1000 Postcodes Freed

Currently, if you want to find out where a postcode refers to, you have to pay for access to the database owned by the Post Office, or use a service that pays for it and comes with various restrictions. Free The Postcode are linking postcodes with latitude/longitude and making this information publically available. The data could be used for, say, compiling maps of free events, or searching Open Street Map by postcode. In the past couple days, my bloke and I have input about a dozen postcodes, along with gps readings, and with our most recent batch we’ve just pushed the number of postcodes in their database over 1000!

Silver Linings

It’s just taken me four hours to complete what should have been a one hour drive. This was caused by traffic jams, roadworks, accidents happening right next to me, major accidents happening on the road I’d intended to use and traffic jams caused by people avoiding traffic jams. I did the entire journey between Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent without using motorway. In short, my afternoon sucked. However, I had my other half’s GPS with me and logging, so with any luck, Open Street Map will have some lovely new tracks of places that have never been mapped by them before. Of course, it would be just typical of today if I got all the logs uploaded and discovered it ran out of memory half a mile down the road and didn’t capture any of the interesting bits.

Subtle Advocacy

In my experience one of the best ways to advocate Free software is to do it subtly. If you bang on about it all the time, people get bored. If you pick the right moment to drop the right comment into the right conversation, you can gain ground quite easily, even if it’s only a tiny bit at a time.

Earlier this week, I wandered into the office to the sounds of a conversation about Skype and VoIP. One of the hobbits is thinking about setting up his own system at home. I spy an opportunity! “Have you looked at Trixbox?” say I. One url later, and he’s considering using Free software. I’d say that’s a square inch conquered. If he decides to go with it, I’ll be claiming a square foot.

Manpower, or even womanpower

Sometimes, when people decide they should do something about the situation, they attack it from completely the wrong side. They start attacking percieved symptoms, instead of the root cause. They overcompensate in areas that are meaningless.

The English language is littered with words based on the word “man”. They refer to “man” as in “human” rather than “man” as in “bloke” – manpower, chairman, man hours, mankind. Every now and then, someone, almost always male, tries to suggest that we should change all these words and have feminine variants (chairwoman, postwoman, womankind…) or they amend themselves in conversation “Hello guys…and Jen.”

This annoys me for two reasons. Firstly, the words themselves are not the problem, so all it would achieve is making conversation more cumbersome and awkward. Secondly, whether a person in a particular role happens to be male or female is almost always irrelevant, so why bother drawing attention to it? Can’t we just accept that all those words refer to human and get on with more important things?

Title of a Blog post about an Email about a Podcast about a Podcast

Some of the members of the LUGRadio community have made a podcast of their own, called hashlugradio. The thing that’s amusing me even more than the extreme meta-ness of this post is that this is one of those moments of clarity when you suddenly see what’s going on around you. There are 496 members of the forum who have posted more than once. There are currently 102 accounts logged into #lugradio. LRL was a big enough success that LRL06 was viable, and bigger and better, and there are already the beginnings of plans for LRL07. There are active members of the community as far flung as America and Singapore. And now there is a return to the roots of the community, with the creation of a podcast.

All too often the world seems set up to tell us that we ordinary people don’t matter, and that we little folk can do nothing to change the world. Here is proof that it just isn’t true. A bunch of mates in someone’s spare bedroom have created a community across the world. In between the cool technology and the bling and the legal issues and the philosophy, the Free Software world is full of such examples of ordinary people having an extraordinary effect on the world around them. We should take more time to notice them.

OpenHelp

The idea behind OpenHelp is that it’s very difficult to take that first tentative step into the FLOSS community. You’ve picked up/been given a CD, you want to try it out, and something just doesn’t quite work. Where do you go for help?

Google? You’ll get loads of confusing information that may or may not be relevant, but you just can’t decipher enough to figure it out.

Forums? They’ll tell you to RTFM, or send you to the stuff you found and failed to understandwhen googling.

IRC? You’ll be lucky to find somewhere that isn’t either so quiet nobody answers anything or so busy you can’t follow what’s going on.

Mailing list? If you can find the right one, and if there’s enough subscribers to even notice your question, they’ll probably tell you to search the logs, and you’re back at square one.

Local LUG? Well, if there is one, and if it’s populated by friendly, helpful people who go out of their way to welcome new people, then you’re very lucky. You’re even more lucky if one of those people happens to be able to help with the problem you’re having.

And, of course, all this assumes you know what question you should be asking in the first place. All too often it’s tricky to figure out which bit isn’t working. If you can’t play an mp3, how do you work out if it’s codecs, the player, ALSA, the sound card, the speakers, some settings somewhere?

So here’s where OpenHelp comes in. If we can get it up and running, and if we can get some serious support, it will be a single place where people new to the community can ask any free software related question they like, and get a sensible, helpful answer, written in English rather than Geek. We’ve got loads of ideas going on about how to set it up and how to get it moving. I will be posting more about it and about how to get involved soon.

I can’t imagine a girl hobbit

For some reason that predates me and has never been explained, in our company techies are known as hobbits and we, the admin staff, are known as pixies. We’re currently recruiting hobbits, and had one potential who was female. My boss’s comment was “I can’t imagine a girl hobbit.” I considered myself very restrained by not rising to the bait and just calmly stating that I knew loads of them. I can’t quite decide if I was more annoyed by the fact it was said (and meant), or by the fact that it was said by a woman.

Women In Open Source

This blog came into being because of the Women In Open Source talk I did with Kat and Phated at LUGRadio Live the other week. So, I thought I should probably start it with something about that talk.

The main aims of the talk were to highlight the rather shocking statistic that, according to FLOSSPOLLS, only 1.5% of Open Source Contributors are women, and to get people to think about things. The fact that the gap isn’t nearly so broad in proprietary software (28% women) suggests that technology or ability that are not the (only?) problems, but it’s something fundamental in the difference between the two. What makes propreitary software and Free software different, in terms of getting involved in them, is the community surrounding them. The Free Software community is excluding women.

While it’s interesting to look at the situation objectively and try to figure out why it’s happening, I’ve no interest in pointing fingers or throwing around blame, because it won’t solve anything, and besides, I don’t believe there is anything deliberate or truely mysogynistic about what’s going on. I think it’s a general lack of regard for new members of the community coupled with and exacerbated by fundamental differences between men and women. All too often when someone goes looking for help, they get told RTFM, or that they’re asking the wrong question, or that they need to learn how to ask a question before anyone will deign to answer them. While it’s good for people to learn how to ask questions, if they’re not given a chance, they’ll never try. Besides, some people will never learn that particular skill, and I don’t think we should be excluding them from the community completely, unless we want to be known as elitist.

Women tend to be less confident and less capable of putting themselves forward than men, especially in an area which is male dominated. I’ll no doubt blog about the whys and wherefores of that another time, but it does seem to be true, and it explains part of why more women than men are put off by the poor response to requests for help. Add in that the poor response can be easily misinterpretted as the men being patronising and basically telling the women that they shouldn’t get involved with things they don’t understand. Then add in the common responses to a woman turning up at a LUG meet or similar – lewd comments, assumptions of low technical ability, a room full of quiet guys unable to speak to her. This kind of thing doesn’t have to come from everybody in the community, just a small number can ruin the good efforts of everybody else.

I’m still amazed by the response the talk got – I had people from all corners of the event wanting to talk to me about it, and so did Kat and Phated. Just about every conversation I had for the rest of the day related back to the talk, and all of them gave me something new to think about. There is only one part of my thinking that hasn’t changed significantly since agreeing to do the talk, but has been considerably reaffirmed: why the situation the descrepancy exists is fascinating, but the more important question is how can we improve things?