FYI - Voices: Global virtual conference on International Women's Day

We are holding a global virtual conference on International Women's Day - March 8 2013 called Voices. We start in New Zealand at 10am and working our way around the world streaming sessions from women in every region to talk about technology, topics of interest to the technical women's community and to offer ideas and best practices on a regional, national and international level on how we can encourage more women in technology and inspire the women in this community.

www.globaltechwomen.com

This is an opportunity for women, no matter where they are on the planet, to access 30 hours of continuous coverage including: 

1. Professional development by leading speakers in the Women in Tech community such as:
   • Jo Miller – “Resiliency defined”
   • Barbara Fittipaldi – “Hands on the Steering Wheel: A model for turning a breakdown into a breakthrough”
   • Stacey Sargent – “Inner success and inner critic”
   • Linda Bernardi – “The role of women in global companies. How do we push the envelope?”
   • Valerie Aurora - "The Power of Internet Activism."
2.  Technical talks on virtualization, Open Source, and big data among others.
3.  Connect with other women in the region, country and internationally.

The cost of this event is only $20 USD and attendees will have access to recordings of each session up to one month after the conclusion of the event. No travel, hotel or time off of work required. Please celebrate International Women's Day with us.

Nine weeks so far...

468 emails this week of which 308 are labeled OTW - !General and 37 are labeled OTW – Board. My calendar says ~7 hour week of which most of those hours were talking about Meta.

I'm not sure how much I can say right now but the conversation seems to be breaking down into:

• Meta Policy (how to define, what to include, exclude, how to manage)
• Technical Stuff (precise terminology, early design discussions, how to handle 'Work Type' labels on existing works on the AO3 AKA: legacy data)
• Abuse Specific (guidelines have to be very clear and fair)
• Support Specific (as above)
• Other (how would the above relate to how we treat original works - would it affect it at all)

It's probably worth mentioning that what happens will go a bit like this:

1. Decide we're going to do it AKA talk for ages then come to a decision (we did this)
2. Discuss it a lot internally (doing this right now)
3. Publish DRAFT #1 for people to comment on (happening at some point in the not too distant future)
4. Discuss people's comments and feedback and add to DRAFT #2 (after 3.)
5. Depending on people's comments, like, if people all say 'hey, it should be more like this' and everyone seems to agree and we think it looks good too then we might be able to go straight to 6. or we might need to do 2-4 again.
6. Publish the Terms of Service (ToS) for people to comment on, make changes to the Abuse and Support policies so they match the Terms of Service.
7. Make a Design for Meta on the AO3 and plan when to make code changes. This will probably take a while, we need to have 1-6 first PLUS we have limited coder resources AND we prioritise improving and fixing performance over new features - even very important ones. *loves on AD&T*

I also chaired the Open Board meeting which was committee updates, and the Closed Board meeting which was a discussion about Annual Report writing and the Board's goals. In exciting news we're pretty much in alignment on what our goals are, we just argue a lot about how to go about making them happen. That's pretty normal.

That thing I can't talk about that I didn't talk about last week got approved and communicated internally \o/ I wrote a proposed policy for something and I need to get it approved and happening. This is one of the many things that would make me happy.

I also read this: Power linked to tendency to punish harshly (warning for white text in a dark background *judges*) which is a good thing to bear in mind.

In reflecting on the impact of Boarding on my own life I'm finding the time I spend engaging in Board type activities tends to be very intense and tiring. My initial intention to spend a lot of time in chat rooms being available has been replaced by the need to spend a fair amount of time regenerating emotional energy. It's good for my knitting and fanfic reading but something I'm wary of. I think it has bad implications for long term survival. I'm still hoping things will settle into something less full-on and I'm trying to remember we're still forming as a team and we're working through a lot of stuff from previous years.

Readability score: 66.3 / Grade 9.4