Ill-mannered Grandiloquence

The big question I got in response to a recent blog post of mine is “how could diversity possibly have a cost?” here’s my attempt to answer it in clearer terms…

Change always has a price

There’s no getting around this. It’s near impossible to change something solely for the better. In the end the change may be a net positive, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t costs, and that for some people affected the change is a net loss.

Ignorance has a cost

It’s not that I don’t think change isn’t needed, it’s that most people I see talking loudly about women in OS are blindly ignorant or apathetic to the cost of their proposals. Because they are blind, their ideas and solutions have no plan for minimizing the cost while maximizing the benefit. Working simply towards the goal of more women can lead to alienating another group that is dear to my heart.

Many people respond that people engage in sexism even when they think they aren’t, and that this sexism by ignorance is just as damaging. This is basically the flipside of that argument. Enlightenment doesn’t work one way, or it’s not really enlightened.

So what’s the bill?

Like the U.N. club in my high school, the cost of “diversity” without concern for preserving what’s already good about something will no doubt mean that you lose it. There are things about OS that make it better than other projects, and not just in the basic principles of open vs. proprietary.

Some of you probably want a concrete example right now, so here’s one: right now, because of the demands of OS projects, you really have to love it to stick with it. Yes, in some ways that’s bad, and those ways should be changed, but one of the best things about OS is that you get to work with people who love what they’re doing as much as you do. With the wrong tactics and the wrong incentives we might get more diversity, but not because those people love it, too.

This isn’t the follow-up to my last post that I was promising. It’s still coming but needs more time to stew in my brain. Though this does follow-up on some of the ideas and concerns I mentioned.

After my post I decided to start following the WoMoz mailing list. It’s actually been quite interesting and I was grateful to find the women there are tolerant, and even agree with some of my less than “feminist” views on the issue.

The group is actually having a difficult time finding first projects as really the issue of gender is a slippery one. It’s based on a generalization and I know many of you agree that generalization can be the first step to failure. However, I think that if you don’t start somewhere you never get started. Gender (in the traditional binary sense, which doesn’t reflect my views on the subject, btw) is really easy to measure. If there is a very high representation of one gender over the other I agree it’s worth exploring, though I remain skeptical on whether it requires action just for the sake of making the numbers match.

That all said, one of the main goals the group has undertaken has started to resonate with me. It’s the idea that to attract more women you need more women. At first I was skeptical. If we believe that women and men are equal then shouldn’t women be able to use a male role model? Well, personally I believe that men and women are equal, but we’re not the same. If nothing else would have convinced me, the experience of pregnancy and motherhood has certainly shown me that our basic make-up (read: hormones) really does affect our personalities and how we experience life.

One way I prefer to experience life is with a little bit of caution. I’d prefer to do things right, and I’d much rather have someone walk me through something than try and fail several times over on my own. Once I know how to do something, or I at least understand the principles behind it, I’m pretty fearless and will explore, alter and experiment on my own. It’s that first time though. I think the best way to explain it is that I want to make sure my information is correct that first time. I don’t want to start, and go on, doing something the wrong way if better information is out there.

This quirk of mine explains partially why I’ve never been very domestic. My grandmother doesn’t like teaching, she likes showing. Instead of teaching me how to do something hands-on she expected me to pick it up by watching her. That’s just not how I work. And so I was 18 before I did my first load of laundry. I don’t cook, but I do bake – the one thing she did walk me through, as that’s basically what a recipe does. I can read a map like nobody’s business, though. My grandfather taught me how.

The same goes for everything else in my life. I’d much rather learn something with a mentor, who can alert me when I’m starting to go wrong, than to just invest a whole bunch of unknowns to come up with an unknown result. Mozilla is actually quite unfriendly to this learning style, though for good reason. With limited resources, especially in the early years, their best bet was to invest in people who could hit the ground running themselves. It’s much easier to get a response on a specific question about a specific piece of code, it also takes less time away from the already stressed developers working on their own bugs.

How do we solve the problem? Women (and men) need to be more visible with their success stories. Women need to be more visible at all. It’s not just about appearances. It’s about giving potential contributors a face and a story that they can identify with. For better or worse we have our own baggage. Some people who have experienced sexism in their lives will see a male-centric group and assume sexism is at play. They shouldn’t be faulted for this, they’re just going by what they know. Also, the sexism isn’t always travelling from the inside out. Sometimes it travels from the outside inwards. I think a woman interested in computers is a lot more likely to be discouraged by her peers outside of her chosen project. Why should we expect her to take the risk if we don’t show her that it will pay off?

When I was in high school one of the first clubs I joined was a mock United Nations club. A friend and I checked it out because we thought it was funny that the name read as one word became “unclub.” We wanted to be part of an “unclub.”

The U.N. Assemblies were some of the best times I had. Students from all over the county would get together and debate history and politics, and we loved it. We followed the same guidelines including points of order, which led to a very funny moment where a U.S. delegate, pretending to be Nancy Kerrigan, responded “Why me?! Why anyone!?!” when told he was speaking out of order (Tonya Harding had originally taken the floor). You probably don’t see the humor in it, but we all did.

My last year in high school our history teachers did a horrible thing. They saw how much fun we were having, how much we enjoyed history and politics, and they forced all their students of a certain year to join. They didn’t love it, and so they made their own fun. They didn’t represent their countries accurately, and unfortunately they weren’t relegated to secondary countries either. The teachers wanted them to participate!

Imagine trying to debate sanctions against Cuba when neither the US nor Cuba gives a shit. The students representing the President and Vice-president stopped trying to maintain order, sometimes even abusing their power, and the page system (passing of notes between countries), which used to be the best part, was used to continue the regular hallway harassment that so many of us had at least escaped when at U.N.

We couldn’t love it anymore. The worst part about it was that they didn’t love it either, they were just making the most of it to get a better grade.

I can’t help but think about this whenever the issue of Women in Open Source comes up. I haven’t heard proponents say much more than there just should be more women. Sometimes someone mentions pay; there should be more women in technology and open source because it pays well. This worries me. I’ve heard this tune since elementary school. As a girl gifted in math there were endless field trips and career nights encouraging me to pursue a career in technology. It was really interesting to hear from women who did these jobs, but when I think back I don’t remember whether any of them really loved their jobs.

The message that did get through was that I should want these jobs because women are just as smart as men and they pay well. There was a pressure, as if in not pursuing these fields I was letting my gender down. That wanting to be a dancer or a mother, with my brainpower, was perpetuating a stereotype that would continue to crush my less gifted “sisters.” I wasn’t being freed of gender roles, I was having a new one thrust upon me.

I still don’t know what I want to be, but as I’m approaching 30 there are two things I love in this world beyond anything else: being a mother and dancing. Math is still up there, too. I tear up when I realize I’ve forgotten how to do calculus. Coding, however, has just never drawn me in. Maybe it’s backlash against the old pressure, but I just don’t love it and no one yet has been able to tell me why I should and I think my anatomy is neither here nor there on the matter.

The men that I know who work in open source, especially the successful ones, they love it. They love what they’re doing and they love it even more because the people they work with love it just as much. I’m not sure the politics of open vs. proprietary come into play directly, so much as that in open source you’re given more freedom and greater trust to make some great code. It’s like pulling Iran out of the country hat right after the “elections.”

Here’s what I think we should be asking before we start making assumptions: Who loves coding? Why? What do they have in common? Are there women out there who love it but are locked out of the industry? What about men? What about the disabled, or other races? I’ve seen statistics on women in software development vs women in open source. How about statistics on people who are in software development because they love it and people who are in it for the money? Dream job or desk job?

I don’t think the popular kids secretly yearned for a forum to discuss how much of a country’s GDP is already going to U.N. efforts, but just didn’t have the courage to join up. One thing’s for sure though, paying them to show up just because we think they should be there is going to have more negative effects than positive.

We need to reach people who will love it and treasure it for what it is, and maybe we’ll need to accept that it just isn’t appealing to a wide range of people. There are so many important roles in open source, I have a hard time believing that we must have diversity in each area to have a diverse voice in the product. I’m not saying that I think we shouldn’t try, I’m just not comfortable making an assumption based solely on gender, and afraid of what will happen if we do.

By now of course you’ve downloaded Firefox 3.5 and enjoyed the best browser update yet! It’s very exciting, and there are so many great improvements to discover. If you can handle any more excitement, we have some bad news. We’ve lost our pandas! We’ve been spending so much time getting our Firefoxes (aka red pandas) ready for their new homes, that they all managed to sneak out when we weren’t looking. We need your help to find them and bring them home.

They can’t have gotten too far, look for them wandering around the Mozilla websphere. Don’t forget to sign up for the hunt so we can get you set up with the tools you’ll need to catch them. You can also follow @mozhunt on twitter for updates on how many pandas we’ve lost, and clues about where they might like to hide.

Oh! I think I just saw one go by now!

P.S. If you have a Mozilla related website or blog that you think might be a cozy spot for a panda to hide, please contact me via email/IM/IRC etc!

Some of you may have seen or received one of the Mozilla Community driven ecards that went around for Valentine’s Day or Holi. Well, we’ve struck again, and this time I helped!

Why not send an Easter message to your friends telling them how great Firefox is, all with the help of Foxkeh and his delicious Easter egg?

I’ve very much enjoyed this past year and my role as the Live Chat community lead. It’s been a very cool experience helping establish a new project with a new team, especially one that so directly impacts users. We saw incredible turn out and some really great feedback when we launched last December. Since then we’ve made several changes to improve the process. The software that we’re using which was partially open source when we chose it has no been fully opened and now the possibilities for making the improvements we’ve wanted to are very exciting. We’ve also been through a release and a major update and it was really great working with other contributors to help so many people experience Firefox 3 properly.

I can’t wait to see what will happen with Live Chat in the coming year!

Working on Live Chat has also given me a chance to develop my skills and get a feel for what types of tasks I really love. I really love helping people and interacting with them. Being able to help someone do what they’re trying to do is always a great feeling. I think my favorite project though was organizing the June Support Firefox Day. All in all I think my favorite parts have all been the ones that involved working with other people to do some awesome things. Working with Jason, Chris and David has been a great experience.

While support is very dear to my heart, that’s been my major role in the Mozilla community to date. I have some opportunities to pursue projects that involve doing some other things that I love and hone some skills that I’ve had fewer chances to use in my current role. I’m definitely going to stay as involved with support as I can, but I’m also going to enjoy letting someone else take the leadership role with Live Chat and seeing what they can do with it.

Look for an announcement soon on who’s taking over!

If my IRC hostname hasn’t already tipped you off, I’m in Europe! This is my first trip beyond North America and it’s very exciting. One side of my family is Danish and everyone older than me has been to at least Denmark and Germany. I have to help that I was watching Enchanted on the plane, which happens to be a very good movie, btw).

With two kids, five cats, and a S.O. very focused on the release cycle I realized I needed a vacation to not only retain my sanity, but to actually get some of my own work done. The fact that I’m actually in Europe is happy serendipity borne from access to Aeroplan points and having a free place to stay complete with internet.

A very happy side effect of the time difference is that I can be around to help out all our European volunteers who have wanted to learn the Live Chat ropes but haven’t been able to make their hours fit with ours. If that describes you and you’d like to take advantage, please find me on irc.mozilla.org in #livechat or send me a message in Spark including the time that works out for you. I’ll be around this evening around 8pm CEST and will play it by ear from there.

Any new project seems to take a very large time commitment from a small group of people to get it off the ground and Live Chat has been no different. We’ve had some unique challenges in that we’ve been in demand since we opened, rather than seeing our user base grow as we do. This has left us trying to grow our community of helpers as fast as possible while still trying to support as many users as possible. Finding a balance between making things comfortable for helpers while still being accessible to users has been an interesting process.

At first we focused very hard on the user, taking as many chats as possible, being open a wide range of hours so that everyone had a chance to get chat support. This worked when we first opened, when we were new, and everyone was home for the holidays with some time to lend a hand. As people went back to school, or realized real time support wasn’t for them, we were left with a handful of brave souls trying to help just as many users in just as many hours.

People stopped having fun.

This is obviously a problem. For a volunteer community to thrive, helping has to feel good. Not only that, but the quality of support the user receives declines incredibly when they’re being helped by someone who’s worried about developing a RSI. As counter-intuitive as it was at first, I realized we needed to improve the support we give our users by scaling back.

The first change we instituted was the change in hours. We focused less on trying to be accessible at different times, and focused on simply being accessible. Later shifts make it easier for students and people with day jobs to turn up. Shorter shifts make it easier for one or two people, like our room monitors, to stick around for the whole thing. It also makes it easier to remember when our official hours are as they are consistent rather than alternating based on the day.

A big change that’s made a world of difference though, has been playing around with the max number of chats any helper can have at once. At first we agreed to set it high so that people could decide for themselves how many chats they could handle. This proved to be overwhelming to new helpers. Even for veterans it was hard to ignore new chat requests and we ended up spreading ourselves too thin. We tried setting the limit to 5 chats as that would let us take most of the chats in queue, but even I found that impossible to keep up with. Finally, after a fair bit of argument that it’s better for the user if we take fewer chats at once and let some people wait a little longer in the queue, we’ve set the max to 4.

What a difference that one chat makes! Now, with only 2 or 3 helpers on a full shift is easy to do, and our wait times have hardly been affected (which are still 30 seconds or less, I might add. Quite ridiculous for a volunteer community so small, way to go guys!). It’s also easy to limit yourself to fewer chats. Currently the software counts a chat as open as long as the helper still has it open, so if you can only handle 2 at once, leave 2 finished chats open. People have stopped saying they’ll come on only if we really need them.

We’re having fun again.

Coming up we’re looking for a good way to sign up for shifts so our helpers can tell when they’re most needed and when they don’t have to feel guilty for having drinks with friends, or sleeping (*cough*Cww*cough*). Calendaring software seems like the right answer but actually has many drawbacks for our use. Ideally I can specify the shifts, as well as how many helpers and room monitors we want to have during that time, and then helpers can highlight chunks of time and sign up. It should all be web based, and hopefully free! If you know of something that sounds like it would work, please let me know!

I posted earlier about our system for doing Live Chat approvals for new helpers. Unfortunately this fell apart for two reasons. First being, I’m the only one who can flip the switch on accounts. Second being, most new helpers were coming around after hours, which is great, that’s when we need more helpers, but that also meant I wasn’t around. We quickly realized this wasn’t going to work.

The ideal solution needed to take several things into account:

1. New helpers shouldn’t be able to open help without a Room Monitor to supervise
2. They need to be able to get to users without waiting for me to approve them
3. They need to see the same UI as they would in a regular help chat

We stuck our heads together, and came up with what we think will be a working solution. So with many apologies to those who signed up and were never approved, here’s how it works now.

1. Sign up for an account though the Spark client as always. Instead of being automatically added to the support group, or having to wait for approval, you’ll now be added to a “trainees” group.
2. Join the Contributors conference. Let people know that you’re new and would like to be invited to help chats. You can also let us know in #livechat on irc.mozilla.org
3. Watch for invitations to join help chats. When we’re open and taking requests, the trainees group will be invited to shadow these chats using the same alerts and UI that you’ll see when taking requests yourself.
4. Help out a few requests to learn the ropes. Once you’ve followed and helped with enough chats to pick up how things work, the helpers you’ve been working with will let me know that you’re ready to help users on your own. I’ll add people to the support team when I’m around. This will usually be within 24 hours of being told you’re ready.

If you’ve already signed up for an account but were never approved, please let me know here, send me or someone else a message on Spark, or let someone know on IRC. I’ll make sure to take care of these accounts ASAP. Again, I apologize whole heartedly for the process fail. Please let us know if there are still issues with the new process.

If this is new to you and you’d like to help out, get started here.

In my last post I talked about the need for our volunteers share their knowledge with each other, and learn the ropes of providing user support. Since our medium is very much one to one and real time, it’s harder to learn from others than it is on a support forum, or even on IRC. We’ve put some tools in place that we hope will give new helpers a jump start on giving support, and help everyone stay on top of new answers and new ideas for being a better helper.

Bookmarks menu item in the Spark client

The first place to look for tools is the Bookmarks menu in the Spark client. These bookmarks are set on the server, so everyone always has the same links to important resources. I’ve included links to the other tools mentioned here, SUMO’s homepage, as well as to the Live Chat category of this blog. Let us know if we’re missing a link that you think should be included.

Live Chat introduction to Spark

We’ve put together an introduction to Spark’s interface. It covers all of the functions you’ll use when providing support via Live Chat.

Live Chat basic support handbook

Our basic support handbook details the basics of getting a user a good answer as fast as possible. It’s especially meant for new helpers who aren’t sure where to start, but it’s also good for experienced volunteers. Give it a read. Don’t feel compelled to stick to it if you think it doesn’t apply to the case you’re helping with, though some of the sections are “must follow” and that will be noted in them. Suggestions are always welcome, and this article will be updated when we hit common issues that need a guide.

Live Chat tips and tricks

As an experiment, I’ve set up a copy of the chirpy! quote database software. Submit any tips or tricks you have for giving users good support. Some things you might want to contribute are answers you couldn’t find on the knowledge base, shortcuts to diagnose a specific issue, or maybe even a good way to explain something that makes it easier for users to understand.

Make sure to read the latest submissions and vote up ones you find useful or insightful. Top submissions will be reviewed and added to our articles or other resources as appropriate. This is especially important for answers to new problems. This way we can share possible solutions for each other to test out before they could be added to a knowledge base article as a definitive answer.

Submissions aren’t expected to be in quote form, ignore that it’s a “quote” database. Depending on the tip you’re submitting, summarizing it in your own words is usually best, though it’s okay to just copy/paste how you said it in a chat with a user. All submissions are moderated, to make sure dangerous or incorrect suggestions aren’t promoted.

Have a good idea we’ve missed?

We’re constantly re-evaluating the best ways to support our helpers. Currently we’re looking for good free software to track who can help when, something that works more like a sign up sheet rather than a traditional calendar. If you know of anything please drop a link! Any other ideas that you think will help are also welcome.