FFUntriaged number games

Posted on by Liz

As some of you may know we have over 900,000 thousand bug reports in bugzilla.mozilla.org these days. Around 120K of those are open bugs.

I keep an eye on the incoming bugs, which are still around 350-550 for any 24 hour period and peck away at those. Many people in QA and various engineering teams also keep watch over the incoming bugs so that problems are caught quickly, escalated appropriately, and stuff gets fixed and released as soon as possible.

But the incoming are just one thing among many. Lately I’ve been working on a fairly arbitrary goal. That is to bring down a specific number, the bugs filed for Firefox that are in the “Untriaged” component, where the last comment was by the person who reported the bug. I have it on my todo list as “FFUntriaged”, so I think of it that way. FFUN! (I’m sure that is unconvincing…)

Bugs on a laptop

When I started putting half an hour to an hour a day into this, the count was well over 500 bugs. Now it is closer to 400. I answer some from the front of the queue and some from the tail end, which right now goes back to February 2012. The older, 2012 bugs are mostly obsolete at this point, but I have caught a few that are still valid, and that are now categorized in a product and component that brought them to the notice of the developers who may already be working on similar issues.

Of the bugs that I end up closing, a bunch of them probably should have been support questions in the first place. I resolve them INVALID if they are reallky support questions because they aren’t and weren’t bugs in Firefox. If I can’t tell what was going on, and the reporter doesn’t answer my “needinfo” query, I can resolve the bug INCOMPLETE since there was never enough information to tell if it was really a bug or not.

A few of these long-untriaged Firefox bugs ended up in the RESOLVED WORKSFORME status, which I think of as: when the bug was reported, no one was able to reproduce it, I can’t reproduce it now, and maybe also the original reporter can’t reproduce it. Maybe it got fixed along the way. It doesn’t seem important enough to anyone to pin down exactly what fixed it. It just works now. Resolving it seems ok to me, since that doesn’t erase any history: the bug report is still findable if it comes up again.

The FFUNtriaged bugs project has been fairly satisfying just to watch the number come down over time. Pretty soon we will have it down to something reasonable, like under 30, and actually recent bugs instead of cruft from a year ago. Then I’ll pick a new little project!

And now a digression about duplicate bugs.

A few bugs from FFUNtriaged end up being marked as duplicates. I catch a few, but more often someone more experienced notices the duplicates after I do something else with them, which sends bugmail or puts a report into a new product or component. Some reports just sound like they must have been reported before. DUPing them is a good way to establish connections and direct the original bug reporter to where the action or discussion is. There is good advice in Screening duplicate bugs article on MDN.

There is not only a Most Frequently Reported Bugs list, there is also now a whole dashboard which can show most duped bugs by product. The one I have been looking at a lot recently is the most duped list for Core::Layout bugs. The product dashboard doesn’t let you limit by time though. So I still think the main Most Frequently Reported Bugs page is more useful; you can change its query to limit it by product, or view it as a regular (sortable) bug list.

In theory the better we get (collectively) at duping bugs, the more useful the lists of most-duped bugs will be. It may be a self perpetuating cycle though, to where we learn the most-duped ones, then dup more bugs to them. I have thought before it might be fruitful to hunt after (or ask someone for a lead to) closely related bugs and sort through them to see if any are obvious dupes.

Things I know about automatically as dupes are: anything involving shortcut keys. Layout complains about tables and images. Anything to do with bookmarks. All those are worth a search and a quick scan of a list of bugs with similar words in the summary and then a bit of digging!

Sometimes people are a bit upset that “their” report gets
duped to an already existing bug. I don’t have enough experience (after 8 months triaging) to really have a sense in the patterns of what gets fixed and why. But when a bug is duped to an older one, the people who get bugmail on that older bug are going to get a poke of some kind, so at least that brings the issue to possible attention. And over time, it may affect how teams or engineers set priorities or figure out what to fix or escalate. So I think it it likely useful.

FFUntriage number games

Posted on by Liz

As some of you may know we have over 900,000 thousand bug reports in bugzilla.mozilla.org these days. Around 120K of those are open bugs.

I keep an eye on the incoming bugs, which are still around 350-550 for any 24 hour period and peck away at those. Many people in QA and various engineering teams also keep watch over the incoming bugs so that problems are caught quickly, escalated appropriately, and stuff gets fixed and released as soon as possible.

But the incoming are just one thing among many. Lately I’ve been working on a fairly arbitrary goal. That is to bring down a specific number, the bugs filed for Firefox that are in the “Untriaged” component, where the last comment was by the person who reported the bug. I have it on my todo list as “FFUntriaged”, so I think of it that way. FFUN!

Bugs on a laptop

When I started putting half an hour to an hour a day into this, the count was well over 500 bugs. Now it is closer to 400. I answer some from the front of the queue and some from the tail end, which right now goes back to February 2012. The older, 2012 bugs are mostly obsolete at this point, but I have caught a few that are still valid, and that are now categorized in a product and component that brought them to the notice of the developers who may already be working on similar issues.

Of the bugs that I end up closing, a bunch of them probably should have been support questions in the first place. I resolve them INVALID if they are reallky support questions because they aren’t and weren’t bugs in Firefox. If I can’t tell what was going on, and the reporter doesn’t answer my “needinfo” query, I can resolve the bug INCOMPLETE since there was never enough information to tell if it was really a bug or not.

A few of these long-untriaged Firefox bugs ended up in the RESOLVED WORKSFORME status, which I think of as: when the bug was reported, no one was able to reproduce it, I can’t reproduce it now, and maybe also the original reporter can’t reproduce it. Maybe it got fixed along the way. It doesn’t seem important enough to anyone to pin down exactly what fixed it. It just works now. Resolving it seems ok to me, since that doesn’t erase any history: the bug report is still findable if it comes up again.

The FFUNtriaged bugs project has been fairly satisfying just to watch the number come down over time. Pretty soon we will have it down to something reasonable, like under 30, and actually recent bugs instead of cruft from a year ago. Then I’ll pick a new little project!

And now a digression about duplicate bugs.

A few bugs from FFUNtriaged end up being marked as duplicates. I catch a few, but more often someone more experienced notices the duplicates after I do something else with them, which sends bugmail or puts a report into a new product or component. Some reports just sound like they must have been reported before. DUPing them is a good way to establish connections and direct the original bug reporter to where the action or discussion is. There is good advice in Screening duplicate bugs article on MDN.

There is not only a Most Frequently Reported Bugs list, there is also now a whole dashboard which can show most duped bugs by product. The one I have been looking at a lot recently is the most duped list for Core::Layout bugs. The product dashboard doesn’t let you limit by time though. So I still think the main Most Frequently Reported Bugs page is more useful; you can change its query to limit it by product, or view it as a regular (sortable) bug list.

In theory the better we get (collectively) at duping bugs, the more useful the lists of most-duped bugs will be. It may be a self perpetuating cycle though, to where we learn the most-duped ones, then dup more bugs to them. I have thought before it might be fruitful to hunt after (or ask someone for a lead to) closely related bugs and sort through them to see if any are obvious dupes.

Things I know about automatically as dupes are: anything involving shortcut keys. Layout complains about tables and images. Anything to do with bookmarks. All those are worth a search and a quick scan of a list of bugs with similar words in the summary and then a bit of digging!

Sometimes people are a bit upset that “their” report gets
duped to an already existing bug. I don’t have enough experience (after 8 months triaging) to really have a sense in the patterns of what gets fixed and why. But when a bug is duped to an older one, the people who get bugmail on that older bug are going to get a poke of some kind, so at least that brings the issue to possible attention. And over time, it may affect how teams or engineers set priorities or figure out what to fix or escalate. So I think it it likely useful.

Steady contribution to Firefox support forums

Posted on by Liz

Every once in a while I go over to the Mozilla support forums to this query for questions asked in the last 24 hours that haven’t been answered. I like how it’s phrased. Right now it’s “6 questions in the last 24 hours have no reply. Help solve them!”. That’s out of 86 questions asked in the last day.

Looking up the answers is interesting. To answer the question, I poke around on the support forums, do a general google search, and usually find something relevant or can at least link to advice. Hopefully, the person asking the question feels happy to get a reply even if the answer isn’t easy! And, sometimes, other people who are support forum regulars come in afterwards and give a better answer or correct my answer. So I am not afraid to answer wrong; other people are on it, and if their answers are more useful they will get voted up higher on the answers page. Either way, there is plenty to learn by trying to answer well, giving a link or a source for the information, and just plain being nice to people.

Then I take a look at my SUMO user profile to see my stats build up. I only answer a question now and then, and have edited and translated a few articles. Actually I’m a sucker for anything that shows a steady buildup of activity and any kind of stats. While my mere 38 questions answered isn’t a lot compared to some of the incredibly dedicated contributors on the support leaderboard. It is like a little dragon hoard of evidence that I did something and that is satisfying even when it’s a very small hoard!

Sumo user profile 913

I only realized recently there are canned responses for replying in the support forums. There is an icon like a top hat, or a magician’s hat, which I didn’t notice for months. Perhaps from being a person who is way more into text than images.

Sumo magichat

It never occurred to me to click on that hat. Then someone mentioned it on IRC. Wow! I may file a bug to suggest adding a label next to it, that appears even when you don’t mouse over the hat. (Or is it a can… or a bucket?)

The selection of common responses is extremely useful. Basically there is a lot of infrastructure built to support, not just the people coming to look for answers, but the community contributors answering the questions.

Sumo canned

Bugzilla now has user profiles which I’ll be working to improve and make useful. You can see a person’s last activity in bugzilla.mozilla.org, the number of bugs they’ve filed, commented on, and various other stats that may be relevant to bug reporters, bug triagers, and developers. I’ll post more about this soon!

By the way, my avatar on SUMO, though it kind of looks like me with its purple hair, is from a game called Glitch that closed in late 2012. Glitch was a descendent of Game Neverending. GNE had an image management and social network build into it that became Flickr. I still miss Glitch – it was a great game and a beautiful community!

Hipster Habit App; strategies to cope with pain

Posted on by Liz

Last week I printed out my friend Amelia’s Hipster Habit App to try it out. How much more could I possibly love this little site that is just a one page pdf that you print and fold into a tiny pocket zine, but calls itself an “app”. Yay! So silly and awesome!

Zine cover

I wrote “naps” into the blank and circled “chilll time” as extra reinforcement. On the second page of the zine I committed to lie down and close my eyes for 5 minutes a day at noon, every day.

After the first try at this I thought that I should go back and change it to 10 minutes. Five didn’t seem like enough. It was just enough to lie there feeling pain in my knees and hands, fingers and ankles, and for exhaustion to surge over me like a horrible heavy blanket. At the same time I had a million ideas of things I needed to remember to do, lists to make, errands to run, work emails to send, weird inventions, things I wanted to cook. So many impulses to leap up and grab my notebook to write down the lists! Instead I tried to drift into incoherence, even drifting with the pain, and think about breathing deeply and calmly.

Actually, 5 minutes of that is plenty!!!

After a week of 5 minute “naps” I find that the habit reminds me to slow down. It makes me realize that I should take some painkiller (currently tramadol, and topical voltaren), AND rest, rather than run myself into the ground over the day. 20 years of weird annoying arthritis means that my main strategy of life is to ignore pain as long as I can until I absolutely drop. Distraction is a great way to deal with pain. Fidgeting and stretching also keeps me from stiffening up so I get up a lot from working even when working from bed.

It helps me to consider my activity level that day. Am I walking too much, sitting with bad posture, do i need to adjust my activities planned, put off doing errands or laundry, get help from other people, stay home, put on ice packs, lie down more? A useful reminder to consider those things.

After a month according to the zine I could increase my habit by 10 minutes. Actually, I’m hoping one of these days I’ll really fall asleep and have a nap. That would be so good for me, but it’s so hard to do when my knees and ankles hurt so much. I look back and can’t comprehend how I coped with last year’s pain levels. I will try never to stand for (hahaah) that much uncontrolled pain again. It is criminal that I was expected to. It’s good to have better medical care. Tramadol is working out well, intermittently when I need it, as it cuts the pain level without making me feel dopey or fuzzy minded. In fact I feel pleasantly amped up even with half a tramadol. Most of the day, I can think clearly, focus my mind, and have lots of energy. Some of that might be a side effect of the drug, but I think most of it is just being more free of pain. Pain is exhausting!!

Compared to last year at this time, I am doing amazingly well. Last August I was still on medical leave only just barely starting to be able to walk without the moon boots (aka walking boots for ankle injuries) I still had 2 or 3 wedges elevating my ankles inside the boots. Without the boots I was still shuffling. Now I can take full steps with a weight shifting gait for most of the day. I can go down and up some stairs, almost full on instead of sideways, though sideways is still much easier, with a cane. I thnk it was my enthusiastic stair climbing that really got my ankles in late 2011, so more caution would be wiser.

One more anti pain tool in my belt is that I have my San Francisco medical marijuana card. It was hilariously easy to get. I am curious to go into the nicer dispensaries around town to see what they are like. So far I have only been into the Bernal Heights Collective one, which was like a sort of seedy cafe/biker bar atmosphere and awfully smokey inside. I bought some hand salve, which is helpful at night on my distal finger joints, which hurt the worst, and doesn’t seem to affect me in other ways other than the one time I got carried away, smeared it all over my wrists and knees in desperation and curiosity, and fell asleep high as a kite. In moderate amounts on one’s knuckles it doesn’t have any euphoric effect at all, and is very helpful for pain! If you have painful arthritis or know someone who does, let them know. Pot hand cream all the way!!

The other factor this year is that I have steroid injections every 3 months in my sacroiliac joints. Can’t remember when my next one is due but I am wishing for it on the right side, the last couple of weeks (my bad side, that makes me limp and drag my right leg). I also am in month 8 of Enbrel injections (an immune suppressant). I inject it every week into my stomach. It is funny but every time I think of my mom telling me when I was little that if you got bit by a rabid animal, you had to have INJECTIONS INTO YOUR STOMACH, which sounded like the worst, scariest, grossest thing ever, even to me who had allergy shots once a week in both arm that would swell up like subcutaneous tennis balls. I find that injections into the stomach at least with a bit of cushioning is easily bearable. Though I have pierced my own nose and given birth with no anesthesia so you might not want to take my word for it . . . I’m a complete badass.

Sometimes I kind of forget that other people are not in horrible pain all the time. Like they just aren’t in pain at all. They tweak a muscle or something and are like “Ow!” or they get a cold. Then I remember that, when i compare myself to other people and I worry that I might be lazier or wimpier than other people, it doesn’t actually work that way. It is something I have to constantly deal with and, not fight, but just be with. It is a constant factor. This actually means that I am good at dealing with pain, and know how; it’s a skill. It’s a bit like I am a secret magician deploying force field armor around myself or have some extra sense into the world of, you know, the internal bits of my ankle tendons or whatever. One more thing about pain while I’m on a ramble: it is very true that you (me) can be in pain all the time, yet be extremely happy, and have a good life. I would say that it takes time, endurance, and work for that to be true. It may also be luck of temperament.

OK…. maybe that is enough.. the hand cream might be kicking in.

Supporting The Ada Initiative, and making more room

Posted on by Liz

People ask me all the time what they can do to help change our culture. How to get more women in F/LOSS, in tech, get more women coding and working with us? I have a suggestion! Please donate to The Ada Initiative! I realy believe that it’s helping, and wil continue to help!

Personally I donate monthly to The Ada Initiative as well as participating on its advisory board. Over the past couple of years I’ve benefitted directly from The Ada Initiative as I see conference after conference put anti-harassment policies into place, which TAI has worked hard to facilitate.

Earlier this summer I had an amazing experience at AdaCamp in San Francisco. The Melbourne and DC AdaCamps bore fruit too, as they connected so many women in open tech and culture with the communities I’m already part of, and made us visible to each other.

The synergy from the feminist hackerspace discussions at AdaCamp SF led to the first meeting for a new feminist hacker and maker space in San Francisco. After a whole weekend of talking at AdaCamp, it was like we couldn’t stop! I ended up with a dozen or so fierce activist women in my living room describing their vision for how we could make actual physical room for our projects and ourselves, a space we would invent, define, and maintain. It was really a dream come true.

As an long-time feminist activist, I have felt tremendous relief from the amount of peer support I’ve gained from working with The Ada Initiative. The people who are part of TAI have a tremendously sophisticated view of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and what we need to make it happen. I deeply appreciate the professional commitment of everyone at TAI and everyone I met at AdaCamp! That’s part of why I’m posting to ask you to donate. It’s important to make support for women in free and open source tech and culture truly part of our infrastructure. We can do that by funding that work! Here’s some ways to donate!

Donate now tai

That all crucial three dollar check

Posted on by 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

Posted on by 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

Posted on by 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

Posted on by 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

Posted on by 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.