Smarterware

Designers, Women, and Hostility in Open Source

After working in technology for 17 years now, I can assure you: constantly being the only woman in the room stinks. Since I usually am, one of my career goals is to surround myself with capable women technologists as well as men. It's not easy, but it's important—and not just because I'm lonely, but because I make stuff, and creations reflect their makers. The tech industry is by and large a boys' club, and that's a shame, because homogenous teams turn out one-dimensional products. Diverse teams are better-equipped to make things that shine because they serve a wide range of people. (Related: The Case Against Drop-down Identities.)

At Lifehacker, my original vision was to create a new kind of tech blog, one that wasn't yet another "boys worshipping tech toys" site, one that was helpful, friendly, and welcoming versus snarky, sensational, and cutting. (That was no small task in the Gawker-verse, and I learned much in the process.) Today at ThinkUp, I have a similar goal. We encourage contributions not only by women, but open source newbies and non-usual suspects of all stripes: designers, user experience experts, writers, students, and enthusiastic users. We explicitly identify inclusiveness as one of the best characteristics of our small, up-and-coming community. Still, uptake is slow, the on-ramp steep, and for me, it constantly begs the question: what we can do better?

That's why an essay by UX designer Vitorio Miliano, Designers and Women in Open Source, caught my eye. Miliano theorizes that there aren't many designers in the open source world for the same reasons there aren't many women: because open source communities alienate non-coders and newbies by design. He writes:

I believe the problems with open source not being able to handle non-programmers in their projects is the same problem as the rampant sexism: open source culture is not feminist. Feminism is fundamentally about equality for everyone, not just women, and designers of any gender are just as alienated as women programmers, because it’s not an equally welcoming environment. There’s no perceived value in open source for mentoring, facilitation, disciplining of unruly users, training of newcomers or non-technical users, etc., which are needed to support both designers of any gender and women in any role.

That's a punch in the gut for OSS leaders who work hard, often in their spare time, to create a democratic process and collaborative workflow for total strangers located around the world to create something as complex and technical as software. (Especially those of us who identify as feminists.)

But Miliano's right. And as far as I can see, it's up to OSS leaders to work even harder to redesign their communities to encourage diversity instead of prevent it. Because it helps me to think aloud and write things out, here are some approaches we've implemented, discussed, or are considering at ThinkUp.

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ThinkUp’s iPad 2 Bounty

I don't have any experience with open source bounties, but I'm about to get some thanks to my employer, Expert Labs. We're offering some special motivation to ThinkUp contributors as we work our way to ThinkUp's 1.0 release: Get a wow-worthy contribution accepted into ThinkUp and earn yourself a brand new iPad 2 on top of "I made a great open source project better" bragging rights. 

Expert Labs is offering a new iPad 2 (16GB, Wi-Fi only) to a community member who makes a significant contribution in the next month and a half. Here's how it will work:

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The Case Against Drop-down Identities

Human beings and their relationships are complex and nuanced, so the software that attempts to describe them must accomodate a wide range of expression. Last night, Google rolled out an update to the Google Profiles product, which I've promoted for for almost 2 years. The revamp is surely part of a larger movement at Google to add more people-centric social features to search and beyond.

In the new Google Profiles, I like that you can enter more information about yourself: work history, "words that describe you," brag-worthy facts, gender, relationship status. What I don't like is that a few of these fields have a limited range of possible values, defined in a drop-down list. Before I realized this was worthy of a full blog post, I had a bit of a rant about it last night, which went like this.

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Code and Community: A Year in Numbers

One year ago today, ThinkUp's first official release, alpha 1, quietly became available. I'd been building the app mostly solo during my spare time since August of 2009, but when Expert Labs took on the project in February of 2010, things got really fun. Here are a few representative numbers on how ThinkUp's first year of releases went.

In terms of ThinkUp's codebase, in the past year:

• The source code changed 664 times, an average of about 1.8 commits per day. ¹
• 1,002 out of about 5,500 ² files in ThinkUp's codebase changed: specifically, there were 165,583 lines added and 29,904 lines deleted. ³
• ThinkUp had 16 releases: 8 alpha releases from February of 2010 until September, and 8 beta releases from September 2010 to February of 2011, which is an average of 1.3 releases per month.
• ThinkUp releases and related plugins have been downloaded almost 11,000 times. ⁴
• ThinkUp's automated test coverage skyrocketed to 3,485 passing tests.
• Out of 648 items in ThinkUp's issue tracker, 94 are open, and 554 are closed.
• ThinkUp has spawned two separate open source software projects which it uses: the GitHub pull request email bot by Sam Rose, and Mark Wilkie's Fixture Builder library.

Source code is one thing, but ThinkUp's best feature is its community. In the past year:

• 26 programmers made changes to ThinkUp's codebase. ⁵
• 42 community members helped write ThinkUp's documentation. ⁶
• The project's main hub, the ThinkUp general mailing list, grew to 483 subscribers.
• Community members discussed about 510 topics (not including replies) on that mailing list, an average of about 9.8 conversations per week.
• Of those 510 discussion threads, there were a total of 0 flame wars.
• On Twitter, @thinkupapp gained 2,944 followers. On Facebook, 143 people "liked" ThinkUp's page.
• Community members established the #thinkup IRC channel, in which developers and users are available to chat in realtime almost around the clock.
• Two episodes of the community-run ThinkUp podcast have been broadcast.
• Just this month, we established a brand new developer-specific ThinkUp mailing list. So far it has 24 subscribers and lots of high-quality, technical discussion.

We've also had some incredible users beta-test the ThinkUp application in the past year, from civic and government organizations to Hollywood celebrities and tech journalists. Take a look at the the White House's ThinkUp, Code for America's ThinkUp, Steve Martin's ThinkUp, Wil Wheaton's ThinkUp, and Leo Laporte's ThinkUp. (Are you running ThinkUp? Post a link to your installation in the comments.)

Building software and community around ThinkUp has been one of the most gratifying "jobs" I've ever had. Here's to an even better second year of ThinkUp releases.

1. At first ThinkUp's commit log was busier and messier than it should have been because we weren't "squashing" related commits into a single patch. Later in the year, when the community defined our git/GitHub process, the commit log became much cleaner, and commits to the master branch increased in quality but decreased in quantity. ↩
2. Counted using the command $ find "thinkup/" \! -name ".*" | wc -l ↩
3. Lines of code and number of commits are not indicators of software quality, but they are indicators of project activity. ↩
4. We're not tracking individual ThinkUp installations yet. This number is a total of GitHub's download counts. ↩
5. As per GitHub's comparison of alpha 1 and beta 8.1. ↩
6. Give or take a few authors due to multiple email addresses/GitHub accounts. ↩

Cross-posted to the Expert Labs blog.

Todo.txt Touch Now in the Android Market

My new Android app Todo.txt Touch is now available in the Android Market. Search for "Todo.txt" in the Market, or scan the QR code below on your Android device to get it. The latest release 14 includes a gaggle of bugfixes, a couple of new features, and our gorgeous new project icon that looks great on any screen resolution courtesy of John Rowley.

You saw the full screenshot tour last week. The biggest feature addition in this release is standard Android-style task search: tap your device's search button to try that out. The prettiest bugfix is our new login splash screen, shown here, which appears when you initially launch the app or log out of Dropbox.

Todo.txt Touch will always be free to download on the web, but it costs $2.00 USD in the Android Market. Your two bucks buys you two things:

1. The convenience of auto-updates to the app via the Market;
2. Good karma and the satisfaction of knowing you've supported the whole Todo.txt project.

Don't underestimate #1. That convenience will be worth it, I promise. There are tons of interesting ideas and features we hope to build into this app, and updates will come frequently. You don't want to have to do it manually.

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Todo.txt Touch for Android Now Available to Test

My first Android app, Todo.txt Touch, manages your todo.txt file stored at Dropbox—and it's now available for beta-testing. Before it hits the Android Market, there are some issues to be ironed out, but in the meantime, you can download an early apk to give it a try on your Android handset.

Todo.txt Touch is a companion app to Todo.txt CLI, a command line task manager that adds, updates, prioritizes and completes items on your todo.txt list in the terminal. It supports task priority, projects, contexts, and an archive of completed items. Once you store your todo.txt file at Dropbox, you can update it at your desk in the terminal, on your Android device using this app, or using any text editor anywhere and all the changes sync to your devices automatically. Eventually we hope to support other cloud sources, like perhaps Simplenote.

Here are some screenshots of Todo.txt Touch in its current state in action. Click any image to enlarge it.

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WhereDoYouGo Heatmaps Foursquare Check-ins

At the end of the year, it's always fun to look back at the places you've gone and things you've done in the past 12 months, and if you log your comings and goings with apps like Foursquare or Twitter, doing that year in review is even easier. Today I stumbled on Where Do You Go, a Google Maps mashup that generates a heat map of your Foursquare check-ins, and lets you take a snapshot of a city and publish it. Here's my NYC heat map.

To use Where Do You go, you've got to log in with your Google Account and authorize it to index your Foursquare check-ins, which gave me pause, since I keep my Foursquare history private. But, the app doesn't publish check-in details, just your past whereabouts in aggregate. You can delete all your data from the app if you want to just try it and bail. If you keep your account, the map updates with each new check-in, but only displays check-ins which are more than 24 hours old for privacy reasons. It's fun to see what areas of different cities you favor most--apparently I rarely travel above 34th street in Manhattan--and it can give you even more motivation to visit areas you normally don't, even in your home city. Someday I hope to get a similar heatmap view in ThinkUp for posts from Twitter and Facebook, too.