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Open Source Feminism - Click to Play
Penguin Day is a day-long workshop for nonprofit organizations to explore the range of issues and options inovlved in using Free and Open
Source Software. Penguin Days happen in different locations several times a year and for the past three years, these meetings have taken place after the annual NTC: Nonprofit Technology Conference. Last Saturday, I attended my first one. Although I was pretty exhausted by Saturday, I learned a great deal.
I was curious to observe the gender balance at Penguin Day and while I'm not as meticulous as Christine in counting and calculating the number of women and men in the room, I took a quick video to get a reading. Very roughly, the percentages for Penguin Day look better than industry standards for both OS and commercial software. The video incorporates some slides from Angela Byron's excellent presentation, Women in Floss" which also speaks to the dark side of gender issues in FOSS communities. The presentation offers some good pointers to women in how to get involved in FOSS communities.
The morning started off with a Spectrogram Session. A line was drawn with duct tape from one side of the room to the other. Aspiration's Executive Director, Allen Gunn, read a series of opinion statements and asked if we disagreed or agreed or were neutral. Everyone in the room found a place on the line relative to their opinion. A group dialogue followed allowing people to articulate why they felt one way or other.
I'm sort of foggy on all the questions - due to my tired state, but the first set of opinion statements was Nonprofits should adopt open source software for practical reasons" and "Nonprofits should adopt open source software for philosophical reasons. The discussion reminded of the one I heard in the UK and read later on the Circuit Riders list Is Open Source Fair Trade for Nonprofits (Interesting that KhmerOS had a table at the Cambodia Fair Trade Expo)
The video captures the voices on the philsophical side. I was standing on the "adopt for practical reasons" side of the line. I was somewhat persuaded to come closer to the middle in listening to David's and Jamie's arguments. I think that of advocates need to have open source technology stewards behind them to be successful -- there is a need for stewards to guide the choices, training, translators -- to help nonprofits adopt open source software.
Might I dare suggest that future spectrograms include a question about gender balance in OS?
I participated in the speed geek session where about ten people get to pitch a project or idea to a rotating group of four or five people. I pitched my Open Content game for Nonprofits. In retrospect, I designed the game more for a range people who work in a nonprofits - technical and mangerial - and this audience a mix of more technical and technology providers. Still, I got a lot of great feedback for the next remix of this game. (Sorry Janet, no videos too tired to multi-task.)
After a lunch of pizza (which accelerated my tiredness), I lead a very small group informal discussion on Open Content. We didn't play the game, but we had a great discussion about the creative commons licensing and the issues the notion of open content surfaces.
While she was busy facilitating a linux session, Michele Murrain had managed to blog a very thoughtful post shining a light on the Open Content issues (pay for it or set it free). I agree with Michele's viewpoint, although I understand why Michael Gilbert and Laura Quinn respectfully disagree:
But ultimately, yes, I do think that all content that we provide to the nonprofit sector should be freely available, and under Creative Commons
(or similar) licensing. That's the only way to provide important
information to nonprofits that need it - some have a hard time
affording even nominal fees for that sort of thing.
Click to Play - Adam Thompson Interview
At the end of the day, I met Adam Thompson who teaches at UofC Santa Cruz and I discovered that he distributes some of my blog content to his 25-40 students each semester. He notes that the field is changing fast and that the blogosphere moves faster than textbooks and the "by" license