Metacentricities

Some current events are making me think a lot about leadership. I’ve been (and am) a leader in a variety of contexts, and perhaps I haven’t thought a lot about, or articulated, what I think leadership is, and means. But some recent events in a community I care deeply about have made me reflect on this, and be much more conscious about the ways I am a leader.

I have been involved in the Linuxchix community (a community focused around fostering and supporting women in Linux and open source) since 2000, which, of course, is eons ago in internet time. I have been around for controversies big and small (or small controversies made big, which seems endemic in electronic communities.) I have met many ‘chix face-to-face, and count some as friends. I have found help for my varied and sundry Linux and open source technical issues, and I have helped others with theirs. They have heard both my experiences with varied Linux distributions, as well as my experiences in seminary, and with partners old and new. I have received so much from this community, and I have given what I have been able. It has been a fixture in my daily life for a long time, and so the situation that faces us now as a community is affecting me greatly.

At this moment, a very significant proportion of long-time volunteers of Linuxchix (leaders in their own right) have become disaffected with the present (newly appointed) coordinator of Linuxchix. The process by which that happened, and the way it is playing out, is making me think a lot about what leadership is (and isn’t) - and about how it has failed for this community. I don’t want to give a review of what has happened - I’m sure others will - but I want to reflect some on what I’m taking away from this situation.

Leadership is a role to be taken with great seriousness, as well as with great openness - leadership is more like an open hand than it is a like a closed fist. Leadership is as much listening as it is talking. There are times when leadership is just that - pushing forward, being out on the edge, setting the agenda, and getting things done. Linuxchix needs plenty of that. But there are just as many times when being a leader means following. It means listening to what people are saying, answering questions honestly, taking a moment to stop and ask questions before taking precipitous actions - or being willing to reconsider actions that some express concern about after the fact. Being a leader means being willing to admit that you’ve made a mistake, moved in a wrong direction, and are willing to do a course correction.

Being a leader isn’t easy. I know that it’s something I’ve resisted a fair bit over the years, even though I’ve learned that I’m pretty good at it. But I didn’t get good at it without a lot of mistakes along the way. I hope that the present coordinator can find her way clear to a place of being the kind of leader this community really needs - open, responsive, willing to admit mistakes, and more of a listener than a talker.

Technorati Tags: linuxchix

I don’t know how many of you know about Digg. Digg is one of those Web 2.0 collaborative bookmarking systems - with a big twist - people vote on whether a story (mostly news-y kinds of things) deserves to be seen. The more “diggs” a story gets the more attention it gets.

There used to be this thing when a site got “slashdotted” (or the “slashdot effect” - that was when it got on the front page of slashdot.org.) Well, now, there is the “digg effect”

Anyway, something came across my inbox that I didn’t want to blog about, but I thought it would be worth a “digg” - so if you have an account, digg this story about a contest and a charity. And while you are at it, digg these:

• A famous cancer scientist was paid by Monsanto for years
• The overwhelming majority of Americans think that the government should negotiate for price with the drug companies.
• Google adds the “Geographic Web” to Google Earth

Technorati Tags: digg, technology

For some reason, the subject of women and technology seems to have come to the fore today. First, I got a comment on an entry in my other blog about women and technology, which gave me a heads up on some very good blogging going on about the topic. Ethan Zuckerman (I need to read that blog more) had a great post about gender and ICT. And there is a post by Justine Cassell at the Macarthur Foundation Spotlight site on “Disempowering girls as users of technology”.

Then, somehow, I ended up surfing to the site called “Take Back the Tech.” Take back the tech is campaign to use technology to fight violence against women. They are having a 16 day blogathon (it started on the 25th). I can’t commit to blogging about violence against women for 16 days, but I can at least commit to spreading the word.

Technorati Tags: technology, takebackthetech, women

OK, so I’m not your average gadget geek, even though I read blogs about them, and the like. And I do like playing games sometimes. This year, the big news is that people are camping out so that they can have a chance at getting the new game consoles.

Right. They are camping out for days next to their Best Buy or Circuit City, or what have you, in order to pay premium prices for something that will be available for a lot less money in less than a year. Something they don’t need so badly (I’m sure most of them have a XBox 360 in their living room gathering dust while they sit in line.)

What is wrong with this picture?

Technorati Tags: gaming

So, Scott has some good answers to the question I posted last. He then goes on to ask what kinds of laptops could possibly be used. This is my answer: it depends. Does the minister just want a way to write sermons on the beach? Then, a simple laptop, with a single USB port for a thumb drive that can then be plugged into an office PC for printing would be all that you’d need. An old one would work fine.

Also, one of the great things about Linux is that the older the equipment, the more likely it is to work. Not the reverse. The longer a piece of hardware has been in circulation, the more chance it is that some poor sod of a programmer decided to write a driver for it. And, even better - it’s possible to make Linux really, really light. Way lighter than any way you could make Windows.

So, I’d say, just try it. I bet it works. Fine.

Me, I’m getting on the Ubuntu laptop testing team. I have a vintage 2003 Apple powerbook I just installed Kubuntu on.

Scott Wells and I are doing tag-team blogging this week, the topic: how well can a used laptop work to run an operating system like Ubuntu, or it’s lighter cousin, XUbuntu. Scott’s basic question (part 1) is posted on his blog today. Basically, the question is this - how do you provide a minister of a cash-strapped church (or, a seminarian) with a laptop that is affordable, and provides everything that’s necessary?

So this the beginnings of my answer. On the whole, Linux works really well with used hardware, whether laptop or desktop. It is much, much lighter than Windows XP, and has, however, everything you’d need - an office suite in Open Office, web browsers, email clients, etc.

Ubuntu 6’s release notes say the following:

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS supports four (4) major architectures: Intel x86,
AMD64, UltraSPARC T1 and PowerPC. Depending on your needs, you might
manage with less than some of the recommended hardware listed in the
table below. However, most users risk being frustrated if they ignore
these suggestions.

Table 1 Recommended Minimum Requirements

So, this is, well, pretty darned modest. Looking on ebay, you can get 1+GHz processors, 256MB ram, and 20+G hard drive laptops for $200-300. Some even have built in Wifi.

Now, of course, there is the next question: how do we get people comfortable with using Linux?

I’ve already posted on Second Life, the newish virtual environment that allows you to walk around a virtual world, buy land, build, interact with people, etc. I registered my healthy skepticism already for SL as a tool for nonprofit organizations, and I decided that for me personally, although I might have been all over this 10 years ago, I think I’m getting to value my offline time way too much to decrease it for something like this.

The one thing I used to love about online role playing games like MUDs and MOOs in the past was that no one besides people who were really interested in the game play cared. Well, the same thing is certainly not true of Second Life. It turns out that commercial interests are starting to get gung ho on SL, and SL is going to start selling names to both individuals and corporations. According to O’Reilly Radar:

… this could be the next virtual land grab. … However, for people who want to build a business or make a living
around their name this will become a must have — assuming that they
find Second Life a worthwhile place to have a presence. Certainly
enough companies
and people are doing just that, but in many ways it’s still like 1996
on the internet and picking out a personal or corporate domain name;
they’re not aware that they will need to have a presence.

Oh, calloo, callay, I not only get to sit in a chair while my avatar carouses around and talks to people and builds a house, etc., but I get to do it, and see advertising, and run into "Joe Nike" along the way. Blech. I don’t think so.

I just wanted those of you that read this main blog know that on my other blog, Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology, I’ve been writing a series on Web 2.0 - that interesting group of new technologies and concepts that has made the web a different place than it was a couple of years ago. It might be worth reading. The first few articles are not overly technical (I’ll be getting into some very heavy technical waters later.)

When I lived on the east coast, I used to drool about Fry’s. Fry’s is the place where you can actually buy a motherboard, or a case, or a big internal hard drive, or an LED, or soldering iron or … all of those things that geeky types like and want.

So, I did a geek pilgrimage to Fry’s today. The closest Fry’s is in Fremont, which is quite a ways from Berkeley. There is basically nothing around it except office parks and malls - it feels very sterile.

But Fry’s was fun, and I had a great time walking down the aisles looking at varied and sundry computer/electronic stuff. I managed to only leave with a little more than what I went there for (some micro screwdrivers so I could install new memory in my MacBook Pro.) But so much was so tempting. It reminded me of how much of a geek I still am.

And now my laptop has twice the memory it used to have, so I’m happy.

I admit it - I never read those long legalese agreements on software or websites. It’s just too much of a pain. Well, it might be time to read them.

As you might know, everyone is trying to get into the movie downloading business. Apple just released iTunes 7, with the iTunes store that has movies. And Amazon launched "Unbox" - it’s own movie downloading service.

Well, thanks to Cory Doctorow, and Boing Boing, it turns out that the Amazon Unbox agreement is really, really evil. You basically give them permission to take over your computer, and let them tell you exactly how, and when, to play the movie you supposedly "bought." Right, you are paying them for the right to control what you see, and how you see it.

It turns out that the Unbox software is Windows only, so I won’t be buying any videos anyway. And it’s also true that Apple’s service has it’s own DRM (Digital Rights Management) - but you have much more control of where and when and how you play what you bought. Yes, I’d rather have no DRM - but then again, I don’t really have the desire to own many movies, so I’m not anyone’s optimum customer anyway.

So, I’m going to start reading agreements more closely - and I’d suggest that you stay away from Unbox.