wilkie

In this particular context, centralized vs distributed have to do with control over both storage and propagation of your data more so than its architecture. Or at least, the concerns over how to better control storage/propagation drive decisions about architecture. Twitter, Facebook, etc are centralized in this case. Your data goes to them, they propagate it, you have little to no control. Their system is designed around that. Identi.ca, rstat.us, diaspora are distributed. You control the software that holds the data and distributes it to others. Many designs are possible, even that which you design yourself.

Do these distributed platforms still have centralized components? Yes. There are lots of centralized pieces. Doesn't matter. Minimizing them is still the goal. Less is progress. It's not perfect; it's better.

What's stopping distributed platforms from overtaking centralized ones? The typical things: politics, lack of resources, high barrier of entry for non-tech folks.

Can distributed platforms do X? Yes. For example, the very usual: "But they can't handle spam!" Sure they can. Distributed platforms exist to share information. They can share blacklists. Share training data for spam filters. Ultimately, if they can distribute content, then they can distribute metadata. The only thing a centralized platform can do that a distributed one cannot is provide immediate global consistency... but considering most centralized services grow to the scale where they are internally distributed anyway, they can't even do that.

What do we need to do to succeed? We need software that is light, easily understood, easily augmentable, modular. Something that can easily and freely be deployed with minimal effort from a city's public library. Deployment on hosted or publicly available servers... or packaged on cheap hardware to be used in the home or taken with you. Hardware and deployment services that don't really exist. But creating the software may be the motivation to create them.

Who will build it? I've published research on distributed systems and distributed databases. I founded rstat.us with some friends which has had over 60 diverse contributors from around the world. It got some good, albeit small press, but OStatus (the protocol that rstat.us sits upon) is being superseded. So I'm working on this:

- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-i18n - Support for social sentence generation for many languages/cultures

- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus - A discovery layer and data structures for distributed social graphs. It negotiates the protocol so many different distributed social systems can interact (which is the point, ya think?). (models)

- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-mongodb - Small persistence layer. (models+db)

- https://github.com/hotsh/rack-lotus - Rack extension for interacting with the social graph and content generation as hypermedia over HTTP. (controllers)

- https://github.com/hotsh/lotus-site - Example site (hoping to pull much of the view/presentation logic into a separate repo)

Modular. Easily modifiable. Released as closely to the public domain as is possible (CC0.) With these combined, you can build any number or variety of distributed social web systems (image sites, photo album sites, hosting of web comics, flash games, blogging, etc etc etc.) Hopefully they will share a common deployment strategy so if you build a new thing, however unique, it will be just as easy to deploy from the point-of-view of somebody not very well-versed in technology.

So... Me. I'll do it. With some help. If you care, here is my gittip (I only need $250/wk to squeak by): https://www.gittip.com/wilkie/

You naturally cannot use a microscope and come to a fixed, proven conclusion. However, I would say that all of the causes of attrition are very likely based upon a prevailing systemic gender oppression (sexism.)

The amount of active segregation is indeed frustrating.

> Why can't it simply be accepted that programming is simply a career that tends to appeal to men more than women in the same way that nursing appeals to women more than men?

Because programming was a field dominated by women until established as an academic field. Afterward, even then it saw a unprecedented rise in women in the 80s only to be followed by a sharp decline while every other math/science field had continued to rise: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/spring07a.pdf You may fault the following as this is purely rhetorical albeit reasonable, but I find it difficult to believe that thousands of women who would have potentially studied the field suddenly decided upon a generational line that CS is an uninteresting pursuit. I align myself with Sapna Cheryan's conclusions of the stereotype threat in computer science as an explanation.

> I've also yet to come across a single, official complaint of sexism in the workplace within the tech industry.

I've come across many. The vast majority of aggressions I've witnessed go completely unnoticed and unreported among those that could do something about them.

That's how you see it. They don't have to, and probably won't, see things the same way. Some of their problems might not be problems to you.

> But before I can do that, I have to teach them how to walk away, because their natural inclination seems to be to engage.

Let them engage! Let them both observe and be heard. They are very capable of coming to a conclusion. Your only role should be to ensure that they are heard, visible, and safe. Why would you first teach them to walk away? Why teach them that this form of engagement is negative? Inaction is valid, true, but we should not be afraid to act or suggest that some forms of aggression or anger are invalid.

> Reducing what I was trying to express to "ignore them and they will go away" has put the ball in the bleachers.

I got this message from this statement you made:

> Rather I think of it as not letting other people's drama own any part of me. And that is what I think when anyone complains of anything, be it gender bias or racial bias or religious/political disagreement: nothing can own you unless you let it.

Seems like a valid conclusion to make on my part. Be made out of rubber as though you can just brush off all forms of oppression. But, regardless of being made of rubber, an anchor tied to the waist can still sink you, perhaps regardless of what you do. It requires a collective change to reverse... something I believe your children can inspire.

> We can't go through life saying, "I'm not welcome here because of attributes that are beyond my control."

I wonder, in hesitation, just which attributes you speak of. Regardless, maybe... just maybe... they are within our collective control. The more these types of articles come out, regardless of your feelings that they be suppressed due to their negativity, the more positive discussions like ours will play out in front of your children's generation.

You may "let it go," as you say. That's fine. However, why do you expect others to also let it go? The point of this post to me is that if we don't take action or responsibility, the daughters of today will grow to write these posts themselves someday. It won't change unless we are honest and we put forth the effort to understand the environment and circumstance that leads us to write these articles. And we have, what, one of these posts a month? Can we really ignore them... and keep ignoring them?

As a teacher, I admit that I don't share your ability to let others' circumstances not own any part of me. I do notice how these issues affect the women who chose to take my intro to programming course, or affect the lack, as it were. You just have to be active and look and ask for their experiences. When they come into office hours and ask questions they could have asked in class; I ask them why they didn't and more than one has answered "because I am shy."

Could they all be shy? That's certainly an explanation. I could look the other way from then on and comment how odd it is that women are so shy. Can I rely on this being a biological answer? Are women, as opposed to men, then just not interested in tech? Can I be satisfied? Maybe most are good stopping right there. But the anecdote alone fails to placate my understanding. And yet, if I look, I find evidence of something... more... problematic.

So, studies were done. Are women worse than men at math keeping them out of tech? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080724192258.ht... No. Are they less interested? Well, Sapna Cheryan's study of the stereotype threat in computer science is profound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYwI-qM20x4 So, their interest is very likely to be prejudiced. So, it seems the correlation is weak. Is there a systemic bias that goes against women? http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract Apparently, yes. And I have a handful more that show this. Which is why I anonymize the homework I grade and why conference/journal review should be blind (http://blog.davewilkinsonii.com/posts/conference_diversity).

Attempting to explain the drop in participation of women since the 80s is very necessary. The fact that 13% of undergraduate CS degrees earned by women in 2010 (http://www.cra.org/resources/taulbee) is an increase is both terrible and a tad optimistic. Yet, before we get excited and say the problem is solved, here's the entire graph: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/spring07a.pdf In 2011, 57% of the entire workforce are women, 25% of computing workforce are women, around 9% of programmers are women. (http://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/legacy/pdf/BytheNum..., http://archive.aneventapart.com/alasurvey2011/01.html) So, we should be paying more attention, there is something wrong, and writing like the original post is part of that discussion and valuable.

Also, please don't tell your kids that they should "ignore them and they will go away." That's not how you deal with bullies... that's how you become invisible.

"Female sexuality is framed as something which exists for the pleasure of men" is a true statement in general media.

So. [Most] Porn. Watch it. Who's orgasm is displayed? Who's orgasm is typically non-existent (to the point it is fetishized when it does occur?) Make a judgment. Why is this true? See my earlier post about "bisexual porn."

Ok. Advertising. "With 'female sexuality' I thought about what arouses women." Good. That's a part of what sexuality is but not what it is framed as in terms of its portrayal in media. "You want that car because supposedly it helps you get the woman, it seems to be more about pleasing women than men?" I kinda hope you don't mean that. :) How in the world does 'getting a woman' as a heterosexual man 'please women?' If you are thinking about answering that question... don't!

It would be pleasing to women if their needs (sexual needs in terms of porn, practical needs in terms of cars) were met in media. However, only the needs of men (getting women somehow in BOTH cases) are being portrayed. That's a problem to men because it reduces us to gullible sex drives, yet it is worse for women because it reduces them to objects of that drive... dismissing any quality that a woman can have as an individual.

This is an example of the objectification you see discussed here. Women are the object, men are the subject, we see this in porn, advertisement, and even employment posters (gee, we wonder why 52% of women drop out of the programming field after college.) It's kinda gross and defeating when you take the "red pill" and start to see it everywhere. Even more daunting when you go against the grain of prevailing thought and start talking about this being an actual problem. It just seems like everybody else took the "blue pill" and just don't want to see it. But it does have a negative effect that has been thoroughly studied.

If we accept these tenets as true, and I do and will strongly suggest that you do as well, then we have to see the attack here as sexist. The attack serves to objectify in the same manner as media: by removing individuality, quality, and self from the person. It uses the sexualized images of women just as media uses for this purpose. It is done against a woman, who as I've discussed are oppressed as opposed to men who are simply (at most) discriminated against. It was done so in an obviously malicious manner (that is, beyond parody) in order to hurt their reputation by targeting the fact that they are female (given the nature of their attack,) not by aspects of their character or refuting the merit of their knowledge. That serves to oppress via discrimination determined by their gender: sexist.

But we have to understand that in those situations it is not oppression. And that is a key point. Men are not oppressed by society when they are discriminated, because by-and-large, men make more money, have more opportunity, stay within their industries longer, are (perhaps due to last point) promoted more often, tend to be selected with a gender bias to speak about their subjects. Women currently get more college degrees in general today, yet the gender pay gap remains. That's evidence of systemic oppression. That's why we can say men at large are not discriminated against.

Without observation, we wouldn't seek facts and we wouldn't use the scientific method. In the end, we want to explain what we see. What we see is vile... I'm optimistic we can end that. Every discussion is relevant and every experience worthwhile.

Again, thank you.

Oh hey, my sexism bingo card is full and I didn't even need the free space.

Using the same means of locating a person seems very very reasonable from both a technical aspect (it works for them just fine) and from the viewpoint that people already understand that an email address represents somebody's online presence and this is how you can communicate with them. Concept familiarity is extremely important for adoption, so that should be considered.

Users can be migrated, although it is easier if the identity is separated properly. Webfinger does exist to solve a lot of the migration headaches by allowing a well-known place to link all of your services to a common identity. You want to migrate? Just link to that new service. You then have to multicast some announcement, which is the hard part, and messy... but possible. Webfinger is usable from status.net, rstat.us etc etc... but they also allow you to host your identity with them.

Your privacy argument thus holds true for email as it is a pull system where your email can be read by any intermediary server. You solve this problem in both instances with keypair encryption. The problem is not a technical flaw (closed, centralized systems are opaque about your data, which can be seen as worse.) but rather a flaw in presenting and educating people to use secure practices if privacy is desired.

That domain does not have to be the server they use for microblogging or whathaveyou. It shouldn't be, honestly. You can host your identity anywhere and point to the microblogging server using a link.

So, I can be wilkie@mydomain.net, as familiar as an email address which is REALLY important for usability; the UI can drop the domain if you think it is ugly or hinders readability, and we go on from there.

This is what webfinger + xrd gives you: http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/wiki/WebFingerProtocol

It's already used by status.net, rstat.us, etc etc. tent.io ignores it and wants to reinvent everything.

Now I can switch microblogging sites if I want by just pointing to a new one. But, just like changing your name is a hassle in real-life, changing where your identity is held is also hard. Using DNS and having your own server for at least your identity are ideal.

And the beauty of it: the way the technology works (OStatus), every time somebody does this, the overall network gets larger. In my opinion, it's really only a matter of time.

For instance, capturing situations like: Are you a 65 year old grandfather that feels younger through the interaction with the core crowd here? Are you a 12 year old aspiring hacker that seeks the maturity of the seemingly 20-something base contrary to the peers of their own age?