Andromeda Yelton

It is one of those times when the blogosphere is talking about how leadership and professional identity dovetail with clothing choices. I love those times.

Me, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the leadership angle of fashion choices (though I expect now that I’ve been elected to the LITA Board I will be). But one of my singular little joys is when people say “you’re dressed up today!” and I say “yeah, work” and they are just about to nod in understanding and then do the double take of “…wait! You work from home!”

It’s true. I do. My dress requirements get as far as “should put on a shirt before the video call (but not necessarily pants)”. And yet most days I’m wearing this cozy sort of business casual with a twist of nerd, outright feminine though not too girly. With actual accessories. Often even a jacket.

Here’s the thing: somewhere in my twenties I had this blinding realization that I’m not in high school any more and therefore I do not have to pay attention to stupid social boundaries like “there are people who like math and people who like clothes and never the twain shall meet”. ¹ And it’s taken me a long time to operationalize this because I have no innate taste, so I had to spend years studying style in a data-gathering nerdly way, and then I was spending all my money on grad school (and didn’t have the skill or kid-free time to pull off the stylish-via-Goodwill route), but now, here I am, necklace and portrait collar and wedge sandals and all. And it turns out, the more I’ve gotten into code, the more clearly feminine my style has gotten.

Because I like crossing boundaries and challenging stereotypes. Being a woman in tech at all challenges stereotypes. But then you get here and the men wear jeans and nerdy t-shirts and the women wear jeans and nerdy t-shirts and…huh. I am super glad that geekdom provides a home for women who are fed up with gender-normative performance, who are happier being androgynous or genderqueer or just not giving a damn (and maybe not even, while we’re at it, wearing the term “women”). A lot of my friends, no matter their anatomy or chromosomes, are happiest being somewhere outside mainstream conventions of gender performance, and that is awesome.

But it is not awesome if the unstated rule in slinging code is that, if you’re going to be female, you’d better not be obviously or conventionally female. That, you know, girls who code are cool and all, as long as it’s not too hard to pretend they’re guys. That we’re still in a space owned by guys, which girls get to enter if they play by guy terms.

I feel like I can challenge more stereotypes, from more directions, as a woman with a development environment and a skirt than I can as a woman with a development environment, full stop. And I thrive on that.

It turns out that the stereotype I challenge most is my own, of me. I thrive on that too.

Now I don’t think I get to play with these boundaries for free. Clothing choices still carry social signals, even if I’d rather they didn’t, and I can choose to dress in ways whose signals aren’t wholly accurate, but I can’t choose not to be misread for it. I do feel lucky to be in a position where I can dress more or less how I want, but I find the parts of this conversation I’m most interested in are the instances where people feel they can’t — where the social and professional consequences for misaligning signaling and role or identity or body politics are too big to take on. I’d like to hear a lot more from those voices.

And maybe over time, by dressing to be, yes, socially aware, but ourselves as much as we can, we can push this envelope outward, create more space for people to signal and be more variegated things, yet still unquestionably be seen as belonging inside the boundaries of “coder” or “leader”…

Earlier I blogged on how to get me to want you as a keynoter. Now that LITA Forum acceptances & rejections are out, I think I can safely blog on how to get me to want to accept your concurrent session proposals. ¹

I clearly gravitate toward some different things than many of my fellow committee members, so I’m going to state my preferences, and then tell you which grains of salt you should apply.

I also want to thank everyone who submitted proposals for Forum. I hoped that you all would make our jobs difficult, and you did; we had more than twice as many proposals as slots. We turned down plenty of talks that I am confident would have been good fits, or will be good fits for some other conference. We turned down talks that had strong advocates on the committee. So if we turned down yours, please revise and resubmit somewhere — there’s probably a good home for it. And I hope to see you in Louisville anyway. I hear it’s got great restaurants and pretty much all the bourbon…

Stuff you should do

• Proofread (better yet: ask someone else to). For heaven’s sake, you’re submitting a proposal to librarians. Some of whom may be catalogers. Don’t misspell stuff. We have issues with that.
• Read the CFP. If we say “X is required” and you do not do X, we have issues with that, too.
• Then read it some more… The CFP tells you what topic(s) and audience(s) the conference is aimed at. Your proposal needs to clearly fall under that umbrella. It should be obvious how your topic relates to ours and why your take on it is relevant to our audience. That doesn’t mean it has to be relevant to 100% of the audience — in fact there’s some benefit to having talks that appeal to new audiences — but we have to feel like people would actually attend.
• ….but zag when others zig. Talks should be relevant, yet distinctive. ² If you’re talking about a very new idea, your topic will be distinctive, so show us how it relates to libraries. If you’re talking about something that’s been around for a while, show us why your take on it is unusual. Same thing if you’re pitching a talk on something very trendy or heavily emphasized in the CFP — we’ll get a lot of those, so you have to have a special perspective to stand out. Concrete details are your friend here. So is personality. And it helps to know what people have said at similar conferences recently, so you can say something else.
• Think about how you’ll present the material. You don’t have to prep the talk before writing the pitch (please don’t! who has that kind of time?!), but do think about concrete details. Are you doing a high-level ideas talk or an in-the-trenches how-to? Both can be great and both have fans, but you should know where you are between zero and fifty thousand feet, and so should we. How will you relate to the audience? What sorts of examples will you use? Will there be anything distinctive about your format: you’ll facilitate a discussion, have a hands-on activity, lead the audience to walk away with a deliverable or plan? You’re not just imparting information but delivering an experience; what is that experience?
• Think about level. For a technology conference, you really need to be pitched at the level of attendees — nothing too basic, but nothing so obscure that it won’t have an audience. Your talk doesn’t have to be accessible to everyone, but it should be accessible enough to justify accepting it. If it has prerequisites that aren’t common in your audience, note them. ³ Similarly, don’t propose anything dated (but if you’re a stimulus-seeking Twittermonkey, your sense of what is so-last-year may not be the same as everyone else’s…).
• Take advantage of the space you’re given. Don’t snow the committee under with a ton of stuff they won’t have time to read, but if you’re given some optional fields, use them! The CFP doesn’t give you a whole lot of room to make your case, so don’t waste opportunities. This is doubly true if you’re planning to do something a little outside-the-box that may not be addressed by the required questions. Similarly, if your proposal description only takes up a third of the allotted space, that’s probably a bug. Think about the distinctive elements of your format or perspective and add some concrete details or provocative questions.
• Write well. If the reviews are blind, or if no one on the committee has seen you speak, this is probably your only chance to show that you can communicate. ⁴ Yes, it’s writing, not speaking, and maybe you’re an awesome speaker and a not-awesome writer, and that’s not fair, but it’s what you’ve got. At minimum you should have impeccable writing mechanics (see also: have someone else proofread), and you should be specific yet concise. Bonus points if your writing crackles with personality. I want to see that personality on stage.
• Don’t forget to tell us what makes your talk special. Maybe everyone in your community knows how awesome you are. Maybe you’re working with high-profile partners. Maybe your work has a huge impact somewhere. But maybe the committee members are not in your community, don’t know about your partnerships, are not familiar with your impact.

Some reasons why ignoring my opinion might be the right call

I used to teach middle school. This means I think about pedagogy. I read a proposal and I gravitate toward anything I see about the experiential aspects of the talk. If there isn’t anything, I start guessing, based on the writing style or whatever other thin evidence I’ve got. I visualize what this looks like on a stage, how presenter and audience interact.

And it’s frustrating, because our CFP didn’t do much to elicit this evidence, and frankly I’m not sure how we could have. We can use presenters’ names, but that works against diversity and new voices, and makes things cliquish and predictable. We could have asked people to submit video, slides, etc., and maybe that’s a good idea, but it runs similar risks. We could say “tell us how you won’t be just a talking head on a stage”, but actually talking-head-on-a-stage can be quite good.

That said? I seem to be not normal in this regard. The rest of the committee was much more interested than I in topic choice and focus — the relevant-yet-distinctive questions above. So it’s possible that you can totally ignore everything I just said about style, voice, etc.; make sure you’ve got a solid topic and good proofreading, and you’ll write strong conference proposals.

But seriously? I would like everyone to take the rest of my advice anyway, because I don’t want a world full of strong proposals; I want a world full of strong talks. And the fact is, essentially any topic can be a great talk or a terrible one.

I was ego-surfing, as one does, and, well…

Also considering registration for the pre-conference workshop, Introduction to Python. Co-taught by Andromeda Yelton, the Unglue.it librarian! Holy hell! I am starstruck.

– The Global Librarian

I’ve been starstruck. Still am, sometimes.

I was a babybrarian three years ago — only three! A library school student at my first conference, full of these stories of Important Names In The Field I’d read about or heard guest Skype talks from in school. And then one of them bought me a drink (starstruck) and I ended up coauthoring something with another and now they’re people I run into at conferences, not names but people, hi, how’s it going, what’s up with you these days. Sometimes I can’t quite believe my life works out this way.

Here’s the thing: we see the director’s cut of everyone else’s life, and the behind-the-scenes footage of our own. I have strengths and weaknesses, just like everyone has strengths and weaknesses, you know? And I have nights when I look at the pile of dishes that need to be done and the pile of emails that need to be sent and I say, you know what, screw it, I’m going to light some candles and pour some bourbon and read a trashy novel. The responsible capable endlessly-energetic directors-cut star in someone’s head never does that; she washes the dishes and sends the emails and reads a thought-provoking, life-improving book, and probably then gets six hours of sleep (which she thrives on) and wakes up early to ride the exercise bike, and moreover is not letting her six-year-old play video games right now so she can write this blog post. But I am not her. In fact I think tonight will be a candles-and-bourbon-and-trashy-novel kind of night. (Sorry if I owe you an email.)

Strengths and weaknesses.

So, okay, here’s a thing about that. One of my strengths is an obsession with gaining XP and leveling up, plowing those experience points into my weaknesses until they aren’t weaknesses any more. (Do too much of this and you really need the candles and bourbon and trashy novels…)

Like a lot of people my first introduction to roleplaying was D&D, and, really, doesn’t everyone have some times they just want to strap on the Sword of +5 Mysticalness and stomp around a dungeon killing some hapless kobolds? But I find that whole model increasingly unsatisfying because in real life — even in the real lives of people who have a 16 Comeliness and spellcasting ability — most of the problems we encounter aren’t the kind that can be solved with swords, and killing things isn’t the way we get XP.

These days I’m in a Dungeon World campaign. ¹ The world has a D&D flavor but the system is far more lightweight, driven by storytelling rather than pages of rules. You roll dice when rolling dice would make the story more fun. And either you win, and the thing you want more or less happens, or you lose, and that’s when you get XP.

In the real world, we get XP by going out there and trying things. Taking a risk because, win or lose, it makes the story more fun.

A couple days ago I found out about Fake Grimlock ² — he’s a giant robot dinosaur with fantastic advice about startups and, by analogy, life — and there’s this one essay with this one quote I really can’t get out of my head, on how to be awesome:

BE AWESOME IS BURN WITH FIRE THAT MAKE EVERYONE WARM. BURN FOR JUST YOU IS BE ASSHOLE.

Stars burn with fire that make everyone warm. ³

This library profession, it’s full of still-waters-run-deep types. They may not talk a lot up front about what they’re doing, they may not be at a big-name institution, but you ask some questions and listen for a while and it turns out they’re doing something totally badass. Or they have this great idea or skill or passion but only half of what they need to make it real, and you introduce them to a person who has the other half, and — fire.

We are all star-stuff.

Global Librarian, I’d love to see you at ALA. (Kazakhstan! You moved to Kazakhstan for your librarianing. How cool is that?!)

So hey, I want you to come learn Python with me!

tl;dr It’ll be awesome, and I’m so psyched about this workshop and I want to teach you Python, and early bird registration closes on Friday; register soon so you don’t miss out on the discount.

What: The Library Code Year interest group is sponsoring a preconference introducing the Python programming language at ALA Annual this year. I’m going to be coteaching. We’re basing our curriculum on the Boston Python Workshop, which has been heavily tested and refined in a number of cities. This workshop is part of the diversity outreach efforts of the Boston Python User Group, which means it’s woman-friendly and newbie-friendly.

Who: you! Whether you’re an experienced coder looking to add a new language to your repertoire, an occasional codemonkey trying to get more mileage out of the great ideas discussed on ACRL TechConnect, or someone with maybe some vague memories of library school HTML, you’re welcome here. A mix of self-paced, hands-on, and instructor-guided activities provide room for all skill levels; we’ll obsessively define terms, patiently answer questions, and high-five you as needed.

Why: because code lets you see and also it is fun and useful, and Python is a powerful yet approachable language. And you will build stuff you didn’t know how to build before

When and where: Friday, June 28, 8-4pm, in Chicago, at Annual. (You need not be attending the rest of Annual to register.) You’ll need to do some advance setup of the laptop you’re bringing (Mac, Windows, Linux all fine, but you do need one). We’ll provide online office hours and (we hope) in-person ones on Thursday the 27th.

You can register at any time (including onsite), but you get a discount with early bird registration, which closes on the 12th.

The official announcement won’t be for a few days, and I haven’t read the article yet (so curious), but I guess I can tell you now because…

…this is the photo on the front page of Library Journal right now, and that’s me having a dance party with Justin Hoenke and Kirby McCurtis and Kate Tkacik.

I’m moved that so many of you saw this award and thought that I should have it. I’ll try to justify your faith in me.

ALA elections are March 19 through April 26 via email. ¹ I’m endorsing Courtney Young for ALA President. Here’s why.

• Courtney’s been extremely involved with ALA governance at many levels, most notably ALA Executive Board and the Budget Analysis & Review Committee. ² This means that she knows the major, high-level issues facing ALA, and how things work. The President’s term is short, which means she doesn’t have time for a learning curve. Courtney already has the expertise and network to get things done during that short window in office.
• Part of Courtney’s platform is diversity. This is an important issue to me, too, and to the LITA Forum committee I’m on. When I’ve asked her for help with diversity questions, she’s followed up quickly with advice and concrete help. I appreciate that she backs up her platform with action, and that she gets that sometimes the most important part of leadership is just being responsive.
• As a LITA member, I want a President who understands technology issues. Courtney spoke articulately to the LITA board at Midwinter, fielding their questions in a way which showed she is familiar with LITA’s concerns. (And why not? She’s a LITA member, too.)
• I had this great conversation with Courtney once, just because Foursquare told me we happened to be in the same hotel. She’s not too busy or too special to sit down for a random chat (even though she is pretty busy and special!). She’s friendly, approachable, and relatable. She’s a teacher, a military brat, a nerd, a fashionista, and a football fanatic, which is to say, it doesn’t matter who you are; there’s something about Courtney you can connect with.

As long as I’m endorsing people, here’s who I’m voting for Council, too.

• My pals from the Think Tank slate: John Jackson, Kate Kosturski, Chris Kyauk, Coral Sheldon-Hess, and Patrick Sweeney. They have divergent personalities and styles, but they’re all smart, interesting people who do things and who care.
• Peggy Cadigan, a fun person doing neat stuff in New Jersey.
• Maria Taesil Hudson Carpenter, the new(ish) director of my local public library, which has been doing a lot of good things since she came on board. I’m happy to see her on the ballot.
• Loida Garcia-Febo (is there anyone who isn’t impressed by Loida?)
• Lauren Pressley, thoughtful, strategy-minded, LITA Board member; as far as I can tell everybody likes her. Plus which she’s got this unglued ebook…
• I will also be seriously considering the rest of the Think Tank caucus, all the Emerging Leaders, and Martin Garnar, all people I’ve heard good things about.

There’s a gigantic pdf where you can read all the Councilor candidates’ bios and statements

I would love to hear who else I should vote for and why!

I am of course also deeply interested in the outcome of the LITA Board elections, but as I’m running I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to endorse anyone. I think the nominating committee put forth a solid slate of qualified candidates and LITAns are likely to be happy with the outcome whatever it is — but I still encourage you to read up on everyone and make an informed choice!

I have been reading this New Yorker article on Aaron Swartz, which is quite justly making the rounds of the internet this morning. And of all the threads that twine through it and around me and make me think, the one I want to talk about is this: context.

It jumps out at me, over and over, that what Aaron Swartz did in a data closet at MIT was not merely licit in his local social context, but was outright condoned by its norms. The sort of thing people laugh and wink about, or even give you social capital for. Had his actions stayed in their context they would have passed silently away, maybe even been a good story to tell at parties. It must have been breathtaking when they proved to exist outside that context. When strangers’ norms applied. When some other context claimed jurisdiction, and pushed back.

Of course we have all had times when actions or remarks we performed in, and for, one social context leaked to another, where they were not received as our intended audience would receive them, where someone pushed back. And I suspect the more disenfranchised you are, the more you find yourself having to exist simultaneously in multiple social contexts, to live in or look for the Venn-diagram space you can navigate among them.

But I think, too, this is one of the fundamental conditions of the digital age, an accelerant we’re not, as humans, cognitively equipped for. We all, insofar as we live out loud, live in multiple contexts now. And they are contexts we do not know; contexts removed from us by space or time or social boundaries. Our actions can be taken from our contexts in ways we did not even know existed, can resurface in ways we cannot even imagine — because no one of us can imagine the ways that billions of people, using technologies perhaps not even yet invented, can see us.

I think my daughter’s generation will be better at this than we are. I think they will of necessity come up with ways to forgive, to look the other way. To recognize we live in multiple contexts, each with different standards of appropriateness, rules, incentives. Because we do and we have to and if we try to live in such a way that anything we ever do or say will be safe in any context it could ever come to light in — people we don’t know, norms we don’t know, exposed by technologies we don’t know, perhaps without our knowledge or consent — we’ll all be utterly paralyzed. Incapable of choice. And (more comfortable on the individual scale, but worse on the societal one) colorless. We’ll leach ourselves of personality or difference in horror that any of our jagged edges should ever prove to cut some way we can’t handle.

I am aware that technologies not yet invented will expose me in ways I cannot dream. That information buried now inside of images or sound will become ever-more searchable, that nontextual indexing and inputs will make new ways to ask and answer questions, that the tools for interrogating big data in human-friendly ways will be more developed and then democratized and then ubiquitous, that our interfaces will go from bricks in our pockets to implants in our bodies, from things we must use in some socially conspicuous way to things we can use with unseen signals, the twitches of electricity along muscle fibers.

I’ve been exposed. I’ve been online since 1991, a small and quiet internet, all anonymous corners and openness and exploratory wonder, an internet of MUDs and mailing lists and gopher, invisible colleges and friendly people and pseudonyms and ytalk and places I could find connection the world around me did not readily offer. I put a lot of myself on the internet before there was Google, before I’d thought to dream about discoverability. A smaller, quieter, wilder, more anonymous, less personalized, more individual, safer internet. And when I was a teacher almost twenty years later some students of mine using a technology that had not existed at the time I lived that life so quietly out loud found bits of me from when I was their age and proceeded to treat me the way middle schoolers treat nerdy introverted teenage girls who situate themselves within the sphere of deviance. I know what context leaks are like.

And yet…and yet. Here I am. I know it will happen, again and again and again, in spaces I can’t dream of, in ways that feel just as threatening and vulnerable. Maybe in ways with higher stakes. And I could be quiet about everything, be nothing but pseudonyms and PGP and cash-only transactions and barely leaving the house, could look for ways to protect myself from all the threats known and unknown, could try to imagine and defend against them all. Be paralyzed. Be colorless.

Or I could do this thing where a lot of me is in public, more than I would have imagined I’d be comfortable with. Because I do benefit from it, do thrive on making connections to people in known and unknown contexts, do have things to say. And choose to close my eyes. It’s a little lie I tell myself. A big lie. But it lets me function.

My daughter’s generation will develop better social technologies for handling context, because they are growing up in a world where they have to. Maybe not good social technologies, because I don’t think human social brains are equipped to be good at this, but better ones. And we will find their norms puzzling and dangerous. Kids these days. Don’t they understand? See the threats we see? We’ll be off to the side, uncomfortable.

But those norms, if they work, they’ll be built around another of the things people have been saying in the Aaron Swartz story all along, people who knew him, people who are wiser than I: only connect. Take care of each other. Be kind and forgive. Don’t be colorless — don’t file off all your jagged edges lest they sometime someone hurt or offend — please, don’t be colorless. We’re fragile and strange, and my favorite people tend to be more fragile and strange still, and we’ll hurt each other and misunderstand, but let’s try to give one another the benefit of the doubt over that, to find forbearance, to love one another not in spite of but for our fallibility, to stumble toward our little bits of the light together, holding out our hands for one another.