Seeing Sarah's question on safe space, I remembered I had something in
draft that should test the concept.
For a change I actually watched the video below; here are my reaction
comments, though not a systematic review of her talk. Quotes mean it's
pretty much what she said, no quotes mean it's me opining unless
otherwise characterized...
++++++++++++++++
Original message: An interesting talk by Alyssa Wright on the gender gap
at OpenStreetMap:
http://vimeopro.com/openstreetmapus/state-of-the-map-us-2013/video/68098504
My response:
Comments as listening - because now and then we females have to let it
all hang out here....:
* First time I ever heard of Open Street Map
* She talks about "Open Source and community." IMHO, Open source is not
really a community if it's anonymous. Community is based on truth. With
anonymity, people can lie about who they are, what their job and
education and interests and COIs are, what sex/gender they are, whether
or not they are law enforcement spies, whether they are a sock who got
kicked off before for bad behavior, whether their collaborator/colleague
is a meat puppet, etc etc etc. It's one of the reasons I've gotten
particularly fed up with Wikipedia in recent weeks and stopped watching
the most controversial/time consuming articles, cutting down my editing
90% .
(And just as I was getting to point where my # of edits would be in the
top 2000 editors; maybe I'll do vandalism clean up for a few weeks, she
said pounding her ample breasts On the other hand I finally have time
to start transferring my embarrassingly old fashioned websites over to a
more modern format, so I'm not totally complaining...
* "Lack of rules makes discrimination easier" - interesting... [[Tyranny
of Structurelessness]] is one of the articles I watch. I like
spontaneous order and participatory, consensus oriented democracy, but
I've also seen no rules and minimal rules abused by cliques in activist
groups. Wikipedia has fairly good rules, but too few people willing to
come to noticeboards where they are discussed and enforced. (Especially
if a female has complaints about editors perceived to be male?)
* She mentions "Incentive and motivation award gap" -- Hoo YA! While
some women get off on the competition for dominance as an incentive and
"victory" as a reward, most have different motivations...
* "Different Communication Styles not discussed enough" -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Tannen has an article on woman who
introduced a discussion on that 20 plus years ago; article has "needs
refs" tag...
* She mentions "Active hostility towards women". She should have (may
have?) added: only the one's with their own ideas, especially if they
dare speak them and, worse crime of all, disagree with some alpha male.
* "Women who want to be part of community" But should they want to
belong if it's not really a community? If you value your time and
stress levels (which I've started to do lately), run from the articles
run by alpha males and POV pushers who get away with murder no matter
how many noticeboards you take them to. Just do the minimal on
"Dick-free" articles of interest to you where you can use it for own
purposes... (As in my now favorite wiki essay:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_a_dick )
* She talks about her experience of community rejection of child care
tag for child care centers (the male argument being kindergarden tag was
sufficient for all types of child care) - even though the male editors
had been happy to approve a variety of tags for sexually oriented
venues. My snide comment removed...
* She talks about "Creating a knowledge base to represent the world..."
and "Open source not a utopia" I'm learning wordpress now.. I hear that
on sloppy organization and even worse technical support; unless I
haven't ferreted out the right help pages yet.... (Luckily I'm on
godaddy which squanders their profits letting us call up and ask the
questions which the online manuals don't answer too well.)
* Talks about "Converting white males..." ROTFL x 88..... Another of my
snide comments removed...
* "Stop being ass holes" she flashes on her big screen - see around 15
minutes in... Hoo Yah!!
*(Per Sarah's comment, I ask: Why can't we just make this a "how to
convert white males from being assholes" email list group??? Or start a
separate one on that topic. (I wrote at first draft of this "the most
liberating concept to jump out of my brain of late...")
* She talks about what I call the "either they ignore you or attack you
syndrome..." (I've found overtime on male dominated lists they usually
ignore me when I make a positive contribution - unless they find some
minor point that annoys me and attack me for that. Over time I've
gotten in the habit of just dropping some bomb of subtle or not so
subtle commentary that I know will get them crazy and then sitting back
and laughing my ass off at their immature and predictable tantrums. (Not
this post, of course, since these phenomena ARE the topic of this list!)
* Re her studies of two different OSM mailing lists, her comments, not
final conclusions: It's not just about openness but who's
participating; not just collaboration -- but how people are working
together; re: participation-- are women actually creating messages? She
found that on one OSM email list, even when the number of women grew,
men still do most of the talking. On another one where there were more
women and they spoke out more. (I don't feel like going back to see if
she had an explanation that I missed; perhaps something about critical
mass?)
Q&A session: couldn't hear questions but her Italian Prime Minister
comment response evidently was a relevant and amusing reply to some
somewhat sexist question; she briefly mentions Wikipedia surveys in
context of her studies; "a woman asked a question!!!" she says when one
finally does; and she agrees with whatever the woman said and wants to
continue discussion in another forum.
Hopeful for constructive response to whatever... Carol in dc