trendpreneur

OK, OK, so I already tweeted this, but it’s interesting. Hillary Mason set up intelligent email autoresponders to deal with repetitive email enquiries and politely nag people for replies. It’s good stuff, and something I’ve never really got around to doing myself, for a couple of reasons (besides the obvious); I use Gmail, and to be honest, no two emails I send are the same.

(It’s an interesting overlap with Project India, by the way… I don’t know why I’m so excited about this year’s Group Projects. Either because they’re kind of real, or because I miss academia. Or both?)

The downsides of using Gmail haven’t really affected me personally, but thinking about it, I would like to be able to actually access my raw email to set up better, NLP-based filters. I have a lot of email filters, and a lot of labels, and a system that just about works (thanks to superstars and multiple inboxes). But, you know, it could be better, and despite IMAP access it doesn’t quite flow; if I wanted to process mail, I’d have to access it all on a random box, and then what? I can’t apply Gmail labels or superstars or mark as read, can I? I guess what I really want is to operate on both the protocol/content and the interface itself, and that’s asking a wee bit too much. Oh well. Time to hack on a communication platform that I can play with…

(credit to Craig, who linked me the video, and will complain if I don’t acknowledge his genius.)

A too-long-for-Twitter thought.

Tech conferences often don’t have many, if any, female speakers. This is an ‘issue’ whether we like it or not.

Why? Because inevitably someone will make a fuss. Usually the feminist sitting in the third row who lovingly flies the ‘female geek’ flag everywhere she goes. (Look, I think we’ve all been through that phase. It’s the pride-in-being-a-minority transition from realising-I’m-different to not-caring). The last thing an event organiser wants is to be The One Who Discriminated Against Women, Oh Look, There Aren’t Any Speaking At His* Conference.

So how do we ‘fix’ this?

Option 1. Go out of your way to find and invite female speakers, offering them bribes and extras to come along, paying for their flights when you don’t pay for male speakers, etc.
Option 1a. …stopping when you have a token female to keep the feminists happy.

Option 2. Make a reasonable attempt to make female speakers aware of the event by circulating the CFP among female tech networks as well as the usual channels, and hope some come forward.
Option 2a. …With an emphasis on the fact you would like female speakers at the event.
Option 2b. …With the CFP committee evaluating talk proposals without knowledge of the proposer’s gender.

Option 3. Hire a few models, put them in Thinkgeek t-shirts, and hope nobody notices.

Option 2 may lead to an unbalanced awareness of the event among various channels, but (to me at least) it’s the obvious winner. As I was pointing out re: some startup events going on around this time of year, if people don’t know about it, they won’t come. The ‘usual channels’ may end up being very male-dominated, just due to the skew in your tech field of choice; this conversation started around a Ruby event, and I honestly do not know a single female Ruby developer. If Option 2 results in no female proposals, so be it. There may be no proposals from Welsh people, but who’s complaining about that?

I’d also recommend against 2a (positive discrimination can of worms) or, if 2a is invoked for higher publicity/circulation among female networks (”we don’t have any women speaking so far, and it’s a disgrace!”), you really want to invoke 2b as well. Nobody wants to be put somewhere just because they’re an X. (And hey, being Welsh hasn’t got me on a single stage so far; who do I complain to?)

So there you go. Women at conferences? Don’t break your back. Awareness and open arms, and less of the “we need women, you get a free pass, flights, 5 star hotel and complimentary hair styling and manicure on the day” — this should keep everyone happy. Couple of extra things: If you’ve got a mixed line up of speakers, and draw panellists from previous speakers, make sure it’s representative (as long as it’s relevant) — MSM09 backchat was grumpy that with two excellent female speakers, the panels were all-male. Secondly, check your audience balance. If no women attend, maybe that’s why no women spoke…

(* Is this an issue with female-run events? I don’t know. Events I’ve attended where I’ve known the organiser have unilaterally been male-run, but often with a bit of female help, such as Mike Butcher organising TechCrunch Europe events but with Petra behind the scenes doing all the hard work ;) Still, my guess is that an obviously female-run event wouldn’t fear being accused of being sexist, so this entire issue is avoided.)

I could talk about this subject all day, really, but don’t worry; I won’t.

“Of Geeks and Girls” is an interesting article. Its main argument — and this is part of scientific research, not just soapboxing — is that it’s not necessarily the low proportions of fellow women that keep girls out of computer science. It’s the environment, the image, and the general “girls not welcome here” feeling that one gets when sitting in a place surrounded by Star Wars posters, Red Bull cans and that lingering odour of nerdy undergraduates who haven’t discovered showers yet.

I find the argument around this fascinating for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s being hotly contested by men: “We don’t keep women out! We’re inclusive and nice!” Are you really? (And here’s where, as with any post on this topic, the generalisations start to appear. Sorry.) Just because you painted the walls of your computer lab pink doesn’t mean you’re inclusive. Do you value a geeky girl who may appreciate different things (books, Blythes, craft, cosplay, independent cinema, Nintendo, anime, WoW, name your thing), or is it only science fiction, Linux kernel hacking and Android development that count? Do you make the same assumptions about a female you meet in a computer lab as you do a male? Or do you assume that if a girl puts her hand up for a TA that she’s stuck, and if a guy does, he’s pointing out an error in the assignment?

Anyway, as a female person who’s been in and around academic computer science for the last decade or so, I find it infinitely amusing that people care more about their own opinions than mine; people have corrected me on my own experiences, saying their “friends” (who they greatly “respect”, of course!) found it different, and so I must be mistaken..!

The second reason is because it’s something far more actionable than many of the other societal factors often pointed to as the reason for female underrepresentation. Want to start appealing to women? Stop appealing to geeks and start just appealing to everyone. (This is why many of the ‘wider audience’ videogames are taking off — they’re totally agnostic. Doesn’t everyone want to be a rock star, to get fit, or to become Prince of the Cosmos?)

Of course, the flipside is that by de-geekifying computer science, you actually lose geek cred and possibly antagonise the female geeks (as we all identify strongly with the geek stereotype, and we certainly don’t want to project the image that no girls like Star Wars action figures, etc). Tricky, no? How can we get the best of both worlds?

I am a child of the Eighties, and as such, many things are true. One of these: as I grew up, learned new skills, figured the world out, and developed social interaction, computers were also growing up, coming into maturity, fadding and exploding and giving rise to the Internet and things.

I am a child of the computer age, and my generation is possibly the first to expect to speak to computers to do everyday things, not humans.

I am a child of automation, of Chip and PIN, of press 1 to pay your bill and of click here to continue. I am a child of Insert Clubcard Or Payment Method, of Oyster cards and of expecting the companies I patronise to listen when I complain about them on Twitter.

But I’m gradually rediscovering humanity, and you know what? It’s pretty cool.

It’s pretty cool to go into a shop and actually have a conversation with a knowledgeable and friendly assistant, instead of self-serve all the way to the automated checkout. It’s pretty cool to have a chat with the barista or the person next in the queue. It’s pretty cool to find out stuff about other people and to work my vocal cords, not my PIN fingers.

The best thing about treating other people as human beings, not flesh-bound robots, is that inevitably they treat you like human beings too. You want discounts? Faster service? Extra cream? Don’t act like you’re talking to a machine and bluntly order, have a conversation, become a person not Customer #18,284 and… magic really does happen.

I’m not saying there’s no place for robots (and automation) in society. It’s just come as something of a surprise to me, as my shopping and living habits have evolved alongside technology, and thus been encouraged to use these faceless machines at every corner — as my usual reaction in shops is to say “Thanks, I’m fine, just looking” — to discover the courtesy that comes with treating other people as human beings, and the undeniable warmth and connection that you get back for doing so. Better service. Better coffee. Shoes that actually fit. A five pound discount. All of these, and more, this last week — just by being a person.

I think this shift in behaviour has been coming for a while, but it’s been triggered by two things: visiting the US, where there’s a very fine line between irritating shop greeters with a fixed smile, and people who actually are amazingly helpful and nice even if you don’t buy anything; and doing a negotiation class, formalising some of my more instinctive behaviour when it comes to figuring out how to get to the nicest possible common ground.

(The trick of the negotiation class? Can you guess? Yup — listen. Work out their needs, communicate yours, and answers become clearer — most problems are in failing to communicate the needs, drivers, variables etc, not in the lack of a compromise existing. In the class exercise, this became scarily apparent. My instinctive reaction was to cover up my position in case it weakened me.)

So, next time a shop assistant says “Can I help you?”, and you’re standing there wondering which of five identical products you should buy, why not smile and say “Maybe you can!”. What’s the worst that can happen?

There’s a really fascinating post over at TechCrunch today by Mary Hodder, someone who’s been working in ‘live search’ – what we now call the real-time web – for some time.

The article’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight some of the difficulties with real-time conversations that she mentions. A great example is the Michael Jackson Tweet-splosion; if you’re taking a purely search-based view, what do you search for? “MJ”? “Michael”? “King of Pop”? As Mary says, that’s a relatively easy example!

More interestingly is the comments Mary makes about authority. How do you measure authority online? Well, as part of my initial PhD research I looked at various web-structure algorithms (yes, including PageRank) and how you might exploit them along with semantic information to gain a true understanding of the importance of an article.

This research is rooted in scientific publications, in fact; we can learn a lot from the relatively ‘clean’ case of scientific paper citations, although the language used on the web is about a thousand times more interesting. (And, thus, a thousand times harder to process.)

If I told you how we actually track influence, of course, I’d have to kill you. But check out Mary’s article, it’s great food for thought.