Last Saturday I attended a podCamp in Boulder, similar to camps I’ve attended in Italy. The topics were mostly techie (of course), and it was stimulating to talk with other folks doing social media et al, and get a fresh perspective.
But the most fun part was at the end, when we learned part of the dance moves to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. (I was participating at first – you can find footage of me if you look hard – but had to duck out to meet a friend and bring her back.)
^ top: the finer points of CSS – Tara and Elena in my kitchen
Increasingly frustrated with the low visibility of women in technology in Italy, back in June I and a few like-minded ladies hatched a plan to start doing something about it.
The first step was to get together. So I invited them all up for a weekend at our house (sent Enrico off to visit his mother – yes, he is a supportive husband!).
Turnout was not as large as I had hoped (the house could have slept 14 or so), but those who came were motivated – most had to be, to trek all the way out here.
Friday night it was just me, Tara, and Elena. It had been a long week for us all, so we ate dinner, watched a movie, and went to bed.
The next morning I woke up early (as usual) and got to work cooking (while my computer was compressing video for Sun). Tara and Elena eventually wandered in and set up their laptops on the kitchen table, working separately and together on this and that. It was oddly comforting to have them there while I cooked (usually a lonely activity for me); I’d like to have girl geeks in my kitchen more often!
The crew gradually assembled and introduced themselves:
Talk flowed, mostly informally, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t sharing useful information.
There were the expected horror stories:
So, yes, there is plenty for women in IT in Italy to be unhappy about. But we didn’t get together just to bitch. The point of the weekend was to discuss what we can do to help ourselves, each other, and the larger community of girl geeks in Italy.
Under Sara Rosso‘s (welcome) leadership, each of us described what we hoped to get out of this event. These included:
^ Sara Rosso and Susan Quercioli [Susie Q?]
Sunday morning the first-round attendees left, to be quickly replaced by:
More useful experiences and information were shared (as well as an Indian lunch that I cooked).
At the end of the two days, we had some next steps:
Possible projects for the community:
Having this nascent supportive community of women in IT is already proving useful. Had I met Bruna a year ago and talked with her about some Italian IT companies she’s familiar with, I might not have been so much in despair about my job prospects in Italy. Celia said that, had she known us three years ago, she might not have abandoned the web business she enjoyed (and in fact she’s now thinking about getting back into it!).
Your thoughts and contributions welcome!
In the afternoon I attended some sessions, though I missed the most popular presentation of the day, Iocelopiulunghismo (“Mine’s-the-biggest-ism”), by Elena and Feba, a funny and ironic look at (male) bloggers’ obsession with their (blog) statistics.
I poked my head into Andrea Beggi‘s unfortunately-titled presentation on “Blogging for Ladies,” but the room was so crowded I couldn’t stay. I hope and assume that he intended the title to be tongue-in-cheek, but it was risky, and evidently a number of people did not take it as ironic. After what was apparently a useful bunch of technical how-to’s on getting more traffic to one’s blog, he came in for some flak about “what makes you so sure women want more traffic to their blogs?”
If this comment was really made, it was more than a bit silly. There are indeed private blogs intended for specific, closed audiences (e.g. one’s family), and hopefully the people who write them are smart enough to make them accessible only to the desired readers. But anyone else who’s blogging probably does want to be found and read – if you blog and nobody reads you, have you truly blogged at all?
I attended a session on women in the open source community, basically a report of statistics which, while I had not heard them before, did not surprise me in the least. I knew instinctively that women are a small percentage of the people working on open source software (I can remember seeing only one on my particular beat – storage – in the OpenSolaris.org forums). The interesting question is: why are there so few? One possible answer (given) is that people tend to do open source work in their free time, which women have less of than men (this is not fair, but that’s a topic for another time).
Something was said about technologies designed by and for women, a concept that wasn’t clear to me. In that context, we certainly weren’t talking about recipe organizers. Marzia responded with an example, Cercatrice di Rete (“Web Searcher”, the word searcher being in the feminine in this case), which she explained in more detail the next day at the E-Wit conference. It’s a search engine tuned to highlight women’s issues, e.g. searching on violenza returns results related to violence against women.
I suppose it’s one more example of a vertical search engine. I may be missing the point but, if I wanted to research “violence against women”, wouldn’t I just type that in? And if I needed immediate resources to protect me against an abusive spouse (the example Marzia seemed to have in mind), I would probably search on something more to the point, like: “how to murder your husband and get away with it.”
When it was my turn to present, I was disappointed that few of the younger women I’d seen at the camp were in the room. I was aiming mostly at them in my talk Fuori dagli Schemi – Aneddoti e Lezioni di Una Carriera Insolita (“Outside the Box: Anecdotes and Lessons from an Unusual Career”). I was afraid that what I had to share would be obvious to career women closer to my own age (well, okay, in their 30s), who seemed to be the bulk of my audience.
But several friends were present to cheer me on, and everyone seemed enthusiastic in spite of my quavering delivery in unusually shaky Italian (a result of nerves plus jet lag). If you want to hear it, go to this page and look for my name (towards the bottom), and click video at the end of that line (actually, it doesn’t sound as shaky as I had feared, though the grammar is not perfect).
Afterwards one woman told me she had needed to hear my admonition to “make sure the people who count know about the work you’re doing”, because she, too, had suffered from accomplishments that went unnoticed.
There wasn’t time for discussion, unfortunately, so I missed the opportunity to raise the question of what next steps the group could take for us women to help each other in our professional IT careers. I do have some ideas, though, which I’ll be discussing shortly in these pages.
Lele then got up to introduce a group of “cheerleaders.” I was about to rip his head off – the idea that my “go get ’em girls” talk should be immediately followed by sexist, male-pleasing bullshit was just too much. Then I realized that he had been asked to introduce a presentation I’d been curious about, “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World,” on gender in the fan communities of Heroes. Lele had gotten the wrong end of the stick in introducing the three young women doing the presentation as cheerleaders – the cheerleader referred to is character Claire Bennett.
One of the three did a good job of presenting the research carried out by a (mixed gender) group of students at the University of Urbino, but we didn’t actually hear any conclusions: those will be presented in a video to be posted on YouTube. It’s a pity her two colleagues didn’t get to speak, and I wasn’t sure of any of their names as Lele made a joke of them. But I appreciated that they had stood in the audience and smiled at me through my own presentation – I hope they gained something from it (e.g., don’t let someone else do all the talking for you, even if she’s female). later – I know at least one of them did: she left a very nice comment.
Amanda then gave a well-researched presentation on women in IT in Europe. That ties in well with what I heard the next day at the E-Wit conference, so I will talk about it in that context, in a future article.
There’s been a lot of bitching about how hot and crowded the venue was. In fact there would have been a lovely and capacious alternative venue, the one used for E-Wit the next day, in quarters shared between the Women’s Library of Bologna and the University of Bologna’s Department of Visual Arts.
However, as Federica (one of the organizers) explained to me, Internet access there was so hemmed about with firewalls that it would have been impossible to stream the video which allowed people from all over Italy (and the world) to follow the event live. Many of us present had also attended RitaliaCamp, hosted at a branch of the University of Milan which turned out to be very grudging in allowing attendees network access, to everyone’s frustration. (Hyper-bloggers gasp like fish out of water if cut off from Internet access for more than 15 minutes.)
The organizers of FemCamp opted instead for via San Felice, and, thanks to a sponsor, were able to provide the best wireless coverage anybody has yet seen at a camp in Italy – lack of which would surely have been cause for complaint at the other venue (note to conference organizers: you can never please everybody).
I belong to the “don’t have anything to lose” school of electronics repairs.
Six months ago I was profoundly irritated that my new-batteried iPod suddenly wouldn’t respond to its buttons. It could still play if attached to a computer, but that didn’t do me much good, so I had to replace it with a new iPod.
Or did I? Yesterday I ran across the old one in one of my boxes of “I’ll do something with this someday” electronic junk and thought “Maybe I can use this as a travelling extra hard drive.” I plugged it into my laptop and, sure enough, it was still perfectly recognizable by the system. I was able to delete all the data from it and reinstall the iPod software, though this did not fix the non-response problem.
I couldn’t do the usual iPod three-finger-salute to reset it because you first have to click on and off the lock button and, no matter which way I slid it, the lock symbol on the display remained on. The problem was clearly mechanical: the iPod wasn’t responding to the lock button.
I did a Google search and found an old post by danah boyd, whose blog I read regularly, but it’s not usually technical in that way: she had issued a cry for help with her own iPod. She ended up having hers replaced, but it was still under warranty – I didn’t have that option.
The numerous comments, however, provided my answer: a mechanical problem admits of a mechanical solution. Some suggested banging (well, tapping) it on a table, others pressing on the case until the two parts re-aligned properly.
I had a better option: I had kept the plastic doohickeys used to open the iPod to replace the battery as described above. I ran one of them around the join of the case at the top, where the button is. I heard a loud, satisfying click – and the iPod lit up, ready to play.
Now and then I suffer from RSI (repetitive stress injury), from too much time on the keyboard: my fingers feel stiff and painful, arms and shoulders get tired, and so on. I know I should move around more, type less, etc., but when I’ve got a lot to do, it’s hard to know when to stop.
Now I have something to tell me when to stop: a piece of software called WorkRave, which I started using a few weeks ago. Wow! It really is something to rave about. It’s a well-behaved little utility that sits in the background and monitors your keyboard useage. You set it to remind you to take a break at fixed intervals; I have set “microbreaks” (60 seconds) every 15 minutes, and a ten-minute break every 45. During the longer break it even suggests helpful exercises you can do, though I’m more likely to go for coffee, talk to colleagues (or, if at home, put in a load of laundry, start dinner)…
Prior to installing WorkRave, I had pictured myself as too easily distracted – always jumping up to go to the bathroom, go for coffee, or do household chores. Now I’m surprised at how quickly those 15- and 45-minute chunks fly by. Heeding the reminders to take a break does seem to be helping my hands, too – I feel worse on days when I’ve chosen to Skip or Postpone them too often.
If you spend too much time on the keyboard and your body is letting you know it (or better, before it does), I highly recommend installing WorkRave. And the price is right: it’s open source.
2013: Two years ago I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout, which helped far more than anything else I’ve tried in a long history with RSI.
