code4libbin’
Apropos of yesterday’s snide hit at the exclusively-male makeup of the upcoming code4libcon’s planning committee, Kevin Clarke invited me to hang out on code4lib’s IRC channel.
O ye geeks, mark well: Kevin didn’t get mad, even though I was snide—he got even. It is a tactic worth considering, in the endless comp-sci gender wars.
So I did pop on for an hour or so last night. And I’ll be back. Often. And not just because there is much to be learned.
I caught just the tail-end of a spirited discussion about Evergreen, the open-source ILS, but I expect I’ll hear more; Evergreen’s developers hang out there.
And then, Kevin recognized my nick and welcomed me. Several other participants, very prominent people, also recognized me (which I found rather shocking—why do these people know who I am?) and were as gracious as gracious could be.
This shouldn’t be noteworthy. Truly, it shouldn’t. All the code4lib folks did was act like the friendly, courteous adults they are. Why should I have expected anything different?
(Well, because I’ve heard and read the horror stories, been in the backwash of one or two myself, and read a fair bit of the literature about women in academic comp sci. If you’re a woman, you dip your toe carefully into the waters of code-dom; Here There Bee Dragons. Nobody should be surprised that open-source software has fewer female developers than commercial. In a work context, even the most misogynistic and unsocialized have external compulsion not to act like Neanderthals. No such pressure exists in the open-source context, especially in the marquee projects with hordes of coders. Women who want to code OSS are in my opinion well-advised to work on small or niche projects.)
I should like to see some of the researchers who look into gender in computer science turn their lenses on systems librarianship. The results might be surprising—and encouraging. And as I said over at Meredith’s, one way librarianship could beef up its coder population quickly would be to recruit from the pipeline of women leaving the toxic swamp that is academic computer science in most places. I’m so convinced of this that I’m going to start working it into the conversation with folks I know in library education.
Anyway, I am happy to have tapped into the library-coder hivemind in this fashion, wholeheartedly recommend that library coders of all genders do likewise—and perhaps by the time code4libcon 2007 rolls around, I’ll have something meaningful to contribute. I was inspired enough by the conversation to start mapping out how an image-gallery plugin for DSpace would work today…