|
Trolling is lame
I really don't like trolling. While I'm a really good troll when I want to be, I'm not really into that any more; at least without a latté in hand. It's just tiresome. So, while the normal advice is to ignore it, we have a weekly requirement to reply, so I will, perhaps incautiously.
One problem with most trolls is that they play off of the psychological issues of their victims, in this case our own egos and stereotypes, without being substantive (that's the game). I mean, they just aren't true. And if you have a little bit of authority, you can say anything. Who's to say if 90% of his students really do write such things about "beautiful wives"? (I doubt it.) And the open source conference is not a good measure of what is really going on the 'Net. I've been a lot of places on the 'Net. I know there is a kernel of truth, but only on the surface. Wisdom demands looking deeper.
I have the suspicion, judging from his blog, that Greg wasn't overly prepared, so he opted for a confrontational lecture. Best defense is an offense, after all. It would have been more useful if he had actually talked about the practice of open source so that us outsiders might have a buy into the process.
So, to that end, if you really want to know what's going on amongst open source developers, read Advogato--where you will find women too, by the way. While I doubt you have time for that now, tuck that link away, because it's the most important one in terms of open source community.
And if you want to understand how the culture of open source becomes bent, look no further than Slashdot. Slashdot consists mostly of users, sysadmins with nothing better to do than to read Slashdot. They are scrazy.
Is that culture gendered? Of course for a million reasons (Ha ha, only serious).
Trolls upon trolls. Useless, n'est pas? Bah.
Some reality
Before coming to lecture for us, Greg Wilson wrote on his blog that he intended to make the argument that
"the web as we know it was built by and for white, male, physically-able, English-speaking, emotionally-arrested geeks. The rest of the world has overcome the “white” and “English-speaking” hurdles (as evidenced by how much content is now in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Tamil, and other languages), but if you want to understand why it still all seems broken sometimes, you still have to look at its roots."
I'm not convinced that "social software" has a gender bias at the level that Greg intimated. For instance, the most popular blogging software outside of LiveJournal is Moveable Type, developed by Six Apart whose CEO is a woman by the name of Mena Trott, who also works on usability and aesthetics. A company commercializing wikis, Socialtext, was co-founded by another woman, Adina Levin, VP Products.
Usage rates in social software also demonstrate an intense gender skew--towards girls, teenaged mostly. LiveJournal is 2/3 teenage girls. I did some poking and I found out the demographic breakdown of LiveJournal's infrastructure through ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) crschmidt, a support volunteer and developer. First, the paid staff consists of 3 women out of 16 people. While all the developers are men, the Manager of Support and Abuse is a woman, as is the accounts manager, and one of the sysadmins. Christopher indicates that "the volunteer staff is representative of the demographics of LiveJournal itself. Developers are pretty much all guys (I only know one female who even tries) but support/abuse staff is about 75-80% female." When asked about the age breakdown (as the average LiveJournaler is 18), he says that "the average age is about 20, with a smattering of younger people and a few people in their late 20s."
Here are some demographics of LiveJournal volunteers and support staff. Age (16-28); gender and sexual orientation (1/3 male, 2/3 female; 1/2 straight, 1/4 bi, 1/10 gay, 1/10 undefined).
The critical point here is that developers of a social space like the 'Net are part of the community of people using their software, and so they want to work with their community. Even if the guys whacking the code into the machine are pale-faced macho men, they do so only in negotiation with the rest of the possibly pluralistic community. Read the Goat Votes here on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_dev if you need to see what I mean.
Of course, you can question why the wiki developers are predominantly male. That's a good question, and it deserves an answer.
As for political activism, well, if there's been anything that has been on the Net since before recorded history, it's been politics. It's not difficult to think of examples of politics online, from anti-globalization protesters to John McCain and Howard Dean. For more local Canadian politics, there is stuff going on, but we never notice since we haven't had many domestic elections worth paying attention to in the last ten years. Politics isn't just a college kid wankfest. Adina is busy at the moment with EFF Austin trying to break the electronic voting system they have. I'm not a political "activist", but I'm involved in more traditional politics as well.
Regarding musician software, if you recall, I popped out a comment about the Finns being central, while the sentiment in the room was that musician software had some intrinsic reason for being usable. My point about the Finns is very simple. When I was 15, I remember crawling through the European demo scene community's collective output. I bet it's not difficult to trace the sociological history of Swedish Propellerhead back to the Finnish The Future Crew. If you are old enough to remember MOD files (from the Amiga), and later Screamtracker, Fasttracker, and the other 'trackers', you know that the evolution of music software has been a steady and furious Scandanavian movement. The design philosophy of that group of developers is particular and their own. Maybe I'm wrong about Propellerhead, but certainly the tracking community was a tight group of people back in the day.
Reality is more interesting than myths.
In defense of my own people
As I described earlier in my pre-lecture post, Orphans Preferred, I think if software is broken, it's not because of its demographic roots, but because of the competitive and arrogant culture. This is compounded by the anti-social atmosphere in compsci.
We compared compsci to engineering this week, and there are important differences to understand. Engineers are more social than compscis. Engineers have their own frosh weeks, but we don't in compsci, excepting Waterloo. Similarly, while engineers have engineering societies leading up to their iron rings, compsci societies are very weak if non-existant. University chapters of the ACM number around 10-20 in total for the entire world, and only a feckless one here at University of Toronto (barely run by three fourth years who lived together in first year residence).
Further, engineering assignments are hard and often done in groups, either explicitly in team projects, or just because it's impossible to do it otherwise. Compscis don't work together on assignments, and we are taught not to since plagiarism is treated very seriously (or at least overly anal compscis take this too seriously). Then the environment becomes overly competitive in many undergraduate compsci environments. Assignment sabotage is not uncommon. And all of this is compounded by not having many assignments that require communal lab space, so we prefer to work at home by ourselves.
So, our worlds become very abstract, and since we are anti-social by choice or by structure, our whole worlds revolve around compsci, so we measure ourselves by our proficiency at compsci having no other structure of validation and by entering a competitive culture. I'll repeat what I wrote, "I was one of those bastards vying for status. I think derailing that pyramid of faux meritocracy would be beneficial for the students' humanity. Many former students agree, once they escape the labs and enter the world once again after five years away from it, that they really regretted playing Enders Game."
The need to feel smarter than everyone else and the consequent ignorance of large swaths of society is what excludes our (actually, your) voices from the process. It's not hard to see what's really wrong. "Social science is useless," is the problem.
But, look, the second half of what I said is that we eventually emerge from school and become human again. Life reasserts itself and by the age of 30, most software developers have sorted themselves out. The ones I deal with on a daily basis are not angry or arrogant or otherwise anti-social. I feel the need to defend the majority of us that move on and are, well, not complete bastards. (I hope I'm not a complete bastard.) I'm sticking by the dictum, Assume good faith. Most software developers actually care about people, you know. They are often afraid of them; often bumbling; often space cadets; but their intentions are almost always good.
Then again, maybe your impression of open source developers needs to be informed from their perspective. Please read Advogato's most excellent Rules of Open Source Programming.
So, like I wrote to jumpinjulia earlier, the lecture was as stimulating as throwing stones at a flock of pigeons. Sure we're all flying around in response, but all we get in the end is a lot of bird poop. Useless.
I hope that I've given here something more substantive to balance things out; a few breadcrumbs at least.
Barn raising
Thesis and antithesis are entertaining and all, but they aren't good enough by themselves. What's more useful is building something; achieving a new synthesis. I know that's hopelessly gauche amongst the latté set, but I'm an engineer at heart or maybe a pol or a small town guy or maybe just sane. Barn raising has been my living metaphor for the past four years, and I'm sticking to it. Collaboration is not about shutting someone down, or performing, but trying to teach each other something new with the hope of achieving some goal. If KMDI is a collaborative design program, then I'd like to collaborate on a design.
We have a proposal on the table to construct a KMDI Travelling Circus where folk can pitch their ideas to a sympathetic audience willing to exchange help to get those ideas off the ground. That would be more of a collaborative design program. I'll post more about that later, but this lecture made me think I should work harder on making that happen. One thing I've learnt is that everyone sitting in one of those chairs, and anyone who's got into KMDI, has an amazing background and perspective. I'm dying to bring some people together to build something, to make something happen.
I enjoy putting two palms on the ground and pushing just to make the world go round.
But hey, that's me. I think it's fun.Current Mood:  quixotic |
|
<crschmidt> Sunir: That's one of the problems with researching LJ as a social network - it's well developed, but it quickly makes you want to stab yourself in the face
As heard on irc://irc.freenode.net/#joiito. |
|
From an interview with an army medic on his experience in Iraq.
Stationed in the area of the Baghdad Airport at the time of President Bush’s Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops there, he also recounts that on the day before the president’s visit, the troops were given a questionnaire that asked them whether they “supported the president.” Those who did not declare their support with sufficient enthusiasm were not permitted to take part in the Thanksgiving meal, and had to make do with MREs (meals ready to eat, referred to by the soldiers as “meals refused by Ethiopians”) in their quarters.
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=668
Makes me want to watch Full Metal Jacket again. |
|
