Meep in the Big City

I was musing over Twitter about why radical communities never talk about being educated in math and science. These are fields covered in privilege and hierarchy, but by taking a radical approach to the teaching and learning of science and math, we can reclaim this important knowledge. Numbers are very important in our daily lives - checking our finances, cooking our food, finding how far we have to travel, making things - and by not acknowledging the existence of math in our lives, it becomes a scary beast. There is the obvious patriarchal math problem - what happens when girls are in a classroom with guys and forced to compete mathmatically? Disaster. Plus, math is taught by rote memorization without actually considering the theory and application. It’s a surefire recipe for disaster. That is not to say that we should make patronizing attempts to integrate math into, say, sewing, but instead create a deeper understanding of what the history and principles of each concept are.

Take for example the discipline of algebra. The fact that it comes to us from the Arabic world is often glossed over, but this could actually be part of an important history and culture lesson. Most people forget that math and science do not exist in a void - the people that create the theories in math and science are part of a certain culture, most often from the dominant culture. Educators must take time to understand the barrier that is created when dominant culture is imposed as “the right way”. After all, science changed radically with the advent of relativity. This is not meant to say that basics shouldn’t be taught - they should be handled with a certain amount of perspective.

Another problem I foresee is that if we do not push all children to explore all disciplines of knowledge, the safety and security of our world is at risk. It is true that companies don’t build things like they used to - when an bad architech designs a bad building and the construction crew uses bad materials and exploited workers, it’s no wonder we have ugly and unsafe buildings. A building is only as good as the sum of its parts. There are radical activists working hard to make sure the construction crew isn’t exploited or the materials are safe and not exploiting nature. But where are the activists teaching the young girl who builds houses instead of playing house? It is one thing to tell privileged men, “Go educate yourself.” That is their responsibility. But young minds need someone to help them to grow intellectually. We need radical teachers who aren’t afraid of math and science who want to have a whole generation of kids who not only see a utopian vision, but are actively constructing it.

YAY! Mindy has been adopted… but not by me. I don’t feel too bad because at least Mindy is going to a good home. However, I am using the funds for a kitten I’m adopting. The kitten was born recently and isn’t ready to go home yet, but I’ll be able to afford to take it to the vet for its kitty shots and eventually spayed/neutered. (Recommendations for a vet in NE Portland would be appreciated.)

I’m also thinking about cat names… and cat food. I was told by a clerk at a local pet supply shop that animals that are put down are taken to a rendering facility to be used in pet food. That isn’t very healthy for cats, as many cats are put down when they are ill. When my cat Roger died, my uncle and I suspected she had some kind of cancerous growth. Imagine if your cat was eating my cat filled with cancer - it seems like a scenario for mad cow disease!

I knew that humans had a rough time with the food supply in the US, constantly being fed things like high fructose corn syrup and overprocessed wheat, but I didn’t realize that cats and dogs are affected by this too. Dogs can be fed a more omnivorous diet, but cats are carnivores. By eating a diet of bad meat and wheat, it’s any wonder our cats are healthy at all. It might explain why so many cats are overweight - they’re consuming a lot of empty calories. Unfortunately the “good” cat food is often expensive, but I’ve heard that you can feed cats on a budget by buying leftover meat from the butcher and grinding it up with bone.

I hope to learn more about the dietary habits of my cat friends. I’ll post updates with information on the blog (whenever I remember).

I attended BarCamp Portland this year in a more participatory role. Considering the resent Rails chauvinist debacle, I thought it was a perfect time to talk about women in tech, as well as the Econix project and PDX Hackerspace. I gave an impromptu 4th session about food and veganism (even though I am not currently vegan).

My three sessions were juggled around a lot on Friday during the planning session. Something I noticed about the unconference board-planning aspect is that it is most useful for people who have already attended an unconference, and people who are willing to be in aggressive leadership roles. The assumption is that a herd is going to race to the board and trample others in order to get their topic on the board, but I noticed this backfired as people were slightly more thoughtful about topics but also more reserved and less self-confident to actually put their ideas out without prior approval. The atmosphere was tinged with nervousness, as many people there tend to be wallflowers. It was a bit surreal. I did my best to get other people participating without being overbearing, though I’m not sure the format in this iteration is the best. It makes me wonder if there can’t be a less confrontational version of this, or if we can create friendly negotiation from the confrontations.

Econix and Local Bartering (notes)

I supervised this session with Di-Ann from Platial. She has started a map-based local bartering system with her neighbors called Urban Traders. This session made me realize that people in Portland want to feel connected to each other in a tangible way but are still experimenting to find the best way to both encourage a real local economy and a sense of community. I took notes and did a reasonably good job.

Women + Tech == Yay! (notes)

On Friday I wanted to make sure this panel was created and wasn’t sure who would step up to host it, so I went ahead and hosted it. I figured it would be similar to last year’s that took place in the lobby, where a bunch of women sat around and talked about their experiences. The session kept moving around and by the time I got to eat lunch, someone told me I was hosting it in the forum. I was rather shocked that people were showing up in large numbers but was unable to be stressed or nervous about it. I simply told people what I had been thinking about on the way to BarCamp that Saturday, and remembered words of encouragement from my grandma. Since the panel, people have come up to me quite a bit to talk about their experiences and thoughts. I appreciate it a lot, though I am still eager to use the energy to create a positive experience for young women of color. Young women are not encouraged enough to explore their technological desires, or even be allowed to like science and math. The same patriarchy is too involved in the internet, and the internet cannot evolve without people who think differently forging new paths with their ideas.

PDX Hackerspace (notes)

I’m involved in the creation of a space for people in the community to hack together. So far the project is very male-centric, but we are looking to create it as a co-op. I am still working on formulating most of the details. It is an experiment in creating a new business, which is new for me. Hopefully the hackerspace can be a place where young women can come and hack together.

Food (notes)

This panel was not as exciting. By this time, I was completely mentally exhausted and managed to hijack the session into a talk about veganism. I’m now much more commited to becoming vegan than before, and it was a nice way to recenter myself. Plus, I met some really cool people.

After watching the movie “Helvetica” recently, I had a discussion with a friend about the implications of the movie, primarily that Helvetica is a font of a whitewashed culture and that the movie interviewed the same WASP types of people and only considered those people as having valid opinions. To their credit, one woman was interviewed, but her opinions closely mirrored those of her colleagues. We also discussed MySpace as an example of people making inferior art not because of a lack of ability, but a lack of a true creative toolkit. This same topic has been discussed at length on The Unapologetic Mexican.

“Helvetica” frequently mentioned how powerful fonts are when creating an experience for the onlooker. I made the next logical step and decided to see what happened when I replaced Chican@-related posters with variations of Helvetica to see what the effect would be. The original is on the left, the variation is on the right, and the images link to the source.

The first image was taking a basic flier to see what the effect was. The original font used creates a more urgent need, whereas Helvetica makes the poster blend into the background. Source: justseeds.org

The second image was interesting as I was substituting a serif font for Helvetica. It completely destroys the effect of an strong, earthy woman. Source: Digindad Rebelde

The third flier looses all punch when substituted with Helvetica. Since it is also using a serif font, it looks inappropriate. Admittedly, my edit job on this picture could have been better. Source: Digindad Rebelde

The final picture, an iconic poster for the UFW, has been stripped of its meaning completely when using Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold. The perfect symmetry of the hand-drawn letters and the (somewhat sexist) way that the word “grapes” and the grape juice is implicating rape is very powerful. The substitution destroys the picture completely. Source: Xavier Montes

(Edit. I forgot to draw a conclusion.)
The next logical step is that when Helvetica is constantly in our environment, the lack of cultural cues is disturbing. Our culture has been slowly whitewashed by the starkness of Helvetica. It is everywhere, keeping us from expressing our insides.

In light of recent events at a Ruby conference, I feel that it is time once again to shed some light on the sexist behavior that still lurks in the tech community. It’s not a topic that gets discussed often, especially in feminist circles and in tech circles.

The most recent event comes from the Golden Gate Ruby Conference. I did not attend, but merely heard about it through a mailing list, which pointed me to a blog post by attendee Sarah Allen. I can only judge through the slides online, which made my stomach turn. I wrote about my initial reaction on the mailing list. Now that I have seen all the slides and read most of the comments on Allen’s blog post, I can determine two things. One is that the slideshow itself is difficult to follow and contains very little useful information. With all the pictures, it makes the case for why Rubyists should use CouchDB very weak. I am actually interested in CouchDB, but it’s a difficult presentation to wade through.

The bigger issue is the actual pictures. It is one thing to have photographs of women in a slideshow, but many of the pictures depicted sexual acts where women were merely sexual objects for men to lust over. The appropriateness of having mildly graphic pictures in a conference is debatable, but the content of the acts were objectionable. None of the pictures depicted women being strong and sexy, and all were very heteronormative.

The fact that Matt Aimonetti doesn’t understand why his slideshow was sexist is indicative of a deeper problem within the tech community. I ran into the same problem at Ignite Portland 5 with Pete Grillo’s presentation that irked me because of his overuse of female sexuality to talk about making omelets. There is a creepy factor when men appropriate women’s sexuality.

At the same time, I don’t think these presentations should be screened. Censorship will not change people’s minds or make them explore themselves. In fact, by letting these things out in the open, we in the tech community should use this as a point of discussion and perhaps even chastising. It is difficult for men to examine their own privilege because it manifests itself in complicated ways. Men also have to be willing to listen critically to what others are saying. I suspect the recent incident has confused some people, like DHH thinking it is the explicit imagery or “R rated” content that bothers people. It’s the fact that women are not being given agency in their own community. There are plenty of women, myself included, that are a bit baudy in nature, but we are allowed to own our personality. The images do not reflect strong women - they are reflections of men’s desires and insecurities.

A more pro-active approach is for the tech community to actively seek out tech women for conferences or to work on open source projects. A topic that has come up many times in WoC blogs is the pressure put on women to change others’ attitudes about sexism, putting the onus squarely on the subjugated party. What should be happening is that women are continually reached out to or encouraged to start their own projects. Unless the balance of communication is ironed out, women programmers should not be expected to constantly seek out the tech community.

Fellow Rubyist Audrey Eschright is also hoping the community will sort itself out, even though her and I both face marginalisation. The Ruby community has a strange level of machismo that makes it difficult for me to keep engaged with the language or to even pair program with others. I do feel the same uneasy feeling when I go to some tech events. I often feel like the recipient of too much heterosexual male attention. It’s nice to know that people find me attractive, but after a while the creepy factor tends to multiply. I find that formerly identifying as FTM has helped me, and my ambiguously male name has given me a little more leverage when meeting for jobs (until they call me on the phone, when they are greeted by a squeaky-voiced girl).

I realize that feminism, for many people, is a dirty word. However, there has to be some kind of feminist-hacktivist mentality that spreads to others in order for everyone to be on an even plane. We can’t just ignore the problem and hope it goes away - we’re techies, it’s a problem that we can solve if we try.

I had my first crowdsourced date last night. In case you’ve never heard the term before, it means that if a company has a problem they can turn to Teh Intarwebz and random people will solve it for them. (Wikipedia can describe it better.) It first came about when I was chatting with friends on Twitter, and someone was looking for a coffeehouse around my old digs. I offered to get dessert there with my friend Nate, and then my friend Aaron wanted to tag along. Before I knew it, people who follow me on Twitter were watching the conversation and I ended up with about 6 people, some of whom I’d never met before, deciding to have a “date” with me. (At that point it was more of a get-together.)
After my Econix meeting, I hung out at Green Dragon for Beer and Blog to relax from my hyperproductive state. I discovered that we had a crowd of TWELVE people for my date, people were hungry, AND it was Teresa’s birthday! Aaron suggested Biwa.
In case you haven’t been to Biwa, it’s a non-sushi bar snack kind of place serving tasty Japanese food. Everything was really good - the sake, the udon, the kimchi chijimi, the onigiri… I would highly recommend it to people who enjoy a relaxed atmosphere and good Japanese food. We all had such a good time and I felt like I got to know my friends a lot better. I tried to instill ideas of being happy, because I want everyone to have a little bit of the happy that I feel.
Afterwards Nate, Eitan, Bram and I went to Rimsky-Korsakoffee, the best place to have a coffee date ever. We found out that Bram really is a superhero typographer - he managed to do a great job of duplicating the handwritten text of the menu! After that we were supposed to go to the Fez but I couldn’t get in because I lost my ID somewhere in my room after I moved into the new house. (Sigh… someday I’ll finish unpacking. At least all my kitchen stuff is unpacked.) Bram, Eitan and I ended up hanging out at the Ace Hotel where I found an old filing cabinet that is filled with Post Secret-style pieces of paper. It was nice to read people’s thoughts and see drawings that capture a moment in time. Many were romantic, a few were sad, and some were bizarre. I left a note that I hope someone else will find.

All in all, I think my experiment in crowdsourced dating was quite fun, even if it wasn’t a “real” date by normal standards. I hope to do this again sometime, as I enjoy spending quality time with the people I’m getting to know in Portland.