Archive for May 22nd, 2007

Posted on May 22, 2007 - by jono

Riding the slides

Today I started work on a bunch of new presentations for up and coming shows. I have had great pleasure in taking How To Herd Cats And Influence People around the world, and been enamoured by its success at each event. Thanks to everyone who showed up and joined in on the fun. If you have not seen it, check it out on YouTube – as well as a rather odd little video of the first 30 seconds of the Brazil gig. I will also be delivering it at Ubuntu Live and OSCON over in Portland, Oregon in July.

So, on to the next presentations. My next main core presentation is called Growing Ubuntu and it will be about some of the specific work going into growing the Ubuntu community, how the community has grown, the challenges it has faced, some amusing anecdotes and more. I have just set the ball rolling on this one and will be presenting it for the first time at LinuxTag on Sat 2nd June in Berlin, Germany. I hope to see a bunch of you there.

It is always very exciting creating new talks, and also unnerving. A few years back I primarily spoke in the UK, and therefore my audience was relatively matched in humour, language, knowledge of popular culture and other cultural issues. As anyone who has seen my talks will know, I try to make them amusing, and I have a traditionally British sense of humour. When you take a talk filled with British humour to another country, you could be forgiven for thinking that it may not translate all that well. Luckily, in the vast majority of cases it does, but it is always in the back of my mind when preparing talks to ensure that everyone actually does get it.

I also just want to say a huge, gargantuan thanks! to the incredible OpenOffice.org team for their recent releases. I find that OpenOffice.org Impress gives me everything I need to create my talks, and it has proved tirelessly reliable and responsive whenever I am delivering them – the one time you don’t want it to screw up is when you are stood in front of 300 people! A lot of people bang on the OpenOffice.org crew for various reasons, but I think they are doing a stunning job. Keep up the great work. And yes, this naturally involves the hero that is Michael Meeks; a man who deserves a knighthood.

Posted on May 22, 2007 - by jono

Say NO to discrimination in our community

Recently the subject of discrimination has been something I have been thinking a lot about. It was the subject of some meetings with ubuntu-women, something I have discussed with my friend Sulamita in a Brazilian bar at 4.30am and the subject of various ad-hoc discussions at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. As the wider Open Source community grows, it becomes more of an issue every day, and something we all need to be aware of.

While in Brazil I made a promise to Sulamita that I would be blogging about the issue of discrimination against women, and I have been holding off writing an entry until I had some real, practical, implementable steps that I can advise people to take to help make the situation better. Although I will never fully understand how some women are made to feel at the hands of such discrimination, I have been hoping my contribution could be to help contribute to an awareness of the issue, and for that to happen I felt I needed to construct some doable steps that people can execute. Solving social problems is hard though, which ain’t all that surprising, so I had held off on a blog post until I had some such action points. I have since discovered that there is really one key step that we all need take – don’t accept or allow discrimination in your community.

In my mind all discrimination is bad. Every day people get up and are discriminated due to gender, age, race, mobility, technical knowledge and more. The issues of discrimination, while different in the specifics (e.g. women are discriminated in different ways to age discrimination), the underlying issue is very similar – mistreating people because of a grouping they are part of. We have all suffered this in different ways, from serious racial hatred to someone not taking you seriously because you have long hair and an Iron Maiden t-shirt.

Equality is not a luxury, it is a requirement. To achieve this we need a change of thinking, a new philosophy. A few years back, environmental issues were largely the concern of a niche group of people; those with an expressed interest in the issue would recycle, bike to work and try to avoid wasting energy. As time went on and the issue grew, it was clear that saving the planet was most certainly not the responsibility of the few, but of the many. As the media and foppy haired politicians jumped on the subject, environmental issues became something that all of us should care about. Caring for the planet is now something that everyone is responsible for.

We need to take the same approach to discrimination in our community. Our community is defined by diversity, it is a pulsating machine driven by ideas, culture and experiences that each one of us brings to the table. The vast majority of us understand this diversity, relish it and enjoy exploring each other’s thoughts and culture as we create this incredible free software platform. Then, out of nowhere, we allow a bunch of ignorant muppets to come in and undermine this diversity with their nonsensical views.

Remember how I said social change is hard. Well, it is hard, but not impossible, and we can make very real change by simply not tolerating discrimination. Say no to discrimination. It is a responsibility that every one of us is tasked with. We may disagree on the direction of free software, we may disagree on who we like and dislike in this community, but I think we all agree that each of us should be treated as equals. If someone discriminates on a mailing list, in an IRC channel, on a forum, at a LUG,at a conference or anywhere else, don’t stand for it. It is a small step, and one voice that may not be heard alone, but this is the ethos of Open Source – each of us coming together as one to make amazing things happen together. Lets make something really amazing happen and stop discrimination in our community.

I would like to encourage every blogger, podcaster, forums poster and anyone else to raise this issue. We need a unified voice, lets work together.