27 is my lucky number. Today I turn 28, and the last year has been the most exciting one yet. I have a slight feeling of having passed the top of the rollercoaster, but then I look ahead and realise how unrealistic that is.

In the last year: I ‘graduated’ from EPIS, launched FestBuzz, visited Silicon Valley twice and then moved here, learnt to pitch and spent a lot of time doing it, spoke at TechCrunch, hammered out my business idea and execution in the forges of Astia, Cambridge University, Informatics Ventures/Ken Morse workshops, NESTA, UKTI and countless other events, and had some eye-opening and enlightening moments at various conferences, especially concerning the marketplace and competition.

The high points of the last year encompass all of the above, and more; small achievements (quitting World of Warcraft cold-turkey due to having absolutely no spare time; learning to run and completing two 5Ks) and improvements in my personal life all add up to an amazing year. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Moving to Silicon Valley has been a hectic and interesting experience so far, and it’s set to make my 28th year very interesting indeed. (Or is that 29th? One’s first year is when one is age zero…)

Having so much on the proverbial doorstep is at once overwhelming and inducive of complacency. The echo chamber is intimidating and shallow. And yet there’s something in the air; some ‘zeal’ carried in the water supply. When people ask you at events “What does your startup do?”, not “What do you do?”, it’s strangely liberating.

There’s also a difference in attitude. Everyone here thinks their startup is the next Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. When asked, I have a tendency to hedge and mumble; “Oh, it’s a Scottish social media AI startup, you probably won’t have heard of it”. When I’m truly attuned to the Silicon Valley frequency, I’ll be answering “We’re reinventing information, and if you read TechCrunch you’ve probably read about us”.

I’m hard-pressed to keep a straight face with some of the startups I run into; although Europe is characterised as having a lot of “me-too-in-Deutsch” type companies, me-toos definitely exist in the Bay Area! “We’re Facebook for dog-lovers”, etc. Despite the melting-pot nature of the area, there are also quite a few startups working on very inward-focused areas, jumping on technology bandwagons (though there are plenty of tech-for-techies startups, many funded by YC, that will probably do quite well in their niches).

Plenty of people design for themselves, for their Silicon Valley lifestyle/friends/needs/itches, and don’t look outwards. I haven’t met enough startups to really put a finger on how prevalent this is, but every so often I’ll run into someone and my first thought will be: “This wouldn’t work in Edinburgh”. (This even applies to some of Google’s ideas, it’s not just the small guys). I’m hoping that my experience of living in a country without free wi-fi, prevalent plug outlets, geographic population density/early-adopter critical mass, reliable 3G/GPS, a good public transport and healthcare system, and Topshop (I miss Topshop) will help some people here.

My mind has been buzzing with ideas since I landed, and there’s nothing quite as inspirational as your own personal itches/problems/difficulties as a newbie in a strange land armed with a Linode server and terminal. Being out of my comfort zone and living in a strange country has been an interesting start to the year, and I actually recommend it. It definitely broadens the mind.

Much as I miss Edinburgh and all the wonderful people there, and even the opportunities I’ve given up or walked away from, I believe the connections and knowledge to be had over here are invaluable. Hopefully I can bring a piece of Silicon Valley back!

I’ve spent a while, recently, sifting through the joy that is Craigslist’s apartment listings, and noticed a few things that I thought I’d share. Note, a lot of this can be applied to Gumtree — and probably others — as well. I’ve specifically been looking for a room in an existing place, not a whole place by myself, so some of this may vary.

Got a room to rent? Here’s how to get replies:

A picture speaks a thousand words. No, really. There are a lot of listings, and anything that gives an idea of your place is a bonus. Double points if you link to a Flickr slideshow or Picasa album (these seem oddly popular) with more photos. I even replied to a couple of ads with bad photos.

Answer everyone’s questions. I’ve seen many ads with one crucial piece of information missing. How many other people live there? Where is it? When is it available? Is it furnished? (Although the norm is for it not to be, in the UK it’s the other way round, and my first few emails to people with pictures of beautifully-furnished rooms were less than successful.)

Convey personality. Why do you love the place? What do you do? Self-effacing humour about your terrible photos goes down well. Some ads I’ve read and immediately got a real sense of what the atmosphere must be like at the apartment.

Sell, sell, sell. Some people (myself included) are looking for things like a big kitchen, lots of light, etc. Don’t leave this stuff out! In the interests of honesty, do say if the room is small or has some other weird feature, but avoid negative language (”This crappy little place…”) if possible.

Finally, and this is really important, remember your apartment isn’t the centre of the universe. I got an email today from a Craigslist poster I’d contacted. “Sure, you can come see the place if you’re still interested”. WTF? How on earth am I supposed to know which place he means? If he’d replied to my email, I’d have been fine (see below)…

So you want somewhere to live but you’re losing track of all the ads:

The volume of ads is pretty stupendous. I dealt with it by looking in a few very specific places, by doing searches on key words (loft, hardwood, claw-foot) to ensure I’d not missed any stunners, by restricting searches to ads with images, and by google-mapping everything before emailing to check if it was a no-go or not. (Ads without any hint to location: grr!)

A crucial thing for me was being able to reference emails to ads. I initially added a line near the top of my emails that read something like “In response to your Craigslist ad: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/blah”. It sounded a bit poncy, so I changed it to just have the link at the bottom of my email. It’s easy to remember if you paste it in before even writing “Hi”. This makes it super easy to figure out what listing the replies are referring to, unless they send you a brand new email (grr!), and to keep track of what you’ve actually contacted.

Sometimes the listing will expire, so if you’re really keen, you can just paste the body text in a new mail, same thread, change the to: address to your own.

Writing successful emails is a matter of individual style, really. I wanted to include a bit about myself, because you always want some idea of who’s coming round. In cases where the ad was particularly appealing, I’d write a bit more about how I might fit in and why it appealed to me. Some ads specifically ask for a few paragraphs about yourself etc, but I think writing too much can be a red flag as well. For ads I wasn’t sure about, such as the couple that sounded nice but didn’t post a location/availability/etc, I wrote a much shorter mail with the key question first and then a two-sentence “about” to initiate the conversation.

Another matter of personal taste, I included my voicemail number in my signature, but never got too far with the few people who insisted on calling it (or who replied to my email with “Call me on…”). I get that some people are way more “phone” than “email”-y, but the awkwardness of not having a decent US phone and the fact I’m more or less on email 24/7 meant that I definitely leaned towards those respondents who a) used email and b) did so promptly. After all, I’m going to be living with these people, it helps to have them on the same sort of communications wavelength. So if the poster has a phone number and you’re a phone person, that’s probably great, but if they say “Call me on xxx (or email)” and you email, be prepared to not quite mesh so well.

I think that’s it. There are some lovely places in San Francisco; I’ve been to dope-smoking dens and high-ceilinged wonders, to a modern “retro-geek” house and a flat that looked like it might fall apart at any moment. I’ve met some crazy people and some remarkably nice ones. Here’s hoping the apartment I finally went for works out!

Lifehacker recently published an article “Five Best Startup Management Tools”, which I naively thought was a post on entrepreneurial webapps, but is in fact about autorun and trimming your Windows boot sequence. I don’t even use Windows (unless forced), so the article — which I keep seeing linked around the place — annoys me on multiple levels.

Here’s my take on what Lifehacker should have written to satisfy the other meaning of ’startup’. (Yes, it’s sort of a list post; I have another blog post brewing on that subject, and more.) The five top tools that help me run my startup, day in, day out, manage everything that’s going on, and not go insane in the process.

1. Email and Twitter

Two for the price of one. Really, the number-one ‘management tool’ that keeps everything flowing is communication, but there are platforms and webapps and gadgets galore for such a basic human act. I spend 95% of my communication time writing, reading and managing email or Twitter. Email… well, no need to go into details, although multiple inboxes, superstars, more filters than you can shake a stick at and labelling really save the day. Not sure what I’d do without Gmail.

Twitter isn’t a key internal management tool, but it has great benefits of its own — new opportunities, new contacts, quick attention-grabbing DMs, keeping up to date on trends, fostering relationships with key people and building a brand/reputation around a specific anchor. This isn’t just idle speculation, either; everything I just listed has actually resulted from my use of Twitter as a sort of mixed corporate-personal communication channel (both on @jennielees and, in August, our shared @festbuzz).

2. Dropbox

I use multiple machines, from multiple locations, across multiple platforms. Having the headache of ‘oh shit, that file’s on that computer 300 miles away’ totally removed from my life is worth the Pro subscription’s weight in gold. I mainly use this for startup work, as personal stuff is just less likely to be as vital, but I’m starting to put more trivial content into Dropbox just for the convenience. Because it’s a ‘real’ folder, I’m not worried about losing the data, but I am a little niggled by the ‘it’s all on the cloud’ aspect — I deal with uber-secure stuff in a slightly more paranoid way. Not sure how I’d transition from personal-dropbox to startup-dropbox shared with multiple people, but I can totally see the benefit of that as we grow.

3. Skype

We don’t use this tremendously much but it’s been insanely valuable when we have. Being a distributed company with the main lynchpin in the arse-end of Scotland people often assume we can meet face to face with them when we can’t; free video calling really does help to bridge the gap. (And, initially, having an 0131 number without a real phone.)

“Virtual facetime” isn’t quite the same as real facetime though, so I should probably add a tiny mention for Easyjet here, despite their monumental awfulness. (And big up the Generator hostel in London, yo.) My mileage for the year’s nowhere near Ewan’s, but I’ve still spent plenty of time on those lovely bright orange 6.30am planes.

4. Macbook Pro

My trusty laptop. I’d say “a” laptop is useful — really, required — to run a startup, but major props to the MBP (disclaimer: matter of personal taste). It’s over three years old, and although it feels quite sluggish now, and the battery life is somewhat laughable — about one and a half hours — it’s definitely served me well.

The main reason I love Macs is because I’m a control freak and command-line junkie on one level, but I also like shiny pretty things. OSX combines the best of both worlds in a way that’s well and truly converted me to the Cult of Jobs; I can get dirty stuff done quite happily in Terminal, set up a near-perfect coding environment that beats ‘four-terminal fwvm2′ into the dust, and yet also use a fantastic array of apps which are generally jolly good. And it doesn’t do games, which is great for a work machine, but it does do WoW, which is great for a junkie’s fix on the road (yesyes, I gave up for good over six months ago).

Honourable mention goes to the iPhone for keeping me connected on the move (providing there’s signal), but frankly, its call quality is terrible, the no-ring/voicemail bug is frustrating in the extreme, the ‘no service’ weirdness I’ve experienced lately is even worse, and the bewildering array of apps is entertaining yet ultimately a huge problem that’s just not being solved. Yes, it’s a great mobile email, web and SMS client, yes, some of the apps are great, yes, Google Maps has saved me more times than I can count. But international data rates, poor signal, low battery etc mean it’s usually an expensive iPod most of the time I’m travelling.

5. Other Startups

One of the things that has helped me learn, improve and generally stay on top of things has been other people — specifically other people who are, or have been, in the same boat. Thanks to communities such as Hacker News it’s easy to learn from others’ mistakes and get a quick opinion before you plunge; of course, I’ve still made plenty of my own, but I feel I somehow did so with a little education. There are a load of events that help startups in various ways, through learning, networking, presentation practice and so on, and it’s easy to get carried away and go to too many. However, having the option and the amount of information there for the taking is still great.

In meatspace, it’s also important to balance the often-isolated habits of entrepreneurship with the real world, and that’s where things like the Informatics Ventures/TechMeetup communities and EPIS have really helped. There’s something nice about the size and energy of the Edinburgh tech community; it’s small enough that you can really get to know people well and yet not too small to be insignificant.

Events like the Silicon Valley speaker series, Ken Morse courses, School for Startups and so on bring the world to Edinburgh. We still have a lot of barriers to get over to put the city on the map, so to speak, and there are plenty of times when I wish I was in London — but I do sense a force for change up here and some genuinely serious interest and investment in pushing Edinburgh’s ’scene’ further.

A side note: simply being in the right place is important to startup management, although not necessarily a deal-breaker. For example, it’s easier to manage a company if your co-founders, employees, investors and clients are all in the same city as you! However, it’s not impossible to succeed if none of them are, which is practically the case for me — you just have to think about things a little differently, and use tools such as those listed above to help with the process.

Having said that, there is a balancing act on hand. Despite the loveliness of Edinburgh and its awesome community, I’m going to be spending the next year in San Francisco simply because I feel I need to be there in person to nurture various things along, and get to a stage I don’t feel I can achieve remotely. But I’ll be back, and that’s what counts.

Photo is of Citizen Space, where I spent a happy nomadic afternoon working. Fortunately, the hot desks have power sockets.

I’m trying to catch up on the notable talks of LeWeb — so far I haven’t seen anything revolutionary come out of it, but a few interesting things, so it’s hard to figure out what to watch (especially since my attention span for online video is absolutely terrible; I prefer transcripts 90% of the time). Still, this talk caught my eye as danah’s work is pretty awesome. It’s definitely worth a watch (and it has a transcript/crib, yay!).

There were two main themes as I understand it; firstly the concept that we all see the Internet differently, and secondly the question of whether we are looking or not. The former is something that’s fascinated me for a while. Being able to see someone else’s world through their eyes — through unedited honest life-stream social media updates, through their Facebook photos, etc — can verge on gratuitous voyeurism. It’s taking the idea of a reality celeb to a new level, in a way. Internet superstars don’t have to be A-list or royalty, they can just be the sort of people whose wry observations about daily life (be it a blog, YouTube channel or even Twitter stream) are entertaining and a form of escapism.

As well as e-stalking interesting people, the more useful (and far more voyeuristic) side of this is e-stalking people I vaguely know. Catching up on old friends’ or past acquaintances’ lives via their LinkedIn, Facebook photos, etc; it somehow seems all right to live vicariously through people if you’ve actually met them. Kinda.

The second theme is about the ugly stuff. There’s a lot of nasty things that happen in this world and increasingly, victims are talking about them online. Bullying isn’t more prevalent now than it used to be, but it is more visible, and the problem is that people assume that there’s an automatic equation between stuff being online and stuff being seen. As anyone who’s ever written a blog knows, you can often be writing for an audience of one, and even if you have a hundred Myspace friends, there’s no guarantee anyone’s listening. Or that their reports to the authorities of your accounts of mistreatment at home will ever get taken seriously.

It’s sort of a cross between Neighbourhood Watch and “eyes on the street“. We need to look out for the disturbing stuff, violence, crime, etc., and use that constructively to help people, to open up conversations rather than jump to conclusions. Because appearance is everything, and someone posting about drug use or self-harm on their Livejournal might be doing it to fit in, not as a cry for help. It’s so hard to find where the boundaries are between the projected image you want to create online, and the real self underneath. The move towards real-time stream-of-consciousness updating kind of helps, but even a simple tweet such as “Help me” needs to be taken in context.

Firstly, firehose access — hurrah!

Secondly, Tweetminster Search (TechCrunch link) is… interesting. It’s a very hard problem to get right, measuring the sentiment of Twitter against a particular term; if the search term is “Labour”, do you search for tweets with the term “labour” in, expand the lexicon based on domain knowledge (”Government”, “Gordon Brown”), or perhaps search every tweet by a Labour MP? The methods and results seem to be in a very early stage right now, but this is something I’ve been thinking about and looking into, so cut them some slack for the rough edges. (Having said that, I will level this one criticism: as the service stands, I can’t really find anything useful out.)

Visualisation of political opinion, trend-spotting, disaster management and voting prediction are all going to become super hot over the next few months. Tweetminster Search is timely, and the mentioned API will be something definitely worth playing with; one area Tweetminster definitely adds value in is the curation of domain knowledge, i.e. maintaining a list of MPs and related Twitter accounts (news etc), and presumably caching those tweets. Firehose or no, having a readymade domain specific API is a NLP hacker’s dream. Honest.

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.)

Growing up, my family finances revolved around cheques. Routinely, we’d go food shopping three days before payday and hand over a bit of paper promising that, once the cheque cleared, we’d actually have the money to pay for the things we were taking home. My mother used to call this “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, borrowing from our future selves to enable us to eat today. This led to a vicious cycle; on payday, all the money would be pre-spent, leaving us with nothing for another two weeks until the next cheque could be written.

Of course, credit cards started becoming available to even those of dubious financial standing, and chequebooks somehow fell by the wayside. Why pay in full for something three days early when you could pay it off bit by bit over months or years? Hardly “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, more “giving Paul a PlayStation and making Peter put in overtime to keep up with the interest”.

Laid out bluntly, the maxim “don’t spend what you don’t have” is incredibly simple. Yet it’s also incredibly hard to keep to, or so it seems. I’ve fallen prey to it in the worst possible way — expecting birthday money, for example, I’d spend my existing cash in advance to get an immediate kick, then once the money arrived, spend that as well because it was my birthday. It’s pretty easy to do, especially if you’re not that connected to your personal finances and avoid looking at your online bank statements.

So, why don’t I do that any more? What’s made me realise I did it in the first place? Actually, it was teasing from people close to me who were familiar with my spending pattern and a little worried about it. I’m not the sort of person who announces my bank balance to friends at the drop of a hat, but they’d picked up on my money mismanagement from offhand comments and new purchases. If someone close to you seems to follow this pattern, it’s seriously useful to pick them up on it, though obviously calling an intervention on someone you don’t know too well is a bit much.

How to stop this unfortunate habit? It’s kind of easy, really: own up to your finances and therefore own your finances. Once you know you’re doing it, stop spending money you don’t have yet, or simply money you don’t have.

Keep your balance.
Know how much you’ve got in your accounts and when that number is going to change — set up Mint or Kublax, log on to your internet banking every day (force yourself for a while and it stops becoming scary; at that point, you can stop logging on daily, but still keep checking regularly).

Plan, but don’t spend.
When you have a windfall coming in, plan what you are going to buy, but don’t buy it. This has the added tried-and-tested advantage of giving you time to reflect on the decision, make the best possible purchase and even change your mind. Imagine yourself owning the item. Are you really happier?

Know where it’s going.
Using Mint, a spreadsheet or the back of an envelope, figure out what your finances generally look like, so you can work out when you have spare cash to spend — and when you don’t. Spending the remainder of your current account balance the day before your rent’s due? That’s money you don’t have. Finance automation is a great help — my income is pretty sporadic, so I squirrelled away my upcoming quarter’s rent and bills into a separate account, making my current account far more reflective of the actual money I had.

Cut up the credit card.
Seriously, they have their uses, but my life’s become so much better (financially speaking) since I stopped using my credit card. If you insist on keeping yours, be super, super aware of what goes in and out, how much that interest is really costing you, and pay it back before you buy new things. Far easier said than done, which is why ditching it worked for me.

Forget the numbers.
Finally, if you’re like me, you have an unfortunate habit of remembering your card numbers, making payments online far too easy. Stop yourself buying things by forgetting your card numbers (or rather, getting a new card and not learning it in the first place), unlinking your bank account from PayPal (no more impulse eBay shopping) and the like. Having to physically look at the card really makes you remember you’re spending money.

This post was originally going to be about more than money, as we “rob Peter to pay Paul” in more aspects of our lives than just the financial. Ever pigged out on food, skipped a day of exercise, procastinated on a deadline or pulled a sickie at work? We’re constantly living in the now, leaving our future selves to pick up the bill, and that’s before we even start to think about the state we’re leaving the planet in for our future generations…

Pretty much what it says in the headline. The Digital Missions are a useful way for UK companies to attend high-profile events like SXSW Interactive without the massive costs involved (although we turned down the recent NYC Digital Mission because of the costs being too high for the return we would get). Today’s the last day to apply if you want a UKTI-facilitated trip to the hottest “new meeja” event of the year, and it’s worth a stab if you qualify.

A couple of caveats though. I hadn’t realised that SXSW Interactive overlaps with GDC (I may be totally mistaken, but this isn’t usually the case, is it?), which causes an interesting problem for any gaming companies out there. In the past we’ve seen innovation in gaming showcased and inspired by both events, but this year… ouch. A quick Google tells me they have clashed in the past, but not recently, which makes me wonder why it’s happening again. I have a horrible feeling GDC will lose.

Secondly, and this is a personal opinion fuelled by first-hand experience covering and attending trade shows; being showcased in a country-specific booth isn’t always to your best advantage. It depends on what you’re doing, how attention-grabbing it can be, and how accessible other options are to you; for us, for example, we wouldn’t have any other reasonable options! But for a company trying to attain equal footing with the world’s up-and-coming, being tucked away with a Union Flag waving limply in the air conditioned breeze is not going to get you attention. The press loves stories, and being “yet another British company” isn’t a story. Stand on your own feet and stand out. The best British startups doing well in America don’t focus on where they’re from, they focus on what they’re doing well.

On the other hand, schemes like this make these events totally accessible to those who may not otherwise be able to go, which is great. Just don’t rely on them as a crutch, and if you want to take the world by storm, do it!

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?