Archive for February, 2010
46 named contributors. The vast majority of them alumni.
Given that we’ve got about 300 alumni[0], and that we were given 20 hours’ notice late on a weekday evening, I’m rather pleased. There were a number of folks who didn’t make the feedback-submission cutoff deadline but sent in “hey, I’m sorry I just read this email and didn’t make it in time, but good luck!” notes, and probably more people who helped in than we were able to identify (most folks didn’t sign in when editing the wiki and left IP addresses instead).
A little tired now – not physically or mentally, but people-buffer-wise; I’ve spent the last couple of days stirring up and sustaining multiple whirlwinds at once, and I’m actually looking forward to a day of solo output now. (This is relatively rare.) So tomorrow I will be working through my work backlog of things I was going to do in the past two evenings before Olin stuff ate my life. I’m done with that now – just in time for a whirlwind week in Rochester and Toronto hanging out with various open-source-and-education colleagues. Sweetness.
[0] Olin has graduated 4 classes ever (I’m part of class #2). On average, each class has 75 members.
Saturday, February 13th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
…I wanted to make sure that folks got a chance to see Lynne May’s posts about the upcoming SoaS deployment – she’s the classroom teacher. (Bernie’s working on getting the blog on Planet, so this should be a moot point soon. Thanks, Bernie!)
“I think it is important for my students to know that Sugar is based on these principles. I want them to think whether or not these principles are compatible with their own thinking about themselves as learners, and about learning. I see how these principles connect to the Quaker principles of our school. Will they?” — from Reflections on the Sugar Mission Statement
Cambridge Friends School is a Quaker school, so it’s interesting to me to see her translating our Sugar work into the values that the school already holds dear, because that’s what they’re going to think is important, that’s how they’re going to be able to start understanding this. It’s like everything else in open source; you start with what they already care about, the itches they want to scratch, and then you find the intersections of your self-interest and theirs where it makes sense for both of you to work together.
There’s also the Proposal draft, which includes the following:
The social studies curriculum for grade one room 2 will focus on
communities for the rest of the school year beginning February. The
students will explore three parallel communities: the school community
(where they work), the neighborhood (where they live), and the Sugar
Labs community (where they share ideas). In the course of this unit,
the students will attempt to answer these two questions:
- What role do I play in these communities, and how do I fulfill this role?
- What makes a community work well for me, and how could I tell if it would work well for someone else?
This has a few important framings and implications. One thing the open source world has historically had a hard time with is communicating to others how we work – how our communities work – because at first glance it sounds totally unlike anything someone from outside the open source world is used to. However, if you frame it as:
- Your school is where you work
- Your neighborhood at home is where you live
- Your open source community is where you share ideas
…then bam, the parallels make a lot more sense. I’ll also note that #3 is basically the core of the definition of a community of practice.
The other exciting implication is that the work of the students is going to be learning how to explain open source participation to others. This is great, because…
- It means they will be participating.
- It means we will have first-graders able to explain how to participate – and if they can grok this and explain it, then by gosh anyone can.
I think that there may be a part of some people’s brains that turns off when I open my mouth[0] – “Oh, you’re one of those… math and… technology people… engineer… I have no hope of understanding what you’re saying so I will now switch to Nod Politely Mode.” But this same circuit does not trigger when faced with a first-grader saying basically the same thing. Because a 6 or 7 year old can’t possibly be saying things that should go that far over your head – if they understand it, you should be able to understand it too.
One thing I would love to see: if we made it a practice to have every Sugar Labs presence at an event include at least 2 presenters age 12 or under. And I mean presenters – speakers, boothworkers, etc – not “we happen to be hanging around the booth while our parents work it.” The kids should be running the show, with the grown-ups supporting them as loyal minions. Mmm, minions. I’m looking forward to trying this out… just need to find a nearby event so the kids (and their parents) can actually make it over there.
[0] Although I also think I tend to trigger this less than some of my fellow engineers – as a young minority woman, I look less like an engineer, which sometimes helps with getting folks to be more open-minded about the things I’m trying to say. (Hey, while the situation exists, we might as well use it to our advantage.)
Friday, February 12th, 2010 | soas, sugar | No Comments »
I am so proud to be a part of my alma mater right now. Really, really proud.
A couple hours ago – a few minutes past 10pm here in Boston – I threw out an email to the Olin alumni mailing list that started like this:
Olin’s got about 22 hours to write and submit a draft proposal for our
Grand Challenge Scholars Program (GCSP) to ARB – the GCSP being
something we’re pioneering for the National Academy of Engineering (NAE)
in our usual role of guinea-pig; other schools are going to be
implementing GCSPs, so this is an attempt to translate Olin’s existing
culture and curriculum into this format so it’s portable to them.
We need feedback and help. Big time. If you imagine bleary-eyed,
sleepless, incredibly hosed Olin students holed up in a team room just
before the Candidates’ Weekend crunch, you’ll have roughly the right
picture.
And lo, edits began to flow all over the wiki, everything from small typo corrections to structure additions to comments to tough questions and their answers. My various IM screens lit up; we flooded into an IRC channel and kept debating. “I’m about to sleep but this is awesome and I’m going to look at this when I wake up tomorrow morning” messages started to hit my inbox. (I mean, I did send it out at 10pm, and apparently some of my friends sleep now…)
There is an 8pm tomorrow evening deadline and hence a 6pm feedback-on-current-version cutoff – the feedback will continue to go and improve the current draft, but a couple students will be freezing a snapshot of whatever version/feedback is there at 6pm and branching it off to polish for improvement and submission to ARB (Academic Recommendations Board – the group at Olin that decides the curriculum).
It is now 2am; most folks online have now gone to sleep (a lot of Olin alumni stick around the Boston area – although we did get David Nelson popping in from Japan, which was ubercool). I got asked if logs would be sent to the list, so of course now I’m going and sending that out before I can pass out (which, at this point, I very, very, very much want to do, even if it’s early).
Oliners know how to work together to change things quickly. You just have to give them the chance to care. The cultural similarities between Olin and the open source projects I love and work in every day are striking – and now I really think we’re starting to see the two converge. FOR GREAT JUSTICE.
Wheeeeeee!
Friday, February 12th, 2010 | olin | No Comments »
Yesterday: transparency fail. Workwise, I ended up spending the entire day working in private backchannels – I tend to have a strong habit of pushing things to open upstreams, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the friction this time. On the up side, netbooks came! And today was much better in terms of doing things transparently. Much.
My aunt and I were talking about SoaS deployment roles when we realized that RACI (which I was introduced to by my team at Red Hat) is identical to Quaker decision-making methods.
Watching “Sid the Science Kid” with Audrey made me realize (the episode was on “reversible change”) that one of the things I subconsciously ask myself when making a decision is “is this change reversible?” or “am I replaceable?” – two ways of asking the same question. If I get hit by a bus, somebody else can run Fedora Marketing. But nobody else can be Jason’s sister. But that’s what it’s about, right? You pass the bus/raptor test as much as you can for everything you can so you can focus on the stuff that you can’t be replaced for, if the shit hits the fan. It also makes me reluctant to put myself in positions where I won’t be replaceable.
Today – right now, to be specific – has been a good reminder that even when I’m a good vessel, I still need to buckle down and be a good workhorse sometimes. A lot of swarming pieces came together today, and I spent it in flow state between work stuff, opensource.com stuff, grand challenges stuff, Olin stuff… the kind of momentum-building and convergence I can’t explain, but just… feels… right. And now I’m looking at all the followup I ought to do on all of that and feeling very good, and very tired. Good-kind-of-tired. I’ll try to explain more, maybe tomorrow when I’m actually awake.
Before I wake up, I must sleep. Before I sleep, I must finish the Marketing SOPs and send out a bunch of emails and and and and and. And I need to pace myself because once I start driving on Sunday morning I will not get any rest until approximately April 10. (And I am so, so looking forward to that.)
This is me writing when I’m tired.
Friday, February 12th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Decided yesterday that (someday) I want to learn about finance. I want to be able to make sure that the things I care about will never run out of resources – or if it’s inevitable or designed to be that way, that we come in for a graceful, gentle landing. I want to learn how grants work, how funding works, how investments work, how money is managed, how to monitor it even if you don’t control its flow, how things are appraised and valued, how… how that part of the world works, so I know that mindset and communicate to folks who have it.
I also want to be able to consciously step out of it because it’s not ultimately the stuff I care about and I don’t want to get caught up in it without me knowing. Book recommendations welcome. I’m wincing whenever I think about learning this stuff, so I would love to talk to someone who actually enjoys finance so I can try to grok what’s interesting and fun about it.
The desire to learn finance is definitely borne from a sense of duty towards things I love. I have no love for duty, but I take the duties of love seriously. So when I commit to a cause, I go completely ninja on it. And then I’m tired. But it’s the good sort of tired.
Friday, February 12th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Dear students involved in Fedora, Sugar Labs, OLPC, and/or any other open source project:
Please take a minute to explain to people with fancy titles why you are awesome.
That is all. I hope to see some of you in Boston in April spreadin’ the good news.
Thursday, February 11th, 2010 | fedora, olin, olpc, sugar, teaching open source | No Comments »
This is the latest episode in the CFS SoaS Deployment Saga.
Netbooks arrived today! We filmed the unboxing.
I annotated the video so it’s easier follow along with my excited-and-way-too-fast narration. Annotations converted into bulleted transcript form below:
- We are unboxing netbooks for the 1st grade SoaS pilot at the Cambridge Friends School.
- We got Acer Aspire One 532h netbooks because they’re (1) cheap and (2) known to work well with Fedora (the underlying OS for SoaS).
- I am talking really fast because I’m happy (and nervous about being on camera).
- We’re doing this at the kitchen table in the middle of a normal day – it’s a snow day for school, a lunch break for me.
- Melanie is way better at opening boxes than I am.
- We’re keeping the boxes the netbooks arrived in to be used as cases for transport.
- We may someday need to buy accessories like extra batteries or cases. We’re not worrying about that now, though.
- The netbooks cost $298.95 each; we got 3, for a total of about $900 out of our $1000 hardware budget.
- There are 3 netbooks and 9 students, so 1 netbook for every 3 students.
- The netbooks come in 3 different colors so they’re easy to tell apart; students will be assigned to a netbook to keep them from fighting over their favorite colors.
- I apparently cannot identify colors. We eventually figured out that the netbooks were silver, blue, and red.
- We would like to plaster these netbooks with Sugar Labs stickers. (And Fedora ones, for that matter.) If you have 3 extra Fedora or Sugar stickers floating around that can easily reach the Boston area, let me know.
- Concerns: is the hardware usable? (Can they use trackpads? Should we buy mice?)
- Concerns: will the hardware survive a classroom of 6-7 year olds? (The students need to write a usage agreement and sign it with their parents, promising that they will take good care of the netbooks.)
- The 6th graders last year (7th graders now) used XOs, and the 4th graders are using them this year, so the 1st graders will ask the older students for advice on how they did their usage agreement.
- The 4th grade and 1st grade are buddy classes, so the connection between the two grades using Sugar this year will be especially strong.
- The 1st graders will be working on their usage agreements during the first week of the deployment, and blogging about them on Planet Sugar Labs.
People in the video:
Lynne May (black vest) – voice, camera: my aunt and the 1st grade classroom teacher involved.
Melanie (red vest) my cousin, a high school freshman off school for a snow day today, and another deployment support team member (brand-new, as of an hour ago).
Mel (blue shirt) – me: deployment support.
This concludes my deployment duties for the day. Melanie will be installing Fedora 12 (one each of GNOME, KDE, and XFCE) on the netbooks later this afternoon. Strictly speaking, this isn’t necessary for the deployment, since the sticks (liveusbs) will bypass whatever is on the hard drive, but if, for instance, a stick isn’t working and they need to boot a computer to go online and figure out what’s happening, they won’t have to boot into Windows 7 (which came on the netbooks) to do so.
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | fedora, soas | 1 Comment »
My brain just would not settle down today, so I tried something that I haven’t done for quite a while: caffeine. I calculated a rough dosage, rapidly drank about a liter of strong tea, and found myself able to sit down and actually do stuff – clicking myself gently and consciously into flow state during daylight hours – more easily than I’ve been able to in weeks.
This stuff has its tradeoffs.
Pros:
- Ability to focus more easily
Cons:
- Physical twitchiness
- Reduced ability to regulate body temperature
- Noticeably increased heart rate
- Inability to sleep at a reasonable hour
- A jittery-stomach feeling that lasts for the remainder of the day
- The need to constantly be aware of pushing more water through my system to make up for the diuretic effects of the chemical
- Concerns about getting lazy and becoming suboptimally dependent on caffeine
And yet. Sometimes it’s worth it.
When I was in high school – long before I was diagnosed with ADHD – I was a caffeine fiend. I would make regular trips to the grocery across the street from my high school and return with as many liters of Mountain Dew as a plastic bag could carry without ripping. (Sometimes I’d get Code Red for variety.) During solo late-night study sessions, I would steadily sip through bottles upon bottles of Dew – it was a habit, a ritual, a way I knew to predictably catch my brain in a clear state conducive to things like problem sets and essays and the general passing of classes.
I didn’t connect this to the caffeine at the time, nor was I aware that having such a reaction to a stimulant might be an indication I should pay attention to. My parents didn’t know (they wouldn’t let me drink things with caffeine in it because they wanted me to sleep), though I did do my research before getting my first bottle of Dew my first year of high school and made sure I knew how many milligrams of caffeine were in each ounce of each type of soda I planned to drink, the likely physiological effects, that there were no side effects I had to watch out for (when you’re 14 and your blood pressure’s good, you don’t worry about it being slightly elevated by a chemical that has a 4-hour half life in your bloodstream), and how to make sure that I wouldn’t get addicted. (I’ve never had withdrawal headaches.)
But actually, what it was (and is) is a drug, and what I did (and am doing) is a variant on self-medication. Now, I’m fine with that, to some degree. When I have a sore throat and boil some ginger in water and drink that, it’s fine. When I eat a giant round of simple carbs and follow it with a warm shower in order to make myself groggy, that’s fine. Why should tea be any different? And when I drink tea, I do appreciate it – I can give extensive critiques of any tea I happen to be drinking, I enjoy the taste. (I drink tea nowadays rather than soda; I realized after high school that it tasted better and had much less sugar.)
But there’s this other part of my mind that thinks that well, no, this is different – and maybe you shouldn’t do it. I more or less gave up caffeine after high school because I wanted to listen to that part of me and make sure. I’ll have the occasional cup of tea. Once in a blue moon, I might try a sip of someone else’s coffee or caffeinated soda. And once every couple dozen blue moons, after extended stretches of trying everything else in the book to break a twitchy spell, I’ll cave and chug 300mg worth of the stuff in the form of Raspberry Earl Grey (tasty!) and watch my mind in satisfaction as it settles in and reminds me of how I can think, sometimes. The reminder helps me keep my brain on track on its own on subsequent days; I’ve only had to do this a handful of times since graduating from college.
Did that today. Hopefully can make it last tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. If not, then… well, I’ve got me half a tin of tea left. (But only one small cup at a time.)
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Some things I’ve learned in the past few days while living with a teacher about to deploy SoaS:
Sugar is like the Wii. Lynne May had asked what Sugar was, in the “is it a program? is it a browser? is it the same sort of thing as Windows?” context, and I was scrawling on the whiteboard trying to explain the concept of a software stack without much success. Suddenly, she cried out: “It’s a platform! It’s like the Wii!”
Which actually made sense, after I thought about it a little. A modern console lets you manage settings and data (even an avatar) that apply across all your games; you have a selection of games made to run on that platform (but which may also run on other platforms as well). You can get new games and swap them with your friends, who may have a different selection than you do according to their interests. It’s an analogy I never would have thought of myself.
Teachers are massively parallel. They have a zillion things to proxy all at once, with crazy schedule constraints, a large number of diverse constituents, frequent interruptions… a far cry from the extended periods of focus that developers (occasionally) enjoy. At any given time, two kids might start an argument while a third has trouble reading and a fourth is bored while a fifth’s parent calls and the principal stops by – and that’s light. You need to think about the privacy concerns the parents are going to have. You have to think ahead to how you’re going to describe to your principal how you’re going to describe to the parents of your students how you’re going to describe the deployment to your students before you can think about releasing a description of the deployment to anyone else, which means even initial proposal drafts take a while to be posted.
And somewhere in all this, you’re supposed to find uninterrupted time to immerse yourself in a new culture with different communication norms and tools and learn an unfamiliar platform while being met with baffling amounts of silence and criticism (news flash: returning silence upon success and error messages upon failure doesn’t work for people, they need confirmation of success and possibly some praise when relevant).
I shouldn’t have a hard time understanding this – I’ve taught before, run classrooms before, been responsible for the curricular experience of groups of kids before… and yet it is hard for me, sometimes. The hacker portion of my brain wants to shoot first, ask questions later, assumes I’ll get a second shot if I mess up. Not so – if I mess up, I can roll back the wiki page; if a teacher messes up, that’s someone’s future that’s been changed.
And so even the simple step of creating a blog and sending its feed URL to the planetmaster, even under the fortuitous circumstance of already knowing how to blog and how to get around a particular software platform (WordPress, in this case) – even that becomes a 2-day exercise in “before I set this up, we need to think about how the kids will post, and how we will inform the parents, and what happens with comment moderation, and when in the weekly schedule do we fit this in, and…” there are a lot of dependencies, and it’s hard to unthread.
Open source communities are pretty awe-inspiring. This is something that I love to rediscover through the eyes of each new person that encounters open source – for me, getting random emails and comments on a project I’m working on from folks I may have never met before is par for the course, but to someone who’s not used to it, it’s more like: “Whoa, three people emailed in response to your post? Who are they? Why… why are they being so nice? Wow! How do I even respond to this? Um. Thank you! Thank you!”
This post is very much written through the lens of a young engineering-oriented mind. I am sure I’ve gotten much of this wrong, and look forward to subsequent corrections. ;-)
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | soas, sugar | 1 Comment »
Despite my attempts to wake up earlier (and I did, though I wasn’t functional at 5am; more like 7) and get my focus-time started early in the day, something about night just makes me more productive. Maybe it’s a combination of my mind being slightly sleepy, enough to slow and focus without bounding madly across the room every few minutes, plus over a decade’s worth of conditioning that night is the one time of day I won’t be interrupted by my parents, by my classmates asking for help… by anyone. It’s the time I’ve always been able to lay claim to – my chronological territory.
I’ve mused on this before, frequently. I seesaw back and forth between accepting it and trying to change it. I’m still leaning towards the side of “change” this week, which means… I should go to sleep now. Kinda frustrating, because I feel like I just hit my groove in the past few hours – but if I’m actually to shift this timing, it’s what I have to do. It helps to have something to wake up early for, which I do not have at the moment; September had the advantage[0] of 5am meetings with Singapore every Monday.
On the happier side of self-discipline, I’ve actually managed to maintain inbox zero for over a week now, which may be a new record. Woo!
[0] well, perhaps that ought to be “advantage.” Though I did suggest that time, and I really didn’t mind that much – it was something I wanted to do.
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »