selenamarie

:) I removed it, increased the font size and purged the cache.

Are you talking about the PyLadies site itself? I'm not a color expert, but it seems to be mostly red and white.

My site's theme is predominantly blue. I hadn't really thought about my color choices until just now.

Fixed! Thanks.

Heh. Well, on the bright side, I've brought together 85 women that were not part of any open source or Python community before.

Please join https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/operation... if you'd like to chat more with Python developers and teachers doing the same types of things. I'm working with K12 teachers to find ways to connect with Python developers for curriculum development, networking and just getting more computer science taught in schools. :)

I'm liking using taximagic.com in Portland, and love it, so I'm excited to see taxis also available through Uber.

There's a problem around work and male/female relationships that's quite far away from adultery:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/im-not-y...

In particular: "so many of the attitudes her work unveils are of an 'unconscious nature,' which makes beating them back particularly difficult" and "male leaders may think they are elevating women, not stifling them."

There's other research suggesting that "being made aware" of the problem helps male leaders adjust behavior.

http://www.20-first.com/690-0-improving-the-gender-balance-a... (see the section on "diversity training")

And this article about the effect of belief that an organization is meritocratic on fairness:

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/care...

There's significant pressure to not talk about sexism directly and just address this as a conflict between two individiuals (see antirez's rant) -- even though the research says that talking about about sexism and fairness concepts changes the behavior of management.

For those following the UEFI Secure Boot stuff, good read. Goes into why this is problematic -- specifically the rebranding of Linux on the desktop as insecure.

There are some changes happening, but certainly MySQL will dominate pre-existing installs for the foreseeable future. Switching databases is not trivial for most applications.

Here's a blog post from 451Group in May 2012 about a survey they did: http://blogs.the451group.com/information_management/2012/05/...

And a specific bit of the presentation linked from there that I found interesting: http://www.slideshare.net/mattaslett/mysql-vs-nosql-and-news...

Slide 20.

It's certainly not conclusive, but it is interesting.

Peter is awesome and is also primarily responsible for a bunch of power consumption improvements: http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2012/01/power-consumption-in-...

Thanks for sharing this story! :)

My experience is that tech conferences are mostly comprised of socially competent people. In a group of 20 people, for example, I might find that one person in a group is truly inept. So, to do the arithmetic for everyone, that's 5%. Unfortunately, that's often about the same percentage as the number of women present. :/

I won't lay out all of the problems with identification, getting the "socially inept" into one room and educating them, making sure that whoever is teaching this (as yet undefined) social skills curriculum is a good teacher, making sure the education sticks, etc... Instead, I'm just going to share that I don't think education of socially incompetent people will significantly improve my conference experience.

Things that help include:

* An assumption on the part of conference staff, speakers and attendees that women are there to participate, not just observe or tag along

* Swift, friendly, supportive responses from staff if verbal or physical harassment is reported - often made possible by staff who are aware of an anti-harassment policy, and are trained in what to do (LCA did a great job of this in 2012)

* Allies who help stop hostile, harassing and inappropriate comments if they occur

And there's other stuff that helps too. There's some good stuff in the "what can allies do" section of the Geek Feminism wiki.

Anyway, I appreciate your willingness to converse about this issue and hope I've shed some light on why people might be down-voting your comment.

Thanks! :)

I'm thinking next year will be the year I attend conferences for fun, rather than just work. I put it on my calendar.

It's heartening to hear that. I was a *nix security researcher and admin in the late-90s, and attended DEFCON 8 with a group of men. I never went back on my own.

An organizer's support for kdotcdot's cards makes me want to go to DEFCON next year.

Ah, sorry about that.

I was just reading a bit about publishing medical research, and a researcher whose department has decided to publish everything in a combination of R and LaTeX, with Sweave: http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch/Sweave/

Their term for this is "reproducible research."

BJ Fogg has been doing weekly habit formation sessions on this topic: http://tinyhabits.com/

It's a great exercise if you want to hack your own habits and learn about his methodology and research at the same time. Uses all the same ideas.

Wikipedia page might provide a bit more insight into the Mosuo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo

For those who weren't at pgconf.eu - we're actually serious about the cruise. Let me know if you'd be interested in going. :)

I'm not quibbling over definitions. And we are not describing the same reality.

Yeah, that's a really good point. I am talking about organizational culture. More specifically - structure around participation.

But, at the same time, it seems people often conflate governance and power with organizational culture. Is there a good reference for differentiating the two?

You've created a circular argument - if someone doesn't currently have free time or knowledge, how could they ever write good code?

re: free time - I didn't suggest any particular solutions, because the point of this exercise isn't for me to give everyone easy solutions to problems. But I'll offer you one:

More companies could offer time to their employees to work on open source projects. That's something the project itself can help lobby for, and can keep in mind when soliciting help.

That's not a new idea. Many others have said it, and many companies implement it.

My objection is that the use of merit to justify rewards typically seen as an objective measure.

We should carefully identify the reasons for measuring and rewarding a thing - like "we reward excellent code with commit rights", rather than that we "reward people based on merit". The word itself is fraught, as is the philosophy of meritocracy. It's used as a broad brush for many different meanings.

We should just be specific, and say what it is that we are rewarding.

Thanks for your thoughts! Made me think.

I brought up privilege, not gender diversity.

I listed a few: freedom, time and indulgence. More specifically, the freedom to pursue passion in life is often enabled by one's parents having enough money and stability. Time is mostly about leisure time. Having a job that supports work on open source is still not that common, so one is left with figuring out how to do this on your own time - and that depends on you actually having free time because you don't have kids, you only have one job, and you have the background knowledge (socially, tools-wise and background reading) necessary to participate.

So, that's how the whole world works, right? I am not saying that Postgres is unique here. I think we actually do a really great job. We have about 300 contributors every year, and only about 20 committers. That's impressive and shows how the contributors feel about our project. It is prestigious, interesting and fun enough for them to send us their code even though we don't give out commit access, and we subject everyone to a pretty difficult code review.

That just goes to show that if you ask a lot from people, they like it and come back for more. Or at least the people I want to be in a community with like it. :)

I am bringing up to my community that we could do a little better inside of Postgres. We could take a closer look at how we operate, and find ways of inviting people in that don't already fit our mold.

There isn't an easy solution to addressing privilege inside a community, at all. But I was at a conference last week, and a couple people asked me to write my thoughts down about meritocracy. It was not an easy thing for me to do.. I already see a few de-railing comments about gender.

But I continue to get support for thinking and writing about this issue, and ultimately finding more ways of getting more contributors. This is why I continue to contribute, and why I took a moment to make a gentle criticism of a community that I enjoy very much.

I'm a she, and you're leaving out all the things that led to becoming a programmer. Which largely had nothing to do with merit.

The point of the article isn't to discount the work involved in becoming excellent, but to point out that the opportunity to do that work at all is a privilege.

I don't particularly care if any one person changes their thinking about this. My post was meant for my community, which is taking the issue of involvement and its relation to privilege seriously.

Privilege isn’t just about money – it’s about a collection of gifts individuals receive from society, regardless of merit.

Those gifts include but aren’t restricted to freedom, time and indulgence. And to say that a person can only contribute to an open source project if they have equivalent freedom, time and indulgence from society as our very most privileged members, is to exclude a great number of people – I’d say 99% of people – who are capable and would be wonderful additions to our community.

So to address your question about privilege being entwined with ability: it is dangerous to assume a relationship between the two. I choose to question my assumptions about ability (because I know that I have biases!), because the truth is that I have no idea about other people until they actually do something. And even then, my understanding of someone else's abilities is often limited to only what I directly observe.

Keeping that in mind opens up opportunities between people. And I prefer that mindset to one that assumes a link between privilege with ability.

I wrote the entry that started this thread, and an earlier post that mentions do-ocracy in the context of the Portland tech scene[1]. I totally agree with you, and go even further when it comes to the community that's evolved in Portland. I tell people to JFDI. That usually means someone tells someone else about what they're doing. But there's no permission seeking. We have too many people that find fault in the works of others, even before any work has been done.

1 - http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2010/03/17/this-town-needs/

Happens mostly at conferences for me, sometimes at networking events. Especially if I'm at an open source software booth. I don't look like "a hacker", so prevailing stereotypes apply. Last year it happened at least once at each of 3 conferences I attended and staffed a booth at last year.

Would love to! Thanks for the feedback. I've started an outline for another class.