Comments on Just Me, Amber: The Ubuntu Chronicles: The Saga of Amber and Ubun...

Mackenzie,

I'll certainly defer to your opi...

2009-03-20T03:49:00.000-04:00

Mackenzie,

I'll certainly defer to your opinion as to where and when best application of effort is warrented. I am incapable of drawing on the same sort of experience as you. There is nothing more invaluable than role models that you can identify with, so the fact that you are trying to be that sort of role model to other women as a participant in open source development. That effort will pay fantastic divedends if you keep at it as you move forward in your own career.

-jef

Jef:
If you couldn't tell from what I said befo...

2009-03-19T23:09:00.000-04:00

Jef:
If you couldn't tell from what I said before: I'm a girl and in college. And as I've said, I've seen a friend leave computer science because of how the guys treated her.

The prevailing thinking is that college is way too late to try to get girls into computers.

You're probably the wrong generation to ask "how old were you when...?" but from conversations I've had with other computer science majors, we were all under 10 when we got our first computers, and we got really interested in them (as in, start making websites, learning BASIC, etc) between the ages of 8 and 12.

In high school, you're expected to have some idea what you want to do with your life, and kids start taking classes specialized to what they want to eventually major in. That means you need to have some idea what kind of fun things there are in each field by 9th grade.

I'm going to suggest offering summer intro to programming workshops for kids in grades 5-8 to the ACM chapter at our next Executive Council meeting (Tuesday).

Mackenzie,

Okay so you've got an action pla...

2009-03-19T18:38:00.000-04:00

Mackenzie,

Okay so you've got an action plan for the 9 year old. But that's not typically the problem. The real problem comes at the HS, college level when women have to choose a specialization. Young women are typically aces in math and physics up into high school. But the get to college and on choosing a career path, those subjects tend to be less attractive.

Its not because the subject matter is technically harder, its everything else that goes along with the culture that has grown up around certain fields. It's not even overt sexism, but more of an aggressive atmosphere or unbalanced expectations on work habits that turns women off. The subtle day-to-day training and indoctrinations of the subculture which aren't appealing..even though the work itself is.

If you made a critical mass of social support for women inside Ubuntu, thats great. I do not doubt for a second that the promise of a respectful, friendly community vision helped create the conditions for you to form up and get organized. I do not doubt it for second, and Canonical should be given immense credit for addressing the social-political problems as a priority.

But a friendly supportive environment, doesn't grant access to the meritocracy based decision-making that drives the entire open source ecosystem. Not in Ubuntu and not in the larger ecosystem either.

In my, very humbly opinion, there is going to be a point where a campaign along the lines of "Computer Software for Women, by Women" is going to be needed. As a sort of call to action to get women participating in FLOSS by taking ownership of the development of a tool or set of tools that women are the target user for. Something like, and this is off the cuff, social networking oriented applications.

I can't tell you what that something is, I'm not a woman. But knowing what I know about my wife's recreational computer habits compared to mine(its okay to electronically stalk your spouse right? Nothing creepy about that right?) I could make some educated guesses as to what sort of applications would make a reasonable target for women to take ownership of the development process and forcibly build a more respectful meritocracy. But its not my place to go much further than that. Maybe its the parental controls features Amber is interested in. The point is, at some point, you just have to take ownership of an area and start tinkering.

But I will ask you this... is the Ubuntu Women group empowered to grow from a social group into technical leadership the way Canonical has Ubuntu structured? Or is Canonical control in some areas actually blocking the establishment of leadership by women in the community? Am I wrong in saying that the best technical leadership opportunities for women in the Ubuntu community are in areas that Canonical doesn't control tightly? Kubuntu for example which seems much more aligned with upstream KDE than Canonical's controlled GNOME experience in the default Ubuntu desktop.

How much of the meritocracy based development in Ubuntu is dependant on leadership from a Canonical employee? Is Canonical committed to seeing a female perspective in the technical leadership in-house? Is there enough female technical talent out in the marketplace for Canonical or other linux companies to draw from over the next 3 or 4 years? That's the sort of problem I'm worried about. 9 year olds, I'm not as concerned with.

-jef

I think the Ubuntu community is very open. We reg...

2009-03-19T17:23:00.000-04:00

I think the Ubuntu community is very open. We regularly get people who show up in #ubuntu-motu that know nothing about development, but want to learn. We help them (as I was helped when I got started a few years ago).

The purpose of UDS is to plan the work that developers are going to do for the next release, so it makes sense that's who should generally go. If I wasn't involved in Ubuntu development, I don't think I'd get much out of it (I've been to all of one UDS and part of another).

As far as making a positive contribution to Ubuntu, you are at a very good time in your learning curve to do it. You've gotten far enough to have some understanding of what you're doing, but started recently enough to remember what it was like before and what you had to go through. This makes you somewhat uniquely qualified to document the new user experience and where it falls short.

Conveniently you've got this blog ....

So just what you are doing now is a valuable service as part of the community. Before I'd read this post I'd been thinking about your blog and thinking it should be on planet.ubuntu.com so more people would see it.

Jef:
Oh, computer science has the same problem ...

2009-03-19T15:28:00.000-04:00

Jef:
Oh, computer science has the same problem as physics. My CS dept just lost one of the 3 girls in my year because her Development of Open Source Software class had her being the only girl out of 10 students. The other 9 spent three weeks staring at her instead of the board. She dropped that class and the major. She was good at it too.

But hey, I've got a 9 year old cousin running Edubuntu, and I'm going to go write up her first Python lesson now. I once mentioned to her wanting to teach the 10-13 age group about programming. I told her that if she's interested, she could too (she was 8) since I know she can sit still better than most kids her age. She said it sounded fun.

Mackenzie,

My little opening paragraph abou...

2009-03-18T03:45:00.000-04:00

Mackenzie,

My little opening paragraph about skill requirements was a hypothetical meant to take JFo's comment about elitism and come at those feelings from a different angle.

I keep searching for useful brick and mortar volunteerism analogs to compare to how the open source volunteerism works. I like drawing parallels to volunteer fire fighting, but there are others I can wax eloquent about if that didn't make sense to you.

I can't comment on the Ubuntu Women project directly. But I will say that I would very much like to see a well communicated strategy and plan to get women (specifically young women, HS and college age) more involved in learning fundamental computer science skills..including open source development methodologies so we can get the number of women in the meritocracy up to proportionate representation.

I don't want to see what's happened to the physics research community happen to open source development. It's painful watching technically inclined women self-selecting other avenues of endeavor in disproportionate numbers, re-enforcing the "boys club" mentality that physics has fallen into. I think publicly funded, peer-reviewed physics research as endeavor for social benefit suffers from a lack of female perspective at a high level.

Maybe the Ubuntu Women group can be a core group to start addressing that big-picture problem. But the problem is most certainly bigger than Ubuntu..its a problem for the larger open source ecosystem. If the problem is going to be addressed it will have to be addressed by technically skilled women serving as role models across the fabric of open source development spread throughout a number of major projects.

As it turns out I'm not anatomical equipped correctly to credibly champion that sort of effort.

-jef

For once, I agree with Jef about something: Ubunt...

2009-03-18T01:55:00.000-04:00

For once, I agree with Jef about something: Ubuntu's technical base isn't growing fast enough. We do have major QA issues. 70% of Debian users use Sid/Unstable...the equivalent of running Jaunty. I'm sure less than 30% of Ubuntu users do the same. I know you are, Amber, and you totally rock for doing so, but the truth is...we are hurting for people that, like you, want to be as helpful as they can within their skillset and are willing to learn to do so. Can we clone you?

I'm not quite sure where Jef was going about having skill requirements to contribute...but I'd definitely not use or contribute to a distro like that. I still feel intimidated when I talk in #ubuntu-devel even though I'm sort of friends with some of them.

Oh, and Jef: the Ubuntu Women project she mentioned exists for the purpose of encouraging women to contribute. We try to be the furthest thing we can from intimidating.

And yeah...the open source ecosystem is very much a meritocracy. The more you've contributed, the more important you are or the more power you have. Still, it's a better type of -ocracy than any *other* I've ever heard of in Social Studies classes...

But yeah..."we welcome your patch" isn't a very nice response to a user saying "hey it'd be nice if..." It's definitely a lot closer to the middle finger. And I did see it once on an Ubuntu mailing list. I expect a response like that from extremely technical upstreams, like the kernel, but not from Ubuntu.

I think you have some quite good ideas about the b...

2009-03-17T18:49:00.000-04:00

I think you have some quite good ideas about the brainstorm to make it more of a usable tool. I've checked it a couple of times in the past, only to dismiss it within a couple of minutes. In its momentary form it's delusional. There's no distinction between ideas which can be realised, because they're in the scope of what ubuntu can do and which can't.

It's also quite discouraging not to get any feedback, so you don't know what will and what won't be implemented. (and why)

About the developers summit. Isn't it logical to invite developers there and not common users.

quote:
This is for developers and other contributors looking to propose and work on features they want to see in the next versions of Ubuntu. It's not for end users, it's not a time for free support, it's not a time to meet and talk strategy. No suits, no tourists in shorts.

As I see it this is just discouraging end-users who do not intend to contribute. A friend of mine works with a commercial softwarecompany and if they attend a trade show, there are a lot of end-users who come by to get support or complain or give their highly personal opinion what the company should do. All of this is not very productive and should be prevented.

What you're forgetting though is, that ubuntu is packaging programs made by others. They do a little patching here and there, but the main programming is done elsewhere. If you take a look at the site of pidgin (an instant messenger client) for example, there you see direct interaction between the users and the developers on their forums.It's something that's also easier to do on a smaller level.

@Jef

I don't think a larger non technical user-base makes much difference. You won't need more developers when you get more users. So the amount needed will stay the same and probably the amount working on it will too. Maybe it will grow a little out of thanks. If you've been using something for free and you can contribute to it, you tend to do so. At least I do.

There is a support problem though, with a fast growing userbase of non-technical users. Especially if they're rude and not willing to learn. Those are the people which make people who are wanting to help, stop doing so.
On the other hand a larger user base also means they have someone around them, who has more knowledge and can help them solve a problem when it arises, like it's done with their windows system at the moment.

I also think a larger user base could attract commercial companies, like gaming companies to port their games to linux and make hardware manufacturers write drivers for linux or even better give all the technical information to create open source drivers, but that last part is more of a dream than a realistic thought.

JFo,

you are sick to death of elitism in OS...

2009-03-17T17:08:00.000-04:00

JFo,

you are sick to death of elitism in OS's that are supposed to be 'for the user' or a loose usage of 'user-friendly'

Let me turn those feelings on their head.

Would you be more comfortable and more supportive of a linux distribution that explicitly limited its contributing community membership by technical ability and was honestly blunt about the technical skill level needed to be an impactful contributor? What if a distribution just came out and said...we are looking have a highly technical community who come together build software for other non-technical users. What if that community had specific skillset requirements and stuck to them, politely turning away people until they could pass a skillset review? Would you be more inclined to support that distribution as a user? What if that distribution had a skills development program that users could complete and get graded on as a way to gain access to membership as a contributing member?

There is a very real disconnect between the at-large interest in wanting to be involved and the reality of the skills it really takes to have a a positive long term impact.

It's very easy to whip people's interests up. It's very easy to say to them 'hey you can be involved!' But maybe its actually much harder to be positively involved?

Maybe larger open source development projects, like linux distributions, are more like volunteer fire departments than we realize. I sure appreciate that volunteer fire department in my area. It serves a very important role in the community and everyone benefits from their existance. But at the same time its clear that I'm not going to be able to be a a volunteer fireman myself unless I commit to developing a certain set of skills. And I very much doubt they'd take me unless I learned those skills, even though they need more volunteers. If I just hung around the fire house as an untrained person, doing odd jobs and stuff I'm sure that would be marginally helpful. But if there were 30 or 40 untrained people doing that...we'd all just get in the way and that becomes a burden to the fundamental mission.

The open source ecosystem is driving by technically skilled people. That is not going to change, as the fundamental mission is to deliver high quality computer software. Just as a volunteer fire department must fundamentally rely on people with fire fighting skills. My ability to be an excellent cup of coffee (my secret is the dash of cocaine) isn't in the primary skillset needed for a fireman.

For the open source ecosystem, those technical skills are the pacing item to the growth and quality of open source software. Other skills are secondary skills which can serve to either catalyse or slow down how fast the code writers can get code written by impacting the efficiency of writing high quality open code. And I think we all have to keep that in mind.

Things like bug reporting and bug triaging are great...if and only if they help the developers be more efficient. If those activities start to get in the way like Colin Watson recently expressed in his blog...that's a problem. It's great that people feel good about doing that sort of stuff. But what really matters is if that activity is making it easier for developers to spend their time more efficiently. For all the bug reporting and triaging the Ubuntu community does, I still don't think anyone has a handle on whether that's making it easier overall for developers like Colin to be more efficient. I think there's still a lot of room for discussion internally for the Ubuntu to figure out how the large non-technical userbase and the technical contributors are going to interact for best benefit. I hope Colin's blog i seen as an opportunity to re-open that discussion for another look.

It's also great that people feel good about advocacy and spreading open source software...but if that advocacy is only focused on "users" and not focused on helping to create a new wave of technical contributors..that advocacy could end up being a heavy weight to the overall system by overloading the system with too many non-technical users in proportion to the available technical manhours.

Just like when a town has a spurt of home building by letting a housing developer come in and build many new homes all at once. All those home owners can overwhelm the volunteer fire station's ability to adequately respond.

Technical skill drives open source development. Advocacy must take a balanced approach to develop new users in proportion with more technical manpower so that the system can continue to be self-sustaining.

One of my most greatest personal fears is that Canonical has shifted the balance too far and is disrupting the natural development of technical talent in the open source ecosystem and replacing it with a large out of proportion influx of non-technical users. A large swing in the relative proportions of demographics of linux users may look great in the short term..but in the long term it could be a sustainability issue. Long lived upstream projects have to roll in new technical leadership over time...and if we are growing a disproportionately large non-technical userbase those projects may have a hard time finding that leadership to replace older developers when its needed in a few years.

Certainly Canonical as the technical leadership inside the larger Ubuntu community hasn't been able to keep up with user support and become heavily involved yet in existing critical upstream projects. That will continue to be a concern for everyone in the ecosystem as the Ubuntu userbase continues to expand. If Ubuntu dominates the linux landscape, but its not a fertile ground for technical leadership...that may not be a sustainable situation.

I consider the money Shuttleworth is pouring into Ubuntu a destabilizing shock to the open source ecosystem... destabilizing an otherwise healthy self-sustainable ecosystem. Its not clear yet what the new stable equilibrium will look like.

-jef

What we need to remember is that users offer devel...

2009-03-17T16:54:00.001-04:00

What we need to remember is that users offer developers too little incentive to cater to them. In fact the only concrete contributions users can make are bug reports, documentation and code.
User feedback is valued but it is not necessary and developers participating in user forums can easily be overloaded, irritated or insulted, not always inadverdently
Users must remember that Free Software developers tend to be volunteers in no way paid by or for users.

Awesome post. I definitely see where you are comin...

2009-03-17T16:54:00.000-04:00

Awesome post. I definitely see where you are coming from here.
However, I think I disagree slightly.

There is a sort of "developer community" and "user community" mentality, but the key word here IS "community." Anyone is free to "join" the developer community by contributing, and you don't need to be a programmer to contribute. And there isn't a signup, either; the resource is right there. People who speak two languages, write well, make nice icons, or even just do a good job complaining about usability issues can all happily consider themselves "developers," and there's no special pass for that even.

But you have to keep in mind that this IS about getting things done. There have to be maintainers behind projects, who hold the keys. UDS can't be TOO busy for the same sort of reasons. (There's Ubucon or some such, isn't there?).

Of course, since this is a computer operating system, programming is sort of our bread and butter, so the more programmers the merrier. People often see programming as a locked door, but nobody needs a special status to learn how to program. A great way to start is Python. Not just because it is easy, but because they have awesome freely available guides that go through the language from start to finish.

Something I find really magical here is Launchpad. On Launchpad, people can ask questions and have those questions linked to bug reports which are linked to software projects. Lots of the time, Launchpad is The Home for the development of those software projects. It bridges the gap in a beautiful manner because it is transparent. It isn't just polished glass; there's nothing stopping anyone from using Launchpad, grabbing source code and then proposing their changes to be merged with the official version of a project. In my opinion, it's as open as could be. I bet the Launchpad folks would love to know what could be done to make it more hospitable, though.

Maybe at this point we actually have /too many/ user-focused resources, each growing independently of the one aimed at "anyone including developers," to the point that the different sides of the community look more distinct, and the distance between them looks bigger. Maybe this could be made smoother if there was less redundancy between these different chunks.

I'm thinking not just of the different redundant support forums we have, but how about the different upstream projects? Ubuntu's resources should make it more clear, and more friendly, when something really should be discussed with the GNOME folks or with the Abiword people for example. As it is, I can see how those different projects kind of become enigmas when people think of Ubuntu as an all-encompassing thing...

Err, gee that was a ramble. Why can't I write as eloquently as you? :P

I would be really interested to know what you think of Fedora's approach to all of this. They tend to do their work directly upstream (for example with the GNOME desktop project which other Linux distributions inherit) and they have a solid web site set up for the "start contributing!" end of things.
Ubuntu could probably learn from it.

" So it's open to the pubic of developers, or did ...

2009-03-17T16:19:00.000-04:00

" So it's open to the pubic of developers, or did I get it wrong? "

unnhh yes this is very wrong :)

I kid, kudos to you Amber for sharing your experiences and I
think that if you took the gritty
technical aspect away from linux you
would lose a portion of its audience.
It has always been part of its appeal to techies that we need to see whats going on under the covers and be able poke/prod. I think that a good end target is something that is usable at all levels of tech-ness, but in practice its hard to implement something that stays true to that gritty linux tradition and something that is click-and-go.

Tell Pete his old presearch pal Sean says hi :)

In this my dearest of friends, you have hit the pr...

2009-03-17T10:54:00.000-04:00

In this my dearest of friends, you have hit the proverbial nail with the proverbial sledgehammer. I have had this feeling from the time I began dealing with any Linux distro. I am sick to death of elitism in OS that are supposed to be 'for the user' more like simply 'user-friendly' with a loose translation on the friendly part.

I used to want to be in the Open Source community. Heck, I even developed several apps that I intended to release back in the days of RH 7. I changed my mind for the exact reasons you have hit on during your blogging over the past few weeks. I was afraid something like this might happen, but I was also hopeful that Canonical had escaped from such things. I am sorry to say that this is the main reason for my lack of appropriate enthusiasm when Pete talks to me about working for Canonical.

I hope you stay your course. I hope you keep the faith for the User space. Drive change for the desktop users of the world who just want an OS that means what it says and says what it means. Accountability should be your watchword.

I think for me, I will become a ditch digger or some other laborer whose only disappointment is in the blisters caused by manual labor. Corporate two-timing and false sincerity have left such a taste in my mouth as to make me swear off electronics for all time.

-JFo