Slashdot Mirror
Ada Initiative Organization To End, But Its Work Will Continue
An anonymous reader writes: Today the Ada Initiative announced that the nonprofit will shut down in mid-October. Founded in 2011, the Ada Initiative is a nonprofit feminist organization created to help improve open source culture and build a more inviting, productive, safe environment for women. In this interview with Opensource.com, the co-founders look back at the organization's successes, and the work that still needs to be done.
FTFA: "Check back for our Diversity in Open Source series, which starts August 10."
Yes, of fucking course, because the product takes second place to having enough women and minorities that are safe from microaggressions working on it.
I admit that I respond to a lot of this stuff, and I probably should back off, but the number one reason why I do is because I feel I have to offer a counter-message to stuff like this. As much as I don't want to talk about it anymore, I feel like the more of the stuff like this that gets posted, the more it gets accepted as "truth" that women are somehow under attack by "the boys club".
For every woman that claims there's some inherent "truth" that conferences need "anti-harassment policies" and "safe spaces", I'd like to be a woman that says there are plenty of women with experiences that indicate the problem isn't as bad as they say it is.
(And, no, your feminist blog is not proof that it is. Any and all feminist blogs offering such "proof" will be roundly ignored.)
Yes, you have assholes. You have them everywhere. You can't keep them out of your arena.
But I go to Code Camps and other technical events fairly regularly. And I've never once got the sense that I (or any of the other women in the room) have been hounded, or hounded out or treated with derision.
Maybe the problem is because that one asshole draws so much attention to him- (and indeed, her-) self, we create archetypes based on those personalities which we then elevate into "the norm", and then we forget all the nice, normal people around us that aren't being assholes to us. And believe me, there are far fewer assholes than there are decent people out there.
If you can't find any decent people around you, and you're calling everyone an asshole, you might want to grab some toilet paper and give yourself a good once-over. Or as we used to say when we were kids: "She who smelt it, dealt it."
Maybe, then, the solution is to stop treating sexism as if it's a constant problem for everyone at all times. Maybe it's time to start understanding that what's creating a hostile work environment in many places is the assumption that it's going to be hostile from the jump. Maybe it's time to start acknowledging that when you have an organization that's a hammer, perhaps you've developed a myopia that tells you everything around you looks like a nail.
Men don't need to be taught not to rape (or for the purposes of this discussion, harass).
Women need to toughen up and realize that no space is ever completely "safe", and sometimes you just have to deal with it.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
When it came to supporting our work financially, we figured that companies that benefited from open source software would just hand over giant wads of cash to an unproven new nonprofit run by two former software engineers.
I realize they're probably being tongue-in-cheek, but does it really come as any surprise that such an organization (regardless of what it's doing) would be closing down? That seems like an even more cavalier approach to funding than the typical venture-capitalist start-up approach in silicon valley where the business model is to just get a bunch of users and figure out how to generate revenue at some magical point in the future.
I think that the other big problem is that they didn't provide enough ongoing value to a company to get funding. Any organization could use their recommendations or examples to create a code of conduct, but once that's in place, they're only really receiving money for past services rendered and no business is just going to keep forking over money that they don't need to.
Not the OP, but why was this marked as Troll? He's right. Feminism seems to be beloved by certain circles of geeks and I cannot seem to grok why. Everyplace I have worked that had even the slightest amount of feminist leanings was a terrible place to work. The places that were largely patriarchal and where men could be men, curse, keep the lights off in the cube farm, hang up posters, smoke right outside the data room doors -- those are the best places to work.
I despise walking on eggshells around feminists, women in general, and homosexuals. It's become so PC the last few years. I really am thankful I have a the job I do. I have my own office, set my own work pace, in general have a lot of latitude from on high. And my coworkers are not PC. We can joke, laugh, have good banter with no one running to HR because someone got offended at a homo joke or making fun of this or that person.
I really do miss the halcyon days of my data center youth where anything went as long as you did your job.
Well it's a pity that only filesystem might use compare by hash and that she's unaware of salting hashes. Oh wait neither of those is true and in fact the paper you gave mentions salting but not filesystems. You know git uses compare by hash, right? How world you keep salt secret with git? And git is not the only system out there.
Frankly, I think the claims are a bit over blown / the paper is not widely applicable, but that still doesn't make it anything like as wrong as you appear to believe. It's still just a mediocre paper and you can't glean much from that for reasons I've already elucidated and you haven't rebutted.
Look, I don't know this Valerie person from Adam, and I don't care if she's competent or not, but given that you are making demonstrably false claims about the evidence you provided, I'm now firmly of the belief that you're for some reason emotionally invested in proving her wrong. That's kinda weird.
SJW n. One who posts facts.