Adele Shakal ([info]shakal) wrote,
@ 2007-02-12 01:00:00
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Current mood: pleased
Entry tags:opensource, sysadmin

Local groups, and thoughts on open source geeknitude
I had an absolute blast volunteering at SCALE 5x. I didn't even have time to attend any of the talks or Birds of a Feather sessions, and honestly many of the topics weren't really my thing anyway, but I had time to wander the exhibit area and to schmooze and chatter with lots of people in the hallway track, and generally make myself useful in the registration booth, which meant I got to meet a whole, whole bunch of the more than a thousand conference attendees at one point or another during the weekend.

And now a personal forehead-smack-worthy moment: Why I didn't figure this out until now kind of baffles me, but most of the local "Linux User Groups" are actually Linux-tinged Open Source enthusiast groups, not just all-Linux-all-the-time, as I have been assuming for years and years. Color me dopey for not reading past the titles and acronyms....

Yeah, I lived in a very Solaris-colored world when I worked at Caltech, that's what the group I was part of specialized in, so I didn't twig on to the idea that a local Linux user group might be for me. Sigh. Should have figured this out a lot sooner... but then again, I don't think many of the Linux sysadmins I worked near at Caltech are members of these groups either, and I'm not sure why that is... lack of time, lack of the group's visibility or outreach or something? One of them even meets on campus! I have no clue why more of my sysadmin former co-workers aren't already participating in this sort of professional development, social networking and general commiseration and enthusiasm (or were and never mentioned it to me, although I'm a vocal proponent of USENIX/SAGE and LOPSA and evangelize about joining professional organizations and mailing lists and such fairly frequently). Anyway... that's all water under the bridge. Onward and upward!

I need to seek out local Mac user groups, too... but that's a post for another day.

Many of the local user groups' websites have mailing lists and IRC channels, too, and all sorts of other useful stuff. Here are some of the local meetings happening around the Los Angeles area of groups who had a presence at SCALE this weekend.

What: Cerritos Linux Users Group (CLUG) (seems to have merged with the Linux Users at LAX group Lilax recently)
Where: California State University Dominguez Hills venues
When: second Saturday of each month from ~10:00am to 2:00pm

What: LAMPSIG, "the Los Angeles LAMP Special Interest Group (LAMPsig) is an off-shoot of the Linux Users of Los Angeles (LULA) group. LAMPsig is focused on web development and end user web interfaces. The LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is the SIG's starting point."
Where: Tom Bradley Center, 5213 West Pico Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90019
When: third Saturday of each month

What: LA Perl Mongers, the Perl Users Group of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area (note that they also link to some affiliated groups via their website: Orange County Perl Mongers, San Diego Perl Mongers, and Thousand Oaks Perl Mongers)
Where: Ticketmaster Corporate Headquarters, 8800 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069
When: as scheduled, check the website

What: Santa Barbara Linux Users Group (SBLUG)
Where: Santa Barbara somewhere
When: every 2 weeks, more details can be found at http://www.sblug.com but the website seems to be down currently

What: San Gabriel Valley Linux Users Group (SGVLUG)
Where: 107 Downs on the Caltech Campus in Pasadena
When: 2nd Thursday of every month from 7pm to 9pm

What: San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group (SFVLUG)
Where: location varies (but seems to include Van Nuys and Northridge), check the website
When: every two weeks, on Saturday once a month, and a Monday or Tuesday once a month

What: Unix Users Association of Southern California (UUASC)
Where: Los Angeles County chapter, check the website
Where and When: Orange County Chapter, second Monday of each month from 7 to 9 pm

And I just found the lovely helpful listing of other local user groups and techgeek meetings at http://www.lalugs.org/ :-)

But by far the most interesting for me personally, among the local user group booths...

LinuxChixLA, the local chapter of LinuxChix -- "Primary communiction between members is via email lists and include lists for New Chix, those new to Linux, developers on the Tech Talk, Programming, and Kernel Chix lists, gender issue focused lists on the Grrls Only and Grrltalk lists, and a welcoming learning environment on the Courses list."

Also, there are number of wikis springing up which focus on the volume and visibility of women participating in open source. Some neat items from one of the LinuxChixLA booth handouts:

http://wiki.linuxchixla.org/
http://wiki.apache.org/women/
http://wiki-ubuntu-women.org/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Women
http://wikichix.org/wiki/WikiChix

ETA: There's an excellent writeup of the women in open source miniconf at http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/300/ -- it has even more useful links!

Did I mention that I had an absolute blast volunteering at SCALE 5x this weekend?

;-D

Off the top of my head, I can think of more than a few packages based on open source that I absolutely depend on, at home and at work on my MacOSX laptops and work tower, and to connect from them to Solaris and Linux servers: Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email client, LiveJournal, TWiki, MediaWiki, GIMPshop image editing software, Cyberduck file transfer software (FTP and SFTP), MPlayerOSX media player, VLC media player, Audacity for sound recording, and (less frequently) I use Jomic comics viewer, and of course, I use Wikipedia frequently for looking up random factoids. I also installed Adium for chat a while back, though I often use iChat instead.

Back when my work computer was a WinXPpro tower, I used Thunderbird, Firefox and Putty daily...

And in hunting down some of those links, I've just stumbled across these two handy pages listing lovely open source MacOSX software, and oooh, some of that looks very shiny...

So yeah, I may not be in as deep as some folks who muck about up to their elbows (or necks) in the Linux kernel, and I may never want to spend time doing that, but I'm an open source enthusiast, in my own ways. And it was great to be around near-kindred spirits this weekend.

And now I'm eyeing my old Dell WinXPpro tower, pondering various choices for rebuilding it into something more interesting... don't know when I'll get to that project, of course, but still... :-)


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[info]browneyedgirl65
2007-02-12 05:15 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, Linux as a delivery system for open source ;-)

I started focusing on open source because very frequently they are multiplatform so that I could use the same programs pretty much regardless of where I was (work, home, etc). Wasn't long after that that I ditched Windows on my pc entirely...

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[info]shakal
2007-02-12 05:40 pm UTC (link)
I'm pretty much exclusively working on OSX nowadays. I got used to Firefox for browsing back when my work computer was a Windows tower because tabbed browsing rocked my world when it was first available, and I've been using Thunderbird for ages since I got hooked on NetscapeMail back in 1996 or so. I brought my Firefox and Thunderbird affection with me when I bought my home Powerbook G4 a couple years back. *pets my shiny little tiny laptop*

And now I'm thinking about the commercial software packages I depend on these days... hrm. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, because of work. Dreamweaver at home and at work. OmniGraffle Pro at work because I used to depend on Visio when I was on WinXP at my previous job and Visio isn't available for Mac. Mac Mail and Addressbook and iCal at home, since using Mail and Thunderbird lets me keep my work, old-work, and home email accounts completely separate. iPhoto at home since I haven't found a replacement I like better to interface with my digital camera cardreader USB thing (and I'm using Flickr more than I'm using iPhoto). ircle and iChat. iTunes because it interfaces very nicely with my iPod and I ripped all my CDs into it. Quicktime, Realplayer and Windows Media Player just in case VLC and Mplayer can't open something properly. Stuffit Expander. iDVD. SilverKeeper for backups. And of course Terminal for SSHing. CoreDuoTemp to monitor the temperature of my work MacBookPro.

Hrmmmmmm...

:-)

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[info]shakal
2007-02-12 05:43 pm UTC (link)
And now, looking at that list, I remember someone at LISA a few years ago (maybe [info]yesthattom?) recommending a replacement for Terminal... I need to go back through my notes, because at the time, I was too swamped with other concerns to spend any time customizing or improving it...

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[info]rowan_redbeard
2007-02-12 11:12 pm UTC (link)
iTerm, probably. It's pretty nice, but I still mainly just use Terminal.app, since it basically does what I need it to.

I'm going to spring for Adobe Lightroom for photo stuff. The beta is very nice ... but then I think I do a bit more fancy photo processing.

But yes, open source. It's safe to say that my job would be immeasurably different without it.

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[info]shakal
2007-02-12 06:04 pm UTC (link)
There's a writeup of the women in open source miniconf at http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/300/ -- fascinating stuff and even more useful links! :-D

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[info]montyy0
2007-02-13 11:05 pm UTC (link)
I've occasionally been impressed by the http://women.debian.org folks, who I see got a link from that page (and Bdale Garbee was a speaker, it says...) I'm particularly fond of http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/howto.html as a reference for this stuff.

With the caveat that I may be an ignorant male or something, I find (unlike the rest of the article) the problem list credited to Jean T. Anderson of "the most significant barriers to female free/open source software participation" is disturbing. Most of it seems like it's stuff that makes everyone (male or female) uncomfortable, and it's not particularly endemic to IT, and it's also largely stuff that all people of all genders need to get over to be effective in a work environment. I don't mean to say there's not a real phenomenon that makes things problematic for women, I just suspect that there must be some other undercurrent that the list doesn't capture, because frankly, most women that I know can overcome those things just as well as most men that I know can, and the way I read the list, it's actually demeaning and disempowering toward women in that it implies that they somehow deserve or require some special treatment to overcome some sort of intrinsic disability.

But hey, maybe the list was taken out of context, or maybe I'm a sexist pig... although in my defense for the latter, I offer a SIGGRAPH horror story:

A young, female undergrad looking for a job after she finishes her BS or MS or something goes to a major animation house's booth, and this dialog ensues:

STUDENT: I'd like to drop off a resume with you.
BOOTH WEENIE: sorry, we're not hiring artists right now.
STUDENT (annoyed): I'm not an artist, I'm looking for a programming position
WEENIE (incredulous): but... you're a girl!

apparently, at this point the shit hit the fan, and things worked out at least to the level where there was a formal apology made from some upper management person, but the fact that WEENIE exists at all and was allowed to represent the company at a trade show is pretty strong evidence that there is a serious problem. But if making a bullet list, I'd rank that more as "people with influence in the hiring process at major companies actually believe that a penis is required to write software" than any "women are afraid they might get flamed or look stupid" sort of category.

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[info]shakal
2007-02-14 04:23 am UTC (link)
Not having attended any of the Friday sessions, I don't know what the context was. I do know that it felt to me like there were very many more men at SCALE than I'm used to seeing at USENIX/SAGE or LOPSA sysadmin-related events.

"Booth babes" and "booth bunnies" and "booth boys" who are there basically as decoration as a concept bother the crap out of me. I understand the realities of marketing (shiny pretty gets attention, duh), but if the booth is recruiting or hiring, in addition to marketing or selling product? Then the booth workers had darned well be brought up to speed on equal employment legal stuff and their company's current HR guidelines and standards. There's no excuse for booth staff or volunteers to drag us all back in the dark ages.

In my case, I'm not participating much in the open source movement (other than using open-source tools, as I mentioned above, and now starting to volunteer with SCALE) because I don't know anyone already doing it (or if they are they haven't mentioned it to me) and, more importantly, I don't know what to expect to get out of participating.

The one thing I expected to see on the list of barriers-to-entry for women to participate in open source wasn't on the list anywhere in that miniconf writeup. See if this makes sense to anyone but me: (a) there are a finite number of hours in the day, (b) women are usually spending significant hours both at work and at home, and (c) in general, women are undercompensated financially for hours worked in the workplace compared with men's earning power. We choose to spend our time on the necessities of life, then what is financially rewarding, and then on what is personally rewarding, professional development-related and social-support-relaxation related... more or less. What's the return on investment for our time if we decide to spend it on doing open source development? I honestly do not know. I'm assuming it's professional-development related, if someone is learning new skills or honing existing ones or making professional network connections because of their efforts on an open source project. But if the work to be done on the project is just using existing skills we're already using in the workplace, with people we already have professional contacts with... if we're not gaining knowledge, cross-pollination of creativity, or professional contacts, we'd darn well be better off spending our time on something that gets us money.

But maybe that's just me, single woman with credit debt and student loans that I am, and renting with a roommate where there's a high cost of living, and knowing that by the time I may eventually be able to retire there's going to be no social security or pension plans other than what I manage to stash away myself.

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[info]montyy0
2007-02-14 05:20 am UTC (link)
yeah, I can believe that income disparity is an issue. I don't think it's enough by itself to explain what's missing from the original list, but I think you touched on something in terms of attitudes and priorities, too. In terms of return on investment, I think a lot of people see it as a way of paying back some of the value they get out of using the software, or as contributing to fight questionable commercial software practices, or as aesthetically pleasing. There also seems to be a desire to be able to practice the craft of software creation in an environment that doesn't have work/corporate/pointy-haired-boss pressures and where one is allowed to do things one's own way. And, I suspect that there is an underlying desire to be known as the creator of, or a contributor to, some cool software that has a good reputation, and to be able to list that on one's resume and web page and such. This does seem to tie in to some amount of machismo or pride that seems typical of us Y chromosome types, although a lot of the women who are involved seem to share it, too.

Taking a step back from the FOSS and even the whole IT field, I'm not sure why more men than women like to work on old cars, either. I do it because I think it's fun, I like getting into the guts of how things work, and it's an enjoyable distraction, and I also get an ego boost out of being able to fix or improve them. I don't really see any reason why there should be a gender difference in any of those things, either, so I don't know if there's a cultural or an actual biological difference in interest level or perceived value there. I certainly wouldn't blame anyone (male or female) for not sharing these motivations, but I don't really understand why there should be a gender difference, since it seems the personality factors that lead to car fiddling aren't tied to gender differences in any way I can think of.

Maybe the question is less "what are the barriers" and more "why do less women than men see value in overcoming the barriers" -- is that a cultural bias, or just a style difference, or what? I guess that's a lot of my gripe with that list, in that it seems to suggest that women can't overcome the barriers if they want to, while I see women as quite capable of dealing with all those issues if they decide it's worth their while, so is the problem that the barriers are so substantial that it detracts from the perceived value, or is it something else, like there's less perceived value in the first place?

I guess, now that I think about it, a lot of developers seem to like the sense of community they get from participating in FOSS-- maybe part of the difference is that women's attitudes or desires for communities they're interested in getting involved with are somehow at odds with the nature of the FOSS world. It seems curious to me that despite the horror stories, I don't know too many cases of women who got past the initial problems and started being involved in FOSS (or IT in general, or Math/Science/Engineering) who left in disgust because of all the horrible problems, so I almost wonder if there's some sort of weird cultural pressure that makes the perceived problems or lack of value just lead to women not being interested in the first place.

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[info]montyy0
2007-02-14 05:28 am UTC (link)
p.s. looking at http://women.debian.org/profiles/ suggests that women who are involved in Debian, at least, have the same reasons for being interested as most of the men, as far as I can tell. Of course, this is a biased sample of the women who did decide to participate, and there's no easy way I can think of to sample women who aren't involved to find out why they aren't...

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[info]shakal
2007-02-14 03:31 pm UTC (link)
Once women are into FOSS, they must be getting something out of it, if few leave. But getting past the initial hurdles to decide to participate must be significantly different for women than for men. I do think it's a relative difference, not an absolute one...

Hrmmmmmm...

I love bouncing ideas around with you. Thinky thoughts result! :-)

is the problem that the barriers are so substantial that it detracts from the perceived value, or is it something else, like there's less perceived value in the first place?

Perhaps less perceived relative value, compared to the twenty zillion other things a person could be doing. :-)

I don't know too many cases of women who got past the initial problems and started being involved in FOSS (or IT in general, or Math/Science/Engineering) who left in disgust because of all the horrible problems

I know plenty of women who left Math/Science/Engineering in disgust, and most of them still love science as a concept but object to the feudalism and the machismo and the bullshit. There are barriers to entry, and there are plenty of reasons to leave.

Also there's a lack-of-applicability or lack-of-practicality issue associated with specializing in theoretical science, and there's an over-specialization-to-the-exclusion-of-too-much else issue which affects those in both academic and in industry science.

Add to that the fact that the feudal mentoring style is very different than the kind of mentoring most women I know value so highly, and the fact that the timeframe of the academic process is in a pretty nasty conflict with women's biology... and on top of all of that, many of us (women and men) who did stick it out to finish technical bachelors degrees and who consider going further for masters or doctorates face an attitude of "of course you'd want to stay in academia, that's the purpose of a higher degree, and if you can't hack academia, well, only people who can't take it, can't tough it out, fall back into *peers down nose* industry jobs..." That's bullshit, but folks I know who are between 2 and 10 years older than I am got a heavy, heavy dose of it, and perhaps those women were just sick of bullshit.

I know few women who left IT in disgust. In fact, many of the women I know who left Math/Science/Engineering went to IT of some flavor. It's practical, there's definite return on investment, and if we bridge the gaps between developers, engineers, programmers, sysadmins and end users/customers/managers, we have the opportunity to work with both techie geeks and folks who natively have more interpersonal skills. (I'm sorry, but in general, techie geeks are poorly socialized, and that's one more tick in the bullshit side of the comparison when people consider who they want to spend hours and hours each day with).

Actually, that's another barrier to entry for FOSS. When many of the first people one meets in something are on the low end of the socialization scale (and especially if one is themself, shall we say, less socialized than most), the initial encounters are more likely to include misunderstandings or misinterpretations, and it's one more hassle to overcome.

I hate to put it this way, but maybe it's just that many of us are more like porcupines than we care to admit...

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[info]shakal
2007-02-14 04:15 pm UTC (link)
More thoughts...

Most of the things I value doing for the simple sake of doing them, I value despite the fact that I don't put them on my resume. I knit, crochet, tat, sew, bead, hike, backpack, cook, do creative writing and dabble with digital art, organize things, enjoy reading, enjoy fostering and moderating discussion, am creative about being environmentally conscious, am creative about being politically active, and absolutely adore finding like-minded women to talk about things that interest me and from there, any topic imaginable.

I get a huge personal ROI from spending time doing those activities, obviously enough to offset my lack of income from them. I can choose my level of participation in those activities, theres no corporate/pointy-haired-anyone pressure, I can do things my own way, and I find like-minded women friends quite easily, and there's little bullshit.

It would be nice to find some way of adding some of what I've learned from my hobby-interests to my resume, but that's a daunting challenge for a wide variety of reasons, and yeah, now I'm past the point I want to talk about in a public post. Suffice it to say that a translation layer is usually required, and care and carefulness, and that there are risks involved both known and unknown.

At times the lack of integration between my professional life and my personal life is incredibly frustrating.

*wrinkles nose and furrows brow*

Feh, if anyone wants to know more, go read books by Henry Jenkins, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, Rhiannon Bury, Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander, Lisa Lewis, and Sheenagh Pugh, and then find me in person to talk. I refuse to cross the streams in a public LJ post here.

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[info]shakal
2007-02-14 04:25 am UTC (link)
By "very many more men at SCALE" I mean the male/female ratio felt more skewed than I'm used to, in case that wasn't clear. The lOPSA events I've attended were smaller in total attendance than SCALE, and the LISA conference by USENIX/SAGE is larger.

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[info]sigje
2007-02-12 06:02 pm UTC (link)
you know Wil Wheaton occasionally pops up in the SGVLUG :) .. welcome to the party!

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[info]shakal
2007-02-12 06:03 pm UTC (link)
Yep... I was kind of surprised not to see him at SCALE, actually.

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[info]chameleonlizard
2007-02-13 02:56 pm UTC (link)
I need to seek out local Mac user groups, too... but that's a post for another day.

Let me know what you find, please. I've looked a little bit, but haven't seen anything local enough to attend.

Linux - just what I need - to learn a third OS. No, I'm *not* going to do that..... (Where's my copy of Virtual PC for the Mac???)

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[info]shakal
2007-02-14 04:25 am UTC (link)
Will do.

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