Archive for December, 2009
Linking to Wikipedia articles and blog posts from other people is one of my favorite side effects of the design of the web. It’s not just that it lets me learn new things myself – it also saves me lots of time explaining things to other people. Good documentation is a form of scripting, except it’s for your brain - it’s semi-automated information delivery. It’s what allows us to move from the “sage on the stage” model of learning (where content delivery is tied to a person delivering it) to being able to spend more time exploring new things, new syntheses of ideas, and so forth because you’re not spending all your effort getting the base data that’s now become a commodity.
When ideas are modular and redistributable, they’re easier to tweak, make, maintain, and generate, because an ecosystem created to be made of tiny bits is easier to add tiny bits to than an ecosystem created to be One Giant Thing. (Rephrased: modular systems make it easy to make modules.) And that gives you a lower barrier of entry into that ecosystem, whether those ideas are about software or music or metallurgy. And the lower the barrier of entry, the more likely people are to get into it while being able to do other things at the same time.
Think of it this way: people can do software as a hobby now. With open source, they can then bring that richness of their other world into the community of practice of software development and the things that support it. Can people do immunology research as a hobby right now? Chip design? Hearing aid manufacturing? (Why do you think there isn’t much of a DIY culture around it, anyway?)
It’s like there’s a barrier. The Hobby Barrier. The cost has to drop – not just the equipment and materials cost, but the time cost and the social risk. This does not dumb things down. It doesn’t make the art you’re teaching need any less effort to master – it just makes it easier to work really, really hard and get there.
Andrew and I had this conversation over 4 years ago.
Me: “The question shouldn’t be ‘How do we make more engineers?’ It should be ‘How do we get more people to do engineering?’ How do we get people that aren’t necessarily engineers to do engineering things?”
Andrew: “It ought to be ‘How do we get engineers to enjoy engineering?”
Me: “Not just engineers, but everybody.”
Huh, I should put this in my grad school application (it’s from the same blog post as the bit above, but reworded to reflect the way my thinking’s changed on how to teach things since).
October 2005, age 19: Give a man a leatherman. Tell him there are these things called fishing poles and nets, that he knows the stream better than you do, and can he help you figure out a way to pull this fishing thing off for his village.
December 2009, age 23: Tell the village that there are these things called fishing poles and nets; offer them any tools you can collectively find, and offer to introduce them to people from nearby villages who’ve made their own variants of fishing poles and nets before. Ask them to teach you about the river, because they know the river better than you do. Write down their stories so you can carry their words with you to share when you go back home. And stay in touch.
Saturday, December 26th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
So, about this post title: for all practical intents and purposes, I’m still incredibly Anglo-centric. I speak fluent English, fluent English, and fluent English. (And sometimes not even fluent English, as those who’ve heard me attempt coherence at 5am can readily attest.) The reason I can call myself a language geek is because that term doesn’t necessarily say anything about my skill with languages, just the enthusiasm with which I attack them. That’s the first step, though.
Languages… are cool. I never thought I’d say this. Languages are cool, and I love learning them. I pick up snatches here and there as I can, trying to occasionally read the backlog of an IRC channel in Chinese, trying to respond in (broken) Spanish to a Latin American contributor’s question, figuring out how to set up my computer so 我可以写在中文 (I can write in Chinese – albeit with really ugly fonts right now) oder tippen der Deutsch Eszett (type (not sure if I picked the right word for that) the German ß – which I still copy-paste each time – umlauts too, because I haven’t figured out how to type them yet) o escribir con acento español (or write with Spanish accents – again, copy-paste for the ñ), and reading, reading, reading – lurking in IRC channels, reading wiki pages, looking through mailing list archives of languages that fascinate me.
Most of what I’m doing now is playing. Actually, all of it’s playing; I’m just getting myself used to the strange letters, shapes, sounds, and sentence structures. When little things catch my curiosity, I look them up, and don’t stress about remembering them. It’s not like there’s an exam at the end of term. When you have a richer world to be exposed to, the rules make much more sense in retrospect; I found a Tagalog grammar-book while browsing through a bookstore and went oh, that’s why they say that, and now I’ve forgotten what it is I’d seen – but that’s all right; I know where the bookstore is, where the book is, what it’s called, and that I can reach out and learn it when I need to.
I’m surrounded by puzzles, and I’m slowly accumulating tools that let me solve them; while sitting in the children’s section of the library (waiting for Melanie to get books on Ancient China for her research paper) I sat and figured out what “Strauße stecken bei Gefahr den Kopf in den Sand” meant – no dictionary, no grammar book, nothing except the rest of the entirely-in-German children’s book and lots of guessing. “Kopf” meant “head,” I knew; “in den sand” was almost certainly “in the sand.” What would you do with your head in the sand? “Stecken” sounded like “sticking,” you could stick your head in the sand, okay.
I knew the letter ß was pronounced “ss,” so what thing that sounded like a “strausse” – wait, astrausse…. ostrausse… ostrich! Ostriches stick their head in the sand – right, they do! (Oh, look, a picture of an ostrich nearby. Win!) And “bei Gefahr?” Ostriches, I remembered, put their head in the sand when they’re afraid of danger. So I guessed “bei Gefahr” meant something like “when they are scared” – maybe “Gefahr” –> “fahr” –> fear? Close enough. As best as I can tell going to the dictionaries later, “Strauße stecken bei Gefahr den Kopf in den Sand” roughly translates to “Ostriches stick (when in danger) their heads in the sand.” Silly? Yes. Slow? Absolutely. Managed to get the understanding that I wanted from the resources I had on hand? Oh yeah.
Languages are about communication; communication is about communities. Can I participate in a community that speaks that language? That’s my gauge. For English, the answer is “yes, unless it’s over a conference call with unfamiliar voices, or in a big room with many speakers that you can’t keep up with lipreading, unless there’s a text backchannel, which makes everything okay.” For Mandarin, I can get by at dinners where I don’t have to keep up with the conversation, with some polite phrases and enough vocabulary and grammar to ask about various dishes (with a lot of pointing) and compliment the chef. For ASL, it’s “yes, if there’s auditory augmentation and I don’t have to sign back.” It’s getting better over time – now I can read a Chinese IRC channel while asking kaio questions about colloquialisms on the side; a few years ago I wouldn’t even have been able to do that, and I can kind of understand American movies my dad gets Chinese DVDs for, because the English audio I’m able to hear plus the Chinese subtitles I’m able to read somehow combine to give me just enough information to snap some segments of the plot into focus.
Here’s what I’m doing: I’m getting ready for the opportunity to learn ridiculously fast. And at some point, the little snatches of learning I’ve picked up for a given language (“where I am”) and a sudden reason for wanting to be able to speak it better (“where I want to be”) and the opportunity to make that knowledge jump (“a way to get there”) will coincide. The more I learn and the more I get myself to want to learn, the more opportunities will pop up, because I’ll be able to use more things to learn the things I want to learn; I’ll be able to meet more resources at their level, and so they’ll turn into resources instead of “well, what’s that thing over there?”
And then… click. Things will (with a lot of hard work) fall into place; when I sit down and actually focus on studying that language, I’ll be able to make sense of the pieces I already know. The foundation’s a lot easier to build when you’ve got a bunch of bricks already lying nearby and have seen a lot of walls before. At some point, I’ll be able to say “look, if I had two weeks where I did nothing else but study Spanish, I could probably give a preplanned and rehearsed technical presentation in it,” or “if I audited Italian IV at a local college next semester, I could probably read Calvino in the original as my class project,” and on occasion, when those sorts of opportunities come up, I’ll be able to say “…so what the heck, I’ll do it!” And I will.
No, I probably can’t self-study German or Spanish or Tagalog or anything else effectively in isolation, but I’m starting to be less surprised by their translations when they’re typed. My Mandarin is atrocious from lack of use, but the sounds of the language ceased to be foreign to me 2 years ago (my family speaks Fookien, not Mandarin, so Mandarin used to sound really weird) and I could understand snatches of what the Chinese delegates in Singapore were saying. I haven’t spoken Japanese to anyone since high school, but I can map the subtitles to syllables in the anime my cousin Melanie is starting to get into. I can barely sign ASL sentence fragments back at people, but I can sort of understand what they are saying – at least enough to be able to explain a little of the structure of the language to my hearing friends who haven’t seen sign language before. It gets better. It always gets better.
I love languages. They help me reach the people I want to connect to. They help me make my world a little bigger. And they’re fun to play with. And they’re also great places for learning-metaness – I mean, have you ever looked at all the different approaches language-teaching materials take to the exact same verb conjugation in the same language? By looking at the difference between how the methods teach, you can see their assumptions of the ways people learn – and that in itself is fascinating to tinker with and dissect, too.
Time to go back and study.
Was is das? Das ist ein Buch. Was is dies? Dies ist auch ein Buch. Ist das auch ein Buch? Nein, es ist ein Fehler-Meldung. Er ist lang… ich mag rpmlint nicht! –Mel’s First Adventures In German
Thursday, December 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
As part of our preparations for the Fedora 13 cycle, the Marketing team is (still) learning how to answer the all-important question:
“So, what do you folks do, anyway?”
A way to understand the things we’re doing is to think of Marketing as working in 3 stages, roughly corresponding to (the time leading up to) Alpha, (the time leading up to) Beta, and (the time leading up to) GA day. That sounds incredibly boring, so cue the dancing penguins…
Alpha: focus on tools. (For F13, that’s pre-March 2nd, 2010.)
The dancing penguins sing: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” –Abraham Lincoln
The dancing penguins sing: “We need a better lyricist / a lyricist, oh, oh, oh”
We’re beginning the release cycle by concentrating on infrastructure, tools, resources, and knowledge that will make it easier for us to produce our release deliverables. The most visible-outside-the-Marketing-team projects from this part of the cycle are the tools – working with other teams on getting limesurvey (with Infrastructure, for marketing research) and zikula (with Docs, News, Websites, Infrastructure, and Design, for publishing marketing materials on Fedora Insight) up and running in production, and developing fedora-tour.
Design drafts for the fedora-tour interface – it’s only been a few weeks since Ryan and Ankur started, and they’re doing a fantastic job of both getting lots of good work done rapidly and being transparent about the work they’re doing so others can jump in to help. Come to think of it, the second probably helps the first…
Somewhat more behind-the-scenes, we’re writing up SOPs (how-to instructions) for our deliverables, planning our first Marketing FAD, working with John Poelstra on our F13 schedule (this is the start of our 3rd release cycle with a schedule at all!), reviewing our Join process and new-member queue, updating our wiki page (thanks to Tatica for the new logo and banner!), looking back and learning from how the F12 cycle went, and much, much more. It’s not that this is our static to-do list – it’s more like “we’re improvising in this general direction, and this is what we’re working on at this particular point in time,” so anyone who’s interested is more than welcome to jump in.
Beta: focus on deliverables. (For F13, that’s March 3rd – April 6, 2010.)
This is our time to focus on deliverables, deliverables, and deliverables. One deliverable at a time, with lots of collaborative work-sprint sessions scheduled on IRC. Our list this time:
- Talking points
- Release slogan
- Feature profiles (there will be multiple feature profiles)
- Screenshots library
- One-page release notes
Well, okay. Technically, we’re going to do the talking points and release slogan before March 3rd, as soon as the features list comes out. And the screenshots library won’t be finished until right before release so we can get the newest screenshots in, meaning the one-page release notes’ screenshots will also be replaced by new images right at the last minute. But the bulk of deliverables work will be done during this time, working closely with the Desktop team (particularly for feature profiles), and taking advantage of our spiffy new toolset from Alpha to push deliverables out on Fedora Insight as they come along.
Fedora Insight, under construction. As you can see, we have… a lot of work left to do before launch. But! This is where F13 release deliverables will come out once they’re made.
Also in this time period: working with Ambassadors to brief both Ambassadors and the press, which probably includes such thing as “writing a press release” as part of gearing up for the next phase. Marketing research will almost certainly be running in parallel with this timeframe if limesurvey is up; we want to be closer to both users and developers this cycle. Deliverables, however, are going to be our primary focus, and the first real test of our SOPs. We hope to set an example of how other teams can work through the same set of instructions to make marketing deliverables for their own projects (Spins, etc.) and I’m guessing we’ll be working out a lot of bugs in those instructions as we go along. Whee!
The first Marketing FAD will also happen during this period – deliverables work will still be continuing over this time (for instance, I’ll still be sectioning out some hours on Tuesday afternoon for our usual IRC meeting and sprinting on whatever deliverable we’re working on that week) but the FAD itself will concentrate on Making Things – perhaps the Handbook, or any of those other projects we keep thinking would be a great idea, but have never quite cleared the time to sit down and finish. (But hey, that’s what a FAD is for!)
GA: Focus on PR and new contributors. (For F13, that’s April 7 – May 11, 2010.)
Since we’ll be loading our deliverable work between Alpha and Beta, we should be able to breathe easy during this time. Hypothetically. In any case, we shouldn’t be running down the hallways yelling “AAAAH! DELIVERABLES NOT YET DONE!!!” (Which is amusing, but not… optimal.) Anyway, what the deliverables frontloading means is that we can concentrate on 2 things – the first, and obvious one, is Public Relations (PR) – working with Ambassadors on getting stuff out to journalists and monitoring the press we’re getting. Things like Kara Schiltz’s Classroom on how to monitor PR for a release are going to be extremely helpful for this.
The second thing is something we haven’t gotten much of a chance to do before, which is to go into outreach mode as a team to specifically focus on helping other groups within Fedora with their Marketing and PR. This is in contrast to the single month between Alpha and Beta that we’re spending in Deliverables Mode – that month will be extremely Desktop focused because we need to have one really good example done, this period is “okay, we’ve done it, we know how to do it, let’s go do it everywhere!” For instance, if a SIG wants one-page release notes for their spin, we should be able to use our F13 one-page release notes and the SOP as examples to help them make their own. Or if a team wants to present its setup at an upcoming conference, we can help them figure out press targets and talking points, again using our own Desktop-focused work as an example. Cool. Want to see something even cooler?
The really interesting part of going into Outreach Mode – and the one I’m most excited about because I have no idea what it will look like – is being able to help other teams with capacity-building. This needs to start with a lot of watching and listening and asking other teams what they need, but here’s the general idea: One of the big opportunities we frequently miss in Fedora is the chance to help new contributors get started – we get to help a lot of awesome new folks start, but we miss many, many more. Why? Because new contributors want to come when it’s exciting. And when it’s exciting is when we’re really, really busy – around release day. Generally, new people come in when the teams they’re trying to join don’t have much bandwidth to on-board them, but when you’re new, you want to know right away how to get started helping – you want immediate feedback that this is a community you want to stay in and contribute to.
And that’s the gap I’d like to try and bridge. I’m willing to bet that if we were more conscious about reaching out to help new Fedora contributors get started via the press we’re already going to be doing, we’d have a lot more people to help us out for the next release cycle. We do a lot of this outreach already – Ambassadors do it constantly at events, we all welcome new people on mailing lists and IRC – but but we could use more capacity to work on growing capacity, because in Fedoraland, contributions are our currency. This is the “sustainability” part.
Open source marketing is the community-driven process responsible for enabling users to identify, anticipate, and satisfy their own requirements sustainably. — “what’s open source marketing?” definition draft
We could do things here like working on the Join processes for different teams, publicizing (on Fedora Insight, etc) good starter opportunities for new contributors to help with… maybe working with the Classroom group, where they’d set up training opportunities for different skills each team needs, and we could get new folks and point them there… Again, I’m thinking out loud here – we don’t know what this will look like, it’s very vague and fuzzy right now, and we need to do a lot of listening and working with other Fedora teams to figure this out together, and be on top of our game so we can have the ability to do this, but I wanted to give a heads-up on where we’re looking for that far horizon. And boy, am I looking forward to seeing what it’ll look like when we get there.
So that’s the gameplan.
In summary
- Alpha: focus on tools.
- Beta: focus on deliverables.
- GA: focus on GREAT AWESOME. (Which is what GA stands for, right? Right? No, Mel, it’s General Availability. Oh. I still like this one better.)
Traceback: this came from a long IRC braindump which came from a topic at the last Marketing meeting which came from discussions on the marketing list which came from… well, I lose the traceback at that point, but you get the point; momentum builds momentum, and sometimes cool things come out.
Thoughts? Questions? Feedback? Clarifications? Tomatoes?
Grape tomatoes / Tomates miniatura / Tomates en grappe / Cocktailtomaten, auch Kirschtomaten oder Cherrytomaten, photo CC-BY-SA by Softeis via Wikimedia Commons – please throw if needed.
And yes, the obligatory call for participation – you, too, can join us!
Thursday, December 24th, 2009 | fedora | 2 Comments »
It really boils down to this, doesn’t it?
And my heart says yes.
And then it goes into all sorts of disclaimers about the lack of certainty and citations and concrete evidence to back up that yes. But it says yes, regardless.
We’re all set free by others who can’t have those freedoms, and if we’re strong enough, we will in turn give other people liberties, some of which we’ll never have ourselves.
And I’m totally cheering myself on with that [insert colorful adjective phrase] Statement of Purpose right now. Come on, you can do it. Keep unblocking yourself. With lots of help from other folks as needed. Keep on going.
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This is it. Hari’s response to reading my blog post on reading after our long conversation about open source (and life, and many other things) last week, which was part of a long string of similar conversations we’ve had over the last few years, is exactly what I’m trying to see more of, to understand – what makes that “aha!” moment click?
It looks like this:
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. YES!
The trick is in not giving up before you get to Yes – and also in asking questions so that you learn something new from each No. If I can upgrade my question-asking abilities so that I can, on average, go through fewer No’s before hitting the Yes, then that is For Teh Winz.
You know one place I can learn how to do this? Grad school. Grad school! Grad school! Must finish application now.
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Once upon a time, we had a Trac keyword called “sugar-love,” which was a marker that we used for “easy bugs, good for beginners looking to make their first code contribution.” It was great, because when a coder came up to me and said “how can I help?” I’d simply point them to that keyword, and zoom – off they’d go. (Well, theoretically – there was usually some wrestling with jhbuild involved, but the target was at least clear.)
We do not seem to do this any more. There are still some tickets marked with sugar-love, but the keyword seems to have fallen out of widespread usage, and is also not noted anywhere on our Trac frontpage or on the links we maintain for those looking to start helping with development. As a consequence, when beginners come in eager to help, it’s that much harder for them to figure out where to start aiming.
This is an opportunity for someone who would like to ease the way for new coders looking to get involved. There are many such opportunities -we just need to find them and run at them. Do you want more developers involved in Sugar? Are you a programmer who’d like to get involved in Sugar development but thinks the activation energy is just too high right now? For that matter, are you a non-programmer who’d like more programmers to get involved in Sugar development, and want to make it easier for them to do so?
If so, here’s what I’d do:
First: Get a small group of new developers together – people who have at least a little Python development experience and are willing to be vocal testers for Operation: Make It Easier For New Developers To Get Started Contributing. (Possibly with a catchier name.)
You are a team. You’re going to go through learning this together; you can swap questions and stories and tips you’re finding, support each other in chugging through inevitable moments of frustration, chorus together to the rest of the community when you find something that Needs To Be Fixed that you should not be spending your time on. Your job is to make life easier for new developers, and you need to decide where your efforts there are best spent – sometimes you’ll want to go down a yak-shaving chain, sometimes you won’t. Finding your own balance and constantly telling people what that balance is and why is very important.
By the way, if you’ve written a 50-line Python program, that counts; everyone starting with Sugar development will have to learn more Python as they go along, so start from where you’re at. Besides, if you can figure out how you can help, and document that process, you’ve just opened the doors for everybody else with your skill level to be able to contribute – so in a way, the less you know when you come in, the better!
Just make sure you’re ready to be extremely patient with yourself – you’re about to tackle a very, very hard problem. Making it easier to contribute to something can far harder than simply contributing to it – but also far more valuable in the long run. To make it easy to contribute, you also have to contribute, so if you set your sights on smoothing the road for others, you will learn how to walk down that road at some point along the way.
Second: Pick a first small project. Go to the sugar-devel list and introduce yourselves. Let us know what you’re interested in, what questions you have, what things you’ve tried doing in Sugar Labs so far. Point to this blog post, if you want, to let people know you’re interested in both contributing and making it easier for others to contribute. Ask for help picking a first project – or if you have an idea already in mind, ask if that makes a good first project and whether people can help you figure out a good first step. Seriously, ask! We’re sitting here on-list waiting and dreaming for people to come and say those magic words: “What can I do to help?”
If you know how much time your group has to spend working on this, it’s great to say that too – it helps us to know whether you can probably spend 2 hours a week for 3 months working on something or whether you’d prefer to spend a 40-hour week during your winter break sprinting on it instead. I’d say (somewhat arbitrarily) that for a first attempt you’ll want to budget at least 4 hours of work, in blocks of at least 1 hour in length, where you can be on IRC (chat – ask about this in your introduction email if you haven’t used it yet) and asking questions.
And please be patient with us! We’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a newcomer, how hard it is to get started, how difficult (and exhilarating and valuable) learning to walk in a new world can be. We make assumptions, and sometimes we don’t remember that this once was hard for us, too. We need you to teach us, and we need you to remind us what you’re teaching us. Sometimes we are slow learners; please be kind. We’re trying, too.
Third: Start running, loudly. Simply start working on your project and telling us what you’re up to every time you do something. “I’m stuck on X, please help!” is just as valuable a cry as “look, it’s working, TRIUMPH!” In fact, it’s probably more valuable; if you post something and don’t show how you did it, we can’t figure out how to do it too, but if you post the blockers that you’re hitting, we can learn from it as well. This way, when you solve your problem, you also solve that problem for everybody else. We need to be open-source in our practices as well as in our code.
That’s the “start running” part. How about the “loudly”? Well, here are the ways we talk to each other right now (and you should, too!) Your to-do list for this:
- Get on IRC.
- Join the Planet. Try to blog about your project once a week.
- Join the mailing lists for things you’re interested in. Introduce yourselves. Try to write an update on your project once a week. An email that simply contains a link to your blog post and 2 sentences of explanation totally counts.
If there’s something on this list you can’t figure out how to do in 15 minutes, that is a bug. It’s a participation bug, and it’s our responsibility to fix it. Email iaep and report it. We will help you patch it. In fact, I’ll personally take responsibility for making sure these bugs get fixed, so if you don’t get a response from iaep within a week, drop me a line at mel at sugarlabs dot org with a link to your iaep thread, and I will Do Something about it. (Offer good until September 2010.)
Fourth: Welcome newcomers. “Wait,” you say. “I’m new myself. How could I possibly do this?” Answer: it’s simple. When someone else who’s new posts to the list, or shows up in the chatroom, or otherwise encounters you in real life, you say the following:
“Welcome! We’re glad you’re here!”
That’s all. You may want to follow that up with an introduction…
“I’m (your-name-here), I’m also new – I’m working on (your-project-here), we’ve just (something-you’ve-recently-done).”
…and possibly a few questions.
“What are you working on? Can I help you get started? If we can’t figure something out, we can always ask the others. Do you have any questions? How did you decide to start getting involved? Do you want to help us with our project?”
You get the idea. Sometimes, it’s actually better for a newcomer to welcome another newcomer – you’ve just been down the same road yourself, and can help others through it far better than us old-timers who have forgotten. So yes – as a contributor to Sugar Labs, helping others get started is your job as well.
Fifth: Say thank you.
We become what we celebrate. If we want to be a vibrant and growing community of contributors, we need to celebrate those around us who are doing the things we’d like to see more of.
If someone helps you, thank them. If they do something awesome – even if you didn’t ask for that help, if what they did helps or inspires you – thank them. Tell them exactly why the thing they did is awesome, and explain the difference that it made to you, if you can. If there’s room for improvement, give feedback to that effect – but thank them.
Alright. Start running, then. :-)
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | sugar | No Comments »
There are two overlapping voices in this post. They’re both me. Also, TL;DR BRAINDUMP MODE! You have been warned.
I think about the things I want to get out of going to grad school and the problems I want to use those abilities to tackle. (I should write out both lists sometimes). And I think I’ve seen people older and wiser and smarter than me – people I admire – try to do this for years, try to change the world this way. And I’ve seen them hit walls and have to deal with crap that’s weighed them down. Not because of any lack on their part – but because of the way the system works right now. What makes me think I can do anything at all?
But people made the system, and so people can change it. And I’m a person! And I’m a person with the ability to get other people excited.
I don’t need to go to grad school – I’m not hitting walls due to my lack of credentials.
Except I am. The difference is that I’m expected to hit these walls at this point in my life, so it’s not a blocker to me participating in academia. I’m still at the age and at the stage in my life where I could easily still go to grad school; maybe professors can see me as “potentially one of them in the future,” so they let me in a little more, in some ways. That’s probably the only thing I could do differently – the only way I could attack this from a different angle and not get stopped by the same things.
I think that teaching and learning – and I’ll say “especially in post-secondary engineering education” because it’s the best leverage point I can find to put myself into in making this world a hacker’s world – needs to change. We can do it better. We do do it better, in open source communities. We could share that.
We need ambassadors. I could be one. I’m not the only person who could be one, but someone’s got to step up and do it at some point.
Here’s the way I think about changing things. I think that the only thing you really have control over changing is yourself. So you need to become part of what you need to change – because when you become part of something, it becomes part of you. And then when you change yourself, you change that thing, too. If you want to change it deeply, and if you want to get it to transform itself in a way that eventually isn’t dependent on you, that’s what you have to do.
I have this sense – and maybe it’s arrogant to say this – that I have, or could have, a bridging-ability that very few people in the world could have. I expected to keep on continuing to be in the ivory tower, so I have a bit of the… sight left, if that makes sense. I can sometimes, for brief moments, put on the glasses of an academic. A really young, inexperienced one – but even with just that, I can, on rare occasions, see glimpses of things a lot of my friends in open source don’t catch so readily. I love and admire them, and they’re so far above me in so many ways – and yet I see these things! And I can explain it to them, sometimes. And I can explain them to academics, sometimes.
Rarely.
But even rarely is sometimes. And even that tiny bit of ability – and it’s an ability I may be hallucinating, mind you – means that I can do something that nobody else I know can do, and something that I don’t think they could train on as easily. (I mean, if someone else was going to grad school right now to study exactly this, I wouldn’t go – but I can’t find anybody else who’s going.)
And that tiny bit of ability, as bad as I am at it right now, is still powerful enough for me to think “what if I actually developed that?” What if I took the time to learn more, and learn how to navigate and negotiate this world more? What if I actually worked on having Magical World-Bridging Superpowers? What could I do then? Is that something I could do that nobody else could do?
And my heart says yes.
And then it goes into all sorts of disclaimers about the lack of certainty and citations and concrete evidence to back up that yes. But it says yes, regardless.
I could always do it later.
And I could always say I’ll do it later and later and later. At some point, “later” has to become “now,” or it becomes a “never.” I mean, before you know it, I’ll be 40, 60, 80. That’s a long time from now, but I also at one point thought that 23 was so old as to be incomprehensibly unreachable; I’ll get there too. And maybe at that point I’ll have settled down and won’t be able to abandon my family (if I have one) for a couple years to go to grad school.
I’ve barely started with CommArch. Hasn’t it been amazing? Don’t I want more than a year with them before I go to school?
Who says the two are mutually incompatible?
But wait. Go back again. The teachers I admire most – and they may or may not actually work as teachers – also had struggles doing the work in education that they wanted to do. These folks are superheroes to me. I don’t even ever expect to get that good.
And they have to fight and fight and fight and sometimes it goes nowhere. Not because they’re not good people, or smart people. But because the system is so… freaking… broken.
And I’m scared that’s going to be me, too. If I go in for grad school, I’ve basically committed myself to fighting this battle to fix education for the rest of my life. That’s what I’m going to do – not necessarily from inside academia, but at the very least as someone who can walk its hallways even if I come from industry. It’s very specific training that I’m gearing up for – I can’t decide halfway through to switch and… learn… finance, or… whatever. It’s too much an investment on the part of way too many people for me to back out once I start.
And what if I can’t do it either?
And what if I don’t want to put up with all the shit I know I’m going to have to go through for a long, long time?
I could continue to work and learn entirely in the world of industry. I could get shiny articles written in shiny papers. But would that get people to teach differently and learn differently? Based on what I’ve seen so far, not nearly enough. It’s like universities are protected by this force field that things from the outside world bounce off of. Press, industry, anything. We need people quietly doing things.
Shouldn’t I dogfood? If we ask professors to learn how the culture of open source, don’t we owe it to them to send someone back to learn the culture of academia? Why shouldn’t I volunteer?
Sebastian pointing out that by working on education, I’d enable people to fix themselves. “You’re basically giving them the chance to become… The Next Mel (CC-BY).”
I do document things like a maniac. It’s not that I’d be leaving folks behind. I’d be bringing them with me.
Lemme try to phrase the problem I want to solve.
We’ve got something good here in the open source world. We’ve got a way of learning that’s tremendously powerful – it’s letting us make ourselves into the types of people we want to become, and make the things we want to make. We’re hackers, and we can hack ourselves, and our communities (the ones that are full of other hackers).
We can’t spread that way of learning, and we can’t show it to many other people; we don’t know how to understand it ourselves, so we can’t improve the way we do it, nor can we help others do it too. We can’t yet hack the entire world, because not everyone in the world is a hacker.
And the way we operate right now, there are some people who just never really get a chance to choose to learn how to be one. That’s what I mean by “worksforme doesn’t work.” The current folks we have in open source can do a lot of things, but we can’t do everything. We need to figure out who can, and how to help them do it.
I think that academia is good at learning how to understand things; I’d like to learn how they understand “learning how to learn,” so I can understand how we learn how to learn, in a way that lets us teach it.
It’s also going to make me pretty tired and lonely for a long, long time. If they accept me, and I find a way to work it out with CommArch, I’m in for a long haul.
But it’ll make me happy. I guess I really am masochistic.
Realistically, I’ll probably have to be based on campus for up to 2-3 years for classes, though I’ll shoot hard for frontloading them all into 12 months, and will probably have flexibility to travel a decent amount still. And I won’t have much of a life for 5-6 years, most likely. I’m trying to make conservative estimates reflecting that I’d be studying part-time for all of this. But that’s the life I want to have.
If I end up at grad school, I’m going to be at grad school. It’ll be hard at first, but that’s going to have to become another home for me, because I’m going to be there for a while, and I need an academic home to come from, if I’m going to be able to navigate the academic world. And so then I’ll have another home.
I think that mostly I’m afraid of change and uncertainty and the prospect of going down a lonely path for a long, long time.
But it doesn’t have to be lonely. It’ll be hard, but it doesn’t have to be lonely at all. I can bring people with me; that’s why I was given the gift of documentation. I can write enough, and well enough, that others can see through my eyes. I can bring people with me – and there’ll be wonderful people in that world too. And then I can introduce them to each other!
And as for loneliness – I’ve been there before. I’ve thought that loneliness was all there was, and now I know that’s very much not true. Makes it hard to put myself in a spot where I might have to go back again for a bit. But I already deal with this all the time. And wouldn’t it be good to know I can go back if I have to? That I’m not clinging to something due to fear I’ll lose it?
If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it is yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it never was.
All right. I’m going to go and write my application now. There’s much about this that isn’t in my hands – but I will do the part that I can do.
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Sometimes you dial back the clock and watch where you were a year ago. Almost a year and a month now – I’m watching my way through the whole “Community” session series (one session, split into many videos) that Greg and I (mostly Greg) did at the first SugarCamp. Mostly I’m thinking “…wow, I’ve learned a lot since then.” I guess that’s what a(nother) year of leaping off cliffs into the deep end of the ocean tends to do to you.
One of the things I’ve learned between then and now is how to talk for more than 5 minutes without a conference call being redialed in the foreground. One of the things I haven’t learned is how to not be terribly self-conscious of my speech. Talking with Mo during that last late night at FUDCon helped me figure out a little more about why I’m so uncomfortable with attention. I still shrink a lot – you can see it in my body language when I curl up into the nonthreatening beaten-puppy slouch I’m trying so hard to make my mind and muscles unlearn.
And I’m learning that I’m worth something. That’s still an idea that makes something catch in my throat every time I think about it; it’s still raw and unfamiliar enough that it’s still painful in its sinking-in, but dammit, it’ll get there, and I’ll never forget what it’s like to come to this from the other side. So in some respects I’m still young and not yet beat down – and in other ways, I’m learning how not to be. It’s wonderful.
Might be time for a Sugar QA team. The question is how we can make that space so people can lead that charge – I should ping Tabitha sometime.
I need a haircut now just about as badly as I did in that video – my hair’s starting to hang down into my eyes and kinda kick out behind my ears, but I’m going to wait ’till I get back to Boston so I don’t have to hear about how I shouldn’t wear it so short ’cause it looks unfeminine that way. Short hair takes less bothering-with, yet still keeps my head warm. Functionality. End of story.
This time last year I was still reeling from the knowledge that people did “community” for their job. I was still trying to wrap my head around what that could be like, what that meant. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what it means, but now I know at least a bit of what it’s like, and that I’m learning, and that I can do it too. Not quite as well as the others on my team; I’m still green and lack a lot of sheer experience and exposure, but I’m getting that very, very quickly (they’re great teachers). And my approach will always be different, but everybody’s is; part of how you do things in this world has to do with who you are.
When Caroline and Bernie came for dinner last week, I was still mid-dinner prep with multiple burners and chopping boards going. While watching me fly around the kitchen, Caroline said something to the effect of “so you’re like this in real life as well!” and my response was “of course, I’m like this all the time – is the broccoli coo- STRAWBERRIES!” and diving across the table for the log of chevre.
Still watching the video. When I listen, I stop moving. It’s all concentration; I can’t even fiddle with a pen. So when you see me writing or otherwise fiddling – which is often – that means I’ve zoned out to drop into my world momentarily, have no idea what the speaker is saying at that moment, and will be dipping back in to listen to the conversation at some point. And for all that, I still patch together all the partial pieces that I get into something that’s pretty decent. Huh. It often takes all my effort to pay attention to a speaker or a discussion – but that’s a good thing (or I’ve made it into one, at least). It means that when I’m listening, I’m listening. I can’t hear, but I can listen. I’m still working on this. Sustained concentration is a tough thing to train endurance on.
Hari and I were talking last week about how ADHD is a blessing; I love how my brain can focus in these ways, I love learning to understand it. I love the perspectives I can have – to some extent, the privilege of not having a lot of privilege to start with. (I still have a huge amount; I’m from a loving and financially stable family in a peaceful, English-speaking modern-day superpower, which puts me in the top ridiculous-percent of folks who have it easy in this world.) You work with the hand you’re given, and you see what you can do with it.
That was a lot of video. Done now, and putting on some music.
Oh the snow it melts the soonest when the winds begin to sing
The swallow skims without a thought as long as it is Spring…
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
It is amazing how much more productive I am when I have a desk. This happened tonight; I had been previously working while sitting on my bed. And now I have a table and it’s in my room and there’s a chair and wow. Furniture… helps!
Went out for dinner with Jason (brother) and Mark (cousin) today, which meant I spent several hours speaking entirely in affectionate insults – a dialect I’m used to hearing, but very, very, very rarely speak myself. Pizza… was tasty.
Two last thoughts before I turn in for the night:
- Digging a downhill path is like bug advocacy (pdf of a presentation by Cem Kaner) for my brain.
- School ought to be the view-source button for life.
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Are you a Fedora contributor? Are you starting college in the fall of 2010, or know a Fedora contributor who will be? (This likely means you/they are a high school senior, but thanks to Felix Kaechele, recent secondary school graduates currently finishing their gap/military/service years are now also eligible to apply!)
If so, you should apply (or tell them to apply) for the Fedora Scholarship. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes one high school senior per year for contributions to the Fedora Project and free software/content in general, which gives you $2,000 USD plus an automatic full travel/housing sponsorship to attend the FUDCon closest to you for each of the 4 years of your college or university education.
The application process is entirely online, and basically involves you sending us an email with a single attachment. That’s it. It’s not that bad, really. I mean, you’re probably in the middle of college applications now – trust me, compared to those, this application is a breeze. You should read the legal jargon here to check all the fine print before you start, but once you start, it mostly boils down to:
- Tell us who you are and why you should get the scholarship.
- Okay, now do it again in resume format.
- Great. Now tell us the names of a couple folks in Fedora that you’ve worked with so we can get some comments from them.
Seriously, that’s it. The deadline is February 19, 2010. Go spread the word, and get those applications in!
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 | fedora | 2 Comments »
