When I posted my Closing a Door post, I mentioned that a team of moderators would be filtering comments for me. Comments that did not meet my comment policy would not be approved. Moderators also found that some comments simply did not further the conversation, were unclear and confusing due to translation issues, or were just contentless spews of hatred.

The comments on that post are now closed. The moderators approved a total of 254 comments, with 213 comments on my “Closing a Door” post, and 39 comments on my follow-up post “What Makes A Good Community?” The moderators also filtered out 186 comments total on those two posts. Now that the internet shit storm is over, I thought it would be interesting to take a peek into the acid-filled well in order to pull out some metrics.

Of course, I didn’t want to actually read the comments. That be silly! It would completely defeat the purpose of having comment moderators and let the trolls win. So, instead I used the power of open source to generate the metrics.  I used the WordPress Exporter plugin to export all the comments on the two posts in XML. Then I used the python wpparser library to parse the XML into something sensible. From there, the program wrote the commenters’ names, email addresses, and IP addresses [1] into a CSV. I did some manual categorization of that information in Google docs.

Repeat Offenders or Drive-by Haters?

70% of the 186 filtered comments were from unique IP addresses. The remaining 30% of comments were generated by 19 different people, who left an average of three comments each. The most persistant troll commented 10 times.

Anonymous Cowards or Brave Truth Tellers?

72% of the 186 comments did not include a full name. Of the commenters that did not include a full name:

• 39 people used just a first name, making up 24% of the comments.
• 25 people used what looks like internet nicks, accounting for 16% of the comments.
• 17 people used various forms of the word “anonymous” in the name field, making up 9% of the comments.
• 12 people used an English word instead of a name, accounting for 8% of the comments.
• 4 people used obviously fake names, accounting for 7% of the comments.
• 8 people used their initials or one letter, accounting for 5% of the comments.
• 5 people used a slur in their name, accounting for 3% of the comments.
• 2 people used a threat in their name, accounting for 1% of the comments. [Edit: make that 3, or 2%]
  

Community Members or Internet Trolls?

38 people used a full name, accounting for 28% of the comments. That means approximately 1/3 were brave enough to put their real name behind their comments. (Or a full fake name.) The question becomes, are these people actually a part of the open source community? Are they people who have actually interacted on an open source mailing list before? To answer these questions, I choose to search the author name in the Mailing List Archives (MARC) where a variety of open source mailing lists are archived, including the Linux kernel subsystem mailing lists, BSD, database lists, etc.

Of the 38 people who used their real name, 14 people had interacted on an open source mailing list archived by MARC. They made up 8% of the filtered comments. Ten of those people had more than 10 mails to the lists.

[Edit] Of the 25 people that used what looked like internet nicks, 11 of them may be open source users (see analysis below in the comments). That accounted for 8% of the filtered comments.

The important take away here is that only 16% of the filtered comments were made by open source users and developers. This is an important finding, since the article itself was about open source community dynamics.

[1] Before you scream about privacy, note that my comment policy allows me to collect and potentially publish this information.

When I worked as a Linux kernel developer, I often ran across people who were very concerned about compiling and installing a custom kernel. They really didn’t like running the bleeding edge kernel in order to check that a specific bug still existed. Who can blame them? A rogue kernel can corrupt your file system and you could lose data.

Fortunately, there is a safer way to build the latest version of drm and Mesa in order to check if an Intel bug still exists in the master branch. Since Mesa is just a userspace program, it is possible to install it to a custom directory, set a lot of environment variables right, and then your programs will dynamically link against that custom drm and Mesa binaries. Your desktop programs will still run under your distro’s system-installed mesa version, but you can run other programs linked against your custom mesa.

Unfortunately, mesa has some dependencies, and the instructions for how to build into a custom directory are kind of scattered all over the mesa homepage, the DRI wiki, the Xserver wiki, github, and mailing list posts. I’m going to attempt to condense these instructions into one single place, and then clean up those pages to be consistent later.

Debug build or better performance?

In this tutorial, I’ll assume that you want to build a version of drm and mesa with debugging enabled. This *will* slow down performance, but it will enable you to get backtraces, run gdb, and gather more debugging information than you normally would. If you don’t want a debug build, remove the parts of the commands that add the “debug” flag to the USE environment variable or config.mk files.

The point of this tutorial is to be able to install drm and mesa in a directory, so that you don’t have to install them over your distro’s binaries. This means you’ll be able to run the specific test you need, without running into other bugs by running your full desktop environment on the bleeding edge graphics stack. In this tutorial, I will assume you want to put your graphics installation in $HOME/graphics-install. Change that to whatever your heart’s desire is.

If you are working behind a proxy, you’ll need to have a .gitconfig file in your homedir that tells git how to clone through the proxy.

I also assume you’re running a debian-based system, specifically Ubuntu 14.04 in my case. If you’re on an RPM-based distro, change the package install commands accordingly.

Get mesa dependencies

sudo apt-get build-dep libdrm mesa mesa-utils
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` \
    libxi-dev libxmu-dev x11proto-xf86vidmode-dev \
    xutils-dev mesa-utils llvm git autoconf automake \
    libtool ninja-build libgbm-dev

Clone the repositories

mkdir git; cd git
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/mesa
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm
git clone git://github.com/chadversary/dev-tools.git
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/piglit
git clone git://github.com/waffle-gl/waffle.git
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/mesa/demos.git

Set up Chad’s development tools

Chad Versace has been working on a set of scripts that will set up all the right environment variables to run programs that will use custom-installed mesa and drm binaries. Let’s get those configured properly.

Edit your .bashrc to include the following lines:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=/usr/lib/ccache:$HOME/bin:$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
export PYTHONPATH=~/bin/mesa-dev-tools/bin/:$PYTHONPATH

Now it’s time to set up Chad’s tools.

cd dev-tools/

We’ll be installing everything in ~/graphics-install, so we need to create a config.mk file with this contents:

prefix := $(HOME)/graphics-install
USE := "debug"

This will add the debug flag to all builds, which will add symbols so you can use gdb (as well as add some additional code that could impact performance, so don’t add the flag if you’re doing performance testing!).

Build and install the development scripts:

make && make install

Exit your current shell, and start a new shell, so that the changes to the .bashrc and the installation of Chad’s scripts take effect.

Next, we need to get all the paths set properly to use Chad’s scripts to build mesa and libdrm into ~/graphics-install. We invoke the prefix-env script, and tell it to exec the command to start a new shell:

cd git/dev-tools
PREFIX="$HOME/graphics-install" USE="debug" \
    bin/prefix-env exec --prefix=$HOME/graphics-install bash

Double check that worked by seeing whether we have the right mesa-configure script on our path:

sarah@dingo:~/git/dev-tools$ which mesa-configure
/home/sarah/graphics-install/bin/mesa-configure

Check which Mesa version you’re running. Later, after installing a custom Mesa, we’ll verify the installation by confirming that the active Mesa version has changed.

sudo glxinfo > /tmp/glxinfo-old.txt

Note that glxinfo calls through the Xserver to get the information for what Mesa we’re using. Note that if your system xorg installation is too old, the Xserver won’t be able to find an API-compatible version of Mesa, and you’ll see errors like:

Error: "couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig"

Fortunately, we can run many Mesa programs without involving the Xserver. Another way to find what version of mesa you’re running without going through the Xserver is to use wflinfo command:

sudo wflinfo --platform gbm --api gl > /tmp/wflinfo-old.txt

We can see which version of mesa (11.0.2) is installed by default on Ubuntu 14.04:

sarah@dingo:~/git/dev-tools$ grep Mesa /tmp/*info-old.txt
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 11.0.2
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 11.0.2
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.0 Mesa 11.0.2

Now, that we have Chad’s tools set up, and we’ve set up the environment variables, it’s important to build everything from the shell where you ran the prefix-env command. If you need to open up additional virtual consoles, make sure to change into ~/git/dev-tools/ and re-run the prefix-env command.

Building libdrm

The direct rendering manager library, libdrm, is a prerequistite for mesa. The two projects are pretty intertwined, so you need to have updated installations of both.

Change directories into your libdrm repository, and configure libdrm with the libdrm-configure script (note that PREFIX was already set when we exec’ed with the prefix-env script):

USE="debug" libdrm-configure
make && make install

Building Mesa

Change directories into your mesa repository, and configure mesa with the mesa-configure script:

cd ../mesa
USE="debug" mesa-configure
make && make install

Building Waffle

Waffle is a library for selecting an OpenGL API and window system at runtime.

cd ../waffle
USE=debug waffle-configure
ninja && ninja install

For some reason, waffle is different from all the other projects, and likes to install libraries into $PREFIX/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ If you’re on a debian-based system, you may have to change the configuration files, or simply move the libraries one directory down.

Building glxinfo

Confusingly, a useful debugging tool like glxinfo is found in a mesa repository named demos. Change into that directory:

cd ../demos

Since Chad’s tools don’t cover installation of the demo tools, we’ll have to configure them by hand:

autoreconf --verbose --install -s
./configure --prefix="$HOME/graphics-install"
make -j8 && make install

Confirm installation

Confirm that the environment’s Mesa version matches the version you installed. It should differ from the Mesa version we checked earlier.

sudo glxinfo > /tmp/glxinfo-new.txt

Or run wflinfo instead:

sudo wflinfo --platform gbm --api gl > /tmp/wflinfo-new.txt
grep Mesa /tmp/*info-new.txt

You should see something about a development version of mesa in the output.

Building Piglit

Piglit is the test infrastructure and tests for libdrm and mesa.  Let’s build it:

cd ../piglit
USE=debug piglit-configure

Piglit has a slightly different build system than drm, mesa, and waffle. After the first build, the dependencies for piglit tests means it takes a very long time to recompile the tests after a small change is made. This is due to the simplicity of cmake. Instead, it’s recommended to use the ninja build system with piglit.

Make piglit:

ninja

Install piglit:

ninja install

Run your tests

Anytime we want to use the newly installed mesa and drm, we need to rerun the prefix-env script to set up all the graphics environment variables to point to those binaries:

PREFIX="$HOME/graphics-install" USE="debug" \
    bin/prefix-env exec --prefix=$HOME/graphics-install bash

Since we haven’t compiled the full Xserver stack, we have to run piglit with a different platform than X11. If you run `piglit run –help`, you’ll see that a platform could be x11_egl, glx (which is actually calling the GLX api through the Xserver), mixed_glx_egl (which also implies going through the Xserver), wayland, and gbm. The most simple platform is gbm.

Here’s how you run your very first sanity test with gbm:

PIGLIT_PLATFORM=gbm ./piglit run \
    tests/sanity.tests results/sanity.results

If the output says you passed, give yourself a pat on the back! If not, you probably don’t have something installed correctly. You may want to exit all shells, run `git clean -dfx` (to clean out all tracked files) in all the repos, and try again.

To get a more detailed test report, you can run the `piglit summary` command with either console (for text output, good if you don’t have X running), or with html to generate pretty webpages for you to look at on another machine. Piglit will also output test results in a form Jenkins can use.

./piglit summary console results/sanity.results

./piglit summary html --overwrite summary/sanity results/sanity.results

You’ll need the overwrite or append flag if you’re writing results to the same directory.

There’s even more explanations of what you can do with piglit on these two blog posts.

Running games or benchmarks

Once you’ve run the prefix-env script, you should be able launch benchmarks or other tests. Running games or steam with a custom mesa installation is harder. Since most games are going to use the Xserver platform to call into Mesa’s GL or EGL API, you may need to compile a new Xserver as well.

Optional kernel installation

Sometimes you may want to run the bleeding-edge Intel graphics kernel. Confusingly, the kernel isn’t hosted on git.kernel.org! Use the drm-intel-nightly branch from the drm-intel repo on freedesktop.org:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/drm-intel

Instructions on compiling a custom kernel can be found here:

http://kernelnewbies.org/FirstKernelPatch

Additionally, you may need to set the i915 kernel module parameter to enable new hardware support.  You can do this by changing the line your grub configuration defaults in /etc/default/grub to this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="i915.preliminary_hw_support=1"

And then you’ll need to update your grub configuration files in /boot by running:

sudo update-grub

Reporting bugs to Intel graphics developers (or any open source project) can be intimidating. You want the right developers to pay attention to your bug, so you need to provide enough information to help them classify the bug. Ian Romanick describes what makes a good Mesa bug report.

One of the things Ian talks about is tagging your bug report with the right Intel graphics code name, and providing PCI ID information for the graphics hardware. Chad Versace provides a tool to find out which Intel graphics you have on your system. That tool is also useful for translating the marketing names to code names and hardware details (like whether your system is a GT2 or GT3).

In the “omg, that’s epic” category, Adrian Courrèges analyzes the graphics techniques used in Grand Theft Auto V on PS3. It’s a great post with a lot of visuals. I love the discussion of deleting every-other-pixel to improve performance in one graphics stage, and then extrapolating them back later. It’s an example of something that’s probably really hardware specific, since Kristen Hogsberg mentioned he doesn’t think it will be much help on Intel graphics hardware. When game designers know they’re only selling into one platform, they can use hardware-specific techniques to improve graphics performance. However, it will bite them later if they try to port their game to other platforms.

*Pokes head in, sees comments are generally positive*

There’s been a lot of discussion in my comment sections (and on LWN) about what makes a good community, along with suggestions of welcoming open source communities to check out. Your hearts are in the right place, but I’ve never found an open source community that doesn’t need improvement. I’m quite happy to give the Xorg community a chance, mostly because I believe they’re starting from the right place for cultural change.

The thing is, reaching the goal of a diverse community is a step-by-step process. There are no shortcuts. Each step has to be complete before the next level of cultural change is effective. It’s also worth noting that each step along the way benefits all community members, not just diverse contributors.

Level 0: basic human decency

In order to attract diverse candidates, you need to be known as a welcoming community, with a clear set of agreed-upon social norms. It’s not good enough to have a code of conduct. Your leaders need to be actively behind it, and it needs to be enforced.

A level 0 welcoming community exhibits the following characteristics:

• Honest and direct technical feedback is encouraged
• Contributors are encouraged to work out social issues in a healthy manner
• Day-to-day community interactions are generally at DISCON level 1 (Everything is peachy), occasionally dipping down to DISCON level 2 (Non-personal Insults) or DISCON level 3 (swearing)
• Contributors who repeatedly reach DISCON level 4 (personal insults) are encouraged to change
• Contributors who reach DISCON level 5 (threats) are discouraged from participating
• Repeat harassers are removed from conferences and banned from communication channels
• Newbies are warned about any “missing stairs” and people who give unhelpful feedback
• Code of conduct spells out what behaviors are encouraged and discouraged
• When microaggressions are pointed out, community members stop, listen, and apologize
• The whole community, including leadership and community managers actively enforce communication standards

Level 1: on-boarding

The next phase in improving diversity is figuring out how to on-board newcomers. If diverse candidates are only 1-10% of newcomers, but you have a 90% fail rate for people who try to make their first contribution, well, you can’t expect many diverse newcomers to stick around, can you? It’s also essential to explain your unwritten tribal knowledge, so that diverse candidates (who are more likely to be afraid of upsetting the status quo) know what they’re getting into.

Signs of a level 1 welcoming community:

• Documentation on where to interact with the community (irc, mailing list, bug tracker, etc)
• In-person conferences to encourage networking with new members
• Video or in-person chats to put a face to a name and encourage empathy and camaraderie
• Documented first steps for compiling, running, testing, and polishing contributions
• Easy, no-setup web harness for testing new contributions
• Step-by-step tutorials, which are kept up-to-date
• Coding style (what’s required and what’s optional, and who to listen to when developers disagree)
• Release schedule and feature cut-off dates
• How to give back non-code contributions (bug reports, docs, tutorials, testing, event planning, graphical design)

Level 2: meaningful contributions

The next step is figuring out what to do with these eager new diverse candidates. If they’ve made it this far through the gauntlet of toxic tech culture, they’re likely to be persistent, smart, and seeking a challenge. If you don’t have meaningful bigger projects for them to contribute to, they’ll move onto the next shiny thing.

Signs of a level 2 welcoming community:

• Newbie todo lists
• Larger, self-contained projects
• Welcoming, available mentors
• Programs to pay newbies (internships, summer of code, etc)
• Contributors are thanked with heartfelt sincerity and an explicit acknowledgment of what was good and what could be improved
• Community creates a casual feedback channel for generating ideas with newcomers (irc, mailing list, slack, whatever works)
• Code of conduct encourages developers to assume good intent

Level 3: succession planning

The next step for a community is to figure out how to retain those diverse candidates. How do you promote these new, diverse voices in order to ensure they impact your community at a leadership level? If your leadership is stale, comprised of the same “usual faces”, people will leave when they start wanting to have more of a say in decisions. If your community sees bright diverse people quietly leave, you may need to focus on retention.

Signs of a level 3 welcoming community:

• Reviewers are rewarded and questions from newcomers on unclear contributions are encouraged
• Leaders and/or maintainers are rotated on a set time schedule
• Vacations and leaves of absence are encouraged, so backup maintainers have a chance to learn new skills
• Community members write tutorials on the art of patch review, release management, and the social side of software development
• Mentorship for new presenters at conferences
• Code of conduct encourages avoiding burnout, and encourages respect when people leave

Level 4: empathy and awareness

Once your focus on retention and avoiding developer burnout is in place, it’s time to tackle the task most geeks avoid: general social issues. Your leaders will have different opinions, as all healthy communities should! However, you need to take steps to ensure the loudest voice doesn’t always win by tiring people out, and that less prominent and minority voices are heard.

Signs of a level 4 welcoming community:

• Equally values developers, bug reporters, and non-code contributors
• Focuses on non-technical issues, including in-person discussions of cultural or political issues with a clear follow-up from leaders
• Constantly improves documentation
• Leadership shows the ability to recognize their mistakes and change when called out
• Community manager actively enforces the code of conduct when appropriate
• Code of conduct emphasizes listening to different perspectives

Level 5: diversity

Once you’ve finally got all that cultural change in place, you can work on actively seeking out more diverse voices and have a hope of retaining them.

Signs of a level 5 welcoming community:

• Leadership gatherings include at least 30% new voices, and familiar voices are rotated in and out
• People actively reach outside their network and the “usual faces” when searching for new leaders
• Community participates in diversity programs
• Diversity is not just a PR campaign – developers truly seek out different perspectives and try to understand their own privilege
• Gender presentation is treated as a non-issue at conferences
• Conferences include child care, clearly labeled veggie and non-veggie foods, and a clear event policy
• Alcoholic drinks policy encourages participants to have fun, rather than get smashed
• Code of conduct explicitly protects diverse developers, acknowledging the spectrum of privilege
• Committee handling enforcement of the code of conduct includes diverse leaders from the community

The thing that frustrates me the most is when communities skip steps. “Hey, we have a code of conduct and child care, but known harassers are allowed at our conferences!” “We want to participate in a diversity program, but we don’t have any mentors and we have no idea what the contributor would work on long term!” So, get your basic cultural changes done first, please.

*pops back off the internet*

Edit: Please stop suggesting BSDs or Canonical/Ubuntu as “better” communities.

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a year now. It has never been the right time to post this. I have always been worried about the backlash. I’ve skirted around talking about this issue publicly for some time, but not acknowledging the elephant in the room has eaten away at me a bit. So, here goes.

Here’s the deal: I’m not a Linux kernel developer any more. I quietly transferred the maintainership of the USB 3.0 host controller driver in May 2014. In January 2015, I stepped down from being the Linux kernel coordinator for the FOSS Outreach Program for Women (OPW), and moved up to help coordinate the overall Outreachy program. As of December 6 2014, I gave what I hope is my last presentation on Linux kernel development. I was asked to help coordinate the Linux Plumbers Conference in Seattle in August 2015, and I said no. My Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) term is soon over, and I will not be running for re-election.

Given the choice, I would never send another patch, bug report, or suggestion to a Linux kernel mailing list again. My personal boxes have oopsed with recent kernels, and I ignore it. My current work on userspace graphics enabling may require me to send an occasional quirks kernel patch, but I know I will spend at least a day dreading the potential toxic background radiation of interacting with the kernel community before I send anything.

I am no longer a part of the Linux kernel community.

This came about after a very long period of thought, and a lot of succession planning. I didn’t take the decision to step down lightly. I felt guilty, for a long time, for stepping down. However, I finally realized that I could no longer contribute to a community where I was technically respected, but I could not ask for personal respect. I could not work with people who helpfully encouraged newcomers to send patches, and then argued that maintainers should be allowed to spew whatever vile words they needed to in order to maintain radical emotional honesty. I did not want to work professionally with people who were allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes. I feel powerless in a community that had a “Code of Conflict” without a specific list of behaviors to avoid and a community with no teeth to enforce it.

I have the utmost respect for the technical efforts of the Linux kernel community. They have scaled and grown a project that is focused on maintaining some of the highest coding standards out there. The focus on technical excellence, in combination with overloaded maintainers, and people with different cultural and social norms, means that Linux kernel maintainers are often blunt, rude, or brutal to get their job done. Top Linux kernel developers often yell at each other in order to correct each other’s behavior.

That’s not a communication style that works for me. I need communication that is technically brutal but personally respectful. I need people to correct my behavior when I’m doing something wrong (either technically or socially) without tearing me down as a person. We are human. We make mistakes, and we correct them. We get frustrated with someone, we over-react, and then we apologize and try to work together towards a solution.

I would prefer the communication style within the Linux kernel community to be more respectful. I would prefer that maintainers find healthier ways to communicate when they are frustrated. I would prefer that the Linux kernel have more maintainers so that they wouldn’t have to be terse or blunt.

Sadly, the behavioral changes I would like to see in the Linux kernel community are unlikely to happen any time soon. Many senior Linux kernel developers stand by the right of maintainers to be technically and personally brutal. Even if they are very nice people in person, they do not want to see the Linux kernel communication style change.

What that means is they are privileging the emotional needs of other Linux kernel developers (to release their frustrations on others, to be blunt, rude, or curse to blow off steam) over my own emotional needs (the need to be respected as a person, to not receive verbal or emotional abuse). There’s an awful power dynamic there that favors the established maintainer over basic human decency.

I’m not posting this for kernel developers. I’m not posting this to point fingers at specific people. I’m posting this because I grieve for the community that I no longer want to be a part of. I’m posting this because I feel sad every time someone thanks me for standing up for better community norms, because I have essentially given up trying to change the Linux kernel community. Cultural change is a slow, painful process, and I no longer have the mental energy to be an active part of that cultural change in the kernel.

I have hope that the Linux kernel community will change over time. I have been a part of that change, and the documentation, tutorials, and the programs that I’ve started (like the Outreachy kernel internships) will continue to grow in my absence. Maybe I’ll be back some day, when things are better. I have a decades long career in front of me. I can wait. In the meantime, there’s other, friendlier open source communities for me to play in.

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

– Alexander Graham Bell

(FYI, comments will be moderated by someone other than me. As this is my blog, not a government entity, I have the right to replace any comment I feel like with “fart fart fart fart”. Don’t expect any responses from me either here or on social media for a while; I’ll be offline for at least a couple days.)

Edit: I would highly recommend you read my follow-up post, “What makes a good community”

Edit 2: Please stop suggesting BSDs or Canonical/Ubuntu as “better” communities.

At Red Hat Summit, I was presented with the first ever Women in Open Source Award.  I’m really honored to be recognized for both my technical contributions, and my efforts to make open source communities a better place.

For the past two years, I’ve worked as a coordinator for Outreachy, a program providing paid internships in open source to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people, and all participants of the Ascend Project.  I truly believe that newcomers to open source thrive when they’re provided mentorship, a supportive community, and good documentation.  When newcomers build relationships with their mentors and present their work at conferences, it leads to job opportunities working in open source.

That’s why I’m donating the $2,500 stipend for the Women in Open Source Award to Outreachy.  It may go towards internships, travel funding, or even paying consultants to advise us as we expand the program to include other underrepresented minorities.  There’s a saying in the activist community, “Nothing about us without us.”  We want to make sure that people of color are involved with the effort to expand Outreachy, and it’s unfair to ask those people to perform free labor when they’re already paid less than their white coworkers, and they may even be penalized for promoting diversity.

I urge people to donate to Outreachy, so we can get more Outreachy interns to conferences, and expand our internships to bring more underrepresented minorities into open source.  Any donation amount helps, and it’s tax deductible!

Want to support women in tech? Donate to the Ada Initiative!

For the last two years, I’ve been going to the conferences the Ada Initiative has put on for women in open technology and culture. It’s a really awesome experience to be in a room full of hundreds of techie, geeky women. There’s everyone from open source developers to security analysts, hardware hackers to fan fiction writers. Heck, I even met a documentary producer at the last AdaCamp in San Francisco.

One of the most important things I learned at Ada Camp was how to combat impostor syndrome. It’s basically the feeling that you’re not really that smart, that your accomplishments are just luck, and some day, someone is going to find out, and you’ll get humiliated/fired/shunned. It’s surprising the number of highly successful tech women who experience this feeling.  I used to have the worst case of impostor syndrome, until the women at AdaCamp taught me how to fight it.

Read More

The LKML thread where I stood up against verbal abuse has been winding down. I’ve posted a summary of my position. As I noted, I have been listening and learning from the arguments on the thread. In the course of the thread, my personal viewpoints have changed subtly, and I’ve chosen to push for change in areas where I think I might actually make headway. It wouldn’t be a discussion if no one changed their mind.

Nothing is going to change overnight in the Linux kernel community. As Casey Schaufler pointed out, I cannot force or demand change. I’m merely asking to discuss the possibly of change at the Linux Kernel Summit.

Thank you for listening and debating on this subject. Open discussion can only improve our community.

I’m standing up against verbal abuse on LKML.  I will happily stand alone, however you can also support this cause.  Please speak up, either by resharing this post, or commenting on this post with words of support.  If you dare, you can also reply to my LKML email.

“Where do I put this fire? This bright red feeling? This Tiger Lily down my mouth? He wants to grow to 20 feet tall… I’m so tired of being shy; I’m not that girl any more. I’m not that straight-A anymore.”

Update

Examples of verbally abusive behavior on the Linux kernel mailing list:

• http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=135628421403144&w=2
• http://marc.info/?l=linux-acpi&m=136157944603147&w=2

This week, Facebook came under fire for not pulling several pages that promote violence against women.  Pages like “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” remained up, even after they were reported to Facebook.  After a dedicated campaign to get ad sponsors to pull their ads, Facebook said they would retrain staff to take down pages that promote gender-based violence.

That’s not enough, in my opinion.  Sending the message that violence against women isn’t socially acceptable on Facebook is a step in the right direction.  However, silencing the conversation on social media does not change how our culture views violence against women and rape.  Thoughts on how to prevent rape and violence are below the cut.

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