However, there are unknowns that haunt me. Who has tried to contribute to Koha or Evergreen, only to be turned away by an knee-jerk “RTFM” or simply silence? Who might have been interested, only to rightly judge that they didn’t have time for the flack they’d get? Who never got a chance to go to a Code4Lib conference while her male colleague’s funding request got approved three\u00a0years in a row?<\/p>\n
What have we lost? How many lines of code, pages of documentation, hours of help have\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>gone into the tools that help us help our patrons?<\/p>\n The ideals of free and open source software projects are necessary, but they’re not sufficient to ensure equal access and participation.<\/p>\n The Ada Initiative<\/a> can help. It was formed to support\u00a0women in open technology and culture, and runs workshops, assists communities in setting up and enforcing codes of conduct, and promotes ensuring that women have access to positions of influence in open culture projects.<\/p>\n Why is the Ada Initiative’s work important to me? For many reasons, but I’ll mention three. First, because making sure that everybody who\u00a0wants\u00a0to work and play in the field of open technology has a real choice to do so is only fair. Second, because open source projects that are truly welcoming to women are much more likely to be welcoming to everybody \u2013 and happier, because of the effort spent on taking care of the community. Third, because I know that I don’t know everything \u2013 or all that much, really \u2013 and I\u00a0need<\/em> exposure to multiple points of view to be effective building tools for libraries.<\/p>\n Right now, folks in the library and archives communities are banding together to raise money for the Ada Initiative. I’ve donated, and I encourage others to do the same. Even better, several folks, including Bess Sadler<\/a>,\u00a0Andromeda Yelton<\/a>, Chris Bourg<\/a>, and\u00a0Mark Matienzo<\/a>\u00a0are providing matching donations up to a total of $5,120.<\/p>\n Go ahead, make a donation by clicking below, then come back. I’ll wait.<\/p>\n Money talks \u2013 but whether any given open source community is welcoming, both of new people and of new ideas, depends on its current members.<\/p>\n Therefore, I would also like to extend a challenge to men (including myself — accountability matters!) working in open source software projects in libraries. It’s a simple challenge, summarized in a few words: “listen, look, lift up, and learn.”<\/p>\n Listen<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/em>Listening is\u00a0hard.<\/em>\u00a0 A coder in a library open source project has to listen to other coders, to librarians, to users \u2013 and it is all too easy to ignore or dismiss approaches that are unfamiliar. \u00a0It can be very difficult to learn that something you’ve poured a lot of effort into may not work well for librarians \u2013 and it can be even harder to hear that your are stepping on somebody’s toes or thoughtlessly stomping on their ideas.<\/p>\n What to do? Pay attention to how you communicate while handling bugs and project correspondence. Do you prioritize bugs filed by men? Do you have a subtle tendency to think to yourself, “oh, she’s just not seeing the obvious thing right in front of her!” if a women asks a question on the mailing list about functionality she’s having trouble with? If so, make an effort to be even-handed.<\/p>\n Are you receiving criticism? Count to ten, let your hackles down, and try to look at it from your critic’s point of view.<\/p>\n Be careful about nitpicking. \u00a0Many a good idea has died after too much bikeshedding \u2013 and while that happens to everybody, I have a gut feeling that it’s more likely to happen if the idea is proposed by a woman.<\/p>\n Is a women colleague confiding in you about concerns she has with community or workplace dynamics? Listen.<\/p>\n Look<\/strong>.<\/em> Look around you — around your office, the forums, the IRC channels, and Stack Exchanges you frequent. Do you mostly see men who look like yourself? \u00a0If so, do what you can to broaden your perspective and your employer’s perspective. Do you have hiring authority? Do you participate in interview panels? You can help who surrounds you.<\/p>\n Remember\u00a0that I’m talking about library technology here — even if the 70% of the\u00a0employees of the library you work for are women, if the systems department only employs men, you’re missing other points of view.<\/p>\n Do you have no hiring authority whatsoever? Look around the open source communities you participate in. Are there proportionally far more men participating openly than the gender ratio in librarianship as a whole? \u00a0If so, you can help change that by how you choose to participate in the community.<\/p>\n Lift up<\/strong>.\u00a0<\/em>This can take many forms. \u00a0In some cases, you can help lift up women in library technology by getting out of the way \u2013 in other words, by removing or not supporting barriers to participation such as sexist language on the mailing list or by calling out exclusionary\u00a0behavior by other men (or yourself!).<\/p>\n Sometimes, you can offer active assistance \u2013 but ask first! Perhaps a woman is ready to assume a project leadership role or is ready to grow into it. Encourage her \u2013 and be ready to support her publicly. Or perhaps you may have an opportunity to mentor a student \u2013 go for it, but know that mentoring is hard work.<\/p>\n But note — I’m not an authority on ways to support women in technology. \u00a0One of the things that the Ada Initiative does is run Ally Skills workshops<\/a> that teach simple techniques for supporting women in the workplace and online. \u00a0In fact, if you’re coming to Atlanta this October for the DLF Forum,\u00a0one is being offered there<\/a>.<\/p>\n Learn<\/em><\/strong>. Something I’m still learning is just the sheer amount of crap that women in technology put up with. Have you ever gotten a death threat or a rape threat for something you said online about the software industry? If you’re a guy, probably not. If you’re Anita Sarkeesian or Quinn Norton, it’s a different story entirely.<\/p>\n If you’re thinking to yourself that “we’re librarians, not\u00a0gamers, and nobody has ever gotten a death threat during a professional dispute with the possible exception of the MARC format” \u2013 that’s not good enough.\u00a0Or if you think that no librarian has ever harassed another over gender \u2013 that\u2019s simply not true. It doesn’t take a death threat to convince a women that library technology is too hostile for her; a long string of micro-aggressions can suffice. Do you think that librarians are too progressive or simply too darn nice for harassment to be an issue? Read\u00a0Ingrid Henny Abrams’\u00a0posts<\/a> about the results<\/a> of her survey on code of conduct violations at ALA.<\/p>\n This is why the Ada Initiative’s anti-harassment work is so important \u2013 and to learn more, including links to sample policies, a good starting point is their own conference policies page<\/a>. (Which, by the way, was quite useful when the Evergreen Project adopted its own code of conduct). Another good starting point is the Geek Feminism wiki<\/a>.<\/p>\n And, of course, you could do worse than to go to one of the ally skills workshops.<\/p>\n If you choose to take up the challenge, make a note to come back in a year and write down what you’ve learned, what you’ve listened to and seen, and how you’ve helped to lift up others. It doesn’t have to be public \u2013 though that would be nice \u2013 but the important thing is to be mindful.<\/p>\n Finally, don’t just take my word for it \u2013 remember that I’m not\u00a0an authority on supporting women in technology. Listen to the women who are.<\/p>\n![\"Donate](\"https:\/\/adainitiative.org\/counters\/2014counter-libraries.svg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nUpdate: other #libs4ada posts<\/h4>\n
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