It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying [...]]]> I picked up on Danah’s post commenting on Clay Shirky’s post on ‘A Rant about women’,

It’s tempting to imagine that women could be forceful and self-confident without being arrogant or jerky, but that’s a false hope, because it’s other people who get to decide when they think you’re a jerk, and trying to stay under that threshold means giving those people veto power over your actions. To put yourself forward as someone good enough to do interesting things is, by definition, to expose yourself to all kinds of negative judgments, and as far as I can tell, the fact that other people get to decide what they think of your behavior leaves only two strategies for not suffering from those judgments: not doing anything, or not caring about the reaction.

I am usually very private and do not discuss anything personal on my blog, but this topic is too close to heart and here is what I learnt:

1. Stereotypes sometimes contain some good schemata for us to quickly categorise and ‘manage’ people,  but not always true: My experience tells me that there are men who suck as self-promotion, there are also women who put themselves out there and talk themselves up.

2. You don’t need to talk and act like a ‘man’ to get respect.  You need to be good at what you do and be proud to tell other people succinctly. This does not discount your respect for other people, but it means that you are STRONG enough to stick to your gun when you guts tell you that you KNOW what you’re talking about.  People can doubt you, but not yourself.  Same lesson for men and women.

3. Everyone has their own insecurities and things that they wish they are better at.  I am still struggling at times of projects that I have no prior knowledge to – but do I rant/share my fear?  To be honest, I would just do it.  Research, ask questions, think, use your bloody brain, talk to someone who is good, hire someone to do the part you are not sure about and focus on your strength.  At the end of the day – focus on the deliverable – if you’re passionate and conscientious about your clients’ work, it comes across.  Whether you are a man or a woman.

4.  I love how Tom Coates put it in bigger perspective,

And while encouraging people to spot the talented and the creative, we should also be considering how we shame those people who self-promote without creating. The financial collapse has taught us that rhetorical bubbles divorced from reality are a danger to us all. We’re already approaching this point – our industry has become venal, insular and dominated by marketing. We have come to value the wrong things. And if we want a continued vigorous, creative, free, open and equal environment, that’s something we have to fix. It’s not something to aspire to.

Time to get real.

5. Finally – I am not actually arguing against Clay, I just want to clarify that women and men might communicate differently, but none needs to be arrogant/ego-maniac to gain respect.  What I note is that when I work with younger people (I’m sorry to generalise), they tend to focus too much on ‘what I can learn from you’ and ‘how I can help’ instead ‘I know what I am talking about and here is what you should be doing.  I can help you with this and that’.  To be fair, I do see more men talking with the latter perspective, which is pretty handy in building confidence with people you work with.  Having said that, I do talk like that too… and I’m a woman.  Damn proud of it.

In sum, the key thing is:

Don’t let other people decide who you are.  You know best, and with trust and compassion in yourself you stand tall. A weak ego usually comes big, because they need all the fluff to fill in the room.  But there is little substance, or foundation of trust in it.  When it bursts, nothing stays because it’s all air in it.

A small but strong ego is a beautiful ego.  It is quiet.  But when it speaks, people listen.

We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has [...]]]> Let’s have some fun and do a genderanalyzer meme – I’m a man – according to this GenderAnalyzer,

We created Genderanalyzer out of curiosity and fun. It uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. Behind the scene, a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com has been trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women. In our lab it seems to works pretty well, we want to see how it performs on the web! We hope you like it!

Well obviously I must be thinking like a man, at least when I blog,

I have defied the text classifer that has been derived from over 2,000 blogs.  See they might either need to include more ‘extreme’ users, or maybe just lady-geeks in general.  Are you a man or a woman?  Trackback here!   Let’s get the meme rolling!

Okay, [...]]]> Was given an UNIX enlightenment years ago by my Wikipedia mentor fuzheado, but if you don’t use it you loose it.  What’s so nice about working in a geeky environment is to be surrounded by tons of web experts.. and boy, finally executed proper command today and uploaded a file via sftp

Okay, the point is, do encourage women in UNIX:

special notes to 3.14; 3.19 and 3.25.

/wink

So why UNIX (exerpt, the future of innovation)?

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what the future will bring. O’Reilly suggested that really you just need to look around and ask the right people. He quoted William Gibson, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” So how do you figure out what’s coming? O’Reilly related the story of a toy company looking for beta testers. They would go ask kids “who’s the coolest kid you know?” They would then follow the trail until a kid answered, “I am.” O’Reilly sees his core business as serving the alpha geeks, the inventors of the future. He tries to spot and follow interesting thinkers and the people they think are doing interesting things.

O’Reilly looked at the various stages of technology evolution. The first stage is the hackers. A hacker is someone who pushes the envelope. When the tool they’re using on a computer doesn’t do what they want, they figure out a way to do it anyway. The second stage is the entrepreneurs. These people make things easier for ordinary users. Mac OS X has many cool tricks available from the Terminal, but they don’t exist for ordinary users until there’s a GUI front end that’s easy to use.

The third stage, according to O’Reilly, is the scary one. This is the stage where dominant players integrate the technology into a platform and either raise barriers to entry or build a healthy ecosystem. This can be stifling in the Windows space. Microsoft figured out that if you offer a platform and make things easy for people then you’ve got control. Unfortunately, O’Reilly cautioned, if you take too much control you dry up innovation. O’Reilly said that his mom told him that Bill Gates sounds like someone who’d come over for dinner and say, “I’ll take all the mashed potatoes.” When the dominant players take over a technology, the hackers and the entrepreneurs are no longer interested so they go on to look for other opportunities.

A simpler version of this is the story of the boiling frog – we jump out of hot water because we know it’s going to burn us, but we die from gradually heating water because it gets all too cozy.  Before we learn how to drive, we should learn how to cycle.  Before you start getting too used to client-based programmes, we take a glimpse on how things are being made.  It still surprises me how easy it is to make perfectly steamed seabass, and how restaurants charge an exorbitant price.  Anyway.  I digress.  As usual.  But you get the point. 

Also inspired recently by Jonathan Zittrain’s ‘the future of the internet and how to stop it’ – see the ‘dumb-down’ version of his interview by Colbert here (it’s rather funny ;D):