All Ages: How to Build a Movement
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Okay, your next speakers are Deb and Molly talking about how to build a movement. Thanks for coming. This is Molly DeBlanc.
00:22
This is Deb Nicholson. That's okay, go with it. Could be someone else's problem. We're going to talk about how to build an all-ages free software movement. If you want to tweet about that topic, you can use this hashtag or you can use it on other social media, whatever you like.
00:41
I'm baconandcoconut and this is mollymillions, mmillions. And, let's see, I think the TLDR is here. Great. We believe that in order to build a strong, successful, ongoing movement that can really create change, especially on a global scale,
01:01
you need to have diverse and inclusive communities where you have a wide variety of experiences and specialized knowledge. Age is one of the particular issues in which we aren't necessarily great at. So what we're going to cover is we're going to go a little bit deeper on why we care and then we're going to look specifically at what's going on with age in our communities
01:22
and then we're going to talk about some solutions we like, some that already exist and some that perhaps we'll be able to inspire folks here to help us create. So, going on to why we care, movements that are successful or persistent and they last for a long time, and that means that you have to be able to pass the torch
01:43
from one generation to the next without losing kind of what really makes the movement special and motivating and, you know, it can't just kind of degrade into this thing we show up for. And so that means not just communicating how we do it, but why we do it.
02:04
Great. So we're focused on talking about movements right now. Free software tools are great. I use a whole bunch of them. Deb uses a whole bunch of them. I hope all of you also use a whole bunch of them. But right now we want to talk about how to push a movement forward.
02:22
So, free software is a philosophy and there's a wonderful developmental model that is enabled by this philosophy. When you're building a movement, you're really looking at a long-term plan and so sometimes you'll do things that don't have short-term payoffs and that's what we're really talking about now.
02:41
And in fact, the tools and the movement feed off of each other like yeast and maybe they create exciting things like beer. But the things like shared decision making and transparency and consensus building are often what that sort of mutual feeding can look like.
03:01
And they tend to produce exciting, successful, fast projects when they're done well. And then that said, communities have to focus on people. So these folks, I assume they're having a lot of fun even though they look half dead, right? And so, communities need to sort of focus on individuals
03:21
and making sure that everyone's having a good time or people will stop showing up no matter what their age is. So this is going to be very much for communities. Some of it may be helpful to you and your company but we're really talking about the communities which are people. We also are aware and think everyone needs to be aware of the difference between diversity and inclusivity.
03:42
These days people are putting them together a lot more. Diversity, one way to think about it is the picture on your textbook or in the advertisement where it's like, oh, there's the blonde girl and there's the black kid and there's the Asian guy. And instead of space where people feel welcome and feel like they can contribute and be part of a community.
04:03
Right, so more than just optics, this is a whole study on how diversity makes groups smarter. And what this researcher found was that when people are preparing an argument that they perceive, for someone they perceive to be as different from them,
04:21
they actually prepare a better, more thorough argument. They're like, I did more of my homework. I did more of the work to prove my point. And this happens in politics, it happens along different lines like when someone is presenting something to a different gender or a different race or a different political party,
04:41
they tend to present stronger, more well thought out ideas, which I think makes our movement stronger. And this one is also about diversity, but this is about not just sort of like you were talking about the picture or like sort of the sprinkling of diversity or the diversity on your pamphlet only,
05:02
but diverse headcount is useless without inclusivity. So people need to want to stick around. If you've got one person who's like your token woman, they're not going to be very happy being your token for very long. So our challenge is to not just go to the letter of like your organization's diversity statement,
05:27
but to really kind of arms wide open and not, this is a metaphor, don't physically touch people when they get to your community, but until you know them, until you know them, but it means asking them questions and then listening to the answers
05:42
about how they're doing in your community. It means incorporating their ideas, making sure they're at the meetings where important decisions are made, making sure they have access to the information about like what is successful and what's not successful about your project. Another way to think about this is as shared power. So if there's an invisible barrier between like entry level you get to be in our yearly photo
06:06
and oh, the board which drives all of our actual decisions over here, you're not going to have people keep coming to your project to just be part of your yearly photo. So you really need to share power if you want people from groups
06:23
that you haven't had in your project before to stick around. So who is a minority in tech? All of these people. This photo was from Women of Color in Tech Chat. They did a session where they took a bunch of stock photos
06:42
that wonderful people like you can now use when you need stock photos. Oh, this is another person who's a minority in tech. I love this photo because it's like classic hacker computer screen darkroom. She's up to no good. Look at that face.
07:01
Oh yeah, she's definitely DDoSing something, I'm sure. She might be. So to be more specific about some groups that are minorities in tech, now we did our best to try to use terminology here that seemed like the right terminology to us.
07:22
If you know better words we should be using, please talk to us afterwards or you could tweet at us. So that we can do better in the future. So there are minorities of gender and that usually just kind of means anyone who isn't a man. Race and ethnicity, you're dealing with people of color,
07:42
first indigenous or native people, people who identify as Latina or Latino. And background is also there as well. So there are people with disabilities, people who are blind. If you have a particular problem with your project so it doesn't meet typical accessibility standards, someone might not be able to contribute but they also might just not be able to use it.
08:04
Non college graduates, kind of a side note on that is it's still easier to get involved in tech if you're a man regardless of whether or not you have a degree and it's a lot harder for women and other minorities to get involved when they don't have degrees. People outside of technical education and skills,
08:22
like you didn't study computer science, you didn't study mathematics, you don't have a background in that but then you decide it's a thing you want to do. Working class people, so people who aren't from middle class backgrounds or aren't currently middle class. And people over the age of 35 and soon we will talk about why 35 is a significant number.
08:42
So for intersectionality, the same kinds of institutional mindsets, policies and social norms affect people across different demographic groups. So the same kinds of things that could lead people to make women uncomfortable are similar and related to or the same as the kind of things that could make someone who's older uncomfortable.
09:05
Like a grumpy mailing list? Like a grumpy mailing list. Great, so oppressive institutions are interconnected but we haven't really addressed age yet which is why we're going to talk about that. Oh, there's more. And now we have people of all ages working in free and open source software
09:23
so it's a great time to start talking about this. So what's going on with age? This is a really interesting problem because it's highly enforced by popular culture and it's reflected in a lot of companies' ideas about culture fit and we'll go into that.
09:43
This is the quote from Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg. So we're from Massachusetts in the state of Massachusetts. I heard a little zzzz for the z. No, not for Zuckerberg. We live in the state of Massachusetts.
10:02
The Department of Labor in Massachusetts defines anyone in the workforce over the age of 40 as an advanced worker. Keep that in mind. If you're over 40, you're totally great. Regardless, that's what they told me. Advanced. I haven't heard that since I was a kid and I don't know if I like it as much this time.
10:21
So Mark Zuckerberg is this guy. He made a website or something. I hear some people use it. He said, I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? He said this when he was like 22 or 23. So you're seeing this view of younger people and older people in technology from someone who's younger as well.
10:50
And then this is from Vinod Khosla. People under 35 are the people who make change happen and older entrepreneurs fail to innovate because they're falling back on old habits.
11:01
He was 56 when he said this. So tech has an age problem. More on this. The age problem is not limited to individuals talking to one another. It really is an institutional issue. In 2011, Brian Reed, he was a Google employee.
11:22
He was let go of or fired from his job. He sued Google as an age discrimination suit. There had been a lot of conversations on his team about his age and how he was boring and he was old and his ideas weren't any good. And this created a space where he didn't feel like he could participate in the
11:41
team, but it was also very clear that people weren't respecting him for his experience. In 2013, Facebook also had a similar thing, but it was related to a job listing. A number of job listings really like to focus, entry level job listings like to focus on the concept of new grads rather than people who are just starting in the field.
12:06
Here are some specific details I found out about age, median age of employees. Facebook comes in pretty young for large tech companies at 26 and HP comes in at 39, which is the oldest.
12:21
None of these people are advanced workers according to the state of Massachusetts. I'm going to check my notes to make sure I get the next set of statistics right because there are some more. Incidentally, and this is from like job rating websites, HP lists or it's considered that
12:40
the average number of hours an HP employee works during a single day is 7.5. This is in comparison to Facebook where people are citing their averages between 9 and 10. So the way we treat older and younger people in our community is often based on assumptions.
13:01
Of course, those assumptions are pretty different for the two groups and we're going to look at young people first. Young people is a pretty wide breadth here. We're using that to refer to people who are not yet in college or who are in college. Or for lack of a better term, are not yet of a working age.
13:23
So these are people that we want to have drink the free software Kool-Aid. We're going to talk about both pre-college and then also college student age. As Molly pointed out, Facebook has people working 9 or 10 hours a day, which
13:41
of course reveals what they might like about younger workers as opposed to older workers. Not necessarily their sparkly ideas, but their interest or willingness to work for 10 hours a day. So they'll say things like class of 2015 or 2016 preferred.
14:01
They try and convince folks that you can treat the office like your home. It can be like your living room, we'll do your laundry for you. Encouraging people to eat at the office. There are companies that if you come in for breakfast and stay until dinner and then two more hours, you get a free ride home in an Uber.
14:22
So they really have this gone to a science where they get you to come in and do 10 hours a day for as long as possible. Another thing that I think may be happening is that younger people don't have the experience to negotiate work terms. And that includes things like who owns their software, what kinds of licenses they're willing to have their code put under.
14:42
And of course workplace conditions and hours and things like that. How many of you got involved with free or open source software before you were 24? Oh, so cool! Okay, so who here is currently in some capacity contributing to a project?
15:05
This can mean you're using it, but it could also mean you're walking around telling people how great it is. You're trying to get everybody using LibreOffice. You're writing code, you're going to conferences, you're running conferences. Awesome. So keep your hands up. I like having the hands up thing. It's like you're participating.
15:24
Great. Now how many of you are involved in those specific projects before you were 24? Okay, how many of you while you were still in college? Okay, how many of you are actually Wesley Crusher? That's the next slide. Yeah, there's Wesley Crusher. Cool. In a lot of projects similar to how you might see other tokenism, there's also frequently the token kid,
15:48
who's this guy who's super smart and super bright and super sharp and he's involved and he's everywhere and everybody's really excited to help him and be involved with him.
16:00
But that's only one person and that doesn't mean you're actually creating a space for other people, especially if there are other people who aren't already coming at something as someone who feels empowered to participate and to make space for themselves. Next slide. The Gryffindor Quidditch team is a really good example of this actually. Because you have Harry Potter, I love Harry Potter but she picked this slide by the way, this was not me.
16:23
So in the Gryffindor Quidditch team you have Harry Potter who's just like the best at this random wizard sport and he doesn't need any training, he just like shows up and he's brilliant from day one. The thing is generally younger people need more training and then when you're looking at people who are already graduates, people who've been involved in things for a while, people who have different kinds of backgrounds.
16:44
So you need to be there and you need to be ready to work with people to get them up to speed. Next slide. One of the ways you do this is mentorship. Having a mentor is really great. You need things, you need handles, you need identities, you need people to tell you when you're being universally stupid.
17:02
Okay, some of you are hackers fans at least, I hear a few laughs. So that's where mentors come in and they're people who are already experienced and these can be peer mentors so they can be people your age. Peer mentorship is really great, it's super useful, it's one of the best ways to get people understanding things
17:21
and interested in them, especially younger people. But it's also just wonderful to have somebody who's looking out for you and helping you develop. Next slide. Kind of one particular example of this is the tools a lot of free software projects use are older tools. I think IRSSI and in general IRSSI, oh yeah, another IRSSI user over there somewhere.
17:43
Good job, high five. A lot of people are now switching to Slack or HipChat, but IRSSI is still there and people keep telling me it's hard to use, I'm not convinced it is. You know, it took me a few tries to figure it out, but I'm pretty sure I can generally do it now
18:01
as long as I don't actually close the screen. So now we're going to talk about older people. Culture impacts what we think and what kinds of assumptions we make. So I spent a lot of time last year looking at when and if actually I could find depictions of older women in tech.
18:21
And I was going to start looking for women over 50, and then when I started looking, I realized like, oh, I have to go lower. If I want to look at fictional technical women, I have to see if I can find any over 40. And I was only able to find four. I asked people all over the internet if they could think of anyone.
18:42
Two were ones that aged up with their franchise. So we had Samantha Carter from Stargate and Lieutenant Uhura from Star Trek. And then the other two were newer shows, but women in a technical slash management role. Not like, you know, coding at night and guzzling, you know, Red Bull or whatever, but managing people.
19:02
There's also, Deb failed to mention this, there's the nurse in Star Trek TOS. I don't remember her name, which shows you how important she was. But later in the movie, she becomes a doctor. I just heard a lot of people yelling. Someone should tweet that at us and we'll add it for next time. So the two that I found in the technical management role was Nina Sharp from the Fringe show, if people watched that.
19:25
And I watched this so you don't have to. Avery Ryan, which is Patricia Arquette's character in CSI Cyber. So those were the only two other examples I could find of women in tech. I think CSI Cyber is still on. I've tried to erase it from all my history, so I don't hear about it.
19:44
I really appreciate you doing that for me. Yeah, I only spent five minutes and I was like, nope. That's my husband. So a lot of this is very, you know, so it's kind of not, it's not surprising that people can't picture older women in a technical role.
20:03
And in fact we find this to be the case. So I did a number of interviews with women over 40 who worked in tech. And this is a quote from a 57-year-old woman. And she said that it was really hard for her to, you know, get interviews and new jobs.
20:21
So like this is during a time when Silicon Valley is poaching each other's employees. They're working really hard to make sure everyone knows like our workplace is the funnest. Like we're doing the cutting edges software. Like, you know, recruiters are aggressive. Like I have like GNU Linux in my LinkedIn and I get stuff and I'm not a sysadmin.
20:42
They don't know I'm over 40 I guess. But every single company in Silicon Valley manages to just manage to not hire older women in technology. So a lot of the older women that, you guys know this guy? I love this one. A lot of the older women that I talked to, they said, you know, I did this for a number of years and I'm done.
21:05
I'm going to go do something else. Not because they want to have babies. Not because like, you know, the technology changed so fast that they couldn't keep up. But because they were just like, I'm too old for this shit. And they went and they go find another career, something else to do where they don't have to put up with the like,
21:22
you know, weird misconceptions and the, you know, failure to be taken seriously. So, and this finally, for the women who do stay, some of them end up kind of getting pushed towards management. And so this woman said, you know, she used to really like working on technical hard problems,
21:42
but over and over again she's been pushed to train young people. So she gets to the place where she felt like her only purpose there was to mentor young people and have them realize their exciting ideas. And you could like hang around and teach them how to do the tools and all that kind of stuff. And she's like, I didn't want to be a manager, but like because I'm a woman,
22:04
they really wanted me to den mother the new coders. We're going to talk about volunteering now. Free software is powered by volunteers. There are more companies who are producing free software as in people have convinced them that, or they've convinced themselves that what they're working on should be released under a wonderful,
22:22
excellent free software license like all of your companies should be doing. But a lot of it is still people who are just interested in projects and who want to get involved. Great. Volunteering is super wonderful. It's one of the places where you can really create communities that are multi-generational,
22:44
really diverse, really inclusive, because people are showing up for them because they want to be there. They're people who want to help out, they're people who want to be involved, and they're people who are really invested in what's going on. Here are some statistics, I really like statistics and demographics if you can't tell yet.
23:00
Here are some stuff on volunteering when you're looking at younger people between the ages of 12 and 18. You're getting out 55% of them volunteering. They're coming in with about 29 hours per year. Most of these are in youth organizations, so things that are specifically geared towards younger people, and also religious organizations, as, well, I'll get to that in a second.
23:25
One of the reasons for this in that particular age group is that you're looking at people who want to go to college. And while it can be laudable, while it can be great, while it can be wonderful that you care so much about something to put in 250 hours of volunteer time while you're at high school,
23:45
that's actually not that impressive according to an admissions officer at some fancy school in Cambridge. When you're looking at retirees, you are getting fewer people total, as in rather than 55%, they're coming in at 42%.
24:04
What's really great about this, though, and why this is impressive, is these are people who aren't doing it because they want to go to college, they're doing it because they just want to do something, and they want to do this. They're coming in at 96 hours per year, which is really great. Again, there's a lot of volunteering and religious organizations across the board,
24:22
actually. Religious organizations have the most volunteers. There are a lot of reasons for this. Historically, they've built communities. Also, at least in the United States, because religious organizations are all nonprofits, anything you do for one happens to be volunteering. There's another metric when we're talking about volunteers,
24:41
which is how many people are hitting over 500 hours a year in volunteer time. Ten percent of elderly volunteers accrue that many, and this is the largest percentage of people in this wonderful 500-plus hours per year category. Here are some organizations that are multi-generational.
25:04
One that Molly and I volunteer with in Boston is Girls Rock Camp. It's an organization run by women for young women to help them find a voice, be loud, be proud, and play an instrument. There are roles for women of all ages to do mentoring.
25:26
A lot of the kids who go through the camp end up being camp counselors when they're 16, 17, 18 years old. Every single age group is represented in there. Another place that we see a lot of intergenerational volunteering is political campaigns.
25:47
Political campaigns are like, show up, we will find something for you to do. I used to work primarily in local politics in Massachusetts. Older people would show up and stuff envelopes. People would bring their kids in.
26:00
All different ages. It felt like there was a real torch being passed. A lot of amazing stories over the envelope stuffing table. As a quick pitch for that, if you happen to live near one of the many excellent free software and great tech for good humanity organizations, you consider volunteering at them.
26:22
They always need people to stuff envelopes. Going back to religious organizations, you see people like the Quakers. They have the Friends Service Committee. These are people who go all over the world. Some of them are volunteers. Some of them are employees. And they're bringing these wonderful things to other places. You also see this with Unitarian Universalists.
26:43
Habitat for Humanity is another really great example of this because it's an organization that values young people who can run around and swing hammers just as much as they value older people who are retired electricians who can totally just kill wiring a house.
27:01
So, volunteering is great. Younger people and older people like to use their time to do it. Oh, no. There's also, I think, the point of this section is that we could have more volunteers if we were able to be more welcoming to different age groups.
27:23
And I think it's integral to the success of the free software movement to have an unbroken chain of people coming in. So, we're going to talk about some of the solutions we like. We would like to see a movement where older people with experience can pass the torch
27:40
to younger generations while empowering them to actually make the movement their own. I want people to be able to ask each other for advice and for folks, you know, we don't need to put a small handful of older people on a pedestal and looking to them for advice or all kinds of different things that they might not even be expert in.
28:04
I'd like to see a situation where young people and old people can put their ideas out there and the idea is judged on its merits, not by the age of the person who floated the idea. So, that's kind of the vision there. So, there is some great stuff happening to get young people involved.
28:21
Penn Manor is a high school where kids help install software on the computers for the rest of the students. They also help do some of the hardware fixes. They're learning how to be like the help desk and all of these different things and they feel really part of the IT department at their school, which is really exciting.
28:47
OSU, that's Oregon State University, they have an open source laboratory. They host a lot of amazing free software projects on their servers, but students are training to be sysadmins and learning how to do DevOps type stuff through the school.
29:01
So, it's a really great place where they're teaching their students about the importance of giving back to the free and open source software community, but also giving them the actual specific skills to host a server to deal with emails and calls about outages and things like that. Can I interrupt a quick sec?
29:20
So, if you are a professor or a teacher, consider assigning projects where people can get involved in free software. This is next to you. Oh, it's more me. Okay, great. There are maker days. Some places have them. They're simple projects designed to be comfortable and welcoming and friendly and easy.
29:41
There are two particular organizations who don't necessarily host maker days, but have the idea of what maker days accomplish. One of them is like a summer camp after school program called Parts and Crafts, who've constructed these pretty simple kits based around interesting things in technology that they then send out to you and you can build them and play with them.
30:02
But all of their documentation is under the open documentation license, which means that they're also encouraging people to go and modify the documentation to kind of make notes about things that they did with it that were either difficult or exciting or new or how they changed it. Public Labs is a citizen science group that also designs tools,
30:23
and they also, you know, they're part of the Open Hardware Association, and they are also producing all of their documentation under an open documentation license to encourage people to, again, make these changes to share them to participate in these communities, like in these free technology communities, in pretty simple starting ways.
30:44
There's Scratch and Minecraft and maybe other things. I learned recently that I'm old now, too. I'm not an advanced worker, but I'm old, according to some statistics I read. So I don't know what the kids are doing these days. But, you know, there are these wonderful tools that are designed to be easy
31:03
and to introduce, oh, there's little bits. Little bits is also super cool. There are these tools designed to make getting involved in things and developing some kind of technical skills, or at least technical understandings about how things are put together and how technology works. Also, there are Kids' Days at Big FOSS conferences. Those are super cool.
31:25
I hear they're really fun. I don't think I'd be allowed to go to them unless I borrowed someone's child. No, no. SCALE has a day where kids actually give presentations, and I saw an adorable 10-minute presentation on how awesome open hatch is from someone who had to stand on something to be seen over the podium.
31:46
So that was pretty great. I'm so into it. If you already have this space, then why not set some space aside for kids, and then people can bring their kids instead of leave them at home.
32:01
Oh, yeah. So some great stuff that's happening to get older people involved. If people are not already familiar with Outreachy, it's pretty awesome. It's a paid internship to work on free and open source software, but it's not only for students. It's specifically for people from underrepresented groups like women and other minorities, but a lot of the people who take advantage of it are women who are returning to the workforce.
32:24
So it's very exciting. They're fundraising now because they're part of the conservancy with a match. They just kicked off a donation match supporter membership funding drive. I just threw too many words in there. So if you're not a member yet, you should become one. 150 people and they'll get a great match donation.
32:42
They're great. That's our plug. Opensource.com, which is a website that has articles and interviews about people working in free and open source software, they have a really diverse age pool of participation. It's great because writing is one of those things that it takes a little less time to get acclimated to doing than code,
33:06
so it's really great for people who have a little bit of time or don't want to do something technical but want to help. There are also a number of online resources that are designed to help you learn how to code. What's great about them, especially code academy, is it's not where it introduces you to some kind of technical concept
33:25
in the hopes that your beautiful, wonderful, creative mind will somehow make the leap to application, like how to think like a computer scientist does. So those are cool. Volunteering with community-run conferences is also really great. A lot of them have spaces for people to sit behind an information desk and hand out programs and talk about stuff.
33:45
And those are all on-ramps for becoming involved with a community. The key there is, the next batch of things, is to make sure that the language that you put out when you're looking for volunteers makes it clear that you're not only looking for young hipsters or something,
34:02
that you have lots of different types of activities. And that's the case with the things in this category. I'm sure people are familiar with these concepts, but these can be really great ways to bring in a diverse group of people from different ages and different backgrounds
34:23
if the language is correct and welcoming and you take out all the rock star stuff or we're going to hang out at this conference and never sleep and that type of thing. That doesn't mean you have to sleep. I'm a fan of sleep. But if you put out language and you think, huh, would I respond to that if I was 50 and then figure out why not?
34:48
You can also ask people if you're not sure how your language looks. Actually, in studies done with language in advertising for jobs and internship and mentorship programs, you get higher numbers of applicants who are in minority groups
35:04
once your language switches to things like mentorship and learning and community and groups and spaces for you to expand. When you have that kind of language as opposed to language like be a rock star, the number of applicants is just completely different. Right, so if you set the expectation, we'll bring you in and teach you as opposed to you should already be X, Y, Z sort of person.
35:26
So some stuff that we'd like to see happen is ways for kids to do non-code stuff. Like Scratch and Minecraft are cool, but I don't know, there must be nerdy children out there that want to do documentation maybe or something like that. That's the point of public labs and parts and crafts.
35:42
Oh, yeah. Which is awesome. And more places for older people to do non-code stuff. I think you had a point about this, that a lot of older people, once they're retired, they've been in the workforce, they know how to do accounting, they know how to do event work, they know how to do writing,
36:00
and they could do it for us in the free software movement. We just have to make sure they know that we want them to come over. There are plenty of people who leave work to have children. Some of them are mothers and some of them are fathers. And making the transition from being a stay-at-home parent to working full-time or even part-time is hard under the best circumstances.
36:25
As far as I can tell, I don't have children. Neither does Deb. You didn't need to know that about us. I'm sorry. And it's especially rough in technology, though, when you're looking at things that are moving forward that are changing pretty rapidly.
36:41
You know, if you have your experience from a few years ago when everybody was doing cool stuff with Java, and then suddenly everybody wants C Sharp programmers and you're just like, I don't even know what C Sharp is. Oh, youth and junior affinity groups within communities. There are a lot of good examples of this outside of technology.
37:01
Like there are young Republicans and young Democrats. There are youth groups within churches. So maybe we should have some more youth groups in free software. You had an idea? Oh, the Devettes. You wanted for the Debian. Yeah. I think that would be great. And all-ages events at conferences.
37:22
We're really bringing back this event thing again and again, and part of that is that events are really fun. And it's much easier to be excited about being involved in a community when you already like the people there and you have emotional investment in them. So one way this can look is when you have your social event at night, don't just go to a bar.
37:41
I mean, the bars are fun. And we're not saying don't go to a bar at all. The point is have other things that are going on as well. Maybe you want to have a game night or a game space next to another space, which is what Skel does, I believe. Yeah, Skel does. It starts out family-friendly game night, and then people kind of trickle in from the bar,
38:01
and then the kids go to bed, and it sort of switches over. And at one Deb Conf in Portland, the night started out with games, and then it later transitioned to all the adults just drinking lots of wine. And the key is to be clear. If it's going to be family-friendly, say so, so people know to bring their kids, and then if it's not, you also say so. So you can have two different kinds of events,
38:22
or you can have a mixed event or something like that. So making space is really important. We're running out of time. I'm going to talk a little more quickly. I'm sorry. Making space is really important. This doesn't just mean having places where people can be vulnerable and share that they don't understand things, but also to make spaces for people to move up or progress.
38:42
You need to be comfortable sitting down when someone else has the turn to stand up. And some ways to do this, you can have someone shadow you. And make sure that you're sort of spreading out your work and you have people who are always learning a piece of what you do if you're the senior person.
39:01
Having new people do keynotes is a great way to do that. And I had another thought, but I don't remember. So here's a call to action. Which means you should start to think about your questions. So we want you to find ways to bring people into your communities
39:20
and make them feel comfortable and to communicate what is awesome about your community for people of all different ages. So making sure that if you do actually want a full age spectrum of people that your language reflects that. And then when they do show up, make sure you empower these new folks
39:40
to become real decision-making members of your community who are truly empowered to participate and be involved in all aspects. So you have to give them access to important information, make sure they're invited to all the meetings, and that kind of thing. So that way you can just get out of their way and they'll bring in more new people. So this is how you avoid having it be tokenistic.
40:03
Real quick kind of anecdote on that is SPI recently added a member to their board who'd only been really involved with free software for I think about a year at that point. And she was just super enthusiastic. Cool. So you can tweet at us or other social platforms with that tag
40:22
or these are Twitter handles. And then we would be happy to take your questions. So thanks so much for listening.
40:40
Is that okay? It's Noss Chapel by the way. Can you speak a little louder? It's Noss Chapel by the way. And why should being a doctor be any better than being a Noss? Being a good Noss is fantastic. Oh, the Star Trek person you asked about. Oh, sorry. Anyway, I'm standing up and I'm cold. I don't look good in a T-shirt, right?
41:01
I came last night to the delirium tremens and the guy at the door quizzed me as if I was some fat Belgian bloke who was trying to wander into the delirium tremens and I had to prove my chops by talking about penguins. I came to a little conference called OSTEM 17 years ago. Me and 400 other people from Europe came to the original OSTEM conference.
41:21
People change, people get older and we don't all have beards and T-shirts and geckos on them, okay? Thank you for the, you don't need a beard PSA. Yeah, yeah. Maybe you ladies, no. You can get a knitted one on Etsy, I think, if you feel beardless. But great talk, fantastic talk, thank you.
41:42
Thank you. I guess I also have less of a question, but one of the things you mentioned, finding non-coded things for young people and older people to do, one of the things I found that has been super good
42:00
for both the youngest and the oldest is kind of explanation videos. People love making these videos where they teach people their age, how to do stuff or teach people in the older generations, younger than them in many cases, but for the young people, they love teaching their classmates and having videos explaining how to do stuff and those are super easy to get people to do
42:22
if you give them a video and as soon as they see a few people liking their thing, they'll do tons. And there was a question over there. It sounds like a great tool that a lot of projects could use, thanks. You said that you would say why 35 is important and I think I missed it because I didn't hear where 35 is important.
42:41
Oh yeah, so 35 is important as a demographic point because they separate people into older than 35 and younger, especially when looking at shopping, but the VC guy, he said that people over 35 don't have good ideas.
43:02
Lots of ideas. Are they good? Some of them. This one was a good one. Yeah, this was a great idea. Other questions? Oh, yes. Hi, great talk, thank you. I work at a tech company and on the diversity team and we often struggle with representation on panels,
43:23
so I did a quick count of the number of speakers at FOSTEM today that are men and the number of women. What is your advice in kind of inclusivity in terms of representation at events like this? So I think the key, the biggest thing that you can do to get a diverse representation on a panel
43:42
is to start really early. So if you ask the same four women that everyone asks to be on a panel on a particular topic, three weeks before that panel they're all going to be busy and say no. So if you have this idea that you want to have a panel and you want it to be diverse, then you need to be asking people a few months in advance,
44:01
so especially women who may have childcare duties and other things they have to jostle around before they can commit. You have to start early. It's a lot of, it's pretty heavily based on outreach, so you really have to be willing to go where people are. I don't know if you're talking about within the context of a company or a project, but part of that also might just be trying
44:22
to get more people working for it in general and thinking about recruitment strategies. One of the biggest things you can do is explicitly change your language, and not just focusing on things like mentorship or learning or growth, but also focusing on pretty explicitly stating, hey, this is our anti-discrimination policy.
44:41
Yeah, and if you do talk to someone who says, I'm busy, I can't do it, even though you asked me six months out, say, can you recommend someone up and coming that I might not be aware of who could participate on this panel? I have a great secret list, a semi-secret list of really awesome minority free and open source software speakers, so you could hit me up for it.
45:02
Cool. Hi. First of all, I'd like to say I agree with you on the whole. I think older people, like I think a lot about my mom, who's interested in free software, feel like they're being told that this is not really for them, and there is something quite subversive in telling them, actually, it is for you,
45:20
and you should not feel excluded from this, and you can understand it. A lot of older people are basically being told, and I agree with you on the whole. My question, however, is more about some stuff I've seen online, basically some sort of elitist, old school hacker, Eric Raymond crap,
45:41
that is telling us, oh yeah, but we're just going to try and get the special snowflakes in and dilute our elite skills. How do we go back against that? It's clearly quite stupid. We need more people. What's your advice about that? I want to make a really quick comment about your comment, which is my mother works in IT,
46:02
and she's like, oh, free software's in for me. It's too hard and complicated. I'm not sure I could use it. So I face this problem all the time. Yeah, so I think what you're kind of getting at is this, I think, sort of mythical idea that by making our communities more diverse,
46:21
we're somehow lowering the bar, which, I mean, one, I think that's false. It's really easy to create communities that are comfortable for the people who are already there, and it's a matter of figuring out, do you want more diverse participation? Then it means, you know, education is a really good example.
46:41
You talk to people, and they're like, oh yeah, so I invited teachers to come to our 8.30 p.m. meetings. Guess what? Teachers, at least in the U.S., they get up really, really early. It's not that they want special, hand-holdy treatment. It's that they're in bed. So a lot of times, it's something like that
47:00
that's not, that could be logistical, or it could be a language thing that's like, you know, if your company has mustache growing contests, then you're not going to have a ton of women applying. Not because they're like special snowflakes, but because they're like, yeah, that sounds like a bunch of man babies that I don't want to work with. Anyone who says to you that
47:24
your represented groups into your project is lowering the bar is actually just wrong. There's been, oh, I hear some clapping, yes. There have been studies on this, right? When you encourage women to take math classes,
47:41
they do better than men do on average, right? And when you encourage people of color to participate in academic fields that, when you're like, oh, they can't, you're like, oh, I'm sorry. There's specifically a thing about swimming that's an example here. There's this kind of like thing
48:00
where it's like black people can't swim. But it turns out that black swimmers do better than white swimmers frequently. So I think we have time for just one more. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for the inspiration, the recipes, the guidelines, and see-through. I can't find myself in all of those. I'm myself also involved in a couple of
48:24
public and social initiatives under the radar for the common good, et cetera, et cetera. Now, through the years, what bothered me is that, yeah, in the end, you have to find the kind of win-win situation
48:40
where you can find a balance between motivation and interest and at the end getting a product or service that is for the common good, because we are mainly here working on open source in this case. Now, did you come to sometimes the reflection
49:02
that despite all those recipes and guidelines, you cannot find every time systematically the right balance, the right match to get all the people involved that you would like to involve and engage, and that, yeah, at the end, you miss something
49:21
that you can find in the private sector, being paying people for work. It's a thought, and I don't have the answer myself, but it's a recurrent thought. I ask myself, okay, we're engaging all those people for producing something for the common good,
49:42
for everyone, in fact, I was assigned every work deserves compensation, but is it enough? We're actually out of time. I'm sorry. That is a very complicated answer, and if you want to talk about it later, I have some thoughts on it. Thank you again for coming,
50:02
and we look forward to working with you on building an all-ages fossil movement.