New DivaBlog

In Chicago at my first Drupal Association Board Retreat. So far, I'm mostly listening.

Howdy and...I'm *so* done with AT&T

First of all, let me say that I really appreciate that even though I've not blogged here in nearly 2 years, I still have a steady stream of followers.  That's loyalty.  Thanks.

Most of the time I've been away I was blogging at and for the Wikimedia Foundation (mostly on their Tech Blog, since I was the CTO). I'll be posting eventually some more about that job...what I loved about it, what I hated and why I ultimately left (but in the meantime, please do go DONATE ... It's an amazing project, you know you use it, and I still have a lot of friends working there).  I'll also post about my new project(s) (yes, more than one) and how much fun I'm having now, but...

The subject of today's blog is...AT&T.  I have been a customer of theirs essentially my whole life.  First of course I had no choice...they "owned" US Telephony.  Then they were the only provider of iPhone service in the US.  And most recently (albeit 10 years ago), they were the only provider with whom we could sign up for Home Internet when we moved to the fabulous Castro District of San Francisco (because we are plagued by elderly wiring).  

Lately I've been an increasingly unwilling AT&T customer.  Their service overall continues to degrade in San Francisco, both cell (in town and at home) and home internet.  When I worked for Wikimedia we literally couldn't get cell reception inside our building, which was ironic because we were across the street from world AT&T headquarters.  They occasionally tell us that they've installed a new cell tower that "should fix our problem" with cell reception at home (although I suspect the real reason our cell is so bad at home is the fact that we live in a 1912-era Faraday Cage...still it's hard to believe that when a friend with Verizon can get a call in our house but we can't...)

And today our Internet Modem died.  The poor thing was a decade old, and its been flakey as hell for the past few months.  Now its belly up.  Of course I was in the middle of a work-related Skype call when it happened...and of course I'm recovering from a chest cold and didn't want to go out in the cold today...

So I got on the house phone and called 611 and was eventually routed to the "DSL Hotline".  The nice woman, who was quite obviously speaking to me from somewhere in Manilla, said that if I would just drive down to an AT&T store they would give me a new modem.  She even looked up the store address and gave me a 6-digit "pickup code" as proof that this would be the fastest and best fix for me.  I bundled up and got in the car.  However, upon arrival at the store, it turned out the manager there didn't know anything about a "pickup code" and wasn't going to surrender a new modem for less than $100.  Yes, folks, that right, I was going to have to pay $100 to replace AT&T's ancient equipment so I could enjoy more of their crappy service.  There was no "lowest common denominator" option.  Take it or leave it...and determining this fact took 45 minutes of my time during which I felt truly awful (coughing, sneezing, etc.).  To be fair, they did give me a chair after about 30 minutes...but I was already *so* done with them.  You know that kind of "if you keeled over right now in front of me I wouldn't shed a tear" kind of done?  I was finally there.

I asked the manager if there was a return policy on the modem?  The answer was "Yes, a 30-day unconditional money back return policy".  So I cheerfully paid them $100, took the modem home, configured it (so I could have internet again) and then I called Astound, because they left one of those endless door hang tags on our front door just yesterday...

So day after tomorrow, I'll have fiber to my house (no more excuses about the wires in the house being too old, Astound has pulled fiber to the Castro :-) ).  I'll have 50mbps to the house, and a landline...and its going to cost me $40 less per month than I was paying to AT&T.

Now, about jailbreaking this iPhone...:-)

My next vocation

So it has been announced.  Starting next week I'll have a new job.  One friend pointed out that I could put "Wiki Witch of the West" on my business cards ;-).

But seriously...I meant it when I said in the press release that the challenges ahead are both exciting and daunting.  I'm such a big fan of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons, but until it got tweeted, I hadn't realized this hire would make me the only female CTO in the Top-10 websites ...must admit that spun me around for a minute...

I've been working for so long on awareness of the gender imbalance in Open Source, but I've always thought of my own career as a collaborative effort (as in, "It takes a village").  In fact, when I was interviewing at Wikimedia Foundation and described my approach to solving technical challenges, I said something like "I rely on taking in as many well-informed opinions as I can find, digesting them collectively, and reaching an essentially collaborative conclusion."  This may be my Apache roots showing.

Anyway, the announcement hit the web while I was in São Paulo, Brasil for CampusParty, so of course the local Wikimedia Brasil folks came by for a chat, and I quickly learned that there are a variety of opinions about what to do "next" from a Technology standpoint to keep the Wikimedia Community vibrant.  Very interesting discussion.  I can see that gathering the well-informed opinions is going to be an intense but educational process.

Another fascinating outcome of the announcement was the attention my personal wikipedia page received.  My page was initiated by some students in Pune, India during a talk I gave (about risk-taking in one's career) at the GNUnify conference.  I wasn't even aware they were doing it at the time, and they wrote it with next to no citations.  There ensued a lively Wikipedia discussion about whether my page was "worthy", and it was decided that the page could stay largely on the merit of my long-time involvement with the Open Source Initiative...over the years the page has been modified to reflect my employment changes, but this past week it got a through going-over by the Editorial Community and one effect was that I found myself defending certain factoids about myself (by for instance searching out online references to the Chairman's Awards I won at Sun).  I completely understand why citation verification is important, and I want Wikipedia to be as authoritative as possible...but...

One factoid erasure that really surprised me was the fact that I have long been a follower of Indian guru Meher Baba.  It was surprising because it is such a personal detail and because it was deleted not only from my page, but my name automatically also disappeared from another Wikipedia page listing followers.  For the record, I've been following Meher Baba for more than half my life (since 1979), and the pursuit has brought a lot richness and self-understanding to my life.  Hopefully this citation will re-establish the fact officially (can one self-verify?  I'm sure the Community will let me know).

I was delighted to read coverage of the announcement from Sean Michael Kerner that recalled the Great Knitting Incident of 2007.  That I knit in public is another factoid that I'd like to see included on my Wikipedia page at some point (and I've already written about it at length here).  If you're interested in learning to knit to test out whether it helps you concentrate...there are tons of wonderful online resources to help you now.  It's a great thinking tool in my experience.

Anyway...Rest assured I'm in rapid learning mode about all things Wikimedia now.  I've cruised through lots of recent management communications (kindly sent along by Erik Möller) so I can be reasonably productive as soon as I get back to San Francisco.  I really appreciate the ton of well-wishing messages and new followers the announcement engendered, and I'm so looking forward to serving the Wikimedia Community.  Thanks everybody.

Assimilation begins...Oracle Censors Blogs.Sun.Com

I still know a lot of Sun people, and so avidly watched yesterday's press conference where the muck-mucks from Oracle described how they plan to assimilate the Sun assets...at least the ones they think will make enough money to justify the trouble...

What they didn't talk about is their plan to subjugate Sun culture.

Most of the people I know who are still at Sun are active participants on a site I helped to create: Blogs.Sun.Com.  Back when we set it up, the rules of play were revolutionary, but pretty simple (my paraphrase): "Don't defame people. Don't disclose confidential or trade secret information.  We hired you because you are smart...Don't screw up."

Sun was the first large tech company to create an employee blogspace.  The right to blog was a huge perk of working for Sun for the past nearly six years and brought many Sun people satisfaction.  Heck, it made some careers as people discovered it was cool to be passionate about your job.  It was cool to expose a little of your life online and discover your voice.  It was cool to mix life and work in writing...but alas, no more! 

As part of this next phase of assimilation...Oracle recently made available the new rules for blogging. If you work for Snoracle starting now, you must obtain your manager's permission before each public posting that relates to work.  In theory that means before every tweet.  Remaining Snoracle employees have until May to migrate their personal blogs to a non-Oracle-owned hosting service...but if even after such migration, anyone who mentions work on a personal blog forfeits their editorial self-determination, as Oracle believes the blog then becomes Oracle property subject to their draconian rules.

This isn't the only act of cultural imperialism we'll hear about as Oracle teaches Sun that "resistance is futile", but for me its a particularly poignant reminder that the party is truly over.

So...Are We Alone?

January 27, 2010, Sao Paulo, Brasil

Its been a little less than a year since I first received a request from my friend Tim O'Reilly to lend some time to the SETI Institute .  They had just won a TED Wish and were dreaming of releasing their famous source code under an Open Source License, and building a community of "Citizen Scientists".

Today I find myself in Sao Paulo, at a huge event called CampusParty Brasil.  Imagine a FOO Camp, except instead of 400 of your closest tech friends...you're camping with thousands of other geeks in a city park!  Its a week-long event, so many people drop in just for a day.  This year I'm told 44,000 people are actually registered.

I'm here to co-launch setiQuest.org*, a new community site we're building as a home for the SETI Institute code and for collaborative work on client software to enable a new type of participation in the global search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.  The other setiQuest.org co-launch is being done at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by Dr. Jill Tarter.  Our presentation materials can be found on SlideShare.net.

*A sidenote: Astronomy buffs will know that setiQuest was previously also the name of a magazine devoted to the topic of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, published by Carl Helmers from 1994 to 1998.

Misplaced Ire

Yesterday I posted about REvolution Computing and my unexpected change in employment status.  My friend and former direct-report David M Smith, who remains at REvo and took a promotion in the same reorganization, caught the brunt of negative comments concerning REvo's actions on his blog announcing the company's new leadership.  David's blog about the R Language is one of the most popular on that subject today, and controversy there is rare, those comments really caught his attention.

I would like to say that David didn't make the decisions that led to last week's debacle, in fact he tried to convince the new management that they were being hasty and leaving important work unfinished in enacting their reorg plans.  I take comments on David's blog such as...

"I'm sure the open source community into which you gained so much insight will take careful note of the way you have treated all the people who got you this far. Summary dismissal without severance is a lousy way to say "thanks", no matter how you try to sugar coat it here.

I hope your future business doesn't depend on any of us because we have long memories."

...to be directed at those who joined REvo along with the funding, and not at hardworking and honorable people just trying to remain employed through difficult times.  David and many of those left behind at REvo expressed their concern and compassion directly to we who were asked to leave and it was clear to all of us that they were concerned by the actions taken and would have done differently.

So while I continue to believe that REvolution just got much less interesting, I would gladly work with David Smith again and continue to call him my friend.  In fact I'm having dinner with him Friday night.

Start the REvolution without me...

Some of you may have become aware of REvolution Computing, a commercial open source company organized around the R Language, when I joined in March of this year.  For the past few months we have been working on a B-Round of funding.  It was an interesting process and I was happy to be working in my first startup company after so many years in very large corporations. 

We built a small team to work on "Community Engineering", by which we meant developing assets both to benefit the R Language community as well as to entice and inform the "Alpha-Geek" community to learn and use R.  We set up an Advisory Board designed to advise REvolution management about decisions relating to REvo and Open Source, and we helped put REvolution R into the Karmic Koala release of Ubuntu.  It was really fun to work in a small, agile team and I felt like I was getting a great education in startups and we were rapidly moving the company forward...Why didn't I join a startup years ago?

The funding deal closed on Wednesday last week...

Late the next afternoon I received a call from the new COO notifying me that my services would no longer be required at REvolution., effective immediately and with no severance.  Apparently, the company is moving in a different direction.

I was surprised that the new CEO,  wasn't personally handling this unpleasant task...but I guess that might have been distasteful after the many assurances he gave me and my team last July at OSCON that we were "absolutely critical to the company's success" and that he would be "making no changes for at least three months after he assumed control".  Personal courage in difficult situations is rare.

What I find most interesting about today's REvolution announcements is the space they spent thanking the previous management team, given nearly all of us, including the Founders and the Board, were just fired.  47% of the company wiped out and nobody left with more than a year of experience...Shit happens...

And so we begin to pick up the pieces and move on.  I've spent much of the past few days consoling coworkers, personally breaking the news to the many kind friends who had agreed to help us increase interest in R and Revolution, and working out what I might be doing next.  I have some interesting possibilities already, although I'm still open to suggestions...so stay tuned.

Meanwhile I can honestly say that the new REvolution Computing will little resemble the company I was proud to join and represent.  I still think the R Language is really interesting, but I'm no longer sure REvo is the one to watch in this space anymore...For the sake of my friends among the remaining employees and shareholders I hope I'm wrong.

Facebook Needs Me!!!

I'm in Oxford, UK today for BarCampApacheOxford and this morning when I logged in to Facebook, I got the following appeal for participation "...so that it can be used by people all over the world..."  Great, I'm game.  What do I have to do?

Playing in the Band

I blogged last week that I had some musician friends hanging out with me in Amsterdam.  Some of you know that I play (well, I try to play) Irish Mandolin, and carry one around with me when I travel.  Because I knew my friends were meeting up with me, this time I brought my good mando.  I call it my good one because it's...well, its sublime to play.  82 years old and just getting better.  Here's a nice shot of the old girl, taken by Noel Bergman...

My friends and I spent some time playing music downstairs in the bar at the hotel where ApacheCon EU happened...and for me it was a rare and wonderful evening because it was one of the first times I learned a tune in real time while simultaneously playing it!  Probably had something to do with the Duvel...after the third one I couldn't feel my fingers anymore and somehow they knew just where to go to make the right notes happen.  What a feeling to access music through your fingers like you can through your voicebox...hard to describe how great it was.  Here's a picture Noel took of the three of us playing that night...you can kind of tell that I might have been drinking (notice the lean).

10 Years of The Apache Software Foundation

This year at both ApacheCons we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the incorporation of the ASF.  In Amsterdam we had cake and singing, and a panel of "Apache Pioneers" talking about how the ASF was formed.

This panel was great fun, and we'll be doing an even better version of it in Oakland.  Nice to stop and take a minute to reflect on how serendipitous the whole thing was.

By the way, both of the above pictures were taken last week in Amsterdam by my good friend Noel Bergman.

Just now I'm in London, doing some errands before I head up to Oxford for the first BarCampApache that isn't tied to an ApacheCon.  If you're in Oxford this weekend, hope to see you there.