situations where it's socially unacceptable to truly speak their minds. This came to mind because I just watched Tom Hanks introducing a Sony product at CES 2009 and making a deliberate hash of his lines. (Link via MetaFilter.) It was hilarious. None of the examples I can remember feel quite right:
Promising veins for this hue of sarcasm include various kinds of shilling, financial and political. I'd especially love non-US examples if you have any.
# 16 Jun 2014, 11:15AM: Inventions, and "Snake Oil" vs "Once Upon A Time":
Yesterday some pals and I played "Snake Oil", the game where you make up fake things to sell each other. I failed to sell a senior citizen a "Truth Photo" which shows you your loved ones AND hisses if someone in the room is lying (basically stole that feature from Lying Cat in Saga), and I successfully sold a cowboy some "Story Fluid" which makes others' repetitive campfire tales more interesting.
Leonard: Isn't that just alcohol?
Sumana: It's not just alcohol.
If you've played "The Big Idea", "Snake Oil" is similar, but improves the game by giving you customers to target and removing the venture capital logistics. (You might also recall The Colbert Report's recurring segment parodying health news and pharma shilling: "Cheating Death". In each "Cheating Death", Colbert explains why a news story has caused his sponsors to introduce a horrible new medical product.) And, similarly, as you play, you learn your friends' approaches and persuasive styles. I have learned, for instance, that both Leonard and I use the template: "As a [member of class foo], you have two problems! [problem 1] [problem 2] To solve both of them at once, we introduce: [terrible idea]" And some players, while playing the role of the customer, say nearly nothing, while some fully inhabit the role. Acquaintance David did an especially creditable job of improvising as pro wrestler Nut Crusher ("please, call me Nut").
At the party yesterday, we later broke out "Once Upon A Time" and I quickly saw its disadvantages in comparison to "Snake Oil". It takes a little longer to teach new folks, and it gets harder to play in groups larger than four, and it takes longer to play an individual round, and it doesn't reliably let every participant show off and have fun. In contrast, "Snake Oil" scales better to 5-8 people, each round is shorter and more reliably funny, it's easier to learn, and it generally has fewer pitfalls around boredom and path dependency. So although I will still love to play "Once Upon a Time" with small groups of friends, I think "Snake Oil" is a better go-to party game.
(Subtext of this post: look at me, I can talk about game experiences and game mechanics just as though I didn't still have trust and anxiety and insecurity issues around board/tabletop games, failure, learning, "being a good sport", and valuing play and leisure! Hold on, I'm not sure whether I'm using the proper microformat to place this subtext in the metadata rather than the body of the post.....)
# 28 Jun 2014, 10:34AM PST: Different Views:
I just realized that reading blogs about stuff I don't understand -- looking over the shoulders of practitioners as they talk shop -- is a path to legitimate peripheral participation, and maybe that's one reason why I like it. Also I just like (consensually!) eavesdropping on other people's lives.
Examples:
- a bike mechanic
- a pharma chemist
- a scholar and mother
I'm very grateful that the Internet lets me see the perspectives of people who have very different lives from mine.
# (2) 30 Jun 2014, 12:32PM: A Passel of Feelings And Thoughts Upon Returning:
A little over five years ago, I went to my first WisCon. I've now returned home from AdaCamp combined with another Open Source Bridge, a.k.a. the WisCon of open source. Every time I go to one of these, I see someone (example) rearranging their conceptual map to accommodate the knowledge that this thing is possible. Now I have the teacher's privilege of seeing new participants glow with new joy, finding these places. And though the "this is so amazing I can't even" feelings and thoughts no longer shoot off faster than I can track, I still make connections and hear or think things that I need to process.
Some things I thought about, and you know it's my blog because they're in a big unstructured list:
- My talks: A Few Python Tips (notes) and The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next (notes). And I led two unconference sessions, on classism in open source and tech and the future of OPW-like programs. I didn't propose any AdaCamp sessions, but facilitated one on GitHub alternatives.
- My intern, Frances Hocutt, gave the final keynote at OSB, on leadership (description). I found it moving and thought-provoking, and feel pride.
- Open Source Bridge featured twelve talks on Wikimedia/wiki-related topics. I am trying to work out what effect this has. I want to know how much our presentations and presence help OSB attendees and the open stuff community as a whole, and how much wisdom and inspiration OSB gives to Wikimedians. I've been speaking at Bridge for five years and each year Wikimedian participation has grown. Next year I may change it up, perhaps by letting other people represent Wikimedia at OSB, and going to the Allied Media Conference instead (it's often in June, close enough to OSB that I can't go to both and be happy).
- I showed some folks the newish Draft Articles feature on English Wikipedia and they loved it. I filed a Draft-related bug that the product manager has already responded to.
- I met a stranger who reads my blog. Hi!
- I now take alcohol wipes with me on air travel and use them to sanitize the hard bits of airplane seats (armrests, tray tables) when I sit down. So their ephemeral smell is now part of my travel ritual.
- "Do you have your laptop with you? I can show [thing] to you right now" feels like magic to say.
- Now that I've been working for Wikimedia Foundation for more than three years, my stories of Cody's Books, Salon, Fog Creek, Behavior, and Collabora feel so distant. I was literally telling some of those stories around a fireplace a few nights ago, and listening to an explanation of the begats of Helix and Ximian and Novell; it's so primal, doing that. There is so much lore. Perhaps the most urgency I feel is the urgency of distilling down what I learned through anxious years and conveying it to the new arrivals, making sure they know what is possible, how the rivalries started, how to get things done, whom to trust, our jokes, our pain.
- I continue to betray my stewardship of this planet and my responsibility to my fellow beings. I flew to and from the West Coast, I ate a lot of non-vegan food probably grown under exploitative labor practices, I took a bunch of cabs when with a little more planning I could have taken public transit, I used proprietary software like Twitter on probably sweatshop hardware, and it just keeps going, complicity and complicity piled upon complicity within complicity inside complicity, more and different and same. And then there are all the directly interpersonal betrayals, forgetting to set up one meeting, forgetting to attend another, not spending enough work time with my mentee, being an even worse email and SMS correspondent than usual. And it does not really reassure me that I am practically a Jain compared to some people, or that even thinking about these failings implies that I at least have some integrity to start with. I know that "voluntarily-chosen constraints are the source of creativity" - that is kind of how marriage works, for instance. But what about the constraints we didn't choose? Orwell had to process that whininess too: "I wasn't born for an age like this". I used to only admire the hacks that seemed arty and harmless, like "making a game" of tedious work to soak up cognitive surplus. Then I lived longer, and found I could understand people who dropped out, cheated, hustled, broke the law, fought back, broke out the guillotine (thanks to Skud for showing me that video). Sometimes they were right. How do you know if you're Huck Finn and you should rip up the letter and decide to go to hell? Or even what that letter is, in your life? I was never Yudhisthira, though I thought I was. My chariot never floated a handspan above the ground. I was always complicit. It turns out you don't have to sign up for any particular club in order to be capable of betrayal. It's a cold comfort that my regret -- my grief, really, over the delusion that I Am Good -- says that at least I'm trying to do right. It's a cold comfort knowing that one actually can go on looking at one's face in the mirror, that it looks the same, that everyone else is navigating the same muck and mire that I am, that ....
- Okay, while writing that, I looked up Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" and came across an attempting-to-be-chummy analysis (excerpt: "Aw, Auden. You're such a rebel!"). Now I am laughing and everything's better. Despite everything, it remains possible for me to incandesce with joy at a good knock-knock joke, or at the Quaker Cop mythos Leonard and I are developing ("You have the right to remain silent .... in meeting!"), or at Matthew's reinterpretation of the Yaksha Prashna as a Silicon Valley job interview (why did the other four brothers die? "Poor cultural fit."). Incidentally, from my comic book memory of the Mahabharata, I always remembered the riddle as "What's heavier than a mountain? Debt" but online sources say "One's mother is heavier than the earth; one's father is higher than the mountains" which just seems like a centuries-old Yo Mama joke and less ringingly true besides.
- This year at AdaCamp I attempted to be "laid-back" and tried out what it's like to not propose sessions specific to my interests. Now I know that such a course of action will lead to me feeling less engaged, and I'll be my usual pushy self at future unconferences.
- People really appreciated "Entry Level", the zine/reader on class issues, and the opportunity to talk about how class and classism have affected them.
- I groaned and laughed and shouted and generally talked more in those eight days than I usually do over eight days and now my throat is sore.
- Talked with Skud about how the difference between self-care and slacking off is intentionality. But then, intentionality requires a decision, which causes decision fatigue? Noooooooo
- It was so nice to pair program with Coral and do a small manageable technical task.
- I can read body language now better than I ever could before, and it's often depressing. Because now I can tell better when people are uncomfortable or bored. Breaking news: it turns out that obliviousness helps build confidence (yet another point in the "everything is a skill and thus learnable yet subject to Dunning-Kruger" constellation).
- I think the most rewarding thing about these conferences, for me, is some mix of the I've-been-there-too commiserating and solution-sketching, making people laugh, laughing at new inside jokes, literally seeing things in a new light, deepening my relationships with people important to me, and passing on the stuff I've learned. I am drawn to people with curiosity, a work ethic, compassion, and integrity (well, as much as anyone can have in this fallen world), and it nourishes me to see those characteristics in the little decisions they make in front of me.
Future Sumana, I hope you can make something out of this jumble. The light is clear outside and I can hear a bird calling. I am loved and cherished, and I hope you are too.
