I’m off to UMass today for the FSF’s LibrePlanet! I’ll be there all day today and tomorrow. There are a lot of great speakers lined up, so if you’re in the Boston area, you should come by and say hello. The conference is free for FSF members. I’ll be speaking tomorrow afternoon along with the amazing Joanmarie Diggs.
See you there…
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I was so excited to be recently added to the Ada Initiative’s advisors. Perhaps coincidentally, it turns out that this week has been a time when the world demonstrates just how much we truly need the Ada Initiative.
I had my own personal negative experience this week. I posted my recap of my South By Southwest panel, in which I included a picture of me along with the other panelists, since I was wearing my copyright is censorship t-shirt from QuestionCopyright.Org. The very first comment I received on the post was a very specific comment about a part of my anatomy. While I suppose the comment in some sense could be considered complimentary, I instantly regretted having posted the picture. I deleted the comment and moved on, no big deal – but it reminded me of how off putting these things can be. I’m fairly thick-skinned now, but when I was younger, a comment like that could have just turned me off from blogging or even participating in this space at all. It was a fairly disheartening thing to happen, but reminded me all the more about how important the Ada Initiative and other efforts like it are for women in technology.
On a more significant level, as Lukas Blakk, another Ada Initiative advisor, has already blogged about today, there have been a couple of more serious situations of blatant sexism this week.
A tech company called Sqoot organized a hackathon in Boston, and included an overtly sexist advertisement for their event, luring the presumed male hackers by promising beer served to them by women. They further botched things through a weak apology.
The other incident involved a startup called Geekli.st, and a questionable video made to promote t-shirts with their logo. While made by a t-shirt company, and not geekli.st themselves, geekli.st’s t-shirts were prominently featured. The video has been taken down, but you can see how the twitter conversation about it went so badly.
As you can see, never has the Ada Initiative been so needed. The thing that impresses me the most about it (like the GNOME OPW, actually) is that it focuses on concrete and positive activities to improve the situation. Please spread the word about the Ada Initiative as a resource to all who may benefit from it, and consider making a donation.
I’m so thankful for the great GNOME community, for Marina’s amazing work and for the awesome mentors, interns and sponsors that participate in our Outreach Program for Women to make our community the kind of place where you’d want to shrug off the occasional negative comment to keep participating.
This bi-weekly report is a bit short, as I spent almost half of the time at sxsw, speaking about free culture and taking continuing legal education classes to make sure I keep my status as a lawyer in good standing. I wrote a separate report of sxsw earlier. Some of the things I did during the rest of the time are:
I had the privilege this past Wednesday to speak on a panel at the music conference of South by Southwest: Set Your Content Free (It’s Harder Than You Think). Moderated by the enthusiastic and eloquent Michael Petricone of the Consumer Electronics Association, the panel was composed of me, Hank Shocklee (of Bomb Squad/Public Enemy fame), Julie Samuels of EFF, and Paul Geller of Grooveshark.
As you can see, I wore my QuestionCopyright t-shirt, which became a talking point in the panel. It was very refreshing that all of the panelists believed that sharing content is the right way forward, and though each of us had a different perspective, that fundamental agreement made it possible to have a much more interesting and in depth discussion about these issues than I’ve had elsewhere. As Michael put it, we had a great practical discussion of strategies for using free content to promote and maximize alternative revenue streams – the positives, negatives, pitfalls, and the hard work it takes to be successful, even when you give it away for free.
Some of the topics we covered were:
The theme was really exploring various ways that the shift away from centralized distribution and control affects musicians and artists generally. I spoke a bit about Sita Sings the Blues and nonprofit distribution of art and music. Julie piped in about things from a legal perspective in the wake of SOPA/PIPA, Paul talked about his experiences at Grooveshark and the legal battles they’ve been engaged in and Hank discussed his view of the industry as a producer and composer. Favorite moments of mine included Paul saying that there should be many Groovesharks, Hank kicking things off by saying that the key to being successful can only be by building an audience through the free distribution of your music and Julie underscoring my point about copyright as censorship and discussing the erosion of fair use. Also, Hank advises R&B artists to make A Capella tracks stat for DJs to use.
Many thanks to Julie for inviting me to participate and to QCO for sponsoring some of my travel. I really loved the discussion, which was in contrast to the continuing legal education tracks I sat through later in the conference. Those were predicated on the very traditional business of representing copyright maximalists. I found it interesting that most of the panels on the main sxsw tracks were realistic discussions about the current state of the music industry which is becoming more centered on the assumption of sharing whereas the panels of lawyers were mostly staunch supporters of the past models (it was news to me that the demise of SOPA was a tragedy). A few of the lawyers on some of the panels did have very interesting things to say. For example, one lawyer cited that 99.9% of the musicians who perform at sxsw cannot make a living from their music. I hope that over time, these legal focused sessions will become more balanced – both in perspective on copyright and also in their representation of women on the panels. In a field where there are many successful women (and the audience was well represented in this regard), the speakers in the CLE track only included 5 women out of 45 speakers.
Nonetheless, I was very glad to take care of some of the requirements I need to keep my bar membership in good standing, and some of the discussion was very interesting.
It was a fun and fascinating week. I was proud to represent QuestionCopyright.Org and look forward to having many interesting discussions about free culture in the future.
Here’s what I’ve been up to since my last update:
It’s been an exciting and busy couple of weeks. Here are a selection of things I’ve done, so that you can see what I’ve been up to!
My day started out bright and early, meeting Tom Marble, Richard Fontana and Bradley Kuhn to get breakfast and prepare ourselves for the legal issues and policy devroom. I have to credit Tom, there really was a demand for the room and I thought we had some really interesting conversations. I did slip out throughout the day to get to various GNOME related things, but the devroom was my anchor, which was sometimes difficult when it was stuffed to the gills!
I held two sessions today. One was was an unexpected talk I gave with Bradley about fiscal sponsorship organizations when one of morning speakers let us know that he was stuck on a train and wasn’t going to make it. The second was moderating a panel on software patents, which is always interesting.
The whole track was good, but I have to admit that one of my favorite things was having Harald Welte in the room while Philippe Laurent described the German case law.
I also made it to the cross-desktop room to see a few talks including Dave Neary’s talk on mentorship and Allan Day’s talk on Every Detail Matters. The rest of the day was jam packed with intense conversations and meeting people, which was capped off with a really fun time at the GNOME beer event. I even met a few GNOME hackers I’d not met before. It was also great to hang out with my mentee, Emily Gonyer who not only is experiencing her first conference, but also manned the GNOME booth most of the day!
Must get some sleep to prepare myself for tomorrow’s FOSDEM craziness.
I’ve arrived safely and soundly in Brussels for FOSDEM, despite a weird back injury (I didn’t know you could get those from sneezing…) I’ve had a nice time talking to folks already, even if I’ve gotten a couple of rants about GNOME. There’s been some really great positive discussion too.
I’m excited for the Legal Issues devroom I’m cohosting with Tom, Bradley and Richard and also for the Crossdesktop devroom. I’ll also try to hang around the GNOME booth. Please come and say hi. See you there!
Many of you have probably already seen Alberto’s post that Planet GNOME will only include members going forward.
I wanted to take the time to urge all of you who have been putting it off or have been unsure – now’s the time to apply for membership!. It may seem intimidating (I actually put off applying for membership myself until I was already Executive Director – shameful!) but all kinds of contributions to GNOME can count towards membership and you don’t need to be a maintainer or super hacker. The rules say:
Any person who has made non-trivial contributions to the GNOME project and who submits a proper application to the Membership Committee will be approved for membership. A non-trivial contribution is any activity which contributes to the development of the project at a level significantly above that expected of a normal user or fan of GNOME.
Examples of non-trivial contributions include hacking, bugfixing, extensive testing, design, documentation, translation, administration or maintenance of project-wide resources, giving GNOME talks at conferences and community coordination such as bugzilla or release management. Any activity, such as advocacy or submitting bug reports, must substantially exceed the level of contribution expected of an ordinary user or fan of the project to qualify an individual for membership in the Foundation.
Not sure if you’ve contributed enough to get your membership already? Let’s have a mini membership hackfest! Email me or find me in IRC (I’m karenesq on GIMPNet) and I’ll try to help come up with good tasks you can work on in the next few weeks. We really have a lot going on right now that we can use help with. For example, we’re working to put together our annual report and could really use more articles and other content to make it good, which probably doesn’t require a large learning curve to get started. Being a member of the Foundation is important – not only do you get a say in who’s on the board, keep your blog on the planet, qualify for travel sponsorships and get a great @gnome.org email address, but you are showing your support for a great organization that’s making the world a better place.
After a long series of flights this weekend, I’m finally home from my trip to linux.conf.au.
My time in Australia kicked off with AdaCamp in Melbourne over the weekend, which was fantastic and which I’ll give its own post in the coming days. I find conferences to be very intense and can never seem to find the time to blog while I’m there. I’m impressed with those who manage to pull it off.
LCA was a fantastic conference. I greatly enjoyed meeting people and catching up with old friends. It was great to be able to talk about GNOME with everyone. Many people didn’t know about extensions.gnome.org and others hadn’t actually seen GNOME3 and were impressed when I showed them my laptop. (And happily quite a number went away excited to try it.)
I gave two talks at the conference. The first was at the Business of Open Source Miniconf on Monday which was organized by Martin Michlmayr, where I talked about the nuts and bolts of nonprofit law. Since the talk was outside the United States, I kept the discussion mostly on a conceptual level, focusing on issues like governance and common pitfalls for nonprofit management. Usually I worry that these kinds of talks are very boring but perhaps this approach was better, as this time the audience seemed really engaged. I was the last talk of the day, and the Q&A session lasted well past the scheduled end time. Unfortunately, the talk wasn’t recorded but I’d be happy to send the slides on to anyone who is interested.
The keynote I gave on Thursday was my medical devices talk but longer and with more of a focus on GNOME – the thrust of the talk being that software has become critical to our lives and to our society and that since free and open source software is safer over time, we must make it usable so that we can build a bridge to ordinary users. I loved being able to talk about GNOME’s accessibility campaign in this context too. I hope that folks who listened to the talk will give to the campaign so we can make real headway on accessibility.
I was totally overwhelmed with the responses to my keynote. The twitter stream was amazing, but I especially loved the fact that folks were saying that they now want to hack on GNOME after my talk. GNOME developers should be proud about what they’re doing. They’re really making the world a better place. I’m so glad to be able to represent and support the community.
This point was underscored by Jacob Applebaum in his keynote (which was amazing but I think hasn’t been posted yet). He of course talked about security, our governments and ways that we can protect ourself against surveillance. He made great points and I learned quite a lot from his talk. In his conclusion, Jake made several calls for action, including hacking on GNOME (I was particularly proud that he quoted me as saying “the Guh in GNOME is for freedom”). He suggested we build Tor as a default into our desktop to promote more secure web use, and I think that’s a really fabulous idea. One of the problems that we have with improving security generally is getting ordinary people to understand why it’s important and how to implement it. GNOME could be the perfect place for this, as our community understands these issues and is skilled at making beautiful software that is accessible and easy to use.
It may be silly, but thanks to Jake and also Paul Fenwick who got all the crickets out of my room the night before my talk so I could prep and sleep!
I also met with a few reporters and will link to other articles if they wind up getting published.
Kudos to the LCA2012 team, especially Josh Stewart and Kathy Reid. The conference was well organized, interesting and fun. Thanks for bringing me to Australia!