Year: 2007

Tech Women

Tim poin­ted me at the art­icle on devchix about bar­ri­ers women face in tech com­munit­ies; it’s cer­tainly sparked a lot of interest and reac­tions out there.

My reac­tion was two-fold: one was to think “is that how most women are?” To under­stand that, you have to remem­ber that I’ve spent my entire life past the age of 17 in groups that were pre­dom­in­antly male, first in phys­ics, and then in com­puters. I’ve often dis­covered that I look at things one way and some woman I talk to about it will see it quite dif­fer­ently. So until I read some reac­tions to this art­icle, I thought maybe it explained some­thing about the way women-only groups work that I did­n’t know about, since I’m not actu­ally in any (even the book­club I’m in is has men and would­n’t feel right to me if it did­n’t; the only groups I’ve been in recently that were only women were knit­ting classes and those only last a short time).

The second reac­tion was that she makes some fairly strong state­ments that are test­able (there’s that phys­ics back­ground com­ing out): 

I have exper­i­mented with this myself using a male pseud­onym to post art­icles, and being told that the art­icles are inform­at­ive, use­ful, great. Six months later I repub­lish the exact same art­icle, using a dif­fer­ent title and a female pseud­onym, and sud­denly the art­icle is hor­rible, tech­nic­ally incor­rect, use­less. It’s a fas­cin­at­ing study.

It’s actu­ally a hard thing to test. Many people pub­lish art­icles on their blogs, so they can­’t sud­denly change their name and gender for that; where else do people pub­lish these days? How much of pub­lish­ing inform­a­tion is about repu­ta­tion, where the read­ers say the per­son has been right about oth­er things in the past, prob­ably is about this as well? That also does­n’t enable switch­ing iden­tit­ies read­ily. I would like to see some actu­al data and test­ing of the pro­pos­i­tion, and not just from one person.

Shel­ley wrote up her reac­tion; read both the art­icles as well as some of the com­ments and links for a fuller view. [At first I wrote “bal­anced view”, but until we know more about the issues, who’s to say where the centre (and there­fore the bal­ance point) is?]

Facebook

I got talked into join­ing Face­book last week; ok, I’m late to the party but not quite as late as Derek Miller. It’s an inter­est­ing place in many ways, feels like it has more or less achieved what Orkut (remem­ber Orkut?) was try­ing to do. 

The big dif­fer­ence to Orkut is the people who are there, or at least the people I can find who are there. Face­book seems to have three major groups of people:

  • recent and cur­rent uni­ver­sity and col­lege stu­dents (not sur­pris­ing, giv­en where it came from)
  • par­ents and rela­tions of the above, who want to see what their young rel­at­ives are up to
  • Web 2.0‑style web geeks

Not sur­pris­ingly, the lat­ter group are gen­er­ally tak­ing full advant­age of being able to add applic­a­tions on top of Face­book, and cus­tom­iz­ing their pro­file pages, and gen­er­ally show­ing the rest of us how much time you can spend doing these things. Me, I’m try­ing to think through some of the pri­vacy implic­a­tions before I hook up my Dopplr account, and the copy­right implic­a­tions before I start put­ting my blog post­ings up there.

I even­tu­ally deleted my Orkut account, des­pite hav­ing lots of con­nec­tions, because I just nev­er went there, the con­tent was­n’t inter­est­ing enough. Face­book is strangely com­pel­ling, it’s easy to browse through groups and rely on serendip­ity to take you inter­est­ing places. A bit like the web itself, in micro­cosm. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how my usage develops.

Website Connections

One of the themes of the Gil­bane Report art­icle I wrote some time ago on Blogs and Wikis: Tech­no­lo­gies for Enter­prise Applic­a­tions? was that people can use blog soft­ware as an easy way to cre­ate a web site that does­n’t look like a blog. It’s easy to update the con­tent, easy to add more con­tent, and although some thought needs to go into the design of the site, it’s still a much more reas­on­able under­tak­ing than more “tra­di­tion­al” ways of cre­at­ing a com­mer­cial web site. Which enables even small com­pan­ies to under­take the task, although it’s still some­times a little nerve-wrack­ing for those who aren’t embed­ded in the com­puter world.

Recently I man­aged to con­vince Mair­in, who runs the Dianne Miller Pil­ates Cen­ter, where I do Pil­ates on a reg­u­lar basis, that the web site needed updat­ing, and that blog soft­ware would be the right way to do it. Then I put her in touch with Kim who did the actu­al work of installing Word­Press, installing some use­ful plu­gins, pick­ing a reas­on­able selec­tion of themes, then tweak­ing the chosen theme and plu­gins to make the site look just right. We both helped teach the people doing the con­tent how to enter the data. And now the site is live, has been for a couple of months, and it’s made life at the stu­di­o’s recep­tion a whole lot easi­er. People can find out what the stu­dio teaches, what the philo­sophy is, and then call to get more per­son­al­ized inform­a­tion, where pre­vi­ously the recep­tion­ists had to explain again and again all the basics on the phone.

It’s so easy for those of us in the soft­ware busi­ness to get car­ried away with the new­est and greatest and for­get just how much an applic­a­tion of even rel­at­ively simple soft­ware, where the basic prin­ciples have been around for ages, can help. And, incid­ent­ally, that com­puters are still nerve-wrack­ing for lots of people.

SLA

Last night I was part of a pan­el speak­ing to the SLA WCC. This is an inter­est­ing bunch of people, the lib­rar­i­ans for vari­ous com­pan­ies, gov­ern­ment depart­ments, and of course uni­ver­sit­ies. The pan­el (every­one else was a lib­rar­i­an) was speak­ing about blogs and wikis and how they are being used with­in their organ­iz­a­tions. To be more pre­cise, the oth­er four speak­ers talked about how their organ­iz­a­tions use these tech­no­lo­gies, while I did a bit of a wrap-up at the end with lots of pretty pic­tures, talk­ing about some of the things people need to think about when deploy­ing. My slides are here; be warned that the file is fairly big (all those pictures!)

With five speak­ers in not much more than an hour, we did­n’t have a lot of time to go into detail. Check out the pro­gramme for the list of speak­ers and a brief sum­mary of what they talked about.

One thing I found inter­est­ing when talk­ing to people at the meet­ing was the almost uni­ver­sal theme of how hard it was to get the IT depart­ment to do things. The suc­cess­ful deploy­ments either had the ini­ti­at­ive come down from on high, so IT had to imple­ment it, or they were using out­side-hos­ted free ser­vices (which has its own issues). 

And then there was the issue of get­ting people to con­trib­ute to the wiki or blog; not as easy as it may sound. Tracey Car­mi­chael talked about how the BC Secur­it­ies Com­mis­sion uses a wiki intern­ally to track new types of invest­ments, and poin­ted out that many people who have strong opin­ions in dis­cus­sions did­n’t want to com­mit those to a wiki. She thought maybe they were nervous of writ­ing some­thing that was later found to be incor­rect; I wondered how much is due to people not wish­ing to be seen to speak for oth­ers. These sorts of issues prob­ably also have a large organ­iz­a­tion­al cul­ture com­pon­ent to them — in Sun I haven’t noticed any reti­cence to using wikis (except for maybe a lack of time and motiv­a­tion for con­trib­ut­ing con­tent) so they are used a lot for pro­jects in my experience.

Naming Names

Phil Karlton said (at least once in my hear­ing any­way) that nam­ing things was one of the two hard tasks in com­puter sci­ence (read­ing X Toolkit Intrins­ics — C Lan­guage Inter­face, to which he con­trib­uted, will give you some idea why he said it); I dis­covered the truth of this yet again when writ­ing the FAQ for our Iden­tity Pro­vider for Open­ID. In this case, it was even more con­vo­luted, being about what to name the thing that names names.

When a Sun employ­ee signs up at the Sun IdP there is no neces­sity for them to put their real names in the fields marked “first name” and “sur­name”; they can use a fic­ti­tious name if they choose (or put noth­ing at all). In com­mon Eng­lish, this fic­ti­tious name is often called a pseud­onym. The vari­ous dictionary.com defin­i­tions of pseud­onym would seem to fit this usage very well, so I was pre­par­ing to use it in the FAQ. Except for, it turns out that those steeped in iden­tity man­age­ment ter­min­o­logy tend to find that plain-Eng­lish usage of the word confusing. 

In SAML, for example, a pseud­onym is defined as A pri­vacy-pre­serving name iden­ti­fi­er assigned by a pro­vider to identi­fy a prin­cip­al to a giv­en rely­ing party for an exten­ded peri­od of time that spans mul­tiple ses­sions; can be used to rep­res­ent an iden­tity fed­er­a­tion. In Liberty Alli­ance work, the defin­i­tion is An arbit­rary iden­ti­fi­er assigned by the iden­tity or ser­vice pro­vider to identi­fy a Prin­cip­al to a giv­en rely­ing party so that the name has mean­ing only in the con­text of the rela­tion­ship between the parties. The same or sim­il­ar mean­ing is used with­in WS-Secur­ity (the user iden­tity [is] provided in a SAML asser­tion as a pseud­onym) and WS-Fed­er­a­tion (A pseud­onym ser­vice allows a prin­cip­al to have dif­fer­ent ali­ases at dif­fer­ent resources/services or in dif­fer­ent realms, and to option­ally have the pseud­onym change per-ser­vice or per-login).

So in order to make life easi­er for those poor, eas­ily con­fused iden­tity man­age­ment experts, I’ll be using the term “fic­ti­tious name” in the FAQ, where I would oth­er­wise have used “pseud­onym”, an added cost of one let­ter and one word per usage. I hope they appre­ci­ate my efforts to help them.

Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel Gil­ber­t’s Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness is rightly pop­u­lar (I had to wait some time before it became avail­able at the loc­al lib­rary). Des­pite the title, it’s not one of these “sev­en steps to real hap­pi­ness” books. It’s more a book that tells you why people’s expect­a­tions of what will or should make them happy are often mis­placed. Lots of inter­est­ing bits of inform­a­tion about how the mind works, and what it does and does­n’t do, which explained a lot to me. A couple of examples: why is it that when you take a photo of some­thing, and then try to remem­ber it, all you get is a men­tal image of the photo you took? Why is it that the end­ing of a movie has a lar­ger effect on what you think about the movie than a ran­dom piece in the middle? All fas­cin­at­ing stuff and well worth read­ing if you want to under­stand why people do some of the things they do and think the way they do.

Which is not to say I don’t have quibbles with the book, I do, but those are minor. And mostly in the last chapter, where I won­der wheth­er some of the sur­veys he quotes would have had dif­fer­ent res­ults had they been car­ried out in oth­er coun­tries or oth­er cultures. 

In all, I recom­mend read­ing this book if you’re at all inter­ested in what makes people tick. Wheth­er you agree with all the points he makes or not, it cer­tainly will make you think about your own beha­viour, and give you explan­a­tions for oth­ers’ beha­viour that you may not have come up with otherwise.