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