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That all crucial three dollar check

August 2, 2013January 6, 2019 Liz

So, disabled people in theory get to ride public transport at a discount rate in San Francisco and in fact in the entire Bay Area. To get my disabled rate card for the bus I had to bring my accessible parking placard to an office in Downtown SF and pay some nominal fee for a card. This proves I’m disabled I guess. Most transit cards, you can just buy at a Walgreens or in the train station.

That errand took nearly a whole day for me to take the bus, wait around in this office, get sent to the DMV for some reason I couldn’t fathom, spend hours at the DMV, get back on my 4th bus of the day to the Regional Transit Center office on Van Ness. Pay my 5 bucks or whatever it was and be done. I got a plastic card with my photo & an RFID chip. But this is already bullshit. How much proving I’m disabled do I have to do here for this petty benefit? Can’t DMV make it known upon request that yes, in their eyes, I’m still disabled?

Once I had the card – maybe a month later — I could get online to refill the card and even set it up to refill automatically once a month. That part was nice.

In July, I got a badly xeroxed form with a handwritten note saying I needed to check a box to say I was still disabled, and write in the number of my parking placard. I also had to enclose a check for $3.00. Ridiculous!

So I sent this form in a couple of weeks ago. Today my bus pass suddenly didn’t work.

I called the Clipper card people who told me to call RTC which is run out of some company called Cordoba. They said they were getting tons of phone calls, because many people hadn’t gotten their renewals yet.

The phone call with RTC was just frustrating. They acted like they were angry with me and were very condescending. “Well, did you SEND IT? Did you send it to (po box and address.) How do I know? I sent it to the address it said. “Well did you enclose a check for $3.00? If you put cash in, that doesn’t work.” Yeah I’ll bet it doesn’t. They haven’t gotten my renewal letter, and didn’t have any suggestion about what to do other than wait.

The whole process is so silly and inefficient. They need to recognize that lots of people aren’t going to become magically un-disabled, and save themselves a lot of petty paperwork. I wonder what actually happens to that piece of paper I got mailed? No one needs that damn piece of paper! And I don’t think they need any yearly check for 3 dollars either, isn’t that what we pay taxes for?! Really you are gonna hassle every single cripple in the Bay Area every July for a check for $3.00?

I bet that has bad results especially for all the people I see downtown who might not have their shit together to the degree I do. I doubt the intended service manages to serve this population well.

/end rant.

Put a gear on it: The Art of Steampunk

July 27, 2013 Liz

This morning I’m reading the gorgeous review copy of The Art of Steampunk (the revised second edition). Its full title is The Art of Steampunk: Extraordinary Devices and Ingenious Contraptions from the Leading Artists of the Steampunk Movement. It’s a coffee table paperback, with beautiful photos of steampunk art and short articles, focused on the 2009-2010 Steampunk exhibit at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science.

The photos are awesome, glossy and often full-page, and I liked having a collection of them. The art is admirable! I especially enjoyed Mikhail Smolyanov’s motorcycles and Jessica Joslin’s mechanical animals.

Jessica joslin animal

My favorite art piece by far is Joey Marsocci’s Amelia Earhart Navigational System which has a brain in a bubbling, steaming jar on top of what looks like a wooden radio cabinet and which you can type on to get audio clips of Amelia Earhart’s voice (as a paranormal connection). It looks completely amazing, and I’m a sucker for anything that’s a complex framing of history. Here’s a short video about the piece:

Richard Nagy’s steampunk laptop designs are also just great!

As I read The Art of Steampunk this morning I spent some very enjoyable time looking up the artists and their work. I think this book could be a fun starting point for anyone interested in adding some biographies to Wikipedia, and their notability is easily sourced.

I am very fond of analyzing anthologies, who is in them and why, how genres or cultures are defined, looking at who’s in the index or table of contents, and so on, all in a political context. It is a lifetime habit! As maybe is obvious from my enormous anthology project on Spanish-American women poets I particularly like to look at the inclusion and non-inclusion of women.

Of the 17 artists featured in the museum exhibition, or at least in the book’s description of the exhibition, only 2 are women. The book’s introduction says,

Although it’s technocentric in styling, Steampunk design is definitely not just a “boy’s club” of enthusiasts. Its fans and creators are equally divided among women and men, young and old alike, from around the world.

Claims to diversity stand out to me in anthologies when they are not actually reflected in the work represented. It would be better, I think, to acknowledge the diversity represented — in this case artists from several different countries — and also acknowledge where it is lacking or flawed.

A section at the front shows work and biographical profiles for eight more artists whose work was perhaps not known to the book’s editor until after the exhibition, and the work featured dates from after 2009. 6 of these 8 artists are women. I note it as an improvement in apparent diversity in the book, even if it was not reflected in the museum exhibition.

I was somewhat annoyed, in this context, that the book’s editor referred to Mary Shelley in another attempt to be “diverse”, but spelled her name wrong.

While reading this book I thought of postcolonialist steampunk and Jaymee Goh’s blog Silver Goggles, always worth reading. I like her critiques of racism and colonialism in steampunk communities and the framing of “what steampunk is”. Beyond Victoriana: A Multicultural Perspective on Steampunk by Ay-leen also explores, well, actual diversity in the culture and its representation.

Beyond Victoriana is the oldest-running blog about multicultural steampunk and retro-futurism–that is, steampunk outside of a Western-dominant, Eurocentric framework. Founded in 2009, Beyond Victoriana focuses on non-Western cultures, underrepresented minorities in Western histories (Asian / Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, First Nation, Hispanic, black / African & other marginalized identities), and the cultural intersection between the West and the non-West.

The Art of Steampunk didn’t overtly focus on pith helmets and celebrations of colonialism but it does not go deep into the possibilities despite its sweeping claims of diversity. So while I love the book, I wish that there were more of it!

Thank you, allies

June 25, 2013 Liz

Yesterday at work I joined some guys to go from the 7th floor to the first floor to find the community room. None of us had been there yet, as it is a new space for Mozilla. We looked around the corner to see some stairs. There were a couple of guys working at reception in the building lobby who came over to talk with us. Here is where the experience got unusual!

One of the guys with me, co-workers I’m not sure I even know, said to the building staff, “Hi, looks like we can’t get in this way. Can you give us directions for how to get into the first floor space?”

I nearly died of shock. The usual thing here is that a group of people I am with blithely go down or up the stairs leaving me alone to work it out, and maybe I show up 15 minutes later. Or at best the temporarily-abled folks look confused and someone tries to figure out if someone should stay with me or if that would be an insult to my independent living skills.

How nice it was to just be part of “we”. Some of us could have got in that way, down the stairs! Usually “we” go down the stairs while one of us worried about how “she” will be able to do it. Yesterday it wasn’t “we” and “her”. It was just us! No one made a big deal of it! No one fussed or acted like I was embarrassing or in the way! My grinch-like heart grew three sizes, y’all. Or, maybe… one small layer of armor could come off, and be set aside, for that day.

We all went out of the building into the rain, around the corner, through two badged entrances and a set of fire doors and a ramp, to go to the All Hands meeting.

If only that weren’t so rare of an experience.

Last week I arrived at Open Source Bridge to find the floor marked out with blue painters’ tape “travel lanes”. It was a shock. Someone had thought about it. Someone had been at AdaCamp, or at WisCon, or had done some research, and put a useful accessibility tool in place. I didn’t have to ask for it, it was just there. A surge of feeling welcome came over me, as it did at AdaCamp. I was involved in planning AdaCamp in any case so I knew the access would have some effort put into it. Open Source Bridge thought about it without asking me to organize it. What a beautiful surprise.

The travel lanes and other things like good signs about what was where, meant that I could move around the space, and it was easier for me to participate, talk with other people. It benefited many other people, not just me. It made the space more usable for everyone. Though, I have to hold in my beliefs that improved access for ONE person is enough. To keep asking and going out, I have to belief that I am enough; I deserve it. Other people’s work welcomes and includes us. This last 2 weeks, that belief solidified and expanded inside me. I don’t just deserve to ask and fight. I deserve to be welcome. We all do…

Usually, and I’m talking about 20 years here, my experience is that I ask for a specific thing that would make my participation easier whether it is independent or respectfully interdependent. Like at my hotel in Portland where I asked for the key to the lift to get into the building, to be kept in the lift and turned on. I ask for something reasonable. Then get a reply that it is impossible, inconvenient, forbidden, risky, against the law, against their policy, and so on. I might break the lift. Someone else might steal the key. Someone else will USE the lift who should not; people with luggage, kids playing, people who are just lazy and can “obviously” walk. I might hurt myself by operating the lift. Why do I think I am so special to get this exception? Why is this uppity cripple in my face? It’s just a key! Someone will always be there to operate the lift for you (they weren’t. at all. and never are.) Keep in mind this is a lift like any other one a disabled person might encounter and they are designed to be operable by people with disabilities. Anyway, I did persuade the hotel people to give me a loaner key for a $25 deposit. More on this later. But the fight I had to have to do it, and the level of assertion, armoring, fighting, repetition, knowing I was annoying people who were just trying to do their jobs, was very wearing. (It is important to me to be persistent, to ask, and to ask respectfully, until and unless it is necessary or strategic to escalate.)

In contrast to that thorny knot of fierceness and anger, here is how good allies like my co-workers at Mozilla, all the attendees and organizers at AdaCamp, and everyone at Open Source Bridge helped me feel as a participant in a shared space:

kid on scooter in ballroom — Kid on a scooter in a ballroom

This good story happens more often for me lately, and I think back on when I first started using a wheelchair around 1993 or 1994. The attitudes were so much worse. It was rare to find anyone who understood even square one of what things were like, and disability rights, and non-medical models of impairment and disability, access and mobility. I had a magazine called Independent Living that was not very good but was still helpful and like a beacon in a storm. Then I had the great good luck to get into contact with the Disabled Students Union of DeAnza College where there were seasoned cripfam warriors. Now…. these days… it blows my mind. People major in Disability Studies. People who aren’t disabled. They think about it! They have maybe taken a class or read a book. There are multiple awesome textbooks of disability history! Grounding in history is amazing. It bears fruit. Imagine that, education helps!

It’s really heartening.

I may be muttering “fuckin’ walkies” under my breath less often while I put on my patient face and smile. What a relief.

In celebration of allies, here is another photo of a kid on my scooter. A goat kid!

scooter-baby-goat — baby goat on a scooter

AdaCamp meanderings

June 7, 2013 Liz

Tonight was the AdaCamp San Francisco reception, at Google on the 6th floor. We had some food and beer, talked a million miles an hour, and got a short nice speech from the Site Reliability Engineering team. Thanks Google SRE for sponsoring the dinner!

I got an awesome sticker from somebody that says “Intersectional Feminism Fuck Yeah” which is basically the best thing ever. It goes well with the “Open Source Fuck Yeah” sticker on my laptop!

Hung out and talked with SO MANY PEOPLE. Great conversations about mapping, the Hate Map, Open Street Map, open source hardware kits for fiber arts people, web accessibility struggles in open source, all kinds of gossip, new feminist hackerspaces starting up like the Seattle Attic and one coming soon in Portland (there may be an SF one someday … stay tuned). Ciberseguridad in Mexico for feminist activists, scooters…. I can’t remember what else but I was never bored for even a second. Everyone was so nerdy and happy. I can’t wait for tomorrow!

This week I had fun in my “spare” time working with some tactile mapping folks from Lighthouse SF and the AdaCamp organizers. It was somewhat harder than I thought and was my first try at mapping an interior space collaboratively instead of just writing descriptions on my own. So I learned a lot. Here are some tactile map pics for the sighted. I did not know that braille was be printed double sided; the two sides are offset.

adacamp tactile map — A tactile map of the 15th floor of the Mercantile Exchange building, with braille printing.

tactile map key — A map key that says “Symbols and Abbreviations” with braille printing.

I also experimented with writing a textual description of the space and its rooms and exits, which an attendee had asked for. I volunteered to do this for inter disability solidarity, but also because I enjoy writing interactive fiction and MUD areas very much, and have lots of practice at it. The requester mentioned the possibility of different layers of description, maybe on different pages. I ended up making a single text file as The Ada Camp Text Adventure, where each room was marked with “h2” and an anchor tag. Then I hyperlinked the room names. Each room has a short description and a long description. The long description isn’t marked separately but is just in the second paragraph for each room. There are probably more elegant and useful ways to approach this. It would be interesting to collect other examples.

In the descriptions, I did not use 12 o’clock and 6 o’clock as I read was common for way finding and orientation for blind and visually impaired people. Instead I tried to have one clock orientation at the building entrance, and then switch to North south east west terminology. I tried breaking the word AdaCamp into two words as I felt more confident it would read out correctly as Ada Camp. Perhaps it is not different enough to matter. Consistency in the descriptions and style of describing exits may or may not be important. But I am not sure. While the text adventure’s recipient said it was great, I am not sure that means it is useful. To know how to do this usefully, I would need to iterate with map or text adventure users willing to spend significant time exploring and talking about it. But, as I am probably reinventing the wheel, it would be good for me to read more about what other people do in this area too.

What I’m wondering is, could I do this in a useful way for future events or for spaces I inhabit regularly, like Noisebridge, or WisCon? If so, then more people should do it for public spaces or events and I can tell them so. Also, it would be fun and interesting.

My dream from some years back is that Open Street Map would have text adventure markup, so that particular places in very fine grained ways could be described. It would be fun for people with any level of vision to walk around a city, or a campus, like a MUD, or to look north from a particular address and see what there is to see. Maybe that could make audio navigation descriptions more useful.

I keep saying “useful” and that is because I have seen so many pointless wankery “design” type of oh what a nifty thing this would be for disabled people things that maybe also make a Statement, but they aren’t really nifty, and suck, and are a waste of time and money and energy, and they are very annoying. Usefulness is much nicer.

Journalists don't understand Wikipedia sometimes

April 25, 2013 Liz

This morning I saw some pissed-off twitters that led me to articles about Wikipedia’s sexist bias. Always up for a little early morning smash-the-patriarchy outrage, and well aware of some of the clusterfucks that often play out in Wikipedia admin pages, I forged onwards and read the articles, flaring my nostrils in anticipation. In Wikpedia’s sexism towards female novelists Amanda Filippachi points out that many women tagged with Category: American women novelists aren’t tagged with Category: American novelists. She named several examples. Katie Mcdonough from Salon picked up on this, with Wikipedia moves women to American Women Novelists Category Leaves Men in American Novelists.

Even the most cursory googling shows that this is not a very accurate spin. For example look at Amy Tan, Donna Tartt, and Harper Lee, who are named by Filippachi as missing from American novelists. Here is the Donna Tartt article’s history page going back the last 500 edits to 2004. Tartt was never listed as being in Category: American novelist, not because “Wikipedia is sexist” but because no one thought to put that down amid the hundreds of small edits that incrementally improved the article. Until today when someone added “American novelists” to her page, in virtuous activist response to injustice (which I respect, actually). “Category: American women novelists” was never on Tartt’s page.

Okay, how about Amy Tan. The last 500 edits for Amy Tan’s page go back to 2008. Category:American women novelists was not ever on Tan’s page, but American novelists was added today.

Harper Lee’s history, on the other hand, shows an edit on Feb. 21 removing American novelists and adding American women novelists. If you look at the user who made that edit, they often edit categories, and occasionally makes disputed judgement calls, but they appear to be acting alone and from the pattern of their edits, they do many types of edits in several areas, rather than waltzing around sexist-ly removing women from the category of generic human beings, or even novelists.

Just from these three samples, it does not seem that there is any particular movement among a group of Wikipedia editors to remove women from the “novelists” category and put them in a special women category instead. I would say that the general leaning, rather, is to stop people who would like to label women writers as women writers *in addition* to labeling them as writers, claiming there is no need for Category: American women writers at all and that it is evidence of bias to identify them by gender.

When I add writers to Wikpedia because I love their work or find their lives interesting and significant I often am unsure what the trends in categorization currently are. I may add them as Women writers and also American novelists based on looking at a similar writer’s article. If some of the potential categories aren’t there I hope someone will add them.

mmme_hardy on Twitter pointed out to me immediately that the discussion on this topic amongst Wikipedia editors takes place here: Categories for discussion. There is a proposal here to merge “Category:American women novelists” into “Category: American novelists”. The consensus there is to merge the articles, with some people (including me) mentioning the option to merge and keep the category. Merging the category would remove “Category: American women novelists” from many writers’ pages. That also means the page that lists all the pages in Category: American women novelists would no longer exist.

Thus, a well-meaning attempt to include women in the main categorization for American novelists (where many of them were never listed in the first place) may result in women writers no longer being easily identifiable to those who might want to find them. For example if you are looking for Caribbean women writers and they have all been merged into Caribbean writers that might not be a desirable outcome! Filippache mentionsEdwige Danticat being ‘plucked from “Haitian Novelists” and dumped into “Haitian Women Novelists.”’ But I don’t see that plucking happening from the history! Where did that happen!?

Joanna Russ in How to Suppress Women’s Writing lists miscategorization as one of the ways that women’s work is disappeared over time. In this case I am a bit annoyed at the facile reporting that does not seem to take into account the complexity of how information gets added to Wikipedia. If someone can point me to a Category decision from the past where a bunch of editors agreed to remove women en masse from American novelists and put them in American women novelists, go for it, I would appreciate the help in understanding this.

It is much more often the reverse and it would not be too hard to come up with examples — where someone works rather hard on creating a category for Women activists or American anarchist women and then a bunch of other (often male!) editors step in and say that that is sexist and unnecessary and “ghettoizing”. What would be so hard… or so wrong… about listing writers or other people by gender, race, ethnicity or other factor that people who care about identities and identification may want to browse by? Librarians certainly catalogue writers and works that way, and it is extremely useful! I think that the backlash against identity politics is evident here. Yes Wikipedia editors and admins often have systemic bias. In this case the story has been told in an inaccurate way (that I don’t even have time to debunk thoroughly — I am neglecting my day job right now to write this!) and in a way that both discredits reports of actual systemic and individual bias and that harms the visibility of women writers while trying to help that visibility. The sexist thing we should be up in arms about isn’t labelling women as women! It’s the efforts to delete entire categories (like Haitian women writers, for example) because someone has decided that that meta-information is unnecessary “ghettoization”…. the false belief that we should or can be “gender-blind”, “color-blind”, and so on.

The particular moment of charm

April 24, 2013 Liz

I spent some time this week going through my book wishlist, requesting them from the library in a new surge of conviction that THIS TIME I won’t just eat the very same cost of the books in library fines as I would if I had bought them. But since that still leaves me with the need for e-books on my phone to fall asleep on, I bought a couple of new books. Lately my book recs have come from particular blogging friends (oursin, wiredferret, seelight) and my friend Bryony in England (though I am ignoring her obsession with Icelandic mystery and action novels).

And tonight in the bath I was reading the book I bought, Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed. For a while it felt a bit stumbly and awkward, but lovely anyway. It was easy to let go of whatever hangups bugged me about the writing style and see where the book and its charming characters were going. The lion-girl was a good sign! Sometimes I wait while reading for myself to open up to the experience or the ride and have to let go of… of something. (That’s an important feeling, hard to convey, which people may describe as taking a while to get into, but which I think is often a lack of context on the reader’s part. ) Without practicing that letting-go, omg, the things I would have missed in so many excellent books! And details obviously references someone would make sense of were slipping by, that I knew I was missing,. Rughali = ghali = egyptian? Where is the Soo Republic – Soo = Somalia? Missing it all over the place. Tantalizing! Someone else will get it right off and like it. Good. Anyway, as I was in mid-story in Throne of the Crescent Moon, there was a moment where the book completely charmed me and I trusted the story. That’s what I want to describe!

The point of view changes frequently, from Adoulla the ghul-hunter (who feels a bit like the main character so far), to Raseed, his assistant, then to the lion-girl. How the characters think of each other and their relationships is important shifting territory. Adoulla’s friend Litaz and her husband Dawoud, alkhemists from another land, are helping him in a crisis. Litaz is thinking about her (locked/twisted) hair and how her husband affectionately teases her about it at times and how his people do their hair in his country (which is in like West Africa somewhere. Unlike how they do it in her homeland (which is in East Africa). And I was keenly appreciating that they were outsiders in the city yet they weren’t just lumped together like “the alkhemists from Africa”. Then…

Upon waking a few hours later, Litaz made more tea and Adoulla thanked her for it as if she had saved his mother’s life. He was a bit less inconsolable after his rest, grim planning clearly giving him purpose.

“That jackal-thing that calls itself Mouw Awa, and its mysterious ‘blessed friend’—they must be stopped. Somewhere out there is a ghulmaker more powerful than any I’ve ever faced. I fear for our city,” Adoulla said. He took a long, messy slurp of tea and wiped the excess from his beard.

Your city, my friend, not ours, some resentful part of her protested. She’d lived in and loved Dhamsawaat for decades now, but the older she grew the more she pined to return to the Soo Republic. This city had given her meaningful work and more exciting experiences than she could count. But it was in this dirty city that her child had died. It was in this too-crowded city that her husband had grown older than his years. She did not want to die saving this place — not without having seen home again.

She spoke none of this, of course. And she sat complacently as Dawoud said, “Whatever help you need from us is yours, brother-of-mine. Whatever this is you are facing, you will not face it alone.” For a long while, the three of them sat sipping tea…

That was great! And so rare! Here we are in a fantasy novel and someone has thought subtly of her own feelings and motivations. The city Adoullah loves is, to Litaz, also the (exciting, cool, but…) dirty city where her child died. We are treated to a person who helps her friend loyally and is about to be heroic, though she has mixed feelings about it all, and doesn’t see the situation the way he does or the way her husband does.

The “of course”, thrown in offhand, on how she didn’t speak up to discuss this, was nicely done. She doesn’t behave in an out of place woman-fighting-patriarchy way (as so many annoying perky princesses unfortunately and pluckily and fakely do) and she is in control of her situation. And suddenly all the characters seemed to bloom as different from each other and as people, on their own tracks, rather than little representations of “people” who (as if their labor of existence were ultimately exploited by a capitalist machine) serve either the story or the Hero. I hope this conveys something of what charmed me. And I wish that charm wasn’t so rare.

Now to read on. I hope Litaz doesn’t die saving the city, and gets to go back to the Soo Republic and have a nice life being the best alkhemist ever.

It was a nice day but a tiring day; I had a very annoying bus driver and was filled with rage and sadness and confusion on the way to work (about which more later); I put it behind me, I worked hard, had a really nice lunch with co-workers, worked more, rode the bus home while working some more, thought fondly of my friends, made dinner for Oblomovka’s daughter (he is in Hong Kong for the circumvention conference), saw her and Taren off to the Exploratorium, listened to all the Perfume Genius songs twice indulging in a sort of luxurious solitary melancholy (instead of reading aloud and responsibly telling a small human to brush her teeth and put her pajamas on and get in bed twentyeleventy times), and read my friend Gina’s book draft (the Perfume Genius songs were in honor of her book, to go with it). I look forward extremely to reading more and the later versions.

File a bug: the missing manual, now with unicorns

April 9, 2013 Liz

At countless conference talks I have heard standard advice on “how to get involved in an open source project”. It goes something like this:

Step 1. File a bug!
Step 2. Submit a patch! (repeat steps 1 and 2 for a while)
Step 3. Now you are ready to write some new features and stuff! Fly and be free!

I always thought that was interesting because it is an attempt to reassure people that you don’t have to leap into immediate coding. Just file a bug, that is the first step. This results in people coming into projects and wondering vaguely how to find bugs.

Part of what I want to do as bugmaster for Mozilla is to put in another step — look at the bugs already reported, since there are a squizillion of them, and see what you can do to improve the meta information of those bugs.

Today on Planet Mozilla I noticed some really good advice from Jason Smith on how to find bugs: WebRTC testing: Try out conversat.io and file bugs. It is really sensible and practical. Jason’s blog has a few posts like this that advise focus in a particular area, like WebRTC or Desktop web apps, by incorporating use of those tools in your daily life. Our “get involved in open source” sequence now looks more like this,

Step 1. Find some feature that could use testing.
Step 2. Figure out how to use it regularly.
Step 3. Use it.
Step 4. Encounter behavior you think is a bug.
Step 5. FILE A BUG (BUT HOW?)

There is a lot of background knowledge necessary to actually file a bug in the complicated system that is bugzilla.mozilla.org (or BMO).

So let’s take the WebRTC example. Say you’ve followed Jason’s advice, used conversat.io for a while, and found A BUG. Jason helpfully provides a link directly into Bugzilla to the enter_bug form, with the Product and Component pre-filled out to be for a bug with WebRTC (the component) and Core (the product.) Bugs in BMO are categorized according to Product, like Firefox Desktop, Firefox for Android, FirefoxOS, Thunderbird, etc. “Core” is the product for the code that is shared between many other products. If you were looking to file a bug with WebRTC from scratch you would probably not know which product to file it under, though you have to choose one. So it’s great that Jason gives a link to the right product and component!

But wait. There is so much more background, or context, to understand. You don’t have to, but it is very good to understand it!

First of all you have to have a bugzilla account for the link to work properly. If you do that, you will be a new bugzilla user, and some of the bug entry forms will look different to you — you’ll be automatically directed to a “guided bug entry form” which is broken into several steps, rather than the form that shows you the whole “advanced view” with several dozen fields and dropdown menus.

Second, how about looking at the list of all the components in the Core product. This is a good part of the background knowledge – a little piece of the map or geography of Bugzilla. As you can see, there are a lot of components that are part of Core. Scrolling down to the WebRTC bit, you can see that there are several sub categories: WebRTC, WebRTC:Audio/Video, WebRTC:Networking, and WebRTC:Signaling. Click on the general WebRTC component to see a list of open WebRTC bugs. This is where your geography lesson gets useful.

Right now there are 113 open bugs for WebRTC. You might look over them simply to get an idea of what kinds of bugs others have found. More about this later!

The important thing at this moment is: Is your bug already reported? Depending on how many bugs there are in this list, and your levels of interest and patience, you might want to either quickly read through the summaries (the title of the bug) or do a search down the page for words that might be in the bug you’re about to file.

If you find something in that list that you think is your bug, take a closer look at it. Read it and the comments and try to understand what they’re talking about. If it is the same as your bug, you may want to leave a comment describing what you saw happen.

But let’s say you don’t find your bug on that list. Aha! Here we use the File a bug link from the original blog post, link to file a bug with WebRTC. If you are me, or a user of Bugzilla who has made more than 25 edits or comments to bugs, you will see the advanced bug entry form, which is huge (you can see it from space) and looks like this:

Enter bug webrtc advanced

If you are a relatively new user of Bugzilla, you’ll come first to a guided entry form, broken into several screens. (At any point, you can switch to the advanced entry form with a link at the bottom of the page, if clicking through multiple screens annoys you.) The first screen for guided bug entry would normally be for selecting the product and component. Since you have these already chosen in Jason’s convenient link, you start on Screen 2, where you can enter the summary for your bug. In this case I am reporting a sort of unicorn invasion:

Enterbug webrtc screen2

After you enter a summary you will see a list pop up underneath the summary field, of bugs that may be similar. It is worth reading through those to see if anyone else has reported unicorns invading their conversat.io screens in Firefox. In this case, definitely not.

Enterbug webrtc screen2 list

Since no one else has reported this bug, I click the “My issue is not listed” button, and advance to screen 3, which suggests how I can describe my actions or steps to reproduce the issue, exactly what happened that I think is a bug, and what I think should have happened instead.

Enter bug screen3 unicorn jpg

Great, we have filed a bug! Back to that list of “how to contribute to an open source project”:

Step 1. Find some feature that could use testing.
Step 2. Figure out how to use it regularly.
Step 3. Use it.
Step 4. Encounter behavior you think is a bug.
Step 4.5 Make a bugzilla.mozilla.org account.
Step 4.6 Confirm it with the email confirmation.
Step 4.7 Log in to bugzilla.mozilla.org.
Step 5. FILE A BUG (which we now know how to do!!!)

But wait, there’s more — or there can be if you want to get your bearings on that map of Bugzilla. Take a look back at the list of all the general open WebRTC bugs. What can we understand from this list?

As I look over the current list it is pretty mysterious. From the language in the summaries, I would guess some of the bugs are notes by the development team for their own to-do list, and some of them look like bugs discovered by general users of the software. My first impulse is to sort the page a few different ways to see what that reveals. Sorting by Status shows the UNCONFIRMED bugs at the top and the NEW bugs listed just underneath. There is one titled getUserMedia freeze all system that isn’t confirmed yet and may be a good example.

Here is an interesting one, No event when remote peer disappeared. My view of this bug is going to be different from yours, if you are new to Bugzilla, because I have more magic powers, ie, canconfirm and editbugs permissions, as well as some extra admin stuff. There is a lot of stuff on the page. It’s extremely “busy” with text! You have to learn to skim it and parse it mentally so that you can see and notice the stuff that is important to you at the moment. Here is what this bug looks like for a new Bugzilla user.

Example webrtc bug2

What I can see from reading this bug is that there is at least one person actively looking at newly filed bugs, triaging them, and working on the project. And in fact as I click around and read more of the bugs for WebRTC I can see Jason is actively engaged with most of them, which is not a big surprise since he is blogging about the subject.

Jason’s blog looks like a quite useful place to find out areas that welcome testers and bug-finders. You can also look at the QMO quality assurance and testing pages which explain how to run nightly builds and participate in QA’s bug test and triage days.

My bigger point here, though, is that to start contributing to an open source project, aside from reporting one-off bugs you accidentally discover, it is super helpful to learn the landscape of the project. Adopt the project and poke around to learn about it. If you are reporting a bug, look at the other bugs. Look at who is commenting and working on those bugs. Join their IRC channel and read their wiki pages and (usually more formal than the wiki pages…) developer documentation. Or simply google the project to learn more about what’s going on with it. In this case I found that conversat.io is quite new and was developed partly to show off what WebRTC is and what it can do.

It was really apparent, from my morning of poking around, how much transparency there is at Mozilla, and the amazing technical depths you can get to from half a day’s reading and bug surfing. As a society we really have yet to realize the implications for education and educational institutions. It is a major cultural shift I am happy to be part of.

Noisebridge! Best thing ever!

March 27, 2013September 24, 2022 Liz

On April 2nd and 3rd I am going to spend several hours teaching at least 70 high school physics students how to solder and some alluring information about contributing to open source software!

They are doing a project to design and build a solar home. If you know anything about electronics or solar energy cells please join us a do some teaching!

I spent $250 of my own money to buy a crapload of little LED kits so they can have a conveniently teachable soldering project – that is how much I love Noisebridge, and geeky things, and teaching, and non hierarchical anarchist/mutualist community spaces!

I am thinking of the Hackability group that meets at Noisebridge to fix and mod their wheelchairs and mobility scooters! We take over a classroom, gank all the workshop tools, and get on the floor where none of us think it is weird that we scoot and crawl and roll across the floor to pick up a screwdriver just out of reach, laughing at all this solidarity! We bravely dismantle our cyborg leg-wheels and bolt them on again covered with LED lights, jazzed up with arduinos to measure battery voltage, then roll on out into the town!

And the fierce, fun feminist hacker hive that is a chaotic unstructured network of strength and curiosity and information sharing, that stretches from Noisebridge to sudo room and LOLSpace, and beyond!

We need more paying affiliate members — we need you! We need your cold, hard bitcoins or your cash!

I am thinking of all the people I’ve given tours to who come in from out of town and are all starry-eyed and inspired, who meet people and go to Python and Ruby and web dev and Linux classes and eat the strange productions from the Vegan Hackers, the laptops that people at Noisebridge fix and give away, the cameraderie I always find there and the fabulous energy of young people just moving to San Francisco to do a startup or find some kind of freedom or empowerment and hope to find at least part of it at this weird ever changing junkyard coffeehouse-feeling co-op workshop. We made this place that isn’t anything like any other place and it can also be YOURS. Meddle in it!f

SUBSCRIBE to support Noisebridge’s rent, its freely provided wifi, its bins of electronics parts that anyone can rummage through and pillage, its beautiful giant robot, its classrooms and electricity, its ADA-compliant bathroom custom built specially by Noisebridge folk, its elevator, its devotion to support accessibility for all, all its copies of keys that I and others have distributed as Keys to the City, the library of excellent technical books, well used and loved and read!

Our rent went up this year, and our people’s job security and income went down. It’s exactly at that point, when the economy is hard on us all, that we need collectives and co-ops and hackerspaces. We have to band together in the best ways we can come up with.

People visit Noisebridge and like it so much that they move to the Bay Area. They come to Noisebridge for education, to find peers and mentors, to teach, and sometimes to find as close as they can get to home and family when they are hackers down on their luck.

They come to speak in public for the first time at 5 minutes of fame. They sound a little odd and then they turn out to be geniuses. They drudge to clean the floors and toilets and scrub the kitchen and buy toilet paper, doing the unglamorous physical domestic labor of maintaining this place that’s used heavily 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

We do good work together as best we can. We give a lot to our community! We give access, tools, skills, time, belief, trust, fantastic spectacles, beauty and humor and art. With a sense of wonder and playfulness people walk in and look around – I see it on their faces – like they have just had a million new ideas churn around in their heads – So many possibilities and they know they can be part of it.

And we need widespread, ongoing support.

Donate, sign up for a monthly subscription, be a fabulous affiliate of Noisebridge!

If you can spare any, we need your exclamation points as I have used most of them in this post!!

Shorter posts with more worklogs and book reviews

March 19, 2013 Liz

While I love to go on at length and be thorough sometimes it’s been stopping me from recording interesting stuff lately. I’ll be at a conference and take great notes, which years ago I would have posted unedited. Now I tend to procrastinate posting about something “until I can do justice to it” which often results in “never”. Have I posted about Kiwicon? NO! Argh. Fuck that, I need to just post.

So I’m resolving to write more frequently about smaller topics. They may not turn into comprehensive book reviews but at least there will be something here.

At work I am organizing a Bugzilla bug day and preparing to go to Toronto next week for a community building work week.

Not-at-work, lots of people are rumbling about wanting another feminist hackers meeting and a hackability wheelchair/access device hack day. I have Noisebridge stuff going on and AdaCamp is coming up in June. I forgot to actually sign up for WisCon panels but in theory am going to WisCon. There is a lot of “event to-do list” stuff here!

Notable books I read in the last few days: The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s by Rachel Ferguson, which was fantastic; The Diary of Elizabeth Pepys by Dale Spender, which I adored but which was very depressing as you can imagine if you have read Pepys; and Japanese Inn (my boring-book for bedtime) by Oliver Statler, which functioned perfectly as a boring-book and which was good but very colonialish and patronizing in the way you might expect from a book from 1960 and which if you are not trying to fall asleep at night would just make you wonder why you are bothering and realize it would be better to read some actual work of Japanese history or a primary source by one of the people referred to. Though I did enjoy reading Isabella Bird’s travels.

I am feeling more energy lately and less pain, which I attribute to my 2 months of Enbrel injections and perhaps also Tramadol, which is great as an occasional painkiller.

Here is a photo of the fabulous glistening Minecraft block cake I made for Milo’s 13th birthday party (which was at the musee mecanique again)

There really need to be square cupcake pans (well, cubical) Maybe there already are! Then it would be easy to make little Minecraft block cakes and frost them all different colors and build a hilarious structure which could be easily (if stickily) disassembled.

Feminist hacker lounge at PyCon

March 18, 2013September 24, 2022 Liz

PyCon gave non-profit booth space to The Ada Initiative and Mozilla for our Feminist Hacker Lounge and it turned out just awesome. Though it was only a 10×10 booth space lined with beanbags we met and hung out with lots of fantastic people. Lukas, Val, Mary and I roamed the exhibit halls, went to talks, and handed out stickers. We were right next to the PyLadies booth, across from CodeChix, and diagonally across from Women Who Code. So that made for good synergy. We also sent emissaries across the exhibit hall to trade stickers with the Lady Coders.

In the afternoon on Friday we had some larger discussions but mostly people just wanted to talk with each other in small groups. One of the things people said most often was how welcoming various Python communities had been to them and how comfortable they felt. That was great to hear.

We talked about hackerspaces and projects like Planeteria and whatever we have going in github and our jobs. We talked about stuff we want to do at AdaCamp in June. And Lukas and I got into some weird installer problems in trying to deploy bz-tools with stackato on paas.allizom.org. We told some horror stories and a lot of jokes. I painted my nails “VT100” green with “Tux” black stripes. At one point I watched two math nerds realize they shared a “pure math” background and saw them both get ecstatic expressions on their faces, scream, and hug… And obviously we all spent a lot of time just staring at our laptops while lying there on the floor.

One thing I talked about to people…. brainstorming ideas for a project that I thought of when I read harthur’s post after some code of hers got harshly criticized. (She has a followup post: Open Source Rocks which is also very good.) As I was thinking about students looking for open source projects to contribute too, I wondered if we could offer github projects owned by women to women — in a similar way to how Code Triage works. You could add your repo to the tool and then other women might browse through by language or in some other way, find it, and pick it to contribute to (perhaps getting a periodic email invitation with a bug to fix.)

This would be easier and slicker than many “mentoring”, even peer mentoring, match-up tools I have seen over the years.

(The obvious problem, of course, is that adding your repo to this tool may just get you threats, rude propostions, and nasty hate mail. But so does everything else that identifies us as female — and that just can’t stop us.)

I also spent some time talking with a very nice guy about his teenage daughter’s ventures into hackerdom. She has been doing electronics and robotics projects since she was in preschool. He recommended this amazing looking camp for gifted math students to girls and young women looking for their peers. They are Epsilon Camp for age 8 – 11, Math Path for middle school students, and Math Camp for high school.

It was great to be at PyCon and meet so many amazing people! I really appreciated that the PyCon organizers gave us some free passes which we gave out to some Feminist HackerHive women who would not otherwise have been able to go. Yay PyCon! And much thanks to Mozilla for providing the beanbags and portable whiteboard.