Last week I taught a class for Girl Develop It RDU to introduce Drupal to people who have never used it before.
It might not make sense without my brilliant explanations, but you can see my presentation here.
Category: Tech
community application of technology for public benefit
In which I fail to cheer for @Jack’s return to #Twitter
A lot of people (well certain people) have been fussing about Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey returning to the company as it’s new CEO. While I think he’ll easily be better than his predecessor Dick Costolo, I see no cause to celebrate.
The magic in Twitter has always been the connections between people and the ability to grow and connect communities of people. The Arab Spring is the most famous and impactful example of this, but “Black Twitter” is a more current illustration. It’s a large and decentralized community which is having a real impact on people’s lives through connection, cultural critique, and shining a light on police brutality via #BlackLivesMatter.
Today I followed a link posted by an old Twitter friend. It was a collection of reactions of “Twitter influencers” to Jack’s return. They were all white, a couple were my friends. Responses ranged from “we’ll see” to “Jack is my BFF.” There was not a single concern raised. It should come as no surprise that all of the white, male CEOs of Twitter were hired by a board which is itself nearly all white men (with the exception of a few Asian men and one very powerful woman).
Twitter has been making moves to try to compete with media companies (and Facebook) by pushing big news and events, memes that trend via their mysterious algorithm, and celebrity tweeters. This ground has been covered and there will always be someone who does that better than them. Twitter’s unique value proposition is the ability to find and directly connect with real people who you don’t already know but who add value to your life. To be a participant in a movement (whether it’s for democracy or your favorite TV show) rather than just a consumer. I have rarely seen Twitter’s corporate policies show that they understand or appreciate this value. In addition, their continuing lack of interest in doing anything serious about the pervasive abuse of women online further shows that they just don’t care about us, the users that give their platform meaning.
So I wrote a few tweets about this, but it’s hard to convey the complexity and the importance of this in 140 characters so I wanted to expand in this blog post. If you share my concerns, I’d appreciate a retweet or other show of solidarity.
Dear #BlackTwitter, I hope you are thinking abt other platforms & critical mass, Twitter's leadership does't understand or value community.
— Ruby of Manocide (@Ruby) October 21, 2015
This self-congratulatory collection of all-white "Twitter influencers" loving on @jack is just one case in point: https://t.co/cVjHdMqwsu
— Ruby of Manocide (@Ruby) October 21, 2015
Also to the many communities that have organized for democracy & freedom via Twitter. These ppl don't care abt you. https://t.co/AOYAH66Kfq
— Ruby of Manocide (@Ruby) October 21, 2015
NCT4G Unconference
We held another great NCTech4Good hybrid unconference last week. I especially appreciated the other organizers who displayed teamwork above and beyond the call of duty.
Here are a few fun pictures by other folks. You can find more at twitter.com/search?q=nct4g and learn more about it in my previous blog post.
NCTech4Good 2015 is upon us!
Facilitating the 2014 NCTech4Good Unconference
It’s been a little while since I posted about this, but I have been continuing to facilitate NCTech4Good’s hybrid unconference annually since 2011. Tomorrow is our 2015 event!
A lot of people still don’t know what “unconference” means, so I get excited about spreading the gospel. I never fail to have people who looked at me skeptically in the morning come up to me afterward to say how much they loved it and that they will suggest their own organization or community try unconferencing.
Please read my blog post I <3 Unconferences that explains the history and how they work. NCT4G is a simplified hybrid of traditional and “open space” (ie: unconference) event so I will explain our unique methodology here.
Before the conference:
- Organizers solicit session proposals, invite public voting, and, then hand-curate HALF of the day’s sessions leaving half of the rooms free.
- Speakers whose sessions are not selected are invited to attend and pitch their session at the beginning of the day.
At the conference:
- The classic “unconference grid” (see right) is pre-populated with cards from sessions that were already picked by the organizers. The grid lets us see which sessions are in which rooms and at what times.
- Anyone who is interested in convening a session as well as everyone who is already on the grid stands up in front of the group and gives a 30-60 second pitch for their topic. This needn’t be an organized presentation, although Powerpoints are welcome and projectors are available, but can be any form of panel, talk, conversation, demo, Q & A, or even a code sprint!
- Cards for new sessions are added to The Grid, and then we work out any conflicts or special requirements, and Voila! We have a schedule.
As you can tell, I am very skeptical of the whole idea of messing with unconference process, and I wasn’t completely sure it would work at first. But it has a resounding success for several years in a row and everyone came away satisfied. This year we’ll be doing the same and I expect it to go even better. If you are in central North Carolina, I hope to see you there!
Network in nature
If you’ve ever heard me talk about network-centric strategy, then you’ll appreciate this:
Thanks to the always-inspirational Evonne Heyning for sharing this.
Girl, Develop WordPress!
In the past year I’ve been getting involved with my local chapter of a wonderful organization called Girl Develop It. They host social/networking events as well as programming classes. At their Code & Coffee I have found help for a sticky Javascript problem, gotten career tips, and helped others learn more about open source software. I took their Git class a few months ago, and now I use it at work every day! So when they asked me to lead a class for GDI RDU I was honored and happy to help.
This weekend I will be teaching a class on advanced WordPress Theming. Fortunately, I am able to utilize the wonderful curriculum developed by Tracy Levesque. So after thoroughly reviewing and slightly updating the slides (and making sure all the software on my own site was up to date, oops) I am ready to go!
If you want to follow along, I’ve posted the presentation here.
A great day at WordCamp Raleigh
I usually enjoy small tech conferences, but I was still surprised at what a good experience I had at WordCamp Raleigh today. It started out on a great note when I checked in and learned that they had t-shirts in women’s sizes as well as the ubiquitous “unisex.” This really made me feel like I belonged, even though I only knew about a half-dozen people there.
Most of the sessions were either a little beyond my abilities or a little elementary for me, but I still got something out of every one. A few times I followed the unconference Rule of Two Feet and moved to a different session. I especially appreciated the speakers that shared URLs for their presentations at the start so that I could follow along easily from my tablet.
Here are some of the great talks I saw today:
- After hearing about Angular so many times, I was excited to see Angling Angular presented by Will Haley. Not only was this really practical and informative, Will also ate his own dogfood by doing the presentation with a web app that he made with Angular. This was one of those talks that really stretched my knowledge, and was great for me as a front-end developer.
- I’ll admit that I went to the session on SEO Strategy because there wasn’t anything else really catching my eye in that timeslot. But I actually found a few helpful tips and learned the rationales behind a lot of tactics that I already follow instinctively, like posting frequently, meaningfully linking within a site, and only using pay-per-click for short, time-sensitive campaigns. Most importantly, we learned to Keep Google Happy. 😉
- I’ve gotten to know Melissa Eggleston recently though the local Girl Develop It meetup. Her talk was filled with interesting facts and actionable lessons about how users really interact with websites. I highly recommend checking out What We Know About Website Users.
- I almost missed Dee Teal’s incredibly useful talk on WordPress Site Maintenance due to the overly cute session title “Responsible [digital] Home Ownership.” She covered many areas of site security that are really important and so often overlooked.
- Even better was “Using Data to Power the User Experience” (another poorly-titled session) which was full of smart strategy and practical ways to take advantage of the tracking that Google Analytics is already doing for free.
- CMB2: The Metabox Strikes Back was all about a tool that I will probably never use, but gave me good context for working with WordPress hooks, and was peppered with enjoyable Star Wars references.
- The talk on optimizing site perfomance was close to my heart and covered familiar ground, having struggled with a complex Drupal site on Acquia’s servers for years when I worked at HASTAC. However, the presentation was actually only about optimizing server performance, which is something I would rather leave up to the sysadmins, and didn’t have any WordPress-specific advice.
- Finally, I attended a demonstration of Roots, which is like a theme framework on steroids. This was another tool that I can’t see using any time soon, but learning about how it works provided a lot of insight into advanced theming issues, in which I am certainly very interested.
I’m looking forward to returning to Raleigh tomorrow for another fun day of learning with and from my fellow geeks.
UPDATE: None of the presenters I saw on the second day had made their slides available online, but they claim they are coming soon to the Wordcamp site.
HASTAC Features
I’m very proud of some work I’ve been doing on the Drupal site that I manage at work. Here’s a blog post I wrote about some of the newest features:
Today I am excited to officially launch several new features on the HASTAC web site, including Collections, Similar Content, Knowledge Base, and more. I think these additions will do a lot to help people connect with and utilize the rich and deep content of the site.
Collections (beta!)
The culmination of two months of very hard work, HASTAC Collections is a beta feature of our site that brings together content from across the site in a hand-curated list of posts which can be viewed in a large tiled display (at right), or in a multifunction list view (below left). Collections are not limited to highlighting hastac.org content, links to other sites are highlighted with yellow buttons. When viewing as a list, users can sort and filter the collection by type of content, topics and tags, and keywords in the title or body.
I invite you to check out our two inaugural collections, Digital Badges and MOOC HQ, and look for more soon. The staff are using and testing this feature now, and we hope to be able to expand it to more HASTAC members later this year. (It will require additional programming and may even result in a new module that we can contribute back to the Drupal community. As a result it will take considerable time.)
Visitors can browse our Collections by visiting the Topics landng page.
Similar Content
When looking at any content on the site you will now see a list of posts that may be about similar topics. It is generated by an algorithm based on the title, tags, and topics of the post. (See example at right.) If your post doesn’t seem to be generating revelant content, try adding more tags. These are the best way to tell the site what you are talking about and to properly connect related ideas.
Knowledge Base
The Help pages of our site have been in place since 2011, but don’t get much attention. We have now moved them into a proper knowledge page, and added a Frequently Asked Questions section. You can also use the Contact Support link there to create a ticket when you need personal assistance. This is being combined with our existing site feedback tool (see tab in lower right of your browser) which allows users to suggest and vote on improvements for the site.
Other goodies
I have also uncovered or enabled a few other goodies on the site that members might enjoy.
- Get Random is a button you can find on the Recent Content page (linked to from the Recent Content column on the front page) that will let you trip back through 9 years of HASTAC community content, 20 randomly-selected posts at a time.
- Two great ways to see what’s happening on HASTAC right now are the Tracker (a list of content sorted by latest comments and newest publication) and the Heartbeat (a stream of activity including new posts, comments, relationships, and users).
- The site-wide Tag Cloud is exactly what it sounds like!
I hope you enjoy all these new features. If you have more ideas for improving the site (and I know you do) please fill out our Usability Survey (it only takes 5 minutes) and post your suggestions in our Feedback forum. Thanks for your engagement, it’s what makes HASTAC great.
Joi Ito rallies the troops to a maker revolution at MozFest
I just finished attending the fantastic 2012 Mozilla Festival. I got inspired and wrote a blog post about it for work at http://hastac.org/blogs/ruby-sinreich/2012/11/12/collaborative-documentation-mozfest-including-joi-itos-call-maker-rev and cross-posted below.
MozFest might be the first physical event that I’ve attended that used Lanyrd.com. (I’ve seen it used for online events in the past.) It looks like about half of the 1,000 registrants (and all of the speakers) also signed up on the MozFest Lanyrd site, which makes it not the most efficent directory in terms of finding people.
But where Lanyard was truly essential was displaying a grid of the conference sessions. The MozFest site itself did list sessions, but simple as a textual list on one page which made it very difficult to understand the unusual “organic” schedule. Given that sessions were different lengths with a verity of starting and ending times and that there was no printed program available, the temporal grid was the only way to understand what was going on.
But now that the event is over, Lanyrd shines even more with a feature I hadn’t seen before. Any participant can contribute “coverage” of a session to the site in the form of notes, links, pictures, slides, videos and more. We were frequently reminded via Twitter to contribute, and the reult is this page chock-full of great reources with which to follow-up: http://lanyrd.com/2012/mozilla-festival/coverage/
In that coverage, especially recommend checking out the brief and inspiring keynote by MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito from Sunday morning, in which he reminded us that we’re all “a bunch of fucking weirdos” for wanting to be makers in any degree, but that makers are changing the world’s culture. He compared his own frustrating experience with formal education to his sister‘s success. Clearly they are both brilliant, but even among siblings great minds don’t always fit into neat academic boxes.
Citing a conversation with the great activist/thinker/lawyer Lawrence Lessig, Ito said “You don’t win by changing the world’s laws. You win by changing the world’s culture.” Whether you think of yourself an activist or not, “Understand that what you are doing is political. It will disrupt the system. Embrace it with your fist in the air” says Ito. Or, to put to put Joi Ito’s 21st century vision in 19th century verse, here’s Arthur O’Shaughnessy (by way of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka, I’ll admit):
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Photo credit: Paul Clarke
Debate fun
I don’t think I could sit through the canned B.S. that are American political debates without the deep insight and cutting snark of my friends on Twitter. So I Storified my favorite bits: