Symbiotix

Confronting Sexism in Open Source

jpoesen — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:11:42 +0000

For starters: I am blessed with the attention span of a goldfish. Long blog posts usually make me go “Meh, maybe later. #todo #read”, unless they have a really important subject. Like this one.

So what’s this all about?
A while back, after a heated debate on #drupal, twitter and FB, Liza blogged about the Drupalcon Paris design being sexist – a sentiment shared by a suprising number of men and women. Head over to her blog post for more details.

The reactions
Reactions to the female silhouette ranged from “yeah, sexist now you mention it” to “way out of line” and “disgusting”. We were called sexist, wrong and stupid. The artwork was called childish, appalling and f*cked up.

On the other hand, the design was also praised – one particular woman considered the design a tribute to female beauty.

Discussions went back and forth, and then a single ill-considered comment on Liza’s blog polarized the debate, leading it away from Liza’s original intent – pointing out the sexist nature of a design element.

The sexism (part 1)
What bothered people about Louise was her impossible figure and her implied nakedness. Some found she resembled a prostitute in a dark little room. At the very least she was a useless prop, and a naked one at that – on display for everyone.

Some people also disapproved of us making Druplicon male by adding a mustache.

The original intent: Louise and the design choice
Insprired by Development Seed’s stylish DC design, we decided to set the stage in an early 20th century Paris.

Starting point: a rooftop with painted advertisements – a stereotypical mustached and bespectacled Druplicon in front of a faraway Paris skyline, early in the morning. An early bird twittering away and a Parisian woman getting up in the morning, opening the shutters and taking a breath of fresh air.

The woman had a name – Louise. We introduced her as “our special guest”, because we had some pretty special plans with her: she was meant to become the visitor’s guide on a journey through Parisian history, culture, culinary delights and lovely unknown places in the city.

We figured since so many people were going to go through all the trouble to come to Paris, we’d already let Louise meet them half way.

Unfortunately some interpreted Louise being a “special guest” as her being an outsider and even a companion for the evening. Let us be clear: this is not what we meant, nor did we me mean to insert any other sexual innuendo.

The sexism (part 2)
Here are all the elements that lead to the negative perception:

Louise has no personality other than her name and her (very unrealistic) looks
Louise does not serve any clear purpose, she does not contribute anything other than arguably looking “hot ‘n’ sexy”
A combination of design elements frames Louise in a lewd position, objectifying her even more
The very feminine yet but utterly useless Louise is juxtaposed against the very masculine Druplicon – star of the show. This further contributes to the weaker image of the former and the stronger one of the latter

Whether or not the image of Louise is sexist in nature is an interesting question, but one that fits into a much larger debate on the topic of sexism in the IT industry, Open Source world or even in the Drupal Community itself.

Debating Louise outside of this larger context would be a waste of time and energy, both of which could be better used making the community stronger and ensuring DrupalCon Paris will exceed everyone’s expectations.

I’ll say again: it matters little who wins the Louise argument. What matters is that we didn’t consider one of our design choices carefully enough. The fact that we only had the best intentions doesn’t change the fact that we offended a fair number of both men and women.

I personally learned that there’s no hiding behind “we didn’t intend to” – often times sexism isn’t intended, but that doesn’t make it less real. Cultural differences go a way into explaining why at first we didn’t think this was such a big deal, but they don’t justify ignoring the issue altogether.

So that brings us to…

Losing Louise
We took everyone’s advice, comments, raves and rants into consideration and spent hours talking to a dozen people across continents including Liza Kindred and Angie Byron (who, might I add, are two of the awesomesest people I know).

Louise is a key element of what we plan to do with the site, so we decided against simply removing her from the design, as we were pressured to do from many sides.

We followed John Albin’s excellent suggestion: get rid of the innuendo by bringing context to Louise. Make her real.

So we gave Louise a strong personality and make her an inspiring member of our tech community. Head over to the DrupalCon Paris site and meet Louise Deux-point-zéro.

Right under the roof of her building she hardly has any interference at all, so that’s where you’re most likely to find her, tweaking her galena crystal radio determined to make widespread wireless communication reality.

Like I said, there’s more to come. Louise has quite a bit in store for everyone who’s coming to the conference.

So that’s that? Case closed? But we haz a diskushon to finish.
Right. Liza pointed out the big white elephant in the room. Nobody talks about it but it’s still ruining your rug and making a godawful mess in the fish bowl. So what about that?

This issue has obviously stirred some very strong feelings about the latent sexism that is present in the larger open source and technology worlds.

We would love to see these feelings harnessed and focused into an unstoppable force for confronting this larger issue. Several people inside and outside the Drupal community have already expressed interest in helping to shape this debate, carry it forward and build it up towards a series of talks at DrupalCon Paris.

We’re still brainstorming on how best to do this, and welcome your ideas on how to carry on a constructive conversation.

If you send us half the energy you showed the last few days, we’ll be unstoppable. #worlddomination.

Joeri.

A note of thanks, once more:
To @LizaK and @webchick.
To many of you who offered insights and tried to help instead of hurt.
To the DrupalCon Paris team. In particular to @malvese, who designed the site: I <3 your work, and so do many others.

Announcing Drupalcon Europe 2009

jpoesen — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:51:13 +0000

Drupalcon. Europe. September. 2009. Paris. That is all.

Follow the d.o. redesign sprint on twitter

jpoesen — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:23:53 +0000

All semi-shameless self-promotion aside, you can follow the drupal.org redesign sprint in Paris step by step on my twitter stream.

DrupalCon Paris 2009 Proposal submitted

jpoesen — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:33:16 +0000

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, the proposal for DrupalConParis 2009 was cleared to be submitted to the Drupal Association.

It’s been a very interesting ride, starting from scratch and putting together a proposal for a conference that must not only satisfy but rock 1000+ of you Drupal folks out there. What pressure?

Even if the Belgian and Dutch community manage to bring the conference to Maastricht, just putting together this proposal has been important on many levels:

it was the first project taken on by the brand new Association Drupal France et francophone
old ties were strengthened and new resources found their way to the French Drupal community
the initial sponsorship round made some enterprises aware of the scale and maturity of the Drupal project
some exciting new enterprise-community relationships have been formed (more on that later)

These last few weeks the French community has grown. Working together to get this proposal out there was the best decision we made so far – I can’t imagine a better team building exercise and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who wants to take their community to the next level.

So thanks, French Drupal community.

Thanks, proposal team – Damien, Alexandre, Jean-Babtiste, Cédric, Guillaume, Ori, Julien, Greg
Thanks, early sponsors – all 10+ of you.
Thanks, Ségolène – your team will make sure partners and family have a blast in Paris

And thanks, Nestor – who missed out on a date, to make our proposal perfect, for you, drupalsphere, for you.

FOSDEM 2009 - DrupalRoom schedule published

jpoesen — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:35:39 +0000

We just published the FOSDEM DrupalRoom schedule.

Lots of interesting proposals this year. Too bad we couldn’t fit them all in but it’s great to see what’s cooking in Belgium and The Netherlands.

Talk	Length	Start
Welcome	15 min	09:15
Drupal: from 2001 to 2009 (Dries Buytaert)	45 min	09:30
Improving Drupal’s Page Loading Performance (Wim Leers)	45 min	10:15
Building a Community Website using Drupal (Niels van Mourik, et al)	45 min	11:00
Drupal Multi-site for Fun and Profit (Emma Jane Hogbin)	45 min	11:45
Break	30 min	12:30
What’s new in Drupal 7? (Robert Douglass)	60 min	13:00
Moving Content from Staging to Live Server (Roel de Meester)	45 min	14:00
Drupal Showcase: Uit in Vlaanderen / Cultural Activities in Flanders (Davy Van Den Bremt)	45 min	14:45
Automated Web Translation Workflow for Multilingual Drupal Sites (Stany van Gelder)	45 min	15:30
Taxonomy: Drupal’s Powerful Categorization System (Bart Feenstra)	45 min	16:15

Drupal + Ubercart training right after Drupalcamp Cologne

jpoesen — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 15:29:04 +0000

DrupalCamp Cologne is coming up in a few weeks, on January 17 and 18 to be precise. Robert and the German Drupal Community have been working hard to get the show on the road and it looks like we won’t be disappointed!

If a whole weekend of Drupal talks and workshops is barely enough to get you warmed up, you might want to check out the Drupal + Ubercart training on January 19 and 20 in the same venue, right after the camp.

The training is lead by CommerceGuys and AF83 and covers setting up and configuring Ubercart, dealing with the added theming complexity and integrating with the Acquia Network.

FOSDEM 2009 DrupalRoom wiki up and running

jpoesen — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:28:51 +0000

The updated FOSDEM 2009 DrupalRoom wiki is up and running.
Head over to http://groups.drupal.org/node/17167 to propose a talk, add suggestions or to sign up as volunteer.

There's no time like the present. Off you go.

Urban Mobs: beautiful crowd communication visualization

jpoesen — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:36:55 +0000

Orange and the R&D department at faberNovel have just launched Urban Mobs, a showcase in advanced data visualization.

Urban Mobs is used to analyze citywide mobile phone activity and create stunning traffic pattern visualizations. Their site currently shows a series of time-lapse visualizations based on cell tower data gathered in France, Spain, Poland and Romania.

Urban Mobs – Paris handovers

The visualizations currently shown at urbanmobs.fr will be demonstrated in Paris during the Dans la nuit, les images exhibition at Le Grand Palais, from the 18th to the 31st December 2008.

FOSDEM devroom for drupal confirmed

jpoesen — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:42:02 +0000

Our Devroom request for FOSDEM2009 has just been confirmed so we’ll have a mini Drupal track, just like last year.

Mark your calendar: Sunday Feb 8, 2009 – Brussels – FOSDEM Drupal Devroom

The acceptance of our proposal is clear sign of the confidence the FOSS universe has in Drupal, and the importance that is attributed to both the Drupal project and the surrounding community.

Thanks FOSDEM crew!

DrupalCampParis3 kicked off

jpoesen — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:43:19 +0000

5 tracks, 25 sessions, 50+ attendees and it’s not even noon.

Some stuff on the board: Drupal case studies, Drupal+mobile, writing simpletests, data portability, improving performance, Drupal crash course and strategy: identifying needs.

Cool.