The BBC has published four “Faces of the Year” articles this week: “the men” and “the women” for the UK and international markets.

Removing gender references, here are the lists:

I love being [...]]]> The Ada Initiative is raising money for their 2012 activities. They’re primarily funded by donations, and can’t do it without us! To support their full-time work on supporting women in open technology and culture, donate now! And if you can’t donate, please do what you can to help spread the word

I love being part of an open culture. Adore it, believe in it, treasure it. But how can I work in an industry where long-standing members of our communities think I should expect to be assaulted at professional conferences?

Regularly, I ask myself “what about teaching? Or hey, maybe go into publishing?”. Or hell, just go back to Microsoft, get out of Open Source. Proprietary IT is still sexist, but my Microsoft colleagues always stayed within the bounds of decency.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate in life. I come from a wonderful family who afforded me every opportunity. I’ve worked hard, pushed forward, tried for the impossible, and had some amazing strokes of dumb luck But I haven’t, and I can’t, do it on my own.

For the last year, The Ada Initiative have had my back, and the backs of women in a cross-section of open, technical cultures. They’re the reason I haven’t quit the industry entirely, even as I’ve stepped down from my more visible roles. They’re the reason I continue to contribute in quieter ways, to smaller projects.

They are, as I said before, dedicated to a simple vision: a world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open technology, open data, and open culture. Their strategy for change is equally simple: give concrete, straight-forward advice to willing and eager audiences. They focus their effort on programs that are scalable, reusable, and effective, and they are committed to providing their work completely free of charge.

But this is a full-time job for two highly-qualified tech professionals. This isn’t a job that can be done on volunteer time. And although they’ve had seed funding from companies and major individual contributors, they need ongoing support in order to keep up the good work. It’s up to us to make sure they can stay open.

And that’s where you come in. The Ada Initiative has launched a campaign for donations to keep them running past the start of next year! If you want to support their vision, if you think women should be able to attend conferences without fear of being assaulted, if you want to help make sure that the next generation of women are welcomed into computing, you can donate at http://supportada.org/donate. And either way, don’t forget to spread the word!

Back in July, only a week or two after I’d given notice at Google, the Open Source Programs Office there published a Call for Proposals for a Doc Camp to be held in association [...]]]> Three of them, actually And, of course, in the finest traditions of Open Source, it was a (very!) collaborative effort.

Back in July, only a week or two after I’d given notice at Google, the Open Source Programs Office there published a Call for Proposals for a Doc Camp to be held in association with the Google Summer of Code program. I applied, with very little real idea of what was involved. We’d write a book in a week. Freely licensed, on some aspect of Open Source… stuff.

I misread the application form, and thought that proposals would be selected by August 5th. So, when I hadn’t heard anything by the second week of August, I assumed I was out. Not so! A week or two later, I got an email to say I’d been accepted! Google organised the hotel for me, and I booked my travel (train down from Portland, a whole new adventure, and flights back up). I knew that four projects had been accepted, and that there’d be a handful of individual contributors, but not a whole lot else.

I arrived in Mountain View on Sunday night, and met up with some of the other contributors. It was a quiet night, with an early start the next morning. Monday was spent in an unconference’y format, although we explicitly didn’t take notes during our sessions (preferring to focus on the moment than to document for posterity), and there was more structure than a typical unconference (including two pre-scheduled presentations, and some planned exercises to get us ready to create our masterpieces!) The “free agents” rotated among the various teams, and I spent some time working with the Sahana and OpenStreetMap contributors.

Tuesday morning started bright and early, with a meeting to assign the free agents to teams that they would stick with for the day. I’d been wanting to give OpenMRS some love for quite a while, and was very grateful to Anne Gentle, who let me swap with her in order to do that!

The first hour of work was focused on creating a table of contents. We based ours heavily on that of the CiviCRM book created over (several) previous Book Sprints, and were pretty much finished within the hour. Some of the other teams had a harder time, but like many of the deadlines over the course of the week, this one was set more to focus us than to limit our collaboration.

Once we had a table of contents, we split the chapters up based on interest and knowledge, and started writing. I was a bit terrified at first, knowing essentially nothing about the product, but I started out with the “Installation” chapter, and with only a small amount of TIAS, managed to build a reasonably coherent narrative. The rest of the people in the room were all heads-down in their own writing, and I am deeply indebted to the folk in the IRC channel for their help and reviews!

The book sprint took three days, and I’ll freely admit that my recollection of exactly what happened when is hazy at best. We were doing 13+hr days at Google, plus extra work in the evenings when we got back to the hotel. Everything was, of course, catered for us, and mealtimes were a welcome break but we were always keen to get just a bit more work done! It was intense, and exhausting, and exhilarating.

But by Thursday night, each group had written a book. I had worked with three teams (OpenMRS, OpenStreetMap, and KDE), both writing and editing. Every single chapter of each of those three books, I’d done at least one editing pass over.

Friday was a short day for the Doc Sprint, but I’d gotten talking to the OpenStreetMap crowd about helping out during the Grace Hopper Celebration, so I joined some of them on a trip up to San Francisco. We had a fabulous time visiting Langton Labs, and catching the opening of an exhibition at The Intersection (Here Be Dragons–get to it if you can!), but by the time we got back to Mountain View, the Mentor Summit had clearly descended That was, of course, a fabulous event in its own right, but one of the highlights was definitely getting the printed & bound copies of the books we’d worked on.

I’m exhausted, as I said, but also inspired. The Doc Sprint is clearly a well thought-out and thoroughly refined process (even if it feels very experimental as a first-timer!), and I’m incredibly proud of what we produced. It would be a respectable outcome from several weeks of work, and we managed it in barely three days. I’m looking forward to talking to other communities about the idea, and already hoping that Google will run it again next year–I know I could pull a team together to write a book about The Apache Way, and based on the requests we already get for resources on the topic, I’m confident it would be well-read!

All in all, the Doc Sprint was an amazing event. Huge thanks go to all involved: Google’s OSPO, the project teams, Adam Hyde of FLOSSmanuals and Gunner of Aspiration Tech, as well as all the other facilitators and free agents.

After I was assaulted last year, an awful lot of people pointed out that if I go into dangerous situations, I should expect bad things to happen, and that if I don’t want bad things to happen, I shouldn’t go into dangerous situations.

I [...]]]> I’m scared to go to OSCON or the Community Leadership Summit this year.

After I was assaulted last year, an awful lot of people pointed out that if I go into dangerous situations, I should expect bad things to happen, and that if I don’t want bad things to happen, I shouldn’t go into dangerous situations.

I was harassed at OSCON & CLS last year. I got a lot of grief after I wrote about my experience at ApacheCon. And I fully expect that some of the people responsible for both of those things will be at OSCON & CLS this year.

I don’t think it’s realistic to assume that I’ll be able to get through this year’s conference without being harassed again, and O’Reilly don’t seem to be willing to assure me that I’m wrong. But worse, I genuinely get the impression that if anything does go wrong, if I do get harassed, that O’Reilly don’t want to know, they don’t care, and they won’t do anything to help me, to help prevent it happening again, to help prevent it happening to someone else.

A very smart friend of mine reminded me that fear is not a good driver, and suggested that I consider whether OSCON is valuable and whether I can send a positive message by attending.

I’ve been looking forward to speaking. My slides have been rewritten from a previous version of this talk that was very well received, and I think they’re a really good deck. It’s a topic I care about, and I love being able to share my knowledge. Plus, I’m expecting a couple of potential employers to be there, as well as many friends.

And aside from that, there are so many talks I want to see, often several at once! There are people I want to catch up with, and parties I’m looking forward to. So yeah, OSCON is valuable to me.

Can I send a positive message? I’m not sure. I’ve seen the research, and I know from my own experience, that open source events and projects need more role models, and need more women as role models. And frankly, I don’t want people who’ve gone through things like I did at ApacheCon to think that it’s “ok, game over, I can’t go to industry events any more”. That’s not true; I’ve been to and enjoyed many conferences since then. But OSCON is a big event, and it’s a big message to send.

On the other hand, I really don’t want my attendance to be taken as a message of “everything is fine here”. I don’t want to be held up as a statistic, as an example of “plenty of women speaking at OSCON”.

So, on that front, I don’t know if I can send a positive message. I’m just not sure.

I don’t feel safe going to OSCON, and I want your advice.

Is this a dark alley that I should stay out of? Or is there some reason you think I’m wrong, and that I’ll be safe at OSCON?

And to those of you who’ve offered to join my posse, I’m grateful, but I was assaulted at ApacheCon in a bar with dozens of my friends, so I don’t assume that even the best posse will keep me safe.

I’ve spent the [...]]]> In other words, I’m looking for a new job. I’m currently wrapping up things in Zurich, and planning to take a few months off to volunteer with a few projects I really love. I’ll be available from the new year for sure, but am willing to negotiate for the right opportunity

I’ve spent the last few years as a writer, working in Google’s European engineering headquarters in Zurich. For most of that time, I’ve been the sole writer in that office (or even timezone!), so I’ve worked on everything from UI text to API references, from user help to operations documentation. I’ve also been continuing my work with the Apache Software Foundation, providing a new voice on their Board for the last year, and I’ve only recently passed on the mantle of their Conference Planning leadership.

I’m passionate about Open Source, community development, documentation, and communication. I’m at my best when I’m teaching people about the things I love, facilitating
individuals and groups in learning how to do things for themselves, and generally connecting people with knowledge and information. I love travel, but I definitely have a preference for working with or near other people. Distributed is fine, but I’d rather not be the only remote member of a centralized team, especially if there’s nine timezones between us!

You can find my contact details, and more information about some of the things I’ve done in the past, in my CV. Feel free to give me a call or send me an email if you’re looking for someone, or know where I might fit in. In particular, if you’re looking for a community builder, user advocate, happiness engineer, or just a great communicatrix, please get in touch!

In the end, I wrote about what happened. I expected a worried phone call from my mother, the most faithful reader of [...]]]> Last winter, I was assaulted at ApacheCon. I was shocked, upset. I had no idea how to react. The conference organisers, a team I was part of, had no idea how to react either.

In the end, I wrote about what happened. I expected a worried phone call from my mother, the most faithful reader of this blog. I hoped that I could pass out the link to trusted friends, and ask for their support without having to explain the whole story over and over.

Instead, it got picked up in the wildfire that is the internet, and I nearly took down the machine it was hosted on, a shared machine belonging to an old Irish friend.

People turned up in droves. Jerks told me I deserved it. They said I should be grateful for the attention, because I wasn’t hot enough to get a boyfriend. They thought it was my own fault for going to a technical conference, and joining in the evening activities.

And reasonable people turned up, saying they couldn’t believe that this kind of thing still happens, either the assault or the violent responses. Many of them just had no idea how to react to this.

Luckily, I have a strong group of awesome and supportive friends. One of them, Valerie Aurora, spearheaded the writing of a Conference Anti-Harassment Policy that was soon adopted by a variety of conferences and events.

Valerie wasn’t ready to stop there, and with Mary Gardiner and a team of advisors from around the worlds of open technology and culture, she established the Ada Initiative.

The Ada Initiative is dedicated to a simple vision: a world in which women are equal and welcome participants in open technology, open data, and open culture. Their strategy for change is simple: give concrete, straight-forward advice to willing and eager audiences. They focus their effort on programs that are scalable, reusable, and effective, and they are committed to providing their work completely free of charge.

Of course, it still takes money to do these things. And that’s where you come in. The Ada Initiative has just opened a limited funding round, aiming to raise the seed money required to bootstrap the legal structures that will enable them to accept larger, long-term funding.

If you want to support their vision, if you think women should be able to attend conferences without fear of being assaulted, if you want to help make sure that the next generation of women are welcomed into computing, consider contributing to the Ada Initiative Seed 100 campaign.

The good came first. The ApacheCon lightning talks were, as usual, hilarious. The talented Paul Fremantle brought out his tinwhistle and I danced an only-slightly off-time hornpipe. Bertrand revealed the secrets of the members@ mailing list with a speaking chorus. A [...]]]> I had a hell of a time last night – in good and bad ways.

The good came first. The ApacheCon lightning talks were, as usual, hilarious. The talented Paul Fremantle brought out his tinwhistle and I danced an only-slightly off-time hornpipe. Bertrand revealed the secrets of the members@ mailing list with a speaking chorus. A crazy person with a graphing calculator and a psychedelic three-ring binder gatecrashed and spoke about no-one’s sure what. Ross, Paul and I did an “Ask Me!” talk. Leo, Rich, Shane filled their five minutes in traditional and hilarious and moving fashions. Jean-Frederic had us saying Hello World in more languages than I could count. We laughed as we counted hesitations, repetitions and deviations. It was great.

The party moved up to my room. We had beer, and beer pong, and altogether too many people crammed in. It was more egalitarian than I remember last year’s being – lots of new people, lots of people who weren’t part of the old Apache guard. A charming Southern gentleman with the most awesome belt I’ve ever seen (Carl, where did you get that!?), an excited Berliner who picked me up and whirled me around and somehow managed to avoid having me kick anyone in the head. I lay across the bed, sat on laps, generally tried to squish in to any available space and get time to talk to all the fabulous people thronging the place.

At some point, it was too late and too loud to reasonably continue. Everyone cleared out (Nick, you are a *god*, for spending the extra five minutes to clear the carnage, so that I could wake up in a room that showed no signs of what had happened the night before!), and we headed to the Irish pub next door that has become our local.

Some food, a few more beers. Squeezing everyone up so I could sit next to someone I wanted to talk to. Laughing at the events of the week, and the night.

And then I went to the loo, and as I was about to go in, Florian Leibert, who had been speaking in the Hadoop track, called me over, and asked if he could talk to me.

I’m on the board of Apache. I’m responsible for our conferences. I work on community development and mentoring. If you’re at an Apache event and you want help, information, encouragement, answers, I will always do my best to provide. So this wasn’t an unusual request, and it wasn’t one I expected to end the way it did.

He brought me in to the snug, and sat up on a stool. He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn’t interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don’t think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling.

I broke away, headed back to the group, and hid behind some of the bigger, burlier infra guys, while Bill sorted out all the people who’d left stuff in my room, so that I could reasonably escape. We headed back, people got their stuff, Bill stayed around, and I slept.

When Bill woke up, I pretended to still be asleep, because I couldn’t deal with speaking to anyone. I sent a mail to our planning committee to say that I’d been assaulted. Charel came to talk to me, and then I e-mailed Nick, who came up and helped me sort things out so I could get to the keynote and feel safe. Florian didn’t turn up today, and it’s probably for the best.

I had a few drinks. I was wearing a skirt of such a length that I had cycling shorts on under it to make me feel more comfortable getting up on stage and dancing. I had been flirting with a couple of other boys at the party.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me at a tech conference. But it is the first time I’ve spoken out about it in this way, because I’m tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it. I’m tired of the fear. I’m tired of people who think I should wear something different. I’m tired of people who think I should avoid having a beer in case my vigilance lapses for a moment. I’m tired of people who say that guys can’t read me right and I have to read them, and avoid giving the wrong impression.

But I don’t give the wrong impression, and it’s simply not true that guys can’t read me right. I don’t want to be assaulted, and the vast majority of guys read that just fine. It is not my job to avoid getting assaulted. It is everyone else’s job to avoid assaulting me. Dozens of guys succeeded at that job, across the week. In the pub, in the stairwell, on the MARTA, in my bedroom.

One guy failed, and it’s his fault.

ETA: My heartfelt thanks to the Atlanta police for their sensitivity and professionalism.

What a show! It was a great freedom to be able to attend–and speak–without having to run around making sure everything was planned, organized, working. I love putting on [...]]]> Last week, I enjoyed the beautiful environs of Keble College, Oxford, and the rather noisier hospitality of the University Club, to attend TransferSummit/UK, and the associated BarCampOxford.

What a show! It was a great freedom to be able to attend–and speak–without having to run around making sure everything was planned, organized, working. I love putting on the events I’m involved with; I had a fantastic time at the Retreat in Ireland, and we have a brilliant crew who come in to put on ApacheCon, but there’s still always a “background radiation” level of stress and tension that means it was a very different experience to just “show up” and get on stage

My talk was a lot of fun to give – I was delighted that my mum could attend, and it’s always a thrill to have a packed room, whether it’s big or small The audience were a mix – some friends for backup, others for mild heckling, and a whole lot of people, academics and engineers alike, who were completely new to Open Source. I’m too much of a perfectionist to ever be pleased with my presentations, but the feedback was universally positive, and I hope they’ll have me back next year! The organizers very kindly invited mum to share lunch with us before she had to head back home, and it was lovely to be able to introduce her to some of my “Apache friends”

The conference was unusual, in that it had essentially been assembled by a crack team who decided who they wanted to have speaking, wrote up the abstracts, and then asked those speakers to speak to the chosen topics It ended up being a really solid program, with lots of interesting talks from a great cross-section of the open-source and academic communities.

Once I’d gotten my talk done, it was much easier to relax, and Thursday night started off with a wee dram in my room. We had a variety of things to taste, and some excellent (and knowledgable!) company. We didn’t get too very far before it was time for the gala dinner, in an unmatchably beautiful setting – the Dining Hall at Keble College. It was a lot of fun, although I was eventually warned off dancing on the “precarious” floor, a little while after Paul brought out his whistle. The only thing for it, of course, was to move back to my room, where he kept the music going until well past bedtime! Happily all the neighbours were in attendance, and no one seemed to mind too much

The rest of the conference was, of course, of a standard – unsurprisingly! But the fun didn’t stop with the closing plenary, as we headed on for a pre-BarCamp dinner. I retired early, but sadly didn’t get much sleep – World Cup, a warm night, and accommodation above a bar with a great BBQ menu conspired to keep me awake rather longer than I’d wished. And there was no opportunity to sleep on in the morning, despite staying at the BarCamp venue – some tour organizer was wandering up and down the corridors from early morn, trying to determine where her charges were sleeping by yelling for them

The BarCamp more than made up though – a packed schedule, great content, fun presenters, and lots of audience participation. Robert of Bunnyfoot gave a particularly memorable talk about the use of eyetracking, and my sincere apologies to the Apache crew, on whom I completely accidentally bailed, and only turned up for the second half of the “Apache Way” talk I had intended to co-present.

We had a truly delicious Indian dinner afterwards, whereupon I discovered the first person I know who didn’t grow up in Dublin but has heard of “Jesus: The Guantanamo Years” Some of the Americans bailed on the Indian to have Whetherspoons fish & chips, so of course we had to rejoin them and provide appropriate mocking! By then, of course, USA/Ghana was kicking off, and we turned up in a (briefly!) very quiet pub to watch the match.

Much hilarity ensued, a good proportion of it stemming from those unaccustomed to the Irish style of sports supporter laughing at me The result didn’t work out as we hoped, but overall I think everyone had fun, and if they were truly traumatised, the Americans did a good job of hiding it.

Thanks to all involved for not one, but two great events! Hopefully, I’ll see you all again next year

But perhaps [...]]]> I almost didn’t take part in Ada Lovelace Day this year. Between recently taking up dancing, where I find myself suddenly in a pretty solid majority, and being bogged down with work (both $dayjob and Apache), the unicorn status has firmly lost any sheen it might ever have had. The performance is just exhausting.

But perhaps at times like this, it’s even more important to reflect and to celebrate those women whose achievements have inspired, have made possible, my own participation in technology and science.

Dr Sheila Gilheany was the first female lecturer in Astronomy at the Armagh Planetarium, a place I still remember visiting as a young girl. My first encounter with Sheila, however, came when she took up the directorship of the then-new Irish Centre for Talented Youth (CTYI). (Yes, I’ve heard all the jokes about the spelling of the acronym.)

In that role, Sheila was not only a vocal supporter of Ireland’s academically-gifted youth, but also an inspiring educator. I first learnt to program at CTYI, using Logo to learn simultaneously about geometry and angles, loops and variables Over the course of several summers, I studied everything from Visual Arts to Creative Writing, from Pharmacology to Psychology, from International Relations to Legal Studies.

When, at twelve, I was in bits trying to get my head around what exactly pH was, Sheila was there to cheerlead, and wipe away the tears if necessary! (I already knew pH was a measure of the acidity of a substance, but trying to calculate the anti-log of the hydrogen ion concentration should perhaps not have been introduced on Day 1!)

Later on, when I decided that Decision Maths just wasn’t what I wanted to spend my summer on, she let me switch to the International Relations class, which turned out to be even more bizarre than the discussions of Martians and umbrellas that I had left behind Sheila always expected the very best from everyone she worked with, but she provided support in abundance. From the Quaker we elected (democratically!) to office of God, to the girl who wore a Beanie Baby on her head for three weeks, if she was fazed, she never let on! (If any of you have pictures of the Beanie Baby, I want a copy!)

By the time I went back as a teaching assistant, the range of classes had grown vastly (I helped teach Forensic Science, as well as Computational Linguistics). Sheila had, by then, moved on, but her legacy was clearly thriving.

But Sheila’s infectious love for science benefitted not only the CTYI students. As Director of the Centre, she also oversaw the launch of the Pfizer Science Bus, possibly the coolest coach in the country The Science Bus contained a well-equipped mobile science lab, fully connected with gas, water, electricity and even an internet connection! The bus visited schools around the country, and students were invited to investigate everything from optics to satellite technology, from chromatography to the chemistry of food. Of course, there were also explosions, colourful experiments, shiny demonstrations, and much more!

Sheila is now a Policy Officer at the Institute of Physics, but it cheers me greatly to hear that she is still keenly involved in science education