spinnerin

My Conference Schedule

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 17:23:39 GMT

It’s going to be a busy summer.

Open Source Bridge, June 21-24
The 3rd year of our conference for open source citizens. In addition to being on the planning committee (talk to me if you need a media pass or want to schedule a BoF), I’m moderating a panel on building and maintaining open source communities.

Indie Web Camp, June 25-26
Assuming I don’t fall over from exhaustion first, I’ll be at this unconference/hacking event for people working on distributed social software.

Community Leadership Summit, July 23-24
I’ve never been to CLS before, but this unconference on building tech communities has been recommended to me several times, so I signed up.

OSCON, July 25-29
Christie Koehler, Sherri Montgomery, and I will be presenting Event Planning for Geeks, a condensed guide to successful unconferences, code sprints, and beyond.

SecondConf, September 23-25
I’ll speaking at this Chicago conference for iOS and Mac developers, on some combination of mobile devices, game design, location, and not being creepy (unless, of course, that’s your goal). Creepius will probably make an appearance.

WhereCampPDX, October 7-9
Portland’s location and technology unconference is on year 4! I still love helping plan this event. We haven’t really started the planning process in earnest (first everyone has to get through OSBridge) but you can join the mailing list to find out what’s happening as soon as we know it ourselves.

Filed under: events Tagged: conferences, schedule

Game Review: Dokobots

Mon, 23 May 2011 18:50:09 GMT

I’ve been playing with Dokobots on and off since being introduced to it at WhereCamp. I liked it off the bat, but I don’t think there’s much to keep the player coming back over time. I have a few thoughts on how that might be fixed.

The game goes like this: there are robot parts scattered all over the world, from a ship that crashlanded here. You have a scanner you can use to find robot parts, and batteries, which allow you to reactivate them. Once you activate a robot, you can give it a name and a mission (some of mine so far are looking for strong drinks, dance music, and stir-fry). Then, you help the robot with its adventures by adding photos and map markers to a journal. You can only have one active robot at a time, so it’s strongly encouraged to drop the bot off to be found and entertained by someone else. They’re little tourists, traveling from iPhone to iPhone around the world.

I like:

The art! It’s a cute game. Someone clearly put effort into dreaming up a number of fun robot designs.
I know from WhereCamp that the developers thought about how to make this a game you could pick up and play anywhere in the world, and I think these considerations put the game on a solid base. It probably makes more sense in an urban area, but there’s something to do anywhere you can go outside and walk around.
Doko Air: a feature that lets you send a robot off to explore the world.
The photo tool. Most of the gameplay centers around taking little travel photos of the robot in different places, and being able to scale and reposition the bot in the frame makes this more fun.
The magnet: this is another nice consideration for how the game works out in the world. If a battery or robot piece is someplace you can’t physically reach (like the middle of a highway) you can pull it closer with the magnet tool.

I was less happy with:

The reliance on user-generated content. All of the activated bots are named and described by other players, and all of the storytelling comes from what people put into the journal entries. This makes the game easy to expand, but it also means that there’s a lot of uninteresting bots wandering around, with just one or two items in their journal, and unless you have a pack of eager players in your area, any bot you drop off will probably just sit there until you stumble across it again yourself.
The lack of interaction between players who are in the same space, or between robots at all. I can’t hand a friend my dokobot, or batteries or parts, when we’re in the same room, even though this would be a completely natural activity. Instead you drop off the bot, and the other person picks it up. Also, dokobots are basically invisible to each other—I could have a dozen sitting around my apartment, and the gameplay would be exactly the same. This seems pretty contrived.
There are way too many inactive bots available to pick up. In any area I scan, I find several, including ones that are “rare” west coast only or other sub-groups. I currently have 24 inactive bots in my workshop (holding area), and I have no idea what to do with them, since I can’t trade, discard, or combine them into other things. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make people walk around a while between picking up parts. Having only one or two appear in each scan might be more balanced.
The graphics and the game text indicates that dokobots have different structures, but all of them have the same abilities in the gameplay (recording their location and taking pictures). Why can’t the headphone-wearing music lovers record audio snippets? For that matter, why do all bots have cameras? Couldn’t some be text-only terminals? This is another area of the game that feels artificial, instead of innate to the story.
This might be a bug: Doko Air currently allows you to put robots you don’t currently have in your possession on a flight. While that was useful for retrieving a bot I sent to Singapore, it doesn’t really make sense to allow it.
The scanner is kind of annoying to work with when I’m walking for more than a block or two, because every time my phone goes to sleep, the view zooms back out and in again to find my location. Unless the scanner has been sleeping for a while, it makes sense to start from my previous location and slide the map over to the new spot.

So, how might I fix the things I didn’t like about the gameplay?

The first one is that I would hire a couple of writers to craft interesting adventure stories for bots that players could participate in. There’s an underlying problem called participation inequality: the proportion of users who are deeply engaged in creating content is much smaller than the set who are interested enough to browse around a little. Many people might install Dokobots and scan around a couple of times, but far fewer will add several journal entries, actively seek out other people’s bots, and so on. You need a pretty big player community for that to generate enough good content to keep the more casual players coming back, but providing your own story content for people to latch onto helps bootstrap this.

What might those stories look like? Maybe my DrinkyBot needs to get to Toronto to meet the Cocktail Mixing Master, and while it’s there, the two of them won’t just take pictures of the drinks, but collect recipes, then go back out into the world to share the details of that fabulous Negroni. Or there’s a little bot who lost its puppy (also another bot) and players need to use their scanners to help find out where the puppy is, then get the bot to the same place. These don’t have to be terribly complex, just detailed enough to give people something to play with. It could even require that players have to go online and try to recruit other people in the right city to help out. I’ve seen techniques like that work well as part of ARGs. And a locative game like this is a kind of alternate reality experience: there aren’t really robot parts all over the street, but we’re going to pretend there are and see what happens.

The last thing I would do is spend some time thinking about how the game story fits into the player’s world. If my neighborhood’s streets are scattered with electronic rubble, isn’t someone going to want to clean that up? What does it look like when there are several dokobots in my local pub, or at the soccer game? Is everyone okay with helping these tourists along? Do the bots ever get bored and want to go home (but they can’t, because their ship exploded)? The game as it stands now is basically a collecting activity: you get more batteries, and different types of bots to activate, and sets of pictures and paths on a map. Once you’ve collected all the things you can, what happens next?

Filed under: technology Tagged: dokobots, games, iphone, location

A little color this week

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:24:17 GMT

A little color this week

Sciral : Innovative Productivity Tools : Sciral Consistency

Mon, 16 May 2011 18:10:18 GMT

http://sciral.com/consistency/

Instaprint - A location based photo booth for Instagram

Fri, 13 May 2011 18:34:24 GMT

http://instaprint.me/

Privacygate: Facebook’s smear campaign against Google | Good Morning Silicon Valley

Thu, 12 May 2011 18:22:32 GMT

http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2011/05/privacygate-facebooks-smear-campaign-against-google.html

Finished grisaille

Tue, 10 May 2011 14:47:58 GMT

Finished grisaille

Tad Spurgeon : sound practice

Wed, 04 May 2011 23:39:36 GMT

http://www.tadspurgeon.com/news2008.php?page=news2008

Oil painting without solvents | All the Strange Hours

Wed, 04 May 2011 23:07:03 GMT

http://rourkevisualart.com/wordpress/2006/12/29/oil-painting-without-solvents

Oil painting project #2

Tue, 03 May 2011 18:09:44 GMT

Oil painting project #2

Proposed Roads to Freedom

Sun, 01 May 2011 16:48:56 GMT

http://books.google.com/ebooks?id=lhQNAAAAYAAJ

Re-Inscribing the City: Unitary Urbanism Today

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 17:04:08 GMT

http://www.vizkult.org/propositions/uutoday/

walk study training course

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:54:42 GMT

http://www.implausibot.com/walkstudy/

Why I’m Part of Code n Splode

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:36:16 GMT

When Code n Splode started in 2007, it was in response to an event at OSCON and discussions that followed. Several of the people who would become involved had attended a “women in open source” BoF that left them unhappy with how issues of women’s participation in the technology industry were being discussed. (I missed the BoF but heard plenty about it afterward.) In the conversations that followed that week, we came to a kind of consensus that we wanted less talk about the problem and more direct action, and that women feeling isolated because we didn’t know many of our female colleagues (as few as those might be) was definitely not helping. So Code n Splode was born in response.

The meetings have a similar structure to most user groups: there’s a technical talk or workshop given by one of the members, and afterward the group moves on to a local pub for the “splode” part of the evening, a general discussion of whatever we want to talk about from our professional and personal lives. The guidelines for men’s participation have changed over time; the current rule is that all women are invited to attend and participate, and men are welcome as the guest of a female participant. The goal is to create a safe space for women to talk about our technical work in a friendly and open environment.

Why safe space? It’s no secret that the technology industry can be antagonistic, heavily competitive, and hostile toward outsiders who don’t immediately prove their technical competence. While not all women have experienced problems with this, many women (and men) have, and being a member of a visible gender minority often only increases that sense of otherness and hostility. Creating a group that is officially women-focused and has clear guidelines for inclusive behavior provides support in that environment. Men in the industry are part of a majority group; there are no defined “men’s user groups” or “men’s software conferences” because in many cases, that’s already what happens by default. In the open source world in particular, women make up a very small percentage of participants, and I find that having space where I feel visible and normal and not weird for being female is extremely valuable.

Besides that, having a cross-technology group where we can discuss our work with our peers is exciting. I’ve used this to present topics that don’t fit into any single-technology user group, like text game programming or privacy issues in software design, and I’ve attended other topics that don’t relate to my own work at all, but are interesting because of the enthusiasm of the women who are presenting it. It’s also a great environment for women who have never given a technical presentation before, and might not feel like they have the experience to present at a conference yet. This helps us learn the skills to move on to bigger events, meaning that over time we can encourage better representation of the women who are already present in these fields.

The best thing, the part that really demonstrates why this group is important, is seeing the effect it has on the women who participate. We’re learning to negotiate for better salaries, to find jobs we enjoy, to present our work to a larger audience, and we’re building friendships we can rely on when the problems of our industry are hitting us personally. It’s not a “fix” for the imbalances of the technology world, but a support system that helps us continue to be a part of this industry and still have fun.

Does this sound like something you want to participate in too? We meet every 4th Tuesday of the month, and you can find details on the group’s website or Calagator.

Filed under: events, portland, technology Tagged: codensplode, equity, women in technology

Consciousness-Raising -- Women's Liberation Movement

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 01:40:51 GMT

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/fem/sarachild.html

Notes From WhereCamp 2011

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:48:19 GMT

I’ve been in San Francisco (and nearby) for most of the last week, primarily to attend this year’s WhereCamp, which was held at Stanford. I had a ton of great conversations about data, privacy, transit systems, community organizing, and how Portland is or isn’t like other places.

I also led a session on geo-games (games with a locative element, digital or otherwise) and design strategies, mechanics, and reward systems. We started off with a list of these items that I had gathered from earlier reading, and added more items and other details on the whiteboard through our discussion. Amber Case made a spreadsheet from the whiteboard notes: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0Asy5qINtkUStdEZPeE5mODVIa1hCV2tlOUFPZ3JxTkE&output=html

We couldn’t talk about games without playing a few, of course. Amber and Aaron ran a couple of demos of MapAttack, which is built on their GeoLoqi platform, and lets two teams compete for points by capturing dots while running around outside. At another session I was introduced to Dokobots, an iPhone game involving lost robots who crashlanded on Earth and have to be found and re-activated and sent off to explore things.

WhereCampPDX will be returning again this year as well. We’re tentatively scheduled for October 7-8-9 and ought to have more details on the site soon.

Filed under: events, technology, travel Tagged: unconference, wherecamp

Privacy Patterns

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:23:23 GMT

http://privacypatterns.org/

Geo-Game Strategies at WhereCamp 2011

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 23:19:26 GMT

Case took notes at my session.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0Asy5qINtkUStdEZPeE5mODVIa1hCV2tlOUFPZ3JxTkE&output=html

Land's End

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 06:48:43 GMT

Land's End

Painting layer 2

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:30:49 GMT

Painting layer 2

Empty Shelves

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:24:29 GMT

Empty Shelves

Nothing more to buy

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:22:25 GMT

Nothing more to buy

Banks-Vernonia Trail

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:18:36 GMT

Banks-Vernonia Trail

Moustaches

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:17:01 GMT

Moustaches

Pregame

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:33:30 GMT

Pregame

How Much Does a Software Developer in Portland Earn?

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:25:44 GMT

One of the topics I’ve become interested in through PDX11 and other economic development discussions is the variation in wages for local programmers. Surveys like the one we did last year reveal a wide range of annual incomes for developers, so while software development pays better than the local median, that gain appears to be more significant for some of us than others.

How do we find out what other developers are earning? As Christian Kaylor at the Oregon Employment Department helpfully explained to me, all economic data comes from two sources: taxes and surveys. In the US, individual tax statements are private, but there’s an employer-based tax report called Quarterly Covered Employment & Wages (QCEW) that covers about 95% of legal employment in this country [1].

QCEW data is split by industry, so programmers could potentially be covered under any number of areas, depending on where they work, but we can pick a likely area to start, like NAICS code 54151 (computer systems design and related services). In 2009, the last full year with data, there were 9,457 people working in this industry category in Oregon [2]. The total covered wages for the year added up to $722,755,908. So we can divide the two and conclude that the average annual wage was about $75.5k.

What if we want to know more about income by job title? For that we need the BLS Occupational Employment Survey. Here’s the May 2009 data for “Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations”: http://bls.gov/oes/current/oes_38900.htm#15-0000

The national median annual wage for this category is $72,900. In the Portland metro area, it’s $74,890. You can see that broken down further. For example, a research programmer averages $102,930 here, and the most popular job area by employment count, “Computer Software Engineers, Applications”, earns $91,300 a year.

The breakout pages that show you more about the data for each job category are pretty interesting, too: http://bls.gov/oes/current/oes151031.htm
You can use that to find out things like which industries hire the most people with this job role, and which metro areas pay the best.

What other ways can we find out about developer wages? Well, last year Eva and I did a survey of the local tech industry that included questions about this. The median annual income [5] for our survey sample (667 people, but not everyone answered all questions) was $75k. The median for people who described their job role as a software developer of some sort [3] was $80k. The range, though, was from about $25k on the low end to $200k at the top, which seems pretty significant. 46 respondents were earning less than $65k/year, and 43 earned $100k/year or more.

There’s other kinds of surveys, too. This week a Hacker News discussion [4] led to someone coding up a little webapp that lets you ask a group of people how much they earn without revealing who entered what. It only displays the results if at least four people submit their info. Christie asked people on IRC and Twitter to fill one out for Portland software developers. So far the responses range from $0-90k, with 15 responses (the lowest non-zero amount is $38.5k). It’s still too small a sample to know how it compares to our other data, but if you’re a local developer you can add your own salary and see the responses here: http://salaryshare.me/5b9f602f99f87ea1492cc056292000ae

You can also get some employee-reported data on wages through a site called Glassdoor. Here’s a search for software workers in Portland: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/portland-software-salary-SRCH_IL.0,8_IM700_KO9,17.htm
It lets you see things like the average salary for a Software Engineer at Intel is $85,427, while a Software Developer at Rentrak earns $61,500. Might be useful if you’re trying to decide which job postings to respond to, assuming they have data for the company.

Back to that variation issue: what sorts of questions can we ask about why some developers in Portland earn way more (over twice the annual wages) than others? It seems likely that there are factors including Portland’s local economy and business markets, individual characteristics like skills and education, and the specific technical markets a person is working in.

Possible reasons for higher wages:

More education or experience
Working for larger or more profitable companies (including companies with a national or international customer base)
Good negotiation skills and knowledge of market wage rates
Working in technology sub-fields where developers are in higher demand (such as iPhone app development)
Having skills or experience areas that are particularly desirable in the current market

Possible reasons for lower wages:

Less education or experience
Working for larger or more profitable companies
Poorer negotiation skills or knowledge of market wage rates
Working in technology areas where compensation tends to be lower (PHP web development, for example)
Working independently or for a company that is struggling with funding or profitability
Having skills or experience areas that are fairly common in the current market

So that’s what I have so far. It’s kind of a big data dump. I’m not an expert on this by any means, but if you have any questions about other data, who’s included in which numbers, and so on, let me know and I’ll try to find out and report back.

[1] The most notable exception is self-employed workers, who aren’t in this report because they’re exempt from unemployment insurance, which is the tax data used.

[2] Yearly average, based on monthly numbers.

[3] Software developer, software engineer, programmer, web developer, etc. The count of responses for these job titles with usable income entries was 189.

[4] If you’ve curious about the potential benefits and disadvantages for workers and companies to disclose salary info, this discussion pretty much has all the points covered.

[5] Total personal income, rather than wages, so some people may have reported a higher income due to other sources (like investments or a side business) than they would in the government wage data.

Filed under: portland, technology Tagged: data, developers, economics, income, programmers, salaries, software, wages

Co-determination - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 01:18:58 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination

When can I use... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:35:39 GMT

http://caniuse.com/

Painting under way

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:38:56 GMT

Painting under way

Syndicalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 00:25:24 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism

Catholic Worker Movement - Works of Mercy

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:17:42 GMT

http://www.catholicworker.org/aimsandmeanstext.cfm?Number=28

Systems/Layers by Nurri Kim & Adam Greenfield | Diffusion eBooks + StoryCubes

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:24:54 GMT

http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=2364

Inform 7 for Programmers/Part 1 - IFWiki

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:35:15 GMT

http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Inform_7_for_Programmers/Part_1

IF Name Generator

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 23:47:40 GMT

"Fish Vanquish the Night"!

http://nitku.net/if/namegenerator/generatorposter.html

Upcoming Presentation

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 21:48:27 GMT

Tomorrow night I’m giving a talk at Code n Splode about interactive fiction. I’m planning to do an intro about how the history of these games has had some interesting outcomes from the technical side (including encouraging open culture/open source practices), do a coding demo with Inform 7, and have some group game play time (9:05, Aisle, and maybe the intro of Lost Pig). It should be a lot of fun, and I’m excited about being able to share what I’ve learned so far.

Note: Code ‘n’ Splode is a women-focused technology user group. If you need more details about the group and our guidelines for participation, see here.

Filed under: events, portland, technology

Inform - ZMachine - Standards

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:25:04 GMT

http://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/index.html

A history of 'Adventure'

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:53:18 GMT

http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html

The History of Zork

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:23:58 GMT

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/Articles/NZT/zorkhist.html

reidab's gist: 874988 — Gist

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 20:01:00 GMT

Disabling forms.

https://gist.github.com/874988