I've always loved maps. There's a 'joke' about a certain kind of kid swallowing the dictionary. I wasn't ever that kid. Nope, I was the kid who read the atlas instead. We actually had one, which attentive readers will perhaps understand was something of a win.
Atlases, and a love of maps, all kinds of maps, playing with maps, drawing maps, interacting with maps is something that I used to be a little bit shy about admitting. No more. The world has changed, or perhaps rather the circles I move within have changed, I'm not sure. But regardless, the simple pleasure of getting a system to place a marker in the right place, then colour it depending on pre-determined requirements still fills me with glee. It will always fill me with glee.
So, I guess we start at the beginning again, bearing in mind that the best holiday I ever had was navigating off a Michelin map through the Pyrenees as my partner got arm ache from driving around all the hairpins, that I can comfortably navigate people through the centre of London with the aid of an A-Z, in our house we don't use Tom Tom, we use Lou Lou and that I don't ever have to turn the map the right way round to orientate myself. I'm not boasting here, simply pre-empting the inevitable 'but you're a girl, girls can't read maps/can't navigate/can't read signs/can't read maps without turning them around'. This one can, just so we're clear. I am not alone in this, just so we're clear. They're not pre-requisites to being able to map data onto a map, just so we're clear. But loving maps, so intensely, understanding their power but also their restrictions? That really helps, I think.
There are two kinds of maps in the world. One comes as a photograph, a picture, a jpeg. We call them raster images - they are simply images and nothing more. They cannot be asked questions of, you can't search them, if you zoom into them, the points on the map ( the distance between your house and the local pub, for example) will move, but not in relation to each other to any kind of scale. Flat, 2 dimensional map. They've got their uses, of course they do, they're great as a print out on some water resilient paper to take out on the hill with you. They're great for printing out and taking into London with you on a sight seeing trip.
But. You can't move anything, change anything, search for anything, update anything. It's static. A snapshot in time of the way things were, because the second you printed it, it's out of date. History.
The second type of map, we call vector. What it actually means is, 3 dimensional. Sometimes quite literally with the help of some funky tools and as this lovely map of Hong Kong shows.But more often than not, it's 3 dimensional in an entirely different way in that it's searchable, scaleable and interactive. You can drop pins on it, move around the map and the pin will stay in the right place - over the top of the house you dropped it on. You can search by street name and you can plot a path on it - well draw one actually, you don't have to plot anything at all.
There are 2 kinds of mapping tool The first kind are the ones like Google, Bing and the previously linked to 3D Hong Kong map. They're useful to a point, but the point quickly becomes limiting. You can search it, and it will take you to the street you were looking for. But it will be a rough approximation of a street. Put the satellite layer over the top and you'll see what I mean - they're ever so slightly out of sync.
Next, try dropping a pin somewhere on a Google map with the zoom level not zoomed all the way in. Now zoom all the way in. Pin isn't quite on the corner of that junction that you dropped it on any more. It's moved. Fine if you trust that people are capable of spotting a bright yellow bin full of grit from 20 feet away. Not good if that pin represents the something you need to be accurate. Next, search for Witton Park on Google maps. Zoom in to the 2nd from last setting. Note that Witton is spelt as Whitton - right next to each other. One of those spellings is right. One is wrong. Do you know who I can report that to? No one.
Finally, embedding Google maps is a complete nightmare. If you have more than 30 things or so to map, then it will trip over to page 2. And then page 3. Which is fine if you're viewing a map in Google and you realise that that's what happening (some people wont and will think, for example, that you've only mapped the grit bins in Darwen and ignored Blackburn completely). When you come to embed the map into a webpage, the fact that there is more than one page of information you've mapped isn't mentioned. In order to get all the points to display in your embedded map, you have to go to Google Maps, hit the RSS button, get the RSS url of your points and chuck it back into Google Maps again. Then you are graced with a map which you can embed which will show everyone all your points.
I could go on. I think you get the point. You might ask why on earth anyone ever uses Google Maps. I'll explain that at the bottom but over the next few paragraphs, I suspect it will become clear.
The second kind of map is Ordnance Survey built and oh boy is it accurate. Need to know where a set of steps is or how wide a pavement is? OS mapping can tell you. Until April 1st this year (2010) the maps were acknowledged to be so accurate that people paid a lot of money to access that data. Witton gets spelt the right way. If it weren't I'd know exactly who to speak to to get it corrected. They not only provide line maps, they also provide maps with door numbers on to help you orientate yourself (or check your co-ordinates are correct). There is still a bit of a zoom problem, in that if you draw on the map at a certain zoom level, it will move slightly when you zoom in, say from 5km to 1km. But under 1km where you switch to a more detailed map, it's accurate. Points dropped don't wander off. It's accurate, it's reliable.
More interestingly, it can also be fed into Geographical Information Systems (GIS). GIS is a loose term for the set of tools which allows you to place massive amounts of points onto OS mapping, quickly and reasonably simply. Most people have done a degree in these systems and are can make them dance. I've taught myself almost entirely and so am a little behind. To add insult to injury, GIS systems are enormously expensive and so I don't have access to one any more because it's not part of my job. Which is where Open Space comes in. Open Space allows you to do similar things to what you historically could only do with an expensive GIS tool.
So, why, I hear you ask, have I mapped our grit bins and gritting routes using Google?
Ordnance Survey have made a big big deal of their Open Space tools. This 'path' map is an amazing example of what can be done - entirely for free. Except. There's always an except, isn't there. In the bottom left hand corner, you will note a little column which depending on the time of day you view it, will either be green or red. Hover over it with your mouse and you will see "XX% of daily map tile limit used". Open Space, when publicising their wonderful new tools, seem to forget to mention this. You get 150 'views' a day unless you pay for more. We'd go over that in about 3-4 hours, I'd guess. What happens after you exceed that 150 views? Well, we don't know but we're assuming that no information is served at all. Which isn't going to look very good now, is it?
And we're skint. Utterly and completely broke, as a Council, with £48 million of savings to make before 31st March 2011. So I didn't map the routes/bins in anything but Google, because Google was free. Which is why they can afford to ignore complaints of spelling. Why inaccuracies can be forgiven. Why display errors meaning suddenly my screen shows 10 markers all on top of each other practically, for no reason whatsoever, must be simply ignored.
It's free.
So, in true Brit style, we make do and mend. In the meantime, I've bought myself a book and will hopefully be teaching myself how to code so I can make Google behave a little better, so I can code around some of the things which are causing a problem. But (I may be wrong here, but I don't think I am) even then, once you start to code and hack about with Google in anything more complicated than what we've done already, Google control access to their maps with something called an API key. And once again, imposes limits for page views.
So what's the answer?
I don't know. This is where I hope someone else picks it up and passes it on - back to me. Can anyone help? Is there an open source way of displaying a map, inside a box, with a zoom in and out tool, a search tool and is accurate, which I can embed in our web pages and will cost me nothing, be entirely reliable and not melt my brain in the process of trying to work it out?
So. To summarise. There might only be 2 different kinds of map. And only 2 different ways of seeing those maps and interacting with 1 kind of those 2 different kinds of map. But when you start to delve a little further, it's really rather more complicated than it might first appear. And free is free for a reason.
Showing posts with label girl geeks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label girl geeks. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
GIS is to #opendata as.......
GIS (Geographic Information System) is to open data as Microsoft Word is to a bunch of incohesive words and letters. Or at least, when you've been working with GIS for a bit, that's how it looks. A slightly distorted view of course, because GIS wasn't involved in the 15 minute dalliance with some data I danced the other night, but nevertheless, data and GIS is intrinsically linked for me and so I thought I'd try and explain why - with a diagram!
Look ma, no hands! Now, as regular readers will know, I'm not very good at diagrams. Or data visualisations or mash ups or whatever the cool and funky kids are calling them these days - I'm not a cool and funky kid either so I wouldn't know. But this is a pitiful attempt at an explanation, nevertheless because letters are boring and pictures are shiny.
Open data is the end of the story as I hope I've made clear here. Operations is the start. Operations is what generates all the data to go out into the open. Operations means childrens services, it means street scene or refuse collection and street cleansing with some park maintenance in there as well depending on what you're calling it this year, it's the actual day to day stuff like how many fly tips we collected or how many parking tickets we issued or how many library books we lent. It's our bread and butter, it's what we do, it paints a picture in numbers of the service we provide to everyone on a day to day basis.
The data from all that operational activity currently goes in one direction but eventually, one day, will go in two as shown here. At the moment, it goes into management information and in a lot of cases it gets fed, if appropriate and in most cases it is, into the GIS server and processed by our GIS software to make easy to understand visual representations of the data which our Managers can use to make informed management decisions quickly and easily, because the data is not 64,000 rows of ascii (raw letters), but instead thematic mapping, showing them where their hotspots and notspots are, where they need to focus more resource and where there was a problem 12 months ago but now isn't and so they can move resource. It's done more often than 12 monthly, but for the purpose of this, we'll call it 12 months.
The appropriateness of the information going into GIS software is generally whether it's spatial. Spatial means, relational, means does it have a latitude or longitude on it, does it have GPS data attached to it, will mapping it spatially make sense for the data to mean something. In a lot of cases, well actually, in most cases it does, from school catchment areas crossed with deprivation indices crossed with academic achievement levels to a thousand and one other 'mash ups' as they're now called.
Research and intelligence and policy actually have a two way relationship with GIS. They pull data out of the datasets parked there by ops and they crunch it, create 'mash ups' and provide it to Directors and Heads of Service to inform them. They do trend analysis and many other complicated and funky things. Policy take this crunched data too and they build our strategic advice on it. They tell people in words of one syllable (and yes sometimes more) where we were, where we are and where we will be if things continue as they are, but also where we will be if they do not. They don't hold crystal balls, they assure me, but I'm not so sure. GIS and much other non-spatial data is their bread and butter, I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong here, I'm sure).
The datasets which drive all this, will one day go straight onto data.gov.uk once signed off too. INSPIRE says they will. Please read the link, if you've got this far, you need to know about the existence of this Directive.
Which brings me to the other side of open data and the things in data.gov.uk which will sit next to the Operations generated stuff. The cost of satisying Freedom of Information requests was quoted at me by someone at a conference recently from their Authority and I will not post here what it was but it was enough to make my jaw drop. If we are transparent where it comes to information, if we are open, the assumption is that we will actually never receive FOI's ever again, because it will all be easily found, therefore cutting out the middlemen of the poor Administrators and Officers tasked with fulfilling these requests and instead leaving them to do their main job roles. But for the moment, perhaps it would be a nice interim policy for people to put the results of FOI's onto the web automatically, in the assumption that if one person wants to request the information, then perhaps a second will too? It's obviously of interest to someone, right?
And then there's spending data. Generated by Operations but kept by Finance. This is left to last, because Government have almost wrapped this one up. All spend over £500 will be published by local government in January 2011. All NHS PCT spend over £25,000 is already online.
Here ends the tour of data within local government. If you got this far, you know as much as I do, almost. Which in the interests of openness, is exactly the way I believe it should be.
Look ma, no hands! Now, as regular readers will know, I'm not very good at diagrams. Or data visualisations or mash ups or whatever the cool and funky kids are calling them these days - I'm not a cool and funky kid either so I wouldn't know. But this is a pitiful attempt at an explanation, nevertheless because letters are boring and pictures are shiny.
Open data is the end of the story as I hope I've made clear here. Operations is the start. Operations is what generates all the data to go out into the open. Operations means childrens services, it means street scene or refuse collection and street cleansing with some park maintenance in there as well depending on what you're calling it this year, it's the actual day to day stuff like how many fly tips we collected or how many parking tickets we issued or how many library books we lent. It's our bread and butter, it's what we do, it paints a picture in numbers of the service we provide to everyone on a day to day basis.
The data from all that operational activity currently goes in one direction but eventually, one day, will go in two as shown here. At the moment, it goes into management information and in a lot of cases it gets fed, if appropriate and in most cases it is, into the GIS server and processed by our GIS software to make easy to understand visual representations of the data which our Managers can use to make informed management decisions quickly and easily, because the data is not 64,000 rows of ascii (raw letters), but instead thematic mapping, showing them where their hotspots and notspots are, where they need to focus more resource and where there was a problem 12 months ago but now isn't and so they can move resource. It's done more often than 12 monthly, but for the purpose of this, we'll call it 12 months.
The appropriateness of the information going into GIS software is generally whether it's spatial. Spatial means, relational, means does it have a latitude or longitude on it, does it have GPS data attached to it, will mapping it spatially make sense for the data to mean something. In a lot of cases, well actually, in most cases it does, from school catchment areas crossed with deprivation indices crossed with academic achievement levels to a thousand and one other 'mash ups' as they're now called.
Research and intelligence and policy actually have a two way relationship with GIS. They pull data out of the datasets parked there by ops and they crunch it, create 'mash ups' and provide it to Directors and Heads of Service to inform them. They do trend analysis and many other complicated and funky things. Policy take this crunched data too and they build our strategic advice on it. They tell people in words of one syllable (and yes sometimes more) where we were, where we are and where we will be if things continue as they are, but also where we will be if they do not. They don't hold crystal balls, they assure me, but I'm not so sure. GIS and much other non-spatial data is their bread and butter, I think (someone will correct me if I am wrong here, I'm sure).
The datasets which drive all this, will one day go straight onto data.gov.uk once signed off too. INSPIRE says they will. Please read the link, if you've got this far, you need to know about the existence of this Directive.
Which brings me to the other side of open data and the things in data.gov.uk which will sit next to the Operations generated stuff. The cost of satisying Freedom of Information requests was quoted at me by someone at a conference recently from their Authority and I will not post here what it was but it was enough to make my jaw drop. If we are transparent where it comes to information, if we are open, the assumption is that we will actually never receive FOI's ever again, because it will all be easily found, therefore cutting out the middlemen of the poor Administrators and Officers tasked with fulfilling these requests and instead leaving them to do their main job roles. But for the moment, perhaps it would be a nice interim policy for people to put the results of FOI's onto the web automatically, in the assumption that if one person wants to request the information, then perhaps a second will too? It's obviously of interest to someone, right?
And then there's spending data. Generated by Operations but kept by Finance. This is left to last, because Government have almost wrapped this one up. All spend over £500 will be published by local government in January 2011. All NHS PCT spend over £25,000 is already online.
Here ends the tour of data within local government. If you got this far, you know as much as I do, almost. Which in the interests of openness, is exactly the way I believe it should be.
Monday, 18 October 2010
Multiple flavours of geeks
The point I am inelegantly trying to make?
I sit in the middle of absolutely everyone I know. I don't belong in any circle. I just sit in the middle and watch everyone doing amazing things.
It occured to me this evening, reading about the upcoming Leeds Hack, that if I could get everyone I know into one room, all at the same time, without an agenda, that we could fix the digital world. All of it. Completely.
When we build the big society brokerage systems, can we make sure there's a space for programming for free, web designing for free, web coding for free?
Thanks. :O)
Wednesday, 13 October 2010
>Hack it
Verb// to cut a path through something.
Noun// no appropriate definition exists.
Source// Chambers online dictionary
Failure// to comprehend the nature/ethos/etymology or life approach of a really rather large amount of people.
//Once upon a time there was a film called Hackers. It showed a bunch of teenagers cracking passwords (obtaining them illegally without the owners knowledge by running dictionary look up programmes against a password entry field), logging into systems and changing them. Most notably, at the end of the film, they 'hack', by which I mean to say they gain access illegally, to the traffic light system of New York City. For reference, a situation not without the realms of possibility, as proved in Los Angeles, where losing control of only 4 traffic light hubs caused gridlock. "Hack the planet" becomes the rather ridiculous tagline of the film, inducing millions of script kiddies the world over to think they actually can.
//Even before that, there was Kevin Mitnick. A 'real' hacker, who infiltrated the security systems of real companies, at the time of his eventual arrest, he was considered to be the most wanted computer criminal in the United States. He used something called social engineering, which we'll come to later, to obtain passwords, hack systems, hack networks and copy protected data. In the traditional sense of the word, Kevin Mitnick was a hacker. In a rather more common turn of events than most will ever realise, Mitnick now runs his own computer security consultancy, Mitnick Security Consulting LLC.
//In the middle of all this, Loyd Blankenship aka The Mentor wrote The Hacker Manifesto. It was fuelled by an arrest and possibly quite a justified one. Who knows. Who can ever know. But the fundamental truths which eminated and resonated from his words echo down the years, and even now speak to the hearts of the kids who are now adults who never stopped asking the question. All of the questions, the big and the small, the easy and the hard.
//Hack. A word. It can mean many things to many different people. A lot of people think of the Mitnicks of this world when I say the word and I'm left floundering a little, trying to backtrack out of the corner I've verbally painted myself into, rather than explain the following, the subtle nuances, the blacks and the whites and the shades of grey, the morals, ethics and social engineering pitfalls, where manipulation becomes brain hacking others and where brain hacking yourself simply means 'temet nosce'.
//Hacking, to me and many others, is nothing to do with a computer network. It's to do with efficiency. Finding the shortest path to the quickest solution. It's about learning keyboard shortcuts so that windows can fly open and shut as if by magic so hands don't need to leave the keyboard, thus wasting precious time. It's about knowing you can hit enter on most text boxes to submit. It's about knowing that hitting U a few times in a country dropdown box will always get you to United Kingdom without using the mouse, but it's about so much more.
It's about learning the shortcuts. It's about the fact that most people turn left when entering a theme park, so always turning right and not having to queue except at the crossover rides, which can be circumnavigated by Q Jump tickets provided at the entrance. It's about standing at the right end of the platform on the tube, so that you are at the exit when you get off at the other end. It's about finding the side of the stage at a festival that no one ever bothers to walk to cos they're drunk and not thinking straight and having half a field to dance in to The Prodigy.
It's a thousand different things, from making your own cables to connect technology, to hacking your own brain so that you behave in a different way and become a better person. But social engineering is where I draw the line.
\\Social engineering. You may as well call it manipulation. The cold calculated process of looking at the human race as nothing more than data packets being directed by routers around a network, and picking those packets out of the network, draining them for all their knowledge, and then placing them back into the network none the wiser, while you run off and take the credit for all their ideas. Looking at people as sheep, and using it to your advantage by predicting peoples behaviour and then maliciously manipulating that information for your own gain. Catching someone at their most vulnerable and distracted and asking them a difficult question that you know is likely to ellicit an honest answer when it wouldn't normally. Seeing peoples motivations clearly, and dangling carrots in front of them, only to whip them away when you've got what you want from them. Pretending to play nice and not being honest about your motivations.
With geeks, real geeks, there is no guarantee of nice play. Social engineering was a term coined by hackers who are geeks who use what they know of the human race to get passwords and other 'helpful' data out of them. It is, essentially, the cold hard manipulation of a person.
That's the line. Processes can be hacked. Workflows. Websites to be more efficient and engage with people better. Big society, as a concept, is just a hack. A hack of the way society behaves, a massive behaviour change.
Ultimately, hack, to me, just means change something for the better, be that more efficient, more cost effective, more streamlined, more friendly, more engaging, even prettier.
It does not mean take advantage of the stupid people.
Noun// no appropriate definition exists.
Source// Chambers online dictionary
Failure// to comprehend the nature/ethos/etymology or life approach of a really rather large amount of people.
//Once upon a time there was a film called Hackers. It showed a bunch of teenagers cracking passwords (obtaining them illegally without the owners knowledge by running dictionary look up programmes against a password entry field), logging into systems and changing them. Most notably, at the end of the film, they 'hack', by which I mean to say they gain access illegally, to the traffic light system of New York City. For reference, a situation not without the realms of possibility, as proved in Los Angeles, where losing control of only 4 traffic light hubs caused gridlock. "Hack the planet" becomes the rather ridiculous tagline of the film, inducing millions of script kiddies the world over to think they actually can.
//Even before that, there was Kevin Mitnick. A 'real' hacker, who infiltrated the security systems of real companies, at the time of his eventual arrest, he was considered to be the most wanted computer criminal in the United States. He used something called social engineering, which we'll come to later, to obtain passwords, hack systems, hack networks and copy protected data. In the traditional sense of the word, Kevin Mitnick was a hacker. In a rather more common turn of events than most will ever realise, Mitnick now runs his own computer security consultancy, Mitnick Security Consulting LLC.
//In the middle of all this, Loyd Blankenship aka The Mentor wrote The Hacker Manifesto. It was fuelled by an arrest and possibly quite a justified one. Who knows. Who can ever know. But the fundamental truths which eminated and resonated from his words echo down the years, and even now speak to the hearts of the kids who are now adults who never stopped asking the question. All of the questions, the big and the small, the easy and the hard.
My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.Curiosity is not a crime. The direction it gets directed towards can make it become the motivator to commit a crime. The world changed.
//Hack. A word. It can mean many things to many different people. A lot of people think of the Mitnicks of this world when I say the word and I'm left floundering a little, trying to backtrack out of the corner I've verbally painted myself into, rather than explain the following, the subtle nuances, the blacks and the whites and the shades of grey, the morals, ethics and social engineering pitfalls, where manipulation becomes brain hacking others and where brain hacking yourself simply means 'temet nosce'.
//Hacking, to me and many others, is nothing to do with a computer network. It's to do with efficiency. Finding the shortest path to the quickest solution. It's about learning keyboard shortcuts so that windows can fly open and shut as if by magic so hands don't need to leave the keyboard, thus wasting precious time. It's about knowing you can hit enter on most text boxes to submit. It's about knowing that hitting U a few times in a country dropdown box will always get you to United Kingdom without using the mouse, but it's about so much more.
It's about learning the shortcuts. It's about the fact that most people turn left when entering a theme park, so always turning right and not having to queue except at the crossover rides, which can be circumnavigated by Q Jump tickets provided at the entrance. It's about standing at the right end of the platform on the tube, so that you are at the exit when you get off at the other end. It's about finding the side of the stage at a festival that no one ever bothers to walk to cos they're drunk and not thinking straight and having half a field to dance in to The Prodigy.
It's a thousand different things, from making your own cables to connect technology, to hacking your own brain so that you behave in a different way and become a better person. But social engineering is where I draw the line.
\\Social engineering. You may as well call it manipulation. The cold calculated process of looking at the human race as nothing more than data packets being directed by routers around a network, and picking those packets out of the network, draining them for all their knowledge, and then placing them back into the network none the wiser, while you run off and take the credit for all their ideas. Looking at people as sheep, and using it to your advantage by predicting peoples behaviour and then maliciously manipulating that information for your own gain. Catching someone at their most vulnerable and distracted and asking them a difficult question that you know is likely to ellicit an honest answer when it wouldn't normally. Seeing peoples motivations clearly, and dangling carrots in front of them, only to whip them away when you've got what you want from them. Pretending to play nice and not being honest about your motivations.
With geeks, real geeks, there is no guarantee of nice play. Social engineering was a term coined by hackers who are geeks who use what they know of the human race to get passwords and other 'helpful' data out of them. It is, essentially, the cold hard manipulation of a person.
That's the line. Processes can be hacked. Workflows. Websites to be more efficient and engage with people better. Big society, as a concept, is just a hack. A hack of the way society behaves, a massive behaviour change.
Ultimately, hack, to me, just means change something for the better, be that more efficient, more cost effective, more streamlined, more friendly, more engaging, even prettier.
It does not mean take advantage of the stupid people.
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
#girlsinit
I don't normally do this. I really don't. But this is important so it must be done.
I've just signed up to a petition being run be e-skills UK. They are also running an IT Ambassadors rollout which will eventually see people who sign up going into local schools they are paired with and speaking about why they are in IT. With free CRB checks included.
I've signed the petition and I've volunteered to go and talk tech to some teenagers despite avoiding public speaking like the plague. Here's why.
17% of the UK IT workforce are female.
I could stop this blog post right here. Everyone reading this knows that to be a fact. Everyone reading this knows why this is a bad thing. Everyone reading this has undoubtedly had a discussion with a woman in tech at some point in their career which has come at the problem or issue from such a different angle to the one you were coming at it from that you've been blown away.
I'm not a rampant feminist. I just think every sector that delivers a service to 100% of the population (because everyone needs IT) should be representative of the people it serves. Occasionally, girls see things differently. Our best ICT Project Manager in our organisation is a woman. She is focused on detail without being mired in it, MS Project is her weapon of choice and she deploys it well, she is trustworthy but knows when to break that trust for the good of the project, and more importantly perhaps, while I have no idea how much her boss values her, she is the one PM whose name you can mention to anyone, and I do mean anyone in the organisation and to the last, the very last, the person you are talking to will visibly brighten (or relax if it's in terms of that person managing their project) and have marvelous things to say about her.
I shouldn't really need to be making this point but I she is not alone. I know a few women who IT project manage and are damn good at it. Three of the girls on our IT helpdesk are women. They outnumber the boys. Each one of them I trust implicitly to know what I'm talking about, I don't need to filter the tech, I just tell them the problem as I see it in my hodge podge mix of geek and non geek talk and they understand and fix it. So do the blokes. But tellingly, not all of them. And it's people skills where those blokes fall down.
Historically, employing techs meant conceding that perhaps inter-social and customer service skills needed to be sacrificed. The world has changed immensely in the last 10 years. But there is something to be valued in a tech who has excellent customer service skills and still knows how to be calming, polite, empathic and gentle with people. Tech is still scary to a lot of people, you might think they understand what you're saying - truth be told they're probably doing what a rather nice lady I had a chat with the other day about this does - sloping off with their tail between their legs, never daring to ask another question because they've just been geek talked into oblivion and back and would rather die than have it happen again.
This is not the way to do business. This is not the way to provide a service.
Empathy is inherently a trait we all possess. I think perhaps women are better at being comfortable with displaying it. Is the reason that so many women work in customer service because it's traditionally been a low paid role, or because women are simply better at listening to what people are actually saying, what terms they're saying it in, and then mirroring the questioners terminology and phrasing in order to make that person feel more comfortable? Is that they can hear fear in someones voice, or can remember feeling that fear and want to reassure before moving on to solving the problem? Is it because we are comfortable with delivering information slower, sacrificing speed for ensuring that a message really is received and understood.
I'm not for a second suggesting men don't do their jobs in tech well. I'm not suggesting there are some things women can do which meant can't. Everyone can learn. What I am suggesting is that the lack of women currently in IT is depriving us of some great minds, inspirational viewpoints and differently motivated people who have an awful lot to contribute and who are contributing to almost every other sector of society pretty damn well thank you very much. Except ours. And that's wrong.
So, please sign up. Pick it up and pass it on.
I've just signed up to a petition being run be e-skills UK. They are also running an IT Ambassadors rollout which will eventually see people who sign up going into local schools they are paired with and speaking about why they are in IT. With free CRB checks included.
I've signed the petition and I've volunteered to go and talk tech to some teenagers despite avoiding public speaking like the plague. Here's why.
17% of the UK IT workforce are female.
I could stop this blog post right here. Everyone reading this knows that to be a fact. Everyone reading this knows why this is a bad thing. Everyone reading this has undoubtedly had a discussion with a woman in tech at some point in their career which has come at the problem or issue from such a different angle to the one you were coming at it from that you've been blown away.
I'm not a rampant feminist. I just think every sector that delivers a service to 100% of the population (because everyone needs IT) should be representative of the people it serves. Occasionally, girls see things differently. Our best ICT Project Manager in our organisation is a woman. She is focused on detail without being mired in it, MS Project is her weapon of choice and she deploys it well, she is trustworthy but knows when to break that trust for the good of the project, and more importantly perhaps, while I have no idea how much her boss values her, she is the one PM whose name you can mention to anyone, and I do mean anyone in the organisation and to the last, the very last, the person you are talking to will visibly brighten (or relax if it's in terms of that person managing their project) and have marvelous things to say about her.
I shouldn't really need to be making this point but I she is not alone. I know a few women who IT project manage and are damn good at it. Three of the girls on our IT helpdesk are women. They outnumber the boys. Each one of them I trust implicitly to know what I'm talking about, I don't need to filter the tech, I just tell them the problem as I see it in my hodge podge mix of geek and non geek talk and they understand and fix it. So do the blokes. But tellingly, not all of them. And it's people skills where those blokes fall down.
Historically, employing techs meant conceding that perhaps inter-social and customer service skills needed to be sacrificed. The world has changed immensely in the last 10 years. But there is something to be valued in a tech who has excellent customer service skills and still knows how to be calming, polite, empathic and gentle with people. Tech is still scary to a lot of people, you might think they understand what you're saying - truth be told they're probably doing what a rather nice lady I had a chat with the other day about this does - sloping off with their tail between their legs, never daring to ask another question because they've just been geek talked into oblivion and back and would rather die than have it happen again.
This is not the way to do business. This is not the way to provide a service.
Empathy is inherently a trait we all possess. I think perhaps women are better at being comfortable with displaying it. Is the reason that so many women work in customer service because it's traditionally been a low paid role, or because women are simply better at listening to what people are actually saying, what terms they're saying it in, and then mirroring the questioners terminology and phrasing in order to make that person feel more comfortable? Is that they can hear fear in someones voice, or can remember feeling that fear and want to reassure before moving on to solving the problem? Is it because we are comfortable with delivering information slower, sacrificing speed for ensuring that a message really is received and understood.
I'm not for a second suggesting men don't do their jobs in tech well. I'm not suggesting there are some things women can do which meant can't. Everyone can learn. What I am suggesting is that the lack of women currently in IT is depriving us of some great minds, inspirational viewpoints and differently motivated people who have an awful lot to contribute and who are contributing to almost every other sector of society pretty damn well thank you very much. Except ours. And that's wrong.
So, please sign up. Pick it up and pass it on.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
#geekjoy continued
>Users on iDesk plc's ISP help desk: 30
>What year is this?
>1999
Geek boyfriend (what other kind would there ever be?) points me in the direction of his old workplace. I apply for a help desk agent job. I know nothing. I cram. I know something. I get the highest score in the entrance exam after a weeks training. I'm the only girl. By this point, I'm starting to wonder if I will always be the only geek girl. I've met other girls who geek, but to not the point of being completely entrenched in the shiny world, almost every move a digital one.
I help users of various ISP's sort their connection problems. I ask them to hold their telephone receiver next to the speakers of the computer and diagnose problems by the sound of the modem. It's still a sound which wrenches a particular feeling from me, of sounds lost, and times past. Evocative. I get customers who hear the female voice, ask to be passed to a 2nd line tech, who promptly pass them straight back to me, after being told their being put through to the 'expert'. They're not, but I'm as good as all the other 1st line techs.
The company has a games room. Nope, not that kind, thought there is a pool table down the hall, a room full of gaming rigs loaded with Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike. Someone throws down the gauntlet. Girls don't play first person shooters (FPS's). Well this one does and she snipes the boys asses all over the maps. The web has changed, people are using it, people are connecting to it, people are using ICQ to chat across it. Now the noise has started, the sheer mass of pages and people creating a digital cacophony of thoughts, opinions and pages posted and then never touched again, the web littered with the detritus of the geeks short attention span.
>Users on the iDesk plc's help desk: 300 or so
>What year is this?
>2001
2001. Team Leader of 15 people at the age of 23. Only in a dot com. So much shine, so much promise, so much enthusiasm and determination. Managing geeks when you are one is so simple, the motivation as simple as ensuring that everyone feels that they contributed to the final decision, that there is a democracy, that you will stand in front of them and take the shit as long as they don't give you any and respect that. Still playing Counter Strike, still kicking ass. Except now voice over IP (VOIP) technology has taken off and everyone has a headset and is talking. Including me. And I'm the only female voice for quite some cable length. And it's an issue. Of course it's an issue. I'm shooting the hell out of 17 year olds and I'm a girl and they.don't.like.it. Quit the game, wondered off to Everquest for a while. Pretty, shiny, but not shiny enough to make me stick with working out the complicated interfaces and mathematics.
Dot.com crash. Make someone 32 years older than me redundant. Take voluntary redundancy myself. Bubble burst and the bright side of tech turns dark. Heart sore. I loved that job more than was entirely sensible, my social life, my love life, my world. But it was so so good when it was good, empowering and confidence building.
>Users in the generic office: Some
>What year is this?
>2003
My friends are geeks. My girlfriends, well some of them are geeks too. So are my boyfriends, no change there then. We still chat on the internet, we still arrange big group holidays on the internet, we still live in the dark ages on the BBS we all use. Internet forums have arrived and gone from badly built difficult to understand mess to intuitive streamlined behemoths. I don't work in tech, but most of my friends do, and all of them are earning at least twice what I am. I can't code, I can't system administrate, I can't do anything quantifiable technical. So time passes and I have ideas and I talk them through with friends when drunk and brave but nothing ever comes from them. I am a girl, I am in admin, I am in my proper place in the world, spending my far better paid boyfriends money and accepting that this is the way the world will be. The fire has gone out because there is nothing there to fan it.
>Users in the admin office: 4 (all women)
>What year is this?
>2008
I've been drafted in to fill a tech post. Except it's really not a tech post, it's an admin post with a bit of techy stuff attached to it. But it's not data entry or copy typing which is what has been dominating the previous god knows how many years and so it's grabbed, and gladly. With it my interest in tech and it's ability comes back. Someone takes a chance on me. Someone understands that whatever I don't know I can learn and damn quick. Someone sees past me and past the job history and understands that I love tech.
I play with GIS and Map Info. I help people with their day to day Word and Excel problems. I fix the printer. Then I start to push the edges and make the mapping better, push it harder, ask what it can really do, how can we really represent and visualise our data. I discover I'm a data geek, among many other kinds of geek and disappearing into a spreadsheet makes me happy. I discover Facebook and it's a one night stand, I discover Twitter and it's a long term relationship. I start to wonder what the tech can do for us, whether they're just tools in the dry sense or whether they're tools for change. I talk to people, I write in here. I start to stick my head above the parapet at work.
I regain everything I lost when the dot com crashed. The #geekjoy and the deep seated belief that tech can change the world only this time is the right time, this time the rest of the world is on board, this time the bubble wont burst and it wont all fall down and this time I can switch into top gear, throw everything I have at it and things will change, magic will happen and the fire will continue to burn.
I love technology. I love geeking. I love connecting and linking and introducing and networking. I am the shyest person you will ever meet, but you wont ever see that except in words written down here. Technology enables me, a little geek girl with big big big ideas, to become the spark that lights other flames, the passion and the drive which gets things done and finished and wrapped and completed. Digital allows me to run on 4 streams at once, process all the data, learn as fast as I've always wanted to, to speak and be heard. It enables me to have an opinion, to be gobby, to test my new found confidence and my old love of all things tech and do something with it, make it tangible, stop talking and start doing.
I want to burn the envelope, screw pushing it. I want to turn the sky red, never mind blue. I want to inspire and enthuse and share the possibilities because the possibilities are endless, they really are, the only limitations here are ourselves, our human capacity to comprehend the sheer scale of the world as it opens up and all geographical barriers fall.
I am passionately, resolutely, irrevocably a geek. If I'm talking tech and digital, don't expect me not to be empassioned, fiery, or enthused. This I love and I make no apologies for it.
>What year is this?
>1999
Geek boyfriend (what other kind would there ever be?) points me in the direction of his old workplace. I apply for a help desk agent job. I know nothing. I cram. I know something. I get the highest score in the entrance exam after a weeks training. I'm the only girl. By this point, I'm starting to wonder if I will always be the only geek girl. I've met other girls who geek, but to not the point of being completely entrenched in the shiny world, almost every move a digital one.
I help users of various ISP's sort their connection problems. I ask them to hold their telephone receiver next to the speakers of the computer and diagnose problems by the sound of the modem. It's still a sound which wrenches a particular feeling from me, of sounds lost, and times past. Evocative. I get customers who hear the female voice, ask to be passed to a 2nd line tech, who promptly pass them straight back to me, after being told their being put through to the 'expert'. They're not, but I'm as good as all the other 1st line techs.
The company has a games room. Nope, not that kind, thought there is a pool table down the hall, a room full of gaming rigs loaded with Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike. Someone throws down the gauntlet. Girls don't play first person shooters (FPS's). Well this one does and she snipes the boys asses all over the maps. The web has changed, people are using it, people are connecting to it, people are using ICQ to chat across it. Now the noise has started, the sheer mass of pages and people creating a digital cacophony of thoughts, opinions and pages posted and then never touched again, the web littered with the detritus of the geeks short attention span.
>Users on the iDesk plc's help desk: 300 or so
>What year is this?
>2001
2001. Team Leader of 15 people at the age of 23. Only in a dot com. So much shine, so much promise, so much enthusiasm and determination. Managing geeks when you are one is so simple, the motivation as simple as ensuring that everyone feels that they contributed to the final decision, that there is a democracy, that you will stand in front of them and take the shit as long as they don't give you any and respect that. Still playing Counter Strike, still kicking ass. Except now voice over IP (VOIP) technology has taken off and everyone has a headset and is talking. Including me. And I'm the only female voice for quite some cable length. And it's an issue. Of course it's an issue. I'm shooting the hell out of 17 year olds and I'm a girl and they.don't.like.it. Quit the game, wondered off to Everquest for a while. Pretty, shiny, but not shiny enough to make me stick with working out the complicated interfaces and mathematics.
Dot.com crash. Make someone 32 years older than me redundant. Take voluntary redundancy myself. Bubble burst and the bright side of tech turns dark. Heart sore. I loved that job more than was entirely sensible, my social life, my love life, my world. But it was so so good when it was good, empowering and confidence building.
>Users in the generic office: Some
>What year is this?
>2003
My friends are geeks. My girlfriends, well some of them are geeks too. So are my boyfriends, no change there then. We still chat on the internet, we still arrange big group holidays on the internet, we still live in the dark ages on the BBS we all use. Internet forums have arrived and gone from badly built difficult to understand mess to intuitive streamlined behemoths. I don't work in tech, but most of my friends do, and all of them are earning at least twice what I am. I can't code, I can't system administrate, I can't do anything quantifiable technical. So time passes and I have ideas and I talk them through with friends when drunk and brave but nothing ever comes from them. I am a girl, I am in admin, I am in my proper place in the world, spending my far better paid boyfriends money and accepting that this is the way the world will be. The fire has gone out because there is nothing there to fan it.
>Users in the admin office: 4 (all women)
>What year is this?
>2008
I've been drafted in to fill a tech post. Except it's really not a tech post, it's an admin post with a bit of techy stuff attached to it. But it's not data entry or copy typing which is what has been dominating the previous god knows how many years and so it's grabbed, and gladly. With it my interest in tech and it's ability comes back. Someone takes a chance on me. Someone understands that whatever I don't know I can learn and damn quick. Someone sees past me and past the job history and understands that I love tech.
I play with GIS and Map Info. I help people with their day to day Word and Excel problems. I fix the printer. Then I start to push the edges and make the mapping better, push it harder, ask what it can really do, how can we really represent and visualise our data. I discover I'm a data geek, among many other kinds of geek and disappearing into a spreadsheet makes me happy. I discover Facebook and it's a one night stand, I discover Twitter and it's a long term relationship. I start to wonder what the tech can do for us, whether they're just tools in the dry sense or whether they're tools for change. I talk to people, I write in here. I start to stick my head above the parapet at work.
I regain everything I lost when the dot com crashed. The #geekjoy and the deep seated belief that tech can change the world only this time is the right time, this time the rest of the world is on board, this time the bubble wont burst and it wont all fall down and this time I can switch into top gear, throw everything I have at it and things will change, magic will happen and the fire will continue to burn.
I love technology. I love geeking. I love connecting and linking and introducing and networking. I am the shyest person you will ever meet, but you wont ever see that except in words written down here. Technology enables me, a little geek girl with big big big ideas, to become the spark that lights other flames, the passion and the drive which gets things done and finished and wrapped and completed. Digital allows me to run on 4 streams at once, process all the data, learn as fast as I've always wanted to, to speak and be heard. It enables me to have an opinion, to be gobby, to test my new found confidence and my old love of all things tech and do something with it, make it tangible, stop talking and start doing.
I want to burn the envelope, screw pushing it. I want to turn the sky red, never mind blue. I want to inspire and enthuse and share the possibilities because the possibilities are endless, they really are, the only limitations here are ourselves, our human capacity to comprehend the sheer scale of the world as it opens up and all geographical barriers fall.
I am passionately, resolutely, irrevocably a geek. If I'm talking tech and digital, don't expect me not to be empassioned, fiery, or enthused. This I love and I make no apologies for it.
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
I'm going back to the start (#geekjoy)
Some of you will be too interweb young to know about text adventures, or indeed multi user dungeons, or the history of social media - and I mean the true history of social media, not the history that many think is the history.. I haven't been here from the start, but I've been......around. A digital whore, picking up systems, playing with them and dropping them again, staying with some for long term relationships, Ctrl+C'ing out on others after a brief dalliance on sheets littered with zeroes and ones. This is my #geekstory, tell me yours?
>Users in the college library computer section: zero
>What year is this?
>1993
1993 was the year I first saw a computer. None of my friends had computers. None of my friends were remotely geeky. I was so uncool in school, even the dungeons and dragon players seemed unapproachable, settled in the library with their incomprehensible analogue systems. I went to college and left the uncool behind, somehow, but the curiosity for computers didn't start here. My first interaction with a computer was with a Pentium 286 (I think?) running Windows 3.11, standalone. I learnt how to start software by clicking the .exe and that was it, because all there was was Word and it didn't really fan the flames. It was a box. I could write words on it and they would print out.
Underwhelmed, frankly.
>Users in the Babbage computer labs, ground floor, University of Plymouth: Many
>What year is this?
>1995
Two years. We didn't know then that the speed of development and change would carry on at the same pace, but so much changed in those two years that I got a glimpse, even then on the tour of the university campus, of what the future would look like. And it looked damn fine to a hick from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Somerset, let me tell you. Sparks. Curiosity. Macs before they got colourful or white, still at this point a dull beige. Aesthetically unattractive. But.
Netscape. The beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with something I later learned was a web browser. Pages with grey backgrounds. All black text. No understanding of how to use it, playing, clicking, following the spidersweb across the world. Back then, you had two options. Using a directory, the name of which I can't remember but I think might have been Yahoo, which listed, and yes, I do mean actually physically listed, in lists, every website known to man because there were that few then, or to follow the trail of little blue underlined words.
It felt like falling down the rabbit hole.
I can still remember the feeling. I was absolutely completely consumed with following those links. Disappeared into them for hours, coming out two continents and 7 conversations later with people on the other side of the world, asking them incessant questions, them asking me questions too. Nothing seedy, not yet, the incessant wail of Age/Sex/Location (ASL) hadn't filtered through the ports yet, just an innocence as people tried to find out what it was like to live on the other side of the world from real people who were really, actually, talking back. In real time. Type something, hit enter, there the words appeared for both of you to see. My partner in crime during this time? Another girl, as mesmerised as I. I don't know where she is now, but I hope she still geeks well.
>Users in the Babbage Sun lab, 2nd floor: Less than downstairs
>What year is this?
>1997
Another two years. Email is becoming prevalent but it's definitely not the first thing you ask someone for. Web addresses of companies are making their first debut on buses on the streets of Plymouth. Things are.....emerging from the underground? Was there ever an underground? I don't know. I sat with hackers, geeks and cool kids in a lab for 7 hours a day, playing with the tech, learning to use a command line and getting my head around the lack of windows, the lack of pretty pictures.
I discovered Bulletin Board Systems, chat zones, I crossed the country to meet other geeks, I talked into the small hours about absolutely nothing and I made friends that stayed. Friends who have gone on to change the world. Friends who have stepped off the world and off the grid. Friends who have pushed the boundaries of neurological exploration and disappeared down the rabbit hole too. Friends who own Ferraris and friends who build the games we play. Even, perhaps, friends who hacked the Vatican though I never knew if he was lying. The tale was funny to tell all the same. More importantly, I was in a group of people who understood my incessant curiosity, who tolerated my cross examinations happily and who were all, to the very last man, smarter then me. Because this was a lab full of men and I was the token girl, and this was a situation to become replicated later, many many times.They even danced on podiums next to me to Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold. They lost it next to me on the dancefloor to Bon Jovi and Nine Inch Nails. Geeks. The few. The hardcore. But happy.
To be continued.......
>Users in the college library computer section: zero
>What year is this?
>1993
1993 was the year I first saw a computer. None of my friends had computers. None of my friends were remotely geeky. I was so uncool in school, even the dungeons and dragon players seemed unapproachable, settled in the library with their incomprehensible analogue systems. I went to college and left the uncool behind, somehow, but the curiosity for computers didn't start here. My first interaction with a computer was with a Pentium 286 (I think?) running Windows 3.11, standalone. I learnt how to start software by clicking the .exe and that was it, because all there was was Word and it didn't really fan the flames. It was a box. I could write words on it and they would print out.
Underwhelmed, frankly.
>Users in the Babbage computer labs, ground floor, University of Plymouth: Many
>What year is this?
>1995
Two years. We didn't know then that the speed of development and change would carry on at the same pace, but so much changed in those two years that I got a glimpse, even then on the tour of the university campus, of what the future would look like. And it looked damn fine to a hick from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Somerset, let me tell you. Sparks. Curiosity. Macs before they got colourful or white, still at this point a dull beige. Aesthetically unattractive. But.
Netscape. The beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with something I later learned was a web browser. Pages with grey backgrounds. All black text. No understanding of how to use it, playing, clicking, following the spidersweb across the world. Back then, you had two options. Using a directory, the name of which I can't remember but I think might have been Yahoo, which listed, and yes, I do mean actually physically listed, in lists, every website known to man because there were that few then, or to follow the trail of little blue underlined words.
It felt like falling down the rabbit hole.
I can still remember the feeling. I was absolutely completely consumed with following those links. Disappeared into them for hours, coming out two continents and 7 conversations later with people on the other side of the world, asking them incessant questions, them asking me questions too. Nothing seedy, not yet, the incessant wail of Age/Sex/Location (ASL) hadn't filtered through the ports yet, just an innocence as people tried to find out what it was like to live on the other side of the world from real people who were really, actually, talking back. In real time. Type something, hit enter, there the words appeared for both of you to see. My partner in crime during this time? Another girl, as mesmerised as I. I don't know where she is now, but I hope she still geeks well.
>Users in the Babbage Sun lab, 2nd floor: Less than downstairs
>What year is this?
>1997
Another two years. Email is becoming prevalent but it's definitely not the first thing you ask someone for. Web addresses of companies are making their first debut on buses on the streets of Plymouth. Things are.....emerging from the underground? Was there ever an underground? I don't know. I sat with hackers, geeks and cool kids in a lab for 7 hours a day, playing with the tech, learning to use a command line and getting my head around the lack of windows, the lack of pretty pictures.
I discovered Bulletin Board Systems, chat zones, I crossed the country to meet other geeks, I talked into the small hours about absolutely nothing and I made friends that stayed. Friends who have gone on to change the world. Friends who have stepped off the world and off the grid. Friends who have pushed the boundaries of neurological exploration and disappeared down the rabbit hole too. Friends who own Ferraris and friends who build the games we play. Even, perhaps, friends who hacked the Vatican though I never knew if he was lying. The tale was funny to tell all the same. More importantly, I was in a group of people who understood my incessant curiosity, who tolerated my cross examinations happily and who were all, to the very last man, smarter then me. Because this was a lab full of men and I was the token girl, and this was a situation to become replicated later, many many times.They even danced on podiums next to me to Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold. They lost it next to me on the dancefloor to Bon Jovi and Nine Inch Nails. Geeks. The few. The hardcore. But happy.
To be continued.......
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Geek <=> cool?
Somewhere along the line, something has gone wrong. Or, rather, I'm not sure something actually has gone wrong but I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with it. Or, perhaps it is that it is what it is and I am reluctant to step up to the plate but I know that I must, in the same way that we all must if the big society is to work, and those of us who are dreamers, idealists and wishers, we all want the big society to work.
I know some things. I know these things through being inside something. It's as natural to me as breathing, a framework where I instinctively operate. It's not got a name and it doesn't need a special name. It's not cute and fluffy and it's not going to change the world. Except, that was 3 years ago. Now I know some things for the same reasons but I feel somehow responsible for making those things cute and fluffy and accessible. I feel responsible for passing it in, for teaching people, for explaining in plain English to those far smarter than me. Sometimes I find myself in such ridiculous situations, explaining something which to me seems so damn simple, to someone who could intellectually eat me for breakfast.
I am confused. Bewildered. There is a new world order, why yes there is, but instead of being at the bottom of the pile, suddenly I seem to be in the middle somewhere. Have the geeks inherited the earth?
Well yes. Yes they have. But with inheriting something, as in reality with heirlooms, there comes a certain responsibility if you are a certain kind of a person. I suppose I am a certain kind of a person. I don't believe it's someone elses job. I don't believe someone else should pick up the baton. I wont leave well alone. Some of my friends, who are geeks, think I am ridiculous for getting involved. They think I am talking pipedreams. Others don't understand the need for translation, others sneer at those who need translation, instead wanting to keep the knowledge and thus the power to themselves.
Lets get this straight, right now. I am not cool. I am a geek. Being a geek is not cool. If it is going to become cool to be a geek, and increasingly it seems that this might be the case, then I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with that. I love digital. I love technology. I love burying my head in a book. I want to know everything, all of it, all of the time and right now. I do not want to be cool. Cool is frivolous, cool is unquantifiable, cool does not come in black and white and cool is out of my control. Someone else decides whether I am cool or not and I am simply not interested in that. I'm too old, too grumpy, dress too differently, and frankly, am just too uncool.
But I am a geek. A big geek with a big heart. It used to be that that bemused people. Confused them. I would speak, the words would come out of my mouth, and there would be confusion in the listeners eyes. What is this you speak of? Why are you telling me these things? Why are you so enthusiastic about something as stupid as talking in text? We talk to each other, there is no space or time for your weird ideas here.
Now the world has flipped and I am catching up. And I am the one who is confused and bewildered. I perpetually feel like I am supposed to be doing something where I am not entirely sure what something is. I have ideas, hundreds of them. I sit and listen to other people talking and 90% of the time ideas spark and pinwheel off in my brain and I reach for a pad and I scribble and scribble and scribble some more. Ideas, imaginings, what if's, why can't we's, how about we do it that way, or try it that way.....a constant processing of input and generation of output. That's not cool. That's being a geek. An acknowledgement of a brain which works like a computer, which needs rebooting each night, defragging occasionally, but when running at optimum can crunch masses of data and come to conclusions easily and smoothly at the end of the crunching.
I have spent a long time hiding this. I have spent a long time only letting similar people see.
Slowly but surely, the decision to just see what happens is creeping up on me. To jump, take a risk, do something, do something. But that's not cool and the last thing on earth I want to be is cool. The technology is cool. The digital capability is cool. Faster broadband, smaller chips, more efficient processing, crowdsourcing, village pumps , virtual noticeboards, unconferences and bar camps - they are all cool.
I am not.
I know some things. I know these things through being inside something. It's as natural to me as breathing, a framework where I instinctively operate. It's not got a name and it doesn't need a special name. It's not cute and fluffy and it's not going to change the world. Except, that was 3 years ago. Now I know some things for the same reasons but I feel somehow responsible for making those things cute and fluffy and accessible. I feel responsible for passing it in, for teaching people, for explaining in plain English to those far smarter than me. Sometimes I find myself in such ridiculous situations, explaining something which to me seems so damn simple, to someone who could intellectually eat me for breakfast.
I am confused. Bewildered. There is a new world order, why yes there is, but instead of being at the bottom of the pile, suddenly I seem to be in the middle somewhere. Have the geeks inherited the earth?
Well yes. Yes they have. But with inheriting something, as in reality with heirlooms, there comes a certain responsibility if you are a certain kind of a person. I suppose I am a certain kind of a person. I don't believe it's someone elses job. I don't believe someone else should pick up the baton. I wont leave well alone. Some of my friends, who are geeks, think I am ridiculous for getting involved. They think I am talking pipedreams. Others don't understand the need for translation, others sneer at those who need translation, instead wanting to keep the knowledge and thus the power to themselves.
Lets get this straight, right now. I am not cool. I am a geek. Being a geek is not cool. If it is going to become cool to be a geek, and increasingly it seems that this might be the case, then I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with that. I love digital. I love technology. I love burying my head in a book. I want to know everything, all of it, all of the time and right now. I do not want to be cool. Cool is frivolous, cool is unquantifiable, cool does not come in black and white and cool is out of my control. Someone else decides whether I am cool or not and I am simply not interested in that. I'm too old, too grumpy, dress too differently, and frankly, am just too uncool.
But I am a geek. A big geek with a big heart. It used to be that that bemused people. Confused them. I would speak, the words would come out of my mouth, and there would be confusion in the listeners eyes. What is this you speak of? Why are you telling me these things? Why are you so enthusiastic about something as stupid as talking in text? We talk to each other, there is no space or time for your weird ideas here.
Now the world has flipped and I am catching up. And I am the one who is confused and bewildered. I perpetually feel like I am supposed to be doing something where I am not entirely sure what something is. I have ideas, hundreds of them. I sit and listen to other people talking and 90% of the time ideas spark and pinwheel off in my brain and I reach for a pad and I scribble and scribble and scribble some more. Ideas, imaginings, what if's, why can't we's, how about we do it that way, or try it that way.....a constant processing of input and generation of output. That's not cool. That's being a geek. An acknowledgement of a brain which works like a computer, which needs rebooting each night, defragging occasionally, but when running at optimum can crunch masses of data and come to conclusions easily and smoothly at the end of the crunching.
I have spent a long time hiding this. I have spent a long time only letting similar people see.
Slowly but surely, the decision to just see what happens is creeping up on me. To jump, take a risk, do something, do something. But that's not cool and the last thing on earth I want to be is cool. The technology is cool. The digital capability is cool. Faster broadband, smaller chips, more efficient processing, crowdsourcing, village pumps , virtual noticeboards, unconferences and bar camps - they are all cool.
I am not.
Monday, 22 March 2010
Here come the girls (Ada Lovelace with thanks)
The 24th March has been designated as Ada Lovelace day. A day for blogging about women in tech and science in memory of one womans contribution to Babbage's analytical engine. She was, it would seem, one of the worlds first programmers, and she was a woman. I dislike commenting publicly on gender politics, but this is something which hit a chord with me, because I am a geek, and I am a girl, and those two things do not go together quite as often as one might think they do. Ask any male geek how difficult it is/was to find a girlfriend/wife who understood geeking, nevermind is/was one and you will understand. The world looks differently, I hope, from the generation below, but this is my experience.
So I thought I would write about a woman in tech or science who has inspired me. Who has caught my imagination and taught me to understand that being a geek is not unusual, a role model and mentor who I can go to and bounce ideas off, without needing to dumb down the technical terminology because they wont understand.
The problem with that, of course, is there is no one. Not one single person, that I can think of, who is female and codes, sysadmins, network configures or security defends and is out and proud about it enough to inspire or act as a role model.
So I thought I'd write about Lucy (not her real name, I'm not going to embarrass her, she works with me). The reason I want to write about her despite not being a geek, is the way in which she deals with things which she doesn't understand the mechanics of intimately. Most people are aware of ICT. They understand the meaning of the initials. They understand who they are calling when they have a problem and need the helpdesk. Most people don't understand much further than that and make no effort to.
Lucy makes an effort. A really big one. She is not a geek, but she analyses. She is not a geek, but she puts the jigsaw pieces together and quickly. She is not a geek, but she can see the overview faster than most, and sees how everything intertwines, understanding where ICT must fit into that puzzle. She is not a geek, but she problem solves in a way which gets straight to the point, fixes the cause and lets the rest take care of itself. So in some ways she is a geek, but not in the way it matters when understanding the intricacies of system resource management, network speeds and their impact on responsiveness or the nightmares of security. So she asks. Something so many other people fail to do. She doesn't go away and quietly Google it for fear of losing face, she just asks the question, and asks you to qualify and simplify anything she doesn't understand. She goes away with a proper understanding of something in the context it's relevant to and makes decisions and writes proposals based on the correct information.
For me, watching someone unashamedly admit to not knowing something but using the resource around her to gain the information and understand she needs has been exactly what I needed. Lucy gets straight to the point and doesn't get distracted, perhaps because of the sheer amount of information she is taking on board. And in this she is inspirational, because she has taught me the value of owning up to something, that you do not lose respect for admitting to not knowing something, that choosing the parameters within which you will operate in the business world is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength.
It is odd, perhaps, but the person I have found to be most inspirational, helpful and who has provided the most mentoring to me as a geek, is not a fellow geek but someone who is teaching a geek how to operate in the world with no apologies for not knowing something. As much as I am Lucy's translator and interpreter for geek things - software, hardware, connections, requirements etc - she is my translator and interpreter for how to operate in the world outside geekery, where etiquette, social interaction and getting beyond my shyness and expressing myself and my opinion are things which were challenging but are becoming less so because of her.
Our working relationship may look odd from the outside, I have no idea. But from where I'm standing it is a perfect balance and perhaps demonstrates the massive value of surrounding yourself with non geeks as well as geeks.
So ultimately, this post isn't about women in tech and science at all. Except, actually, it is. It's about me. It's about learning from other people and sharing with other people, and us geeks need to do it more often. So, today, I celebrate the women who mentor us and who are our role models despite not being geeks. In the absence of any one else, they're all I have, and I am thankful for them.
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