I mean, I hate meetings. Everybody hates meetings, right? My poor husband is sufficiently good at his job he no longer gets to do it very much and instead is in meetings all day, and we commiserate about this.

But I look forward to meetings at Unglue.it. Partly that’s because I work from home so the chance for actual human contact, not on the internet, is gratifying. But partly it has to do with Ronald Coase.

Ronald Coase and getting things done

Ronald Coase won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on transaction costs. It’s the sort of easy-to-explain, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that work that, once you’ve seen it once, you see it everywhere — it makes the everyday world make new and different sense. Genius. If you’re not familiar with it I strongly encourage at least Wikipedia-level familiarity.

I’m reading Bruce Schneier’s Liars and Outliers^[1] and he discusses one application of this, Coase’s ceiling: the size past which an organization can’t scale without decreasing value. “You can think of an employee inside an organization having two parts to his job: coordinating with people inside the organization and doing actual work that makes the company money….There’s a point where adding an additional person to the organization increases the internal coordination for everyone else to a point that’s greater than the additional actual work he does.”

And in larger organizations, this internal coordination is a big part of what meetings are for. And don’t get me wrong: it’s important…it matters that people know enough about the organization’s priorities and activities that they can make good decisions about which work to do and how to situate it. It’s important to avoid duplication, identify collaborators, and understand strategic goals.

But it’s boring. It’s not getting things done. It’s prerequisite to that, but is not that itself. So those of us with a preference for getting things done, you put us in a meeting, we start to climb the walls.

I work for a company with four employees and three contractors. And even at this scale the coordination work is noticeable — particularly because we all work remotely we’ve had to put a lot of conscious attention into building culture and communication channels, into selecting tools. Even at this scale coordination is a big, important chunk of the work and it can fail. But even so: a lot of it can happen informally. And that means when we have meetings, they are focused on getting things done. There are specific projects and features and needs on the table, and we address them, and we come away with to-do lists, and then we do them. And (shh, don’t tell) I actually like that kind of meeting.

The ALA: many tentacles undermine transparency

I think of the ALA as Cthulhu. (Bear with me; I promise this connects.) It has a million tentacles, and the fifth right tentacle doesn’t know what the forty-second left one is doing, and if you gaze upon it trying to understand it too long you start losing sanity.

The ALA has problems with coordination at scale.

And here’s the thing: if you’re an organization with tens of thousands of members, but you exist in a time before internet technology, before cell phones, before widespread private telephony, before easy long-distance transportation — all of which have been true for at least part of ALA’s history — you want to not be a transparent organization. You may want to have open meetings because it gratifies your moral sensibility, but, you know: “open” meetings that no one not on the board actually comes to, at venues most of the membership can’t afford to get to, poorly minuted. Because that is the only way you can get things done. If you start bringing into the room the overhead of coordinating your thousands of division members, your tens of thousands of association members — even just the overhead of clearly communicating with all your committee and round table chairs and making sure they gets proper orientation and they’re all fully briefed on where the organization is going and they know enough about one another to work together effectively and not duplicate labor — well — you can no longer get things done. Boards can’t deal with all of that in two three-hour meetings every six months and actually make any decisions. Best to write policies that look like inclusion and ensconce oneself in a culture that keeps people effectively out of the room.

Which works just fine, until the membership starts to care. They cared in the sixties and seventies, when they forced the open meeting policy in the first place. And some of us care now — an internet culture hungry for getting things done, at speed and at scale, wanting an organization that facilitates our energy and collaboration rather than pouring it into a black hole where coordination should be, and isn’t.

LITA and its technologies

LITA has flailed about transparency for all the two years I’ve been watching it. (OK, it’s not technically correct that no one not on the board goes to those meetings.^[2]) And, from one angle, what it comes down to is a clash about the technologies the board should be using to manage its coordination overhead. And by “technologies”, I don’t just mean Twitter and blogs and virtual meetings — although that sort of technology has greatly decreased the transaction costs of communication and thus increased the Coasean ceiling at which organizations can function effectively. I also mean cultural technologies. What are the processes by which meetings should be run? What counts as a “meeting” and falls under that rubric? What is it necessary to communicate — and what is it permissible to conceal? Should LITA have a secretary, a person who in some way owns the process of communication and transparency — and what does that mean?

It’s frustrating to watch LITA meetings, because it feels like years of flailing with nothing getting done. Because I like it when the things that get done are real and tangible — a publication, an event, an active communications channel. But very little of this stuff can get done, at least at the board level, because there is all this desperately important, and necessarily slow, and often confrontational and paradigm-altering and difficult, cultural work. What is LITA? And what sorts of technologies — cultural technologies — should it construct to enable it to do its work?

Reference and User Services Quarterly; or, a kerfuffle

This past week there’s been a kerfuffle on some corners of the internet about Reference and User Services Quarterly’s move away from full open access.^[3] I don’t know much about how other divisions of ALA operate — I’ve dropped all my memberships except LITA as I simply don’t have the brainpower to understand more than one and LITA will, in all likelihood, be fully absorbing that for years — but I’m curious, and I know my understanding of LITA would be improved if I understood other divisions, too. Knew how they operated. Had their models in mind to challenge the assumptions that my LITA experience may have engendered. Cross-pollination is always a good thing; I just don’t have the energy for it.

But this has been a chance to see a bit of how RUSA operates. And it’s fascinating because it’s the same issue. What does the board, and the journal, need to communicate? With what technologies, in what venues, to whom? What suffices?

I’ve skimmed the last few years’ worth of RUSA minutes on ALA Connect — a fantastic repository for recent ALA history, a good way to get up to speed — a good technology — and it’s clear that the open access decision was discussed, but the reasoning of those discussions was not minuted (in fact I couldn’t find the term “open access” at all). One set of minutes, Midwinter 2011, refers to a proposal for implementing RUSQ’s transition to all-digital, but I didn’t see the proposal itself. Does that suffice? The open access issue was mentioned in the editor’s column in Volume 50, Issue 4 of RUSQ — which, by the way, those of us without RUSA memberships or institutional subscriptions can no longer read, until the next issue comes out and rolls the embargo forward — one sentence on the second page — does that suffice? I think it’s a little locked-filing-cabinet, disused-lavatory, beware-of-the-leopard myself, but opinions vary. I would like to see the OA policy in the author instructions, and I think it should have been communicated not only at the point of decision but again at the point of changeover — in the journal and on its site, and quite possibly on RUSA’s site or blog as well; I think information should not merely be buried in some FAQ but embedded at point of need. An information architecture approach to organizational communication, if you will.

Now I know that people who are making decisions do not, in fact, sit around brainstorming who might be affected by them, and reach out to them and ask if these decisions have some crazy side effect or turn out to be really important in some unanticipated way from some other perspective, or if there are everyday details that affect implementation that people need to know before making the large-scale decision. I know that expecting that is some sort of naive fantasy. But I’d like it anyway.

Organizational coordination is work, and it’s craft, and it requires thoughtfulness. The explosion of communications options gives us more tools for doing that — not only with our electronic technologies but also with our cultural ones — and, along with that, more prospects for engaging a larger number of members, for releasing their energies, for getting things done.

But none of this happens automatically. And a sixty thousand member organization with the cultural and communications technology of ten, thirty, fifty years ago — Coase is ever against us.

[1] I also blogged about this book recently in the context of trust and school cultures. Seriously, it’s a good book. You should read it.

[2] In fact there will be an online LITA board meeting next week on the 15th, and you should go.

[3] As I had submitted a complete column draft to them shortly before said kerfuffle and presently owe them an author agreement, I have a lot of thoughts on this, and have been debating how many of them it is politic to share.

National media portrays the residents of Southern West Virginia the way they perceive them, instead of how the community see itself. This constant flow of images depicting only poverty, drug abuse and unemployment have an effect on the way the community sees themselves and limits their capacity for action and empowerment. Hollow will provide the McDowell County community a chance to express their own ideas in a project that addresses universal issues seen across rural America.

Let me try to explain something about what it means to be from West Virginia. Those of you from Appalachia, you can nod your heads knowingly, aching visions of green hills as backdrop wherever you happen to be. The rest of you — are words enough? I don’t think words are enough. But words, they’re what I have.

Being from West Virginia. It’s a gnawing, sad understanding of the deep and real and grinding problems of your home, coupled with a fierce defensiveness whenever outsiders mention them — those people from outside, they say these things sometimes with mockery, but at least not with knowledge, not with love.

And how could they know? Because being from West Virginia, it’s the undercurrent of fear whenever you hear your state is in the news — what governor has done something appallingly corrupt, what list of health or education metrics have we come in 49th on — who, in some underground and unregarded passageway, has died? Every so often it’s something good about football, and thank goodness for the Mountaineers, but that — is that all of who we are, to you?

It’s people who are surprised when they find out I’m from West Virginia. “But — you don’t have an accent,” they say. Meaning — what? Meaning they’re only ignorant, they don’t know the unbelievable breadth of linguistic diversity in my state, a new accent every few dozen miles? Meaning, they’re trying to find some way to say, but you’re smart, and I thought everyone from the south was an idiot? Because that, let me tell you, that’s not a compliment, and it’s not okay.

Or then again, it’s the people who find out I’m from West Virginia and say, oh, I have cousins in Alexandria! As if a city I’ve never been to, in a state we seceded from in 1863, has any import for me. As if you can forge a connection by erasing my home from history.

It’s this lifelong feeling — even as I’m living in a wealthy state, with a daughter in private school, even as quite frankly I am the child of academics, awash in cultural capital since birth — that I don’t quite fit in in places that are too shiny, too neat, too polished, too moneyed. I’m happier in places a little tattered around the edges. Places without the pressure to get all the details looking right. Places where the culture isn’t screaming at me that success is a matter of being thin and blond and just-so. Places where, even though I know some things, now, about the geography of Nantucket, I don’t have to.

It’s the occasional secret smile, when you realize you’re talking to friends who are from Maine and it’s similar in the relevant ways and there are shared assumptions you can make, shared things that baffle you, even though you’re now passing for people from first-world America. When you’re at a conference table, a lovely dinner in a lovely restaurant, everyone wearing their pretty clothes, and you realize the secret (and not-so-secret) Appalachians are more than half the table, and you can be at home here among these people.

It’s the knowledge, from birth, that you’re going to move away, if you’re smart or creative or ambitious, because there’s no place for you in your hometown. It’s the guilty understanding that the reason there’s no place for you is that nearly everyone smart or creative or ambitious moves away.

It’s trying to grapple with explaining the world to teenagers groomed from birth to attend, not merely college, but a top-thirty college, teenagers who are workshopping high school application essays in middle school and have hands to hold them through every step of the process, when your mom came home from her job at the university one day, frustrated to learn that her student’s parents had tried to bribe him to stay home, offered him a car if he didn’t leave, go off to college — the state school, a few hours and a world away. A place they were scared they’d lose him. Looking at your friends’ prep school or wealthy-suburbs educations with a physically painful envy and knowing that they know your high school education wasn’t as good as theirs but also that they don’t know it, that sometimes you’ll tell stories like that that you take for granted and take their breath away. That you’ll stumble across chasms somewhere, and not know where until you find them.

It’s the absolute conviction, against all biochemical possibility, that green hills are in your blood. That a certain quietly spectacular landscape embraces you always and all land should look like it and something is missing when it, no matter how beautiful, does not. The drumbeat, the sussuration of land the way it ought to be. Here, in a place I love and never want to move away from, there’s something in the land that’s always missing.

And either you understood every word of that, or it was something quaint and faraway. And that is why this project matters: for people to tell their own stories, in their own words, about a part of America most people don’t know about, would sometimes not believe if they knew the truth. Because we’re not just a string of embarrassing stories that make it into the national press, poverty and corruption and incest jokes. We’re people and complex stories and old mountains so beautiful they hurt. And people should be understood on their own terms.

And if you are quiet and listen, perhaps we will let you.

My daughter is in preschool now at a Montessori school. This could scarcely be more different, in culture or structure, from the school where I taught, and I’ve been struggling for years to find ways to articulate the differences. Part of this is that I’ve felt, increasingly, that the Montessori approach to culture is the correct one, but in ways I, frustratingly, cannot name.

Now I’m reading Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars and Outliers. If you’re at all familiar with Schneier this is self-recommending. If you’re not, let me recommend it; it is, thus far, a lucid, accessible, but astonishingly deeply and widely researched book on the nature of trust. What are the different ways that we, in society, trust each other? Why do we do this? What are the mechanisms that individuals and societies manufacture to elicit and enforce trust?

As you might imagine, this framework is applicable to a wide range of situations we all constantly encounter — social life and digital surveillance & privacy have come to mind most for me over the first few chapters. And, just now, school.

Schneier posits four basic categories of pressure that encourage trust — that tip the scales, in a game-theoretic frame, from favoring a strategy of defection from group norms to favoring one of cooperation with them. These categories are moral, reputational, and institutional pressures, and security systems. He notes that reputational and institutional pressures primarily apply after the fact; for instance, they do not prevent you from committing a crime, but they subsequently increase the cost of having done so through jail time (or the expense of evading such).

In traditional schools, of course, as teachers, a great deal of our time is spent on incentivizing cooperation with, and discouraging defection from, particular social norms. We call these things like “detention” and “anti-bullying programs” and so forth.

There are, however, two problems that Schneier has prompted me to notice with this approach:

• One: The levers available to schools are primarily institutional levers. (They can also be security levers, but I found very few people engaged in schools thought in those terms, so in practice those levers didn’t much apply.) In other words, they’re levers whose action applies chiefly after the fact. And the population you’re dealing with — twelve-year-old boys with ADHD, say — isn’t well-known for its ability to consider future consequences in making moment-to-moment decisions. (Humans, of course, almost universally set their discount rate too high, but children generally more so than other humans, and children with executive functioning problems even more so.)
• These levers exist only within the context of some society. Schools love describing themselves with the word “community”, which is wishful thinking carried to the point of outright offensiveness — adults attempting to impose, by the force of numbers implied in that collective noun, a set of social norms on a group of people who likely had no choice in being there. (It is hard for me to hear the word “community” without looking for the bullies whispering it.) The fact, of course, is that in most schools adults and children do not recognizably belong to the same society, do not participate in the same set of group norms, and do not want to. Adults have a set of norms they would like students to follow, but are not socially integrated enough with them to apply reputational levers or inculcate moral levers (the holy grail for teachers when it comes to discipline, but we so rarely have the tools to do that — and if we did, I fear how we might use them…). The moral and reputational audiences students play to are other students. And, indeed, there is social stigma against being too close to students, too equal to them — against having the sorts of relationships that people who are actually engaged in a common society have, and thus against developing group norms in a way that allows for moral and reputational pressure to be applied.

This is where I come back around to my daughter’s school. The first few years — she spent a year in the toddler room and is now in her second year of the 3-to-6-year-old classroom — spend an enormous amount of time on developing culture. Yes, they also develop fine motor control and phonemic awareness and so on and so forth, but a tremendous amount of time and energy is spent on classroom routines, on the parameters for how we interact as human beings. On culture.

The effect of this is that they can wind the kids up and let them go. And this is crucial for a largely self-paced, self-guided, self-taught curriculum, which Montessori is. If students are to be, to a sometimes very great extent, making their own decisions about what to be working on, and working on it independently, with minimal adult supervision, and this is to result both in actual disciplined learning and in an environment conducive to such, the kids have to have internalized the moral pressures. They have to be exercising prior restraint on themselves.

I do not think it is coincidental that, at her school, adults and kids call each other by their first names. I do not think it is coincidental, either, that many adults entering this environment find that very jarring. We are not used to adults and children, in a school context, participating jointly in social norms.

At the open house, the fourth graders lead the tours, and indeed do most of the job of representing the school to the visiting adults. It is the only school I’ve been to where kids that young are trusted as the public face of so much, with such high stakes. When they, articulately and comprehensively, explained their school to us, they were — without pausing their sentences, without, apparently, noticing — also tidying up the things out of place in the environment. Because joint participation in a society means, also, joint ownership of its physical space. And ownership motivates custodianship. And ownership is something we would never, in most schools, let students have.

Read this book.

So these few weeks are a crazy blur — all the things have to work some of them won’t work which things are crucial which will we forget which will we never see and discover in a spate of disaster in a user email we can fix fast in a back alley the users never see what do we still need to test how do we publicize what are all the things we’ve been putting off that we can put off no longer which things now finally have to be real — their details pinned down under glass, etherized upon a table. Choices made. The web site in reality is never as good as the one in your head, all the bells and whistles you wish you could implement, all the features that you wonder (a knife-edge of terror under it all) were we right when we said that wasn’t mission-critical, we don’t need to delay launch for it — but the web site in reality has one final comprehensive advantage over the one in your head:

It’s real.

So we’ll launch. Soon. With campaigns you can watch and share and contribute to. And when we do I’ll embed all the widgets for them in my blog so we can all track their progress from here, too.

But in the meantime: did you know? There are widgets! And I didn’t make them pretty — let’s all thank our awesome designer for that — but I did make them work. I pretend to be a web designer around here. I populate designs with live data from our back end, I weave HTML into Django, I make things toggle. So here are some books I really like, books on my wishlist at unglue.it. And here are some things I did.

Now my entire econ background is that I’ve read a few books and am a longtime fan of Tyler Cowen and the Marginal Revolution blog, but if we can’t have a bit of uninformed speculation then what’s a blogosphere for? So Griffey asks: what’s a library’s product? What can we commoditize to make that valuable? And here’s what I’m thinking this morning.

This is the wrong frame

There are many types of libraries; people use them in different ways; the inputs that would make that use easier or more valuable are too diverse to be readily encapsulated this way.

More to the point, libraries can’t commoditize anything. Commoditizing things requires the ability to move whole market segments; libraries don’t have the funding, collective action, or manufacturing capability to do so. Amazon can commoditize ereaders in order to explode open a new market which they can then dominate, but Amazon has enormous gobs of money, influence in a variety of market segments, and a supply chain.

I’m going to use it anyway

Conceptual frames don’t have to fit to be thought-provoking.

Why I don’t use my local public library

Except as an occasional book depot — and only because other libraries are farther out of my way — I don’t use my local public library. Why not?

It’s not open on weekends, or most evenings. This means it’s literally impossible to take my kid there, and I can get myself there only during my most constrained — that is, most valuable — time. Time is the product I most need in order to use my public library.

It’s in a beautiful historic building which is badly in need of repair. The paint is visibly tattered, peeling off in sheets in the stairwell. The tables and chairs are worn, ugly, and uncomfortable. The giant, lovely windows mean there’s glare on my laptop no matter where I sit. The upstairs is wonderfully quiet, mausoleum-like, with a stage that tantalizes with possibility that I have never once seen used — but there’s no climate control, it’s muggy up there, the carpet wrinkles and heaves with the threat of mildew. I value my comfort, the sensory pleasure of unobtrusive aesthetics, and the fact is there are other places in my community that give me that and free wifi and let me eat food and drink coffee; I’m in one right now. Yes, I have to spend a few bucks on coffee, but the money seems cheaper than the inconveniences of the library.

So how does that work? The library can’t commoditize my time — though it could shift its hours to be open when my time is less expensive. The physical comfort factor isn’t about some external input; it’s internal to the library. It could certainly be improved, but it doesn’t fall under a commoditize-the-complement frame.

Surfeit

Here’s the thing: commoditizing one’s complement is ultimately about scarcity. You need gasoline to drive your car, so you drive your car less when gasoline is scarcer (or more expensive — same thing). But the library isn’t competing with scarcity; it’s competing with abundance.

My time is overconstrained: there’s no shortage of things I can (and often should) be doing with it. The library competes with all of those.

Comfortable, attractive physical space, with wifi, is abundantly provided in my area. I can think of at least four such spaces no farther from my house than the library — more if I’m willing to pay for the wifi or if I were a student at one of the nearby universities — all of which have more convenient hours.

Unstated assumptions

The unstated assumption in all of this, of course, is — what is the value I get from the library? I mentioned there are many library types and many values people might get from them, and the argument runs differently for different use cases. Clearly, the value I’d be getting from the library is a good place for me to work. I’d also like to be getting the “good place to take my kid” value, but given its hours, my library does not offer that. And I get the “book depot” value — I order stuff online, I pick it up — that’s great, but you could raze the building and replace it with lockers I could open by swiping my library card and I would find that a significant service improvement so, really, let’s not be hanging my library’s value on the book-depot service as that leads nowhere good.

To bring it back to commoditizing the complement, I wonder what sorts of products (resources, services) we should be thinking of here. Are we talking about things that are necessary to use library services at all (in the manner that gasoline is for cars)? Or are we talking about things which make library services more valuable? My impression is that the commoditizing-the-complement frame is more about the former, but I think there are more interesting things to be said here about the latter.

Hence, questions

What resources (needs, skills, values, etc.) might people have which would make information literacy a more compelling good?

What drives desire to engage with civic institutions? to engage with the local community by means of civic institutions, rather than decentralized services like meetup.com, or serendipity? What makes libraries an appealing choice as this locus, amid the variety of possibilities? (Again: surfeit.)

To what extent are barriers to library engagement really driven by external factors (which could be made less costly) rather than internal ones (my library’s hours and physical plant)? To the extent that external factors are the limit does the library really have any power to change that? (I would love to see the library make my time get less constrained but I cannot imagine how they would do that. Do they circulate maids? No? Alas.)

The other way ’round

But honestly, it’s hard for me to think of these questions, because I think the biggest barrier to library use is surfeit. There are so many things which compete with the library for people’s time and attention — many sources of entertainment, of content, of workspaces, of children’s activities, et cetera. When your problem is the competition of abundance there’s nothing to commoditize. It’s the opposite, really: how do you make something that you uniquely have so valuable it outcompetes other options?

I invite your thoughts.

It’s the first piece of advice that keeps jackhammering my brain: sit at the table.

Yesterday I went to my first hackathon. And I was giddy about this from the second I got the invitation because it was hosted by a rock star and…and because I count. I’m cool enough to be invited to a hackathon? I know enough? It’s so easy to look at the world of code and see all these things you don’t know how to do (oh but I’ve only dabbled in a handful of languages, I don’t know Haskell or Ruby or C or or or…oh but I don’t know anything about scalability or performance optimization or deployment or testing…oh but I don’t know that tool that other person is using…) and not to see the things you can (it may be dabbling but I’ve coded in a half-dozen languages…I sped up a key page on our site by 42%…I’ve deployed our code to our site…I’ve debugged our tests…I’ve built real projects people use and my code is running on my company’s flagship…) Part of my brain says, there’s lots of stuff I don’t know because code is big. And part of my brain says, oh, but you’re just a web developer.

So I got invited to a hackathon and that was a pretty big deal for me. And everyone was unfailingly nice and welcoming. And as the twenty-five or so of us filled the room every one of the five women, except me, found a seat against the wall. I was the only one at the table.

Code culture, it measures you by how much you know about code. Status equals intellect and mastery and this was a big part of why, despite frankly excelling at (and liking) the required intro programming class in college, I had not one second’s interest in being a CS major: the cost of that was sleeping all day and staying up all night in a windowless basement room, mainlining Doritos and Mountain Dew while battling to prove your status by showing off your mastery of fine details of memory allocation in C, or what-have-you. And not only could I simply not play that game — not having spent my adolescence memorizing those details and not having the kind of brain that does fine detail recall anyway — I couldn’t see why I’d want to (all-nighters and Mountain Dew? really?!).

As I said, the people in that room were unfailingly nice and welcoming. Adult men are way more mature than 19-year-olds and there was not so much as a whisper of that sort of dick-measuring. Instead, we shut ourselves down. Every single other woman, sitting against the wall, said something that came across as, “oh, I’m not a developer. I’m not a participant. I don’t really count.” Women, mind you, who are doing crucial non-code things for the project! And as the introductions wound their way around the table — with some of the men apologizing for their perceived lack of code mastery, too — I wrote and rewrote mine in my head, fighting the temptation to say, oh, but I’m not really a developer either. I fight the temptation to say that right now, simply because I know that women tend to underrate their competency, and because the first step is owning that word. It doesn’t fit. I squirm putting it on myself. But I’m going to own it.

Because here’s the thing I’ve realized thinking about that room — wondering if I’m exhausted because I’m overcommitted and fighting off a cold and I’m a mom and a startup employee, or if I’m exhausted because I was implicitly carrying the entire weight of Women In Tech on my shoulders for a day — the bar for being a woman in tech is the ability to say “Fuck you.”

And I squirm writing that, too! I don’t swear. Not much. I’m too nice. I’m a librarian! Librarians are nice. We help people. We don’t tell them “fuck you”. (Squirm. Again.)

But we’ve got to be willing to look at whole cultures that are telling us — both from the troglodyte-misogynist and the feminist sides — that it’s uncomfortable being here, that we’re likely to feel some sort of stereotype threat or impostor syndrome that honestly I don’t recall ever feeling at 17 but have apparently picked up now in, and only in, relationship to open source development — and say to those whole cultures, “fuck you”.

And to ourselves, too. At those feelings. At our own — maybe very honest, maybe terribly lowball — assessments of our own skill levels. At our own impulse to softpedal the introduction, to sit against the wall, away from the table. Fuck you, self. You’re better than that.

It doesn’t come naturally. It did when I was 17 and oblivious and in a school which was 25% female — which is, by the way, worlds different from being the only female developer in the room.

But here I am, with a constant background obsession, now, of how to get more librarians involved (and involved more deeply) in tech, how to foster collaboration on library technology projects, which is inseparable from the problem of how to get more women involved more deeply and collaboratively in technology. So I can’t not look at that room and see how the status lines fracture, along code mastery but coincidentally also gender, written in the physical geography of the room, where I’m the only one sitting at the table. I can’t not wonder, how can I create spaces which redraw those lines.

I know a little bit. I know that we can be more explicit and celebratory of the non-coding skills that are equally necessary for successful technology projects — design, usability, documentation, testing, metadata, advocacy. I know we can look for ways to put people with all of those skills together doing shared work on shared projects — yes, at the same table. I know we can be intentional about valuing people, not for what they can show off, but what they can contribute — something the library world has done very well, in my experience. (The hackathon, too.) I know we can look for partners who are solving these same problems. But it’s all whispers, not enough yet.

I want to hear what you know about this problem, too.

Because here’s another thing I know: I have unusual self-confidence. I am more comfortable than most women being in a male-dominated environment, and attacking technology, and believing in my skills. And right now that is the minimum for being a woman in tech. And it’s a minimum that cuts against things we know about women — that they tend to underrate their skills, to be less confident than men even when more capable. And if that’s the minimum, we are excluding a hell of a lot of people who have more than enough aptitude to do amazing things.

The minimum shouldn’t be, well, balls — it should be interest, aptitude (not even skill!), drive to contribute. Not the ability to say — even, if necessary, to yourself — and always to multiple cultures — and even when people are being as pleasant and welcoming as possible — “fuck you”.

So I coded some stuff. I mashed up the Knight Foundation’s beautiful timeline and DPLA API results to create a multimedia view of keyword searches over time. Rough around the edges and not deployed in a place you can see it in action, but you’re welcome to deploy (and fork, and improve) it yourself; the code’s on github.

In fact, please do. Please. Sit at the table.

I also have an export of me rehearsing this in Keynote you can have a look at (as it’s a preliminary version please forgive the minor errors). (ETA: now, embedded! Thanks, Vimeo.)

There’s also a final version of the slides [pdf]; they’re CC BY-NC-ND and I’m happy to provide other formats if that’s more useful to you.

I admit: I’m quite proud of this talk. I hope you enjoy it, and I invite debate.

Quite frankly I don’t think we can go wrong with any of these candidates and I am going to find it very challenging to decide on my votes. Time to go reread all the interviews…

What is LITA?

LITA is the technology division of “the oldest, largest, and most influential library association in the world.” Structurally, this is what sets LITA apart from all of the other organizations, communities, and conferences that serve those of us who are committed to libraries and to efficient and innovative uses of technology. LITA’s status within ALA means we are in a unique position, and have a unique responsibility, to encourage libraries and ALA to make wise decisions about technology and to use technology wisely when making non-technical decisions.

LITA is also an impressive assembly of people who work in and in behalf of libraries. Meeting many of you in person and following many others’ work online, as well as learning more about the people we have elected to LITA’s board, has made me eager to participate in its governance.

LITA has the best members anywhere, but it’s struggled with retention. How will you make the members feel supported by, and connected to, LITA?

When you’re given an opportunity to do work that matters and results in something tangible, you develop a sense of ownership and loyalty toward the entity that provided you with that opportunity. You also make the world a marginally better place, and you’re happier for it.

The board’s responsibility is to help LITA allocate its resources effectively, and its members’ energy and expertise are unquestionably its most valuable. There are innumerable ways in which each of us has the capacity to change libraries for the better. The more of that LITA helps us do, the more likely we’ll be to renew our memberships and recruit additional members to join us.

If you could focus on one effort during your time as LITA Director, what would that be? What one thing most needs your attention?

Two words, but it’s one effort: simplicity and transparency. That’s what makes anything more accessible, and LITA is no exception.

I think two of the most famous maxims about simplicity apply: We need to focus on making LITA as simple as possible (though no simpler), and we need to focus on explaining LITA simply (because if we can’t, it means we don’t really understand it). We also need to be willing to provide that simple explanation to anyone who’s interested in hearing it.

Given the current financial conditions, many LITA members are unable to travel to conferences. What are your views on the use of technology to enable virtual attendance to various LITA meetings and functions?

Short answer: I’m 100% in favor of enabling virtual attendance.

Real answer: I think our individual financial resources and our interest in virtual participation are separate issues, and I think it’s important to see it that way. For one thing, if you conflate these ideas then it’s almost impossible not to create a tiered membership that views virtual attendance as a sort of adjunct to “real” participation. As a librarian, I’m committed to obviating this kind of tiering, and as a technologist I love finding ways to help people get the most out of every mode of communication, including online and face-to-face.

What new collaborative opportunities between LITA and other divisions or round tables would you like to see happen?

What I would most like is for LITA to provide more opportunities for collaborative opportunities, for LITA to become the library world equivalent of Silicon Valley. We have an enormous capacity and inclination for collaborating effectively in unexpected ways. My goal is for LITA to provide the freedom and the resources that nurture the kind of activities I mentioned above, those intersections of librarianship and technology that ultimately help to make the world a better place.

For more about Brett, see his LITA election page.

What is LITA?

LITA is a community of library and information professionals of all stripes working together to explore the ways technology can enhance the services we provide.

LITA has the best members anywhere, but it’s struggled with
retention. How will you make the members feel supported by, and connected to, LITA?

This is a tough question. LITA is an organization both for and by its members. You get out of LITA what you put into it, and each member ought to be as responsible as the next for communication, and for embodying the supportive, welcoming, productive ethos that we love about LITA.

That said, “Ask not what LITA can do for you” isn’t probably the most effective sales pitch when membership renewal time comes around. When I look at the value that I get out of ITaL (especially now that it’s OA!), LITA-L, conference sessions, IG meetings, and (dead serious here) LITA happy hours, my membership dollars feel very well spent. Which segues nicely into numbers 3 and 4…

If you could focus on one effort during your time as LITA Director, what would that be? What one thing most needs your attention?

I’d be interested in exploring a concerted member-driven marketing and communications effort. LITA staff do a terrific job of promoting the association and our events, but by necessity speak with an official voice. I’d like to see a communications committee that could take responsibility for LITA’s blog, Twitter account, etc. and begin pulling together all of the fantastic work of the association and its members. I think that a coherent and ongoing voice documenting the day-to-day accomplishments and concerns of our members would provide a powerful illustration of the value and vitality of the organization.

Given the current financial conditions, many LITA members are unable to travel to conferences. What are your views on the use of technology to enable virtual attendance to various LITA meetings and functions?

Another softball, eh?

I feel that all appropriate measures should be taken to ensure that open meetings are as open as possible, and to ensure that LITA membership has value even when members aren’t able to travel to meetings.

This is a very thorny problem, and not just for the legal reasons addressed at the recent LITA board meeting (see Andromeda’s post for her analysis). Here’s a no doubt incomplete list of issues as I see them:

1. Technology – Yes, it is 2012. Yes, we still cannot rely on sufficient reliable bandwidth to stream meetings and sessions from our conference locations. The vagaries of convention center bandwidth mean that we often won’t know what’s possible until we fire up a webcam at the start of a meeting. Under these conditions, we can’t responsibly give our members the expectation that they can reliably attend our sessions virtually. If you had stayed home from this past Midwinter under the assumption that you’d be able to view and interact with meetings in real-time, you would have been sorely disappointed, but not for lack of trying by LITA members on-site.
2. Privacy – There is a big difference between asking someone to volunteer on a committee and asking someone to do that committee work in a video live-streamed to the entire Internet and archived on a third-party for-profit video service. Yes, the work of our board and committees should be transparent to our membership, but many people have legitimate reasons why they may not want their voice or likeness broadcast willy-nilly, and I would never want these concerns to keep someone from volunteering for LITA.
3. Revenue – LITA relies on income from event attendance. Yes, almost all of LITA’s meetings are open meetings, but historically they have been open to paid conference attendees, with minutes available to the membership at large. When we make the decision to stream everything, we no longer give members as much incentive to attend in person. Again, I say this as a strong supporter of enabling virtual attendance. But for the association to remain strong, we’ll have to find new sources of revenue to replace event income, or figure out how to make LITA function as a leaner organization than it already is.
4. Quality – UStream+Twitter≠Being there. We can and should investigate tools to help make virtual attendance at LITA events as robust as in-person attendance. But at least for right now, it isn’t the same. If we can’t bring you the hallway conversations and happy hour virtually, you’re missing out.

These are problems that we need to solve. And these are areas where I think it’s LITA’s duty to ALA and to the profession to lead the way. Perhaps we turn the problem on its head by making everything virtual first and then porting it back to the in-person events. Find ways to provide appropriate access for members, and look for reasonable opportunities to monetize quality virtual offerings. But we will have to solve these problems deliberately and systematically, because they bear directly on the health and future of the association. I would urge LITA members to engage with the full range of issues implicated here, and to resist the temptation to mistake the absence of an immediate solution for a lack of commitment to transparency.

What new collaborative opportunities between LITA and other divisions or round tables would you like to see happen?

I’ve been really impressed with the recent work of LITA’s Program Planning Committee. Abigail Goben and company have an incredible number of sessions coming up at Annual that LITA is co-sponsoring with other divisions and round tables. I’d like to see this trend continue, for LITA to position itself as a resource for the rest of ALA on tech topics.

This does get tricky though, and I wouldn’t want to sugar-coat it. At present, LITA’s operation is dependent on revenues not just from membership, but from events. In both of these areas, we’re often in effect competing with other divisions and professional organizations for the same shrinking pool of revenue. The most important issue we need to collaborate on with our peer organizations is growing that pool, and bringing greater coherence to the slate of organizations and professional development opportunities we offer.

Heck, I’d really like to see LITA collaborating with Code4Lib.

For more about Cody, see his LITA election page.