"women" entries

Permission to be horrible and other ways to generate creativity

Denise R. Jacobs advocates for new approaches to work and community.

Author and web design consultant Denise R. Jacobs reveals lessons she learned about creativity while writing her first book. She also discusses her efforts to give women and people of color more visibility in the tech world.

Confessions of a not-so-public speaker

If you want the tech community to have diversity, you need to be the change.

Stepping out of our comfort zones and into the spotlight at events (and encouraging others to do likewise) can help address the perception that the tech community is solely populated by young white guys.

Women helping women get into tech

Sara Chipps on IT education and how women are navigating the tech world.

Computer science programs have an iffy track record recruiting women into the tech space. Sara Chipps, co-founder of Girl Develop IT, has a new approach: create an inclusive environment where dumb questions are encouraged and practical application is key. In this Q&A, Chipps discusses her project and the pressures women face in the tech world.

Four short links: 28 July 2010

Four short links: 28 July 2010

End of Open Phones, More Geek Women, Social-ish Teenagers, and Premium Cycles

  1. The end of the road for the Nexus One (LWN) — The pessimistic among us can be forgiven for concluding that the battle for open handsets is being lost. The carriers determine which devices will be successful in the market, and they have absolutely no interest in openness. Customers are irresistibly drawn to heavily advertised, shiny devices with low up-front costs; they just do not see any reason to insist on more open devices or, even, freedom from carrier lock-in. Attempts to create a market in open handsets – Nexus One, OpenMoko – seem to go down in flames. By this reasoning, we may well all be using Linux-based handsets in the future, but the freedom that attracted many of us to Linux will have been lost. (via Hacker News)
  2. Women in Technology — says almost everything I learned from helping women into O’Reilly conferences. Amen!
  3. Teenagers and Social Participation (Nina Simone) — [M]any older visitors enjoy the vibrancy of social events and are more than willing to share stories with other visitors in the context of a museum experience as long as it isn’t overly technology mediated. There is another, surprising group that is much less likely to participate in dialogue with strangers: teenagers.
  4. Three New Features for Reddit Gold — I’ve been watching this with interest. They asked supports to sign up to subscription program before they said what they’d offer in return. Now they’re developing premium features to see what sticks. They’re offering the ability to turn off ads, no surprise there, but also some features (such as resortable lists) that are computationally expensive. I like the idea of offering subscribers the expensive-to-compute services above and beyond freemium.

OSCON: Standing Out in the Crowd

Kirrily Robert gave the first keynote speech this morning, entitled “Standing Out in the Crowd.” She spoke about the gender imbalance in open source and shared her experiences working on open source projects that have a higher-than-average percentage of women participants. She laid out statistics about the current gender balance of various projects, looked at trends in open source, and closed with a number of tips on how open source projects can get — and keep — more women contributors.