I've been a proudly self-identifying feminist for a long time. I took Women's Studies and Feminist Philosophy at University, I wrote articles about Women in Open Source, together with Brenda and Joh I helped start the New Zealand Linuxchix chapter, and I believed strongly in furthering the cause.

I still want more women involved in Open Source, and I want to help the movement that encourages that. But the current climate makes it something I just don't want to be a part of.

I can't take it anymore. The second to last straw was seeing the Geek Feminism Wiki suggest that the Google/O'Reilly Open Source Awards that myself, Angela Byron and Pamela Jones won were examples of Tokenism, meaning that we didn't actually deserve them. The last straw is seeing that people are switching away from Ubuntu, calling for boycotts and talking all over the internet, about a stupid comment that Mark Shuttleworth made during a conference keynote talk about not being able to explain what he does to girls.

Yes, that comment was exclusive, and I myself get pissed off when people use male specific language (I just on Friday corrected a document written by someone that used the gender specific "he" all through it), and I grind my teeth when people make comments that suggest all geeks are men. I even think that Kirrily was well within her rights writing a letter suggesting he apologise (although I agree with Allison Randal that it should have been done privately first), and I think he should apologise too.

But oh my god, the size of the reaction, and the sensationalism of it, absolutely blows me away. Days later, it's still all over twitter, people are still arguing about it, talking about switching to different distributions, gleefully jumping on the "sexism!!" bandwagon, and I'm left thinking that "feminism" is no longer a word I am proud to be associated with.

I'm really struggling to find the balance between updating this blog and updating all the myriad of other self-publication tools I use (mostly twitter, facebook and flickr). If you really want to stalk me, it's better to stalk me there, not here.

Anyway, I noticed this because I found an exploding dog I wanted to post this morning and went to twitter it, but then realised that I used to put those here. So here it is:

I am on an island, you are on a bigger island



Anyway, as usual, I've been busy and not updating. I went to San Francisco again for the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, which was amazing. I met more fantastic people in SF and it was tearing, is the only word I can find to describe it, to leave.

Last night was the NZ Open Source Awards. NZVLE won a special award! That was ace. In general the whole night was seriously cool. So much interesting stuff going on in Open Source.

Also I have American Death Flu.

That is all.

The NZ Open Source Awards site has just launched.

That's seriously ace. I love that this stuff is happening and that Catalyst is involved in it.

Enough gushing. Go forth and nominate stuff.

Rant about still having to use skype aside, I've been having some more adventures with bitlbee lately. I've been using it for my gmail chat account, which is ace except that I run irssi in screen and didn't have autoaway going, so it looked like I was online all the time.

I'm now using an irssi autoaway script (auto_away.pl, not autoaway.pl, for some reason there are two), and that's all working nicely.

But I really liked having status messages in gmail and I couldn't figure out how to do it... Until I found this bug. It's against an earlier version of bitlbee, but it was just a simple matter of

apt-get source bitlbee
patch -p1 < thepatch.diff
dpkg-buildpackage
dpkg -i newbitlbeepackage.deb

and now I can do

09:42 <@penny> account status online "bitlbee: now running patched with bug#68"

Free software ftw.

An article I wrote awhile ago has just been published on VITTA. It's about what it's like, being a woman doing Open Source. Generally diffifcult, from time to time, but pretty ace.

I'm not sure if I ever linked to it, but I also recently wrote an article about Open Source in NZ Education for Open Source Reporter.

I'm not really sure where this writing is coming from really. It's not something I usually do and I wonder where the time has come from. Although from memory, both of those two articles were written sitting at the Matterhorn with laptop and endless cups of coffee.

In the groklaw sidebar today is a snippet of a piece I wrote a while back for OpenSource Reporter

That's pretty fancy.

My father's name is Foss. It was his mother's maiden name.

I was talking about this to some people on irc and it caused the following conversation:

09:52 <@archaelus> the daughter of free and open source software? :)
09:53 <@Tgknnx> does that mean you're licenced under the GPL, and we can distribute you freely and make changes?

It's at least a little bit coincidental.

I have decided that instead of using this blog to bitch about things that might have happened and pissed me off, a better thing to do is focus on the positive.

So I'm writing an article about what it's like being a woman doing open source. I'm trying to identify some of the things that I find difficult to deal with, and some ways I've found to deal with them.

A couple of weeks ago I started writing an article about what it's like to be a woman doing IT, open source specifically. Basically, what it's like to be me.

I didn't really get round to it though, mostly because I've been so busy over the last two weeks with work and other stuff, but I've been thinking about last night a lot today and I think I will probably actually write it now, rather than just think about it.

So, stay tuned.

Not right now, now is going out for dinner to the Flying Burrito Brothers with Mischief Bad Group. We are Auctores Malorum!

An article has just gone live which I was interviewed for back in December.

This article is a great summary of all the different things you have to think about trying to work on Open Source for your company. Really, there are a few things to juggle, but it's totally worth it.

We're replaying our mahara git commits into the sourceforge svn repository (and once that's finished, into eduforge as well), and I set up a new user on sf.net to do this as (in case I needed to add a passphrase-less ssh key for replaying as a cronjob, turns out I don't), and CIA lists pennybot in most active authors almost all the time.

Go little pennybot! Go!

has been released!

Huge improvements in this release, which can be read all about at the Release Notes. We've already picked up the XML DB schema for use in Mahara because it's so good.

I didn't have that much to do with this release other than migrating the Statistics package to use the new Roles system, but a lot of hard work has gone into this from a large number of people. Kudos to everyone involved.

I am in love with Synergy.

I now have twin view in ion3 in debian on flat screens, and mac os x with a crt on the right hand side. It would be a lot better if I had three flat screens, but the fact that I am only using one keyboard and mouse to control both debian and mac os x is amazing. And copy and paste works! Between debian and mac os x!

It is aces.

I just read these slides from the "How to Protect Your Open Source Project From Poisonous People" presentation at Google Summer of Code Mentors Summit (seen via planet debian. The slide that really struck me was the one about building strong communities based on

• Politeness
• Respect
• Trust
• Humility

Moodle is an exemplary community in this regard.

This is particularly interesting at this point of time of course, because of Mahara, our fledgling ePortfolio system.

So I guess this is allowed to become common knowledge now, I'm going to be working on the ePortfolio project. After all the requirements gathering phase, we decided that there wasn't enough feature fit with elgg, so it would make more sense to start over (leveraging libraries and code from a number of projects where appropriate).

Once we have a project name, the scm repo (we're using git) will be publicly accessible, and commits will be rss-subscribable. Woohoo!

If you're an interested party, feel free to go browse the project wiki and documents over at eduforge.

Also any suggestions for project name are welcomed!.. anything to do with learning/teaching/storing information...