V Week events I’m stoked about

These are part of the V Week of Events. There’s lots more, but these were the ones that caught my eye.

2/6 Friday — Critical Mass & Speak Out
@ 1pm, SAMPLE GATES
–Take to the streets in a critical mass bike ride to raise awareness of violence against women.

2/11 Wednesday — Film Screening & Teach-In, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo @ 7:30PM
–Join us to view and discuss the documentary film that explores the violence faced daily by the girls and women of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Republican environmental policy

Republican flyer on tree

I’m as sick of snarky partisanship as much as the next guy, but couldn’t help but share this flyer for Indiana Republican candidate Mike Sodrel that I found stapled to a tree on the IU campus.  I think the tree will survive, but it just seemed crass to me somehow.  Still it wasn’t quite as crass as the flyers discussion of “The more you make, the more they take” tax policy.

Liveblogging from Linuxfest

Linuxfest 2008 web page.

In the first talk the presenter said that he felt the greatest contribution of Linux was that it was the great equalizer and that it was responsible for the generation of skilled IT workers in India, China, and other parts of the world that are emerging as producing a lot of technology and technology workers.

Building Community and Taking Linux to the Masses

Zonker talked about Linux and Community and offered this definition of community, saying that FOSS communities have a lot to learn from communities in general:

“Community is when a group of people come together for common cause, work together, and become something greater than the sum of the individuals.”

He pointed out that community building in FOSS is taking software and not just making it free of cost but letting people drive the creation of the technology.

Despite his employment with Novell, he said that people using Linux, even if it’s not OpenSUSE, is a win for him and he’s happy to point out other FOSS communities that are doing things right.

FOSS communities getting it right: Fedora, Mozilla.

FOSS communities getting it wrong: KDE (releasing beta release as 4.0, dropping support for KDE 3.5), OpenOffice (great product, not growing or good community, lots of head butting with Sun)

Community building

When do you start building a community? As soon as you start a project!  Do you want people to contribute to your code, or are you just pushing it to the world?

OpenSUSE is responsive to calls from Japan for more translations.  He feels like Europe has accepted English as a lingua franca for Linux distros, but Japan hasn’t.  Zonker pointed out that this is totally legitimate and noted the challenges of western Europeans/Americans trying to navigate signs in a non-latin alphabet.  He said signs leading to people being invovled in your community need to be clear to lots of different people.

Community building is in the long term (years ! months).  With FOSS projects it’s important to realize that the projects have to be responsible to the community and not just managers or developers.  From the Ubuntu community manager his job is “Making sure the community is getting screwed by Canonical and making sure that Canonical isn’t getting screwed by the community.”

How do you manage community?  Build up trust so that people (developers) want to contribute.

How do you meet the goals of both the community and managers?  E.g. different milestones for Novell and OpenSUSE community.

A community manager’s job is finding and connecting the body parts, but the community itself provides the spark to bring the project to life.

One of the challenges at Novell was to take people who had worked forever answering to managers and they had to learn how to also be responsive to people who weren’t their managers and didn’t even work for the company.

openSUSE build system allows people to build packages for distros that aren’t just openSUSE.

Cool stuff: Helping Hands sessions to help new users with using openSUSE.

Zonker came to being a community manager from being a technology journalist.  This experience has been helpful because it’s made him a good writer and communicator which is crucial for managing a community.  He misses the objectivity of being a journalist and not being perceived as being connected with a company.

Developing on Mac

Had a really nice slideshow.  Lots of big icons.  As with Zonker, the slides were really sparse with most of the details being filled in with the talk.

Presenter defined the fundamental concept of Unix as:

$ ls | wc

“Little bits of functionality that you can link together in interesting ways”

Quartz composer tool is analogous to the pipe.  Patches link together graphic effects.  All the animations on the Mac are built this way. 

This Japanese artist uses Quartz composer in cool ways to make cool works (and he gives you the source).

This stuff is so cool.  The downside is that you have to be able to afford mac hardware and the OS.  I think the reason that people like Macs so much is because they’re fun to use.  Apparently all 6,7, and 8 graders in Maine get new Mac notebooks.  Kids found a way to cheat on a test, even with iChat disabled by creating ad-hoc wireless networks named things like ‘The answer to question 5 is D’.

Virtualization

There were two talks on virtualization.  The first was on enterprise virtualization and the second was on virtualization security.  Apparently, a lot of the big apps at IU like Oncourse, Onestart, and the IU home page are all running on virtual servers.  They did a cool demo where they moved a virtual machine from on physical host to another with no perceivable downtime.

One big advantage of a virtualization that I didn’t really think about was the fact that, by consolidating VMs on fewer physical machines, all the environmentals like electrical, cooling, cabling, space.

Women’s History Month Events

Women in Science Research Conference
Monday, Mar 3. 9a-2:30p
Solarium, Indiana Memorial Union

Su E Pian (Lady of the Moon): Women and Sexuality from the Kinsey Institute Asian Collections
Thursday, March 6th 7p
Asian Culture Center, 807 E 10th St

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days film screening
Sunday, March 9 2p
Monroe County Public Library Auditorium

Yo Soy Boricua, Pa’que Tu Lo Sepas (I’m Boricua, Just So You Know!)!: An Interview with Rosie Perez
Thursday, Mar. 20th 7:00p
La Casa

“Human Trafficking and Sexual Tourism”
Friday, March 21 12:30-1:30p
Asian Cultural Center, 807 E. 10th St.

2007-08 Fifth Annual Herman Hudson Symposium (Theme: “Lifting the Veil: Multidisciplinary Responsibility in Global Societies”)
Saturday, March 22
10a
Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center

Mujeres en la Artes: Creating a Tapestry of Expression
Thursday, Mar 27
7p
La Casa

Documentary Screening of “Never Perfect” and Conversation with the Director/Filmmaker, Regina Par
Thursday, March 27 7p
Grand Hall, Neal Marshall Black Culture Center

The Sex Workers’ Art Show TourThe Sex Workers’ Art Show Tour @ Whittenberger Auditorium. 7p. free. 18+

The Sex Workers’ Art Show Tour is coming to Indiana University,
Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 7 pm at the Whittenberger Auditorium,
Indiana Memorial Union. This event is FREE and open to the public
(18+, please)!

The show is an eye-popping evening of visual and performance art
created by people who work in the sex industry to dispel the myth that
they are anything short of artists, innovators, and geniuses!

The wildly successful cabaret-style show is hitting the road again,
bringing audiences a blend of spoken word, music, drag, burlesque, and
multimedia performance art. Intelligent and hot, disturbing and
hilarious, the performances offer a wide range of perspectives on sex
work, from celebration of prostitutes’ rights and sex-positivity to
views from the darker sides of the industry.

The show includes people from all areas of the sex industry:
strippers, prostitutes, dommes, film stars, phone sex operators,
internet models, etc. It smashes traditional stereotypes and moves
beyond “positive” and “negative” into a fuller articulation of the
complicated ways sex workers experience their jobs and their lives.
The Sex Workers’ Art Show entertains, arouses, and amazes while
simultaneously offering scathing and insightful commentary on notions
of class, race, gender, labor and sexuality!

For more information, visit http://www.sexworkersartshow.com or email
cps@indiana.edu

Sponsored by: Office for Women’s Affairs, Commission on Multicultural
Understanding, GLBT Student Support Services, Kinsey Institute, Gender
Studies Department, Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, CommUNITY
Education Program, OUT, Crossroads, Keshet, Women’s Students
Association, Feminist Law Forum, Feminist Majority Leadership
Alliance, Friends of Middle Way House, Sigma Lambda Gamma, Progressive
Librarians Guild, PFLAG of Spencer, IN, bloomingOUT, Boxcar Books