Paying It Forward

This was originally posted on the Local Fourth blog as part of my participation in a community media innovation project at the Medill School of Journalism.

I’m finding the word community increasingly confusing, especially when navigating the world of hyperlocal publishing.  When someone says community, do they mean community like the city of Evanston, or the city’s West Side neighborhood, or a block club or church. Or, do they mean the community of users of a particular site? When do these groups intersect, when are they too disparate?  The 2010 Knight News Challenge goes as far as defining a specific Community category for entries:

Community: Seeks groundbreaking technologies that support news and
information specifically within defined geographic areas. This is designed to
jump-start work on technologies and approaches that haven’t arrived yet.
Unlike the first three categories, sub-
missions in this area must be tested in a geographically designated community.

But, in a Sept. 20 post announcing the 2010 challenge, the poster wrote “I think of this as our io9 category,” referring to a Gawker Media-run science-fiction and popular culture site.  Perhaps the poster was referring to the future-focused voice of the site, but it also surfaces the possibility that people may increasingly identify with communities and person-to-person interactions that aren’t geographically bound.

In looking at strong, geographically disparate online communities, groups of people engaging around free/libre/opensource software, or FLOSS projects are one of the most compelling. While they can exhibit the same segregation or bickering of physical communities, they can also be a model for people coming together to build something that serves a clear need. The way in which many projects are firmly grounded in utility and the way in which similar projects seem to sustain themselves not by competing but by understanding how their project does a job that’s different than other software is a lesson that media organizations, particularly in the hyperlocal space, would do well to learn.

FLOSS projects also complicate traditional notions of sustainability. While many projects have found ways to sustain themselves financially, either through donations, sponsorship or by incredible use of volunteer time coding, documenting and providing help and training for the project, FLOSS projects tend to put utility ahead of commercial viability. Making technology that serves a need and remains relevant and responsive to changing needs and to feedback from users is as important to the sustainability of the project as the dollars and cents.

We make use of a lot of FLOSS for implementing the technological part of the innovation project. While there are lots of ways that we could give back for this technology that is so useful us as developers (Palintir, a Chicago-based web development shop that specializes in sites based on the Drupal content management system, for instance, contributes code that they use to develop new features for their clients back to the larger Drupal community), the tight time constraints of graduate school and a rapid project mean that dollars are the best way that I can give back to these projects.

Even though most of the tools that I use to make technology are available free of cost, paying something for them helps me think of how I value the tools for this project. I’ve decided to donate the amount of money that I spend each week on a common indulgence during this project, going out for lunch with other team members, to some of the FLOSS tools that I’ve used the most in the last few weeks.

Python – most of the code in this project is written in this language. It’s flexible, easy to learn, has a large number of useful contributed libraries and is very readable making it easy to understand someone else’s code. Donate to the Python Software Foundation.

jQuery – If the back end of the project is written in Python, the front end is highly dependent on the jQuery javascript framework. JQuery makes it easier to implement some of the rich user interactions that people have come to expect on the web. Donate to the jQuery project.

Django – Django is a Python web framework that has its roots in the newsroom. . The first time I used the framework, I was amazed at how it streamlined the most tedious aspects of web development. When I’m curious about how to do something in the framework, I often discover that there’s an elegant approach provided in the framework along with clear documentation. Donate to the Django Software Foundation.

Vim – I was compelled to learn to use this editor when I started at my first tech job at a regional Internet service provider. The network administrator said that it was important to learn vi (Vim, an enhanced version of the classic UNIX editor, stands for vi improved) because you could be assured that it would be available on any UNIX system that you found yourself poking around. While the navigation of the program, which is keystroke heavy, seemed unintuitive at first, once I got used to it, the lightweight but highly customizable and extensible editor felt like it was designed just for me. Rather than asking for donations to sustain the project, Vim’s lead developer solicits donations for a charity that supports children in Uganda.

Firebug – I don’t know how I wrote programs for the web before Firebug. This Firefox extension helps me understand and tweak the HTML and CSS of a design and also see what is going on behind the scenes with Javascript errors and AJAX requests. Donate to the Firebug project.

gender and software

I was browsing the web looking for information about social justice movements and technology and I found a blog post talking about the involvement of women in free/libre/opensource software projects.  The conversation centers around the question of whether the disparity between male and female participation in FLOSS projects is because of fundamental differences in preferences based on gender; like women preferring more social interactions which some perceive as rare within the FLOSS-development world or women preferring not to allocate their leisure time towards software development; or  larger cultural factors (which seem to parallel some things I’ve read elsewhere about gender, power, and sexism).   The discussion is nuanced and civil and pretty interesting:

The reliance on long hours of intensive computing in writing successful code means that men, who in general assume that time outside of waged labour is ‘theirs’, are freer to participate than women, who normally still assume a disproportionate amount of domestic responsibilities. Female F/LOSS participants, however, seem to be able to allocate a disproportionate larger share of their leisure time for their F/LOSS activities. This gives an indication that women who are not able to spend as much time on voluntary activities have difficulties to integrate into the community.

Interestingly, this point seems to suggest that it is the domestic responsibilities, whether perceived or real, that make women feel they don’t have enough free time to contribute effectively to open source projects. I figured that women simply wanted to take on activities outside of technology moreso than men, and maybe this gives a possible reason why. If women have been responsible for certain aspects of home life for many centuries, then it is not hard to believe that they would feel even today that they did not ‘own’ their free time in the same way as men, even if in modern times these responsibilities don’t always exist.

Through the blog post, I found out about Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Policy Support project whose report on gender and FLOSS provided a lot of the context for the blog’s discussion.  I also found out about the GNOME project’s Women’s Summer Outreach Program.  Which got funding from Google to provide 3 additional allocations for Summer of Code GNOME projects for developers who were women.  I liked this from the program’s web page:

Isn’t this unfair to men? What about people who were rejected from Google’s Summer of Code?

The recent FLOSSPOLS report describes many opportunities that women miss out on when getting involved with computing and free software, ranging from being introduced to computers at a later age, being less encouraged to specialise in computing, having few female role models, having less free time to spend programming than men do, and being on the receiving end of sexism when they do try to get involved. We think it’s this imbalance that’s unfair, and we’re trying to help fix it.

As for whether this is unfair to Summer of Code applicants, we don’t think so – this is GNOME’s money to use how it sees fit, and we want to use it to correct a disturbing lack of participation from women in the GNOME development community. We’re doing this for outreach reasons as well as for technical ones, and so just adding another three projects to the twenty Summer of Code projects being sponsored wouldn’t achieve our stated goals. If you’d like to talk about this with us, feel free to get in touch.

Link to Women in Open Source II blog post from The Female Perspectiveon Computer Science blog.