Women in Open Technology & Culture – Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner
- Very umbrella term including fan fiction, open data, wikipedia, open access
- Why – important areas – women’s participation (especially in charge) very low
- Important for women to be in charge, creating, designing, building, not just as users
- 5 kinds of groups – project specific (debian women), feminist activism, teaching technical skill, networking, majority women projects.
- Community / project specific
- Linuxchix, owoot, pyladies, wikichix, etc ( linuxchix spawned several)
- low participation, poor replacement rate of leaders (often after they get FT jobs), low communication between, sometimes tension between.
- Feminist advocacy
- geek feminism, ada initiative, mind the gap
- growing and active – the new hotness, sharing best practices, paid work more common, some conferences
- Teaching women technical skills
- usually one day or evening courses.
- Growing hugely, vary widely in topics and skills, sharing best practises
- In person networking socialization
- Women in code, girl geek coffees, girl geek dinner
- try not to be dominated by marketing women ( use of “geek” term helps)
- Growing, easy to start local chapters
- Majority Women Groups
- Dreamwidth, Organisation for transformative works
- Often fan-fiction support, protect against takedown, let author control commercialisation
- Survey
- In person vs Online
- Activist vs non-activist
- Community vs technical
- Focussed vs broad topics
- Projects with broad focus within a narrow group seem not to work
- Projects with very technical focus but accoess different technologies seem not to work either (lack common language)
- Why Start – recruit and retain, networking, role models, safe space, feel normal
- Lessons on starting
- Don’t – join an existing one
- If you are a man, don’t do on behalf – “Nothing about us without us”
- Don’t expect women to start a group
- Find 3 or more women to start a group
- Don’t use girl/chix/ladies – use women
- Go broad instead of narrow on topic
- have clear defined goals and scope
- Start small, be realistic about work
- Consider one-off event rather than group
- Avoid NIH , reuse best practices
- be prepared to moderate any public forums you create
- Failure modes
- Become “the nice place” that everybody goes to
- Loses focus on women
- Safe Space moderation too many hours
- Ran low on time, slides will be online
Hacking Everything – Matt Evans
- Reuse things , not just hacking things like audrino that are supposed to be hacked
- reuse, need, art & design
- Gambiarra – brazilian art of an improvised fix
- 1940s radios and TV owners could fix their gear. today people are more passive
- wants people to tinker with things.
- Save resources
- Save money
- take apart things, learn by example
- Low cost manufacturing makes hacking hard ( solid state everything )
- Cheap development makes hacking easier ( reuses common technology, extra bits on devices unused )
- Some products are open hardware designs
- Things to look for – similar to ref design, debug code left in, unused features, factory test points/ports
- Ports that are wired up but unused often serial ports
- “My CD player has a serial port” , common on many devices
- Acquire a “logic level”USB-serial cable
- Other ports – JTAB , In-System programming
- Example: Picture frame, derived from sample board for camera, serial interface, built in CLI
- Old Wifi, ADSL boxes good with OpenWRT
- Don’t just consume – re-consume
- Teach others and tell the world
- Collaborate at a local hackerspace
- support companies that make things hackable
