Category Archives: Conferences

Jan28

HacknTalk – March Event

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HacknTalk – March Event

One thing about me is I love to orgnaise anything, be it room, books, tops, filing or conferences, to me this is in fact oddly relaxing.  Yes i appreciate I am rather alone in this thinking.

However, I missed organising events so have started up a new venture.  It’s called HacknTalk, a one day event where people can come along, work on projects, give a talk on something they have learnt or a demo on something we’ve all read about but don’t know how to use.  This idea came to me when I watched Mark Shuttleworth demo the HUD when he was over at Skycon in October of last year.  Many people had heard of the HUD, but nobody knew how to use it well. After he showed it off when using The Gimp, everyone was willing to give it a try again and people could see the logic in it.  A demo is often worth 3 blog posts :)

With that in mind I set about trying to find a venue in London to use as that’s where I am currently located. To my joy the Google Campus have kindly let me use their venue. The first HacknTalk will take place on Saturday March 9th from 11-5pm. Since HacknTalk is an unconference, the speaking/demo schedule will be set on the day and everyone is free to propose a talk themselves. You are of course free to come along, sit back and listen to other people’s talks but we’d like to encourage everyone to take part and talk on something they are passionate about in technology.

People are welcome to do given a talk on any topic or perhaps they wish to demonstrate something they have gotten to know well.  Talks may be short and interactive, perhaps you wish to have a discussion, or we can hold an hour of  lightning talks. We have multiple tables at our disposal, should people want to collaborate together that is also possible. Again anything is possible  what happens will be up to those who come along!

It’s not distro or language specific, anyone and everyone are welcome to come along.  Place are limited however and you do need to sign up.  There is no cost associated with this event, it really is just created so more people can get together and get more hands on experience and learn from one another.

Aug2

Finally a statement I can agree with, I am not a Geek Feminist

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Finally a statement I can agree with, I am not a Geek Feminist

I have to say I’ve been really happy to see more and more statements with similar expressions that Nixie in her video Riki  Leslie  and others have expressed over the last few days. they are not Geek Feminists! Honestly in the past I’ve had to walk away from such groups of women/men where I didn’t feel welcomed as I didn’t agree with their statements. I’m sorry I just don’t.

Honestly, I do consider myself a Geek, I’ve studied computers at college, worked in tech jobs most of my life, yes I’m not a developer or a sys admin, but that doesn’t make me less geeky to all those people who look down their noses.  I surround myself by Geeky toys, events and people and love every bit of it. I love to go to Geeky events and have happily travelled this way attending events, speaking at then, and organising them.  Yes I fully admit to not always knowing what is being discussed but then again, neither does everyone! I’ll always put myself  out there and try and to learn what’s going on and what’s new. I love new technology!

I truly am sorry to hear about women who have experience shite at events from men and now women on top of it all, it’s inexcusable it really is but I also don’t want to spend the next event discussing and rehashing the experience over and over and over….It’s not what I came for.  I’ve been rather fortunate really I’ve never experienced any of the shite Nixie or others have blogged about at events and it’s frustrating this kinda thing is still happening in 2012.  I would like to find said bloke and sit him down and explain to him how much of a pig he really and also how it can effect the attendance of a conference.

I’ve been going to FOSDEM for the last 5 years and never once experience any issue, hassle, or quiet frankly any comment from anyone. To me this is a normal experience.  There have been at times the odd numptalot who’s put a idiotic image on a slide, has been chastised in their talk and it’s been removed, it’s just not tolerated, and again to me this is a good example of how people deal with people who are being out of line in a conference.  Zero tolerance.

Again, anyone who knows me, knows I speak my mind, and knows exactly where I stand on this topic, but I’ve never blogged about it before as I know to disagree with people it’s seen as undermining the issue. It’s not really, I just don’t want to get drawn into the debate again over and over again. I find circular conversations irritating and boring!

Seeing the others speak out and also the outrage from the open source community has put things into perspective, one needs to speak out and stand up for oneself and happy say (if they want) they are not Geek Feminists! I’ve watched Nikies video and it just made me rather sad,  she really looked upset and down, and I fully admit to not watching her other videos the whole time as I find the over enthusiastic AWESOME and eagerness to be a bit too much at times, HOWEVER, she does bring people to the community, she does have a following and she does get people interested in things, so I won’t knock her! Even recently on the Ubuntu-UK mailing list someone decided to take a pot shot about the way she dresses, I replied as honestly it’s no ones business how people dress, have we really nothing better to be doing!

To Nixi, Riki and all the others, come to FOSDEM, please! Please don’t think all geek events are the same and hopefully you will have a better experience there!

May31

Review of FLOSSIE 2012

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Review of FLOSSIE 2012

This is a summary of my attendance and participation at Flossie, a 2 day conference aimed at women in open source held in London. I had been asked to speak and take part in this event months ago to discuss how I had gotten involved in Ubuntu.  I was also asked to chair a panel discussion about women in FLOSS, this consisted of the speakers who were taking part in the morning sessions. The event was attended by over 70 – 80 women coming from various backgrounds, education, industry, and advoacy from all over the UK and Europe with some three speakers coming from Spain.

We kicked off the session with a reference to the 2006 study funded by the European Union ( Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Policy Support), about 1.5 percent of open-source contributors are women. I’d like to think in 2012 those numbers are up, surveys suggest that in terms of active contributors to the Ubuntu project there are 763 Ubuntu members it is around 5% and in the KDE variant Kubuntu closer to 8%, Computer science graduates overall around 20%. We aimed to discuss over the course of the event were the reasons why the numbers are low, but climbing.

The panel was made up with representatives from industry, higher education, voluntary sector and hardware hacking community. Some of the topics we discussed are below which lead to a good discussion and follow up questions/thoughts.

Programming vs making things

With hardware projects like arduino and raspberry pi and the crafting/maker faire communities experiencing strong growth, is this a trend that will particularly help encourage women to get involved in technology?

Solitary work vs collaborating in teams

Do you feel that women learn and work better in a more collaborative environment than the traditional solitary programmer model? Perhaps with larger more modern software that must be developed by teams the social collaboration is suiting women better than the general development environment in the past has done.

Software freedom as a concept

Do you think the fundamental philosophies of the Free Software foundation, the four freedoms, and the concept of giving freely to society with no tangible reward have, or should have, a particular resonance with women?

Academia vs Industry

Are the initiatives in academia to get girls and young women involved in technology working? Does industry have better ideas? Is there enough collaboration between industry and universities working on getting women into technology jobs?

Event formats

We are at a technology event specifically targeted at women, there are other formats such as geekgirldinners where men are welcomed as long as they have an invitation from a woman, and of course many well run and welcoming events where women are a rarity. What works well, and what do we need more of?

Me personally, I’m not a lover of one gender only being allowed to attend an event, I find it closes off people who could also bring something to the table for discussion.  I love the way girl geek dinners do it, Gentlemen can attend if they are invited as I do think it’s important to work with people and not just beside them.  I do fully appreciate this was FLOSSIEs  first event and wanted to invite as many women to take part in it the talks and it worked out well, but maybe this could be looked at in the future.

There were a lot of great talks over the two days, a lot of the talks on Friday were from academic speakers, how they were working on FLOSS projects in colleges and how researchers work in open source communities. There were also workshops happening at the same time for a bit more hands on experience.

Some key talks were, from the developers of whatsmysize.com where it was developed over a weekend on drupal this was chosen as the preferred platform as the developers know it inside and out and had worked on it before, it grew to 1K users very fast,however it slowed down on updates and enhancements deployments after that due to hiring of a new developer who hadn’t experience and was a php developer so they learned from that to share knowledge to others in the company.

Other projects that caught my eye that I’d not heard of were the Chi-tek project well worth a read and if you get to see it in London rather interesting.

Tex Gen Open Source software for Modelling of Textile composites, this was interesting as it started off as a research project and then went to become an open source project, although the project manage was dubious about this and did put up resistance to this, he now speaks at events advocating open source projects.

There was a large discussion which spread out to lunchtime debate on the Lorea project  they are trying to get it recongnised for a 8K grant to fund it, presentation in English  / Spanish  if you are interested in voting on it.

I gave a talk on baby steps into contributing to an open source project and based it on how to get involved in Ubuntu, it was received well, I had a student come up to me the next day saying she’d not heard of it before, went home and tried the cd I had brought along and loved it and would consider trying it out for a while to see how she got on.

Overall it was a good experience, and they are going to plan a 2013 to happen next year.