I'm speaking at the Girls in Tech Power Femme Roundup put on by Adriana Gascoigne.

Here the info if you'd like to come (from Adriana):
the Girls in Tech femme-Power RoundUP on April 29th at 6:30pm at Orrick, San Francisco. We have an AMAZING group of panelists joining us. Some of these lovely ladies include:

Kaamna Dhawan, Skewz.com
Eve Phillips, Chirp Interactive
Jeanine LeFlore, LiveHit
Mary Hodder, Dabble
Jory Des Jardins, Blogher
Layne Gray, Vivanista
Sarah Lacy, BusinessWeek/Yahoo! Tech Ticker
Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks
Sasha Cagen, StyleMob/GLAM.com

Moderator: Sue Kwon, Anchorwoman, CBS 5

To RSVP, please click on the following link:

http://gitfemmepower.eventbrite.com

Webguild sent out a very disturbing email this morning, saying that because they held evening events named "The Future of Web Apps" (also a Carson company conference series event name) and "Web 20 Conference and Expo" (also an OReilly conference series event name) that Google had ceased to sponsor or host the WebGuild events.

WebGuild's post is here: called "Shame on You Tim OReilly." I read it, and found it disconcerting, because if true, it implies that OReilly (not Carson) went to Google, instead of approaching Webguild directly, and used its "old boy's network" to get Google to pull support, because of the naming conflicts.

Then, I left a comment tried to leave a comment on the WebGuild post, which said (which was up temporarily but has now been deleted):

Hi,
From the outside, this does sound disturbing, but I'm reserving judgment until I see answers to a few questions.

First, I agree with Michael Slater above that it's strange to name your evening event after The Future of Web Apps conference (not an OReilly event, but rather a Carson event) and your conference after the Web 20 Conference and Expo which is an OReilly event.

Why not change the names a bit, to avoid confusion in the marketplace (the point of trademarks)?

Second, I don't think OReilly sued IT@Cork but rather sent them a Cease and Desist letter. I think you should correct your post as such. They subsequently worked things out, without a lawsuit.

Did OReilly and Carson contact you directly about the naming conflict? You don't say in your post but that's a very important point.

Lastly, I don't think you help your argument by conflating the "old boy network" as you call it, with your issue, which is that Trademark holders went around you to your sponsors to put pressure on you.

Pls let us know the answers to help us understand more about what's happened.

Thanks,
mary

Note that the Michael Slater comment is now missing(note: Slater did a post on the missing comment and issues here) (as is mine now.. a few minutes after it was briefly posted) from the WebGuild post, which was legitimate but negative, suggesting that it was really strange to name *two* events after two other conferences. Other later comments are there. For a while, they didn't post mine, but now it's up, listed before others that appeared before it in the list.

Anyway, I have to say, based upon seeing the Slater comment disappear, and now mine, they just lost a lot of points.

I've attended their events in the past, but now I'm not so sure I would go, or sympathize with their issues.

I'd really like answers to the questions I wrote, so that I can make up my own mind about what they are doing. But getting lots of people to blog negatively about Tim isn't the answer here.

We need better community solutions than that for solving IP issues and community confusion for naming issues with events.

Updated: Techcrunch wrote about this same topic Jan 1, 2008 which gives more background on Webguild.

Last Friday and Saturday the Data Sharing Summit was held in SF. I attended a bit on Friday, but not Saturday. It looked like a lot got done by the participants, and so they did accomplish a lot!

Kaliya Hamlin has posted notes and goals for the next meeting in one month.

Here is an excerpt of the results:

Do-able Now
* Portable Identities (OpenID, LiveID, FB-ID)
* OAuth (sever to server) delegated auth.
* Contacts Portability (FOAF, XFN, Microformats, like MicroID)
* Sync (feed sync)
* Social Network Portability (Open Social FB platform)
* Social Application Portability

Do-able Soon
* Standard Schema for Profile
* Standard Schema for Address books
* Media portability + metadata + permissions
* Linking ID’s of different ecosystems?

Looking forward to the Data Sharing Summit 2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on May 15th.

Hilarious South Park episode on losing access to your drug of choice: the internets. Note the giant Linksys router is the placeholder for the whole internet. Funny. Go watch it.

I can't go, but I hope lots of folks out there who support and open and free internet do. Here's the schedule according to Save The Internet:

It is rare for all five members of the Federal Communications Commission to leave Washington, D.C., and they want to hear from you. There will be a public comment period - come speak up to save the Internet!

WHAT: Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet
WHEN: Thursday, April 17
TIME: 12:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University
(471 Lagunita Drive, Palo Alto, CA) Map It!
For directions and travel information, visit: http://www.savetheinternet.com/=stanford_travel

FCC Public Hearing Agenda
12:00 p.m. - Welcome/Opening Remarks
12:45 p.m. - Panel 1: Network Management and Consumer Expectations
3:00 p.m. - Panel 2: Consumer Access to Emerging Internet Technologies and Applications
4:30 p.m. - Public Comment
6:30 p.m. - Closing Remarks
7:00 p.m. - Adjournment

Note also that Comcast is proposing a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" according to ArsTechnica, who is skeptical. Don't see any users in that room, but if they don't invite us, I'd guess after Boston, we'd all get pretty mad and force them to include us. Either way, (FCC or voluntary code) I think it's going to be user centric in the end. We're just going to have to fight like hell.

Kevin Marks also makes a great point about Comcast: They are like The Producers who oversold their Broadway show, assuming it would fail, by getting 100 people to buy 10% of the who. Comcast, by overselling their network for internet access is doing the same, and then having secret levels above which they cut people off out of the blue, is pretty bad.

Eddan Katz wrote this piece: Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, and I acted as his editor, 5 years ago. We posted it to the bIPlog on the first day of the war in Iraq.

We had a real uphill-behind-the-scenes fight about it at the Journalism School, where the blog was then hosted, because some of the other folks on the blog thought it wasn't really under our mission to publish something about the war and culture and the internet. But we convinced them; we knew we would get it published when John Battelle, one of the profs, lent his support for us. And it got slashdotted. And Revolution was made into a tshirt. Which was all a blast after working on it all night messing with the language and placing links ... some of which are broken but I think it matters to keep them intact and original. I think the linking is a kind of expression in this piece.

Eddan and I thought up what Napsterization could be here at this blog, but in the end only I've posted to it. I still wish Eddan would, and maybe someday he will. He's really great.

Anyway.. here is Revolution. I got all misty-eyed when I reread it and moused the links, because it's passionate and it means something, even if some of it is a little out of date. Cause the war ain't over. I can't believe it. I just didn't think things could get this fkedup. But as Robert Fisk says, The only lesson we ever learn is that we never learn. Right on.

Revolution is Not an Aol Keyword*

You will not be able to stay home, dear Netizen.
You will not be able to plug in, log on and opt out.
You will not be able to lose yourself in Final Fantasy,
Or hold your Kazaa download queues,
Because revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be brought to you on Hi-Def TV
Encrypted with a warning from the FBI.
Revolution will not have a jpeg slideshow of Dubya
Calling the cattle and leading the incursion by
Secretary Rumsfeld, General Ashcroft and Dick Cheney
Riding nuclear warheads on their way to Iraq,
Or North Korea, or Iran.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will not be powered by Microsoft on
The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base
And will not star Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee
Or Larry Lessig and Martha Stewart. Revolution will not promise penile enlargement.
Revolution will not get rid of spam.
Revolution will not earn you up to $5000 a month

Working from home, because revolution is not
An AOL Keyword, Brother.

There will be no screen grabs of you and
Jeeves the Butler one-click shopping at My Yahoo,
Or outbidding a shady grandma on eBay for
That refurbished iPod 20-gig.
MSNBC.com will not predict election results in Florida
Or fact-check the Drudge Report.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no webcast of Wil Wheaton boxing
Barney the Dinosaur on the dancefloor at DNA.
There will be no mob- or wiki- blog of Richard Stallman
Strolling through Redmond in a medieval robe and halo
As St. iGNUcious of the Church of Emacs
That he has been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Survivor, The Osbournes, and Joe Millionaire
Will no longer be so damned relevant, and
People will not care if Carrie hooks up again with
Mr. Big on Sex and the City because Information
Wants To Be Free even while Knowledge Is Power.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.
There will be no final pictures from inside the
World Trade Center in the instant replay.

There will be no RealVideo of 2600-reading,
Linux-booting white hat hacktivists
And Mickey Mouse in the public domain.

The theme song will not be written by Jack Valenti or
Hilary Rosen, nor sung by Metallica, Dr. Dre,
Christina Aguilera, Matchbox 20, or Blink-182.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Revolution will not be right back after
Pop-up ads about eCommerce, eTailers, or eContent.
You will not have to worry about a
Cookie in your browser, a bug in your email, or a
Worm in your recycling bin.
Revolution will not run faster with Intel inside.
Revolution, dude, is not getting a Dell.
Revolution will increase your Google rank.

Revolution is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword,
Is not an AOL Keyword, is not an AOL Keyword.
Revolution will be no stream or download, dear Netizen;
Revolution must still be live.

*See generally Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Posted by Eddan Katz at March 20, 2003 05:45 AM

On Monday I had a sort of intense, momentary experience that happened on a sidewalk in Menlo Park, reminding me of my blog post on Facebook and Slide, and a comment a friend of mine made recently.

That friend said that in my Facebook/Slide post, where I said that "young boys" with little social skills and little mentoring were making social applications that are antisocial at times, was maybe an unfair characterization. When the sidewalk incident happened, I realized I'd witnessed the public demonstration of what I was talking about in the Facebook post, and that I wanted that to happen with the young guys in my prior post that make online products for others.

So what happened on the sidewalk? I was walking toward the door of my friend's office building, and within a couple of feet of the door, a guy, maybe 16, driving his bike kind of recklessly and fast and weaving in and out of people brushed past me. Two guys who were maybe 70, in Bermuda shorts and short sleeve button down shirts and sandals yelled at him, "Hey, you almost hit that lady, you're being an asshole, you can't do that in our town." At which point they grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him off his bike, and then he denied it, and I was at this point, inside the glass doors but could hear everything, but they told him he had to ride in the street and forced him to get off the sidewalk. It was so confrontational, as I was lost in my own thoughts and then jarred out of them, that I felt kind of embarrassed. But as I walked upstairs, and met this same friend mentioned above, I told him about what just happened. And then I said, sort of surprised, that well, this was kind of the in-person demonstration that would be nice to see at any of these companies where your social software behaves antisocially. In other words, older men who understand the value of good behavior can teach that well to younger men.

Well, I also want to explain in response to my friend above, about why I said what I did about "young boys" who need some mentoring from older men. One reason I feel comfortable saying this "group" verses another has a problem, in this case, is that while I know it's possible for "young girls" to make antisocial software, I ask, have you ever heard of that? I never have. There are very few women coders, compared to vast number of men coders, and most of the women coders I know gain the confidence to build their own companies or software systems a little later in life, if they ever do at all. Women are socialized to think they can't or shouldn't create or speak out aggressively or publicly criticize and it takes some living often into their early 30's before they are willing to put themselves out there and take a huge personal risk like building a product or company. I mean, why is it that factories in poor countries (Asia, South America, Eastern Europe are all reported to do this) only hire women under 25? Because they are looking for docile workers and you just don't get that with young guys.

At the point all coders are a little older, they tend to be more socialized, and also, at least in my experience verbally express more desire to build tools that take better care of the user. But it's the young guys I'm worried about coding social software, because they are more likely to have ego and aggression without experience. Which is a scary combination. Like the guy on the bike. I realize it's not politically correct to say so, but I wanted to talk specifically in that post earlier about Facebook and Slide about where I think responsibility lies for the social problems that have come up on Facebook with apps like those made by Slide. And to ask for help from older men, who fund these young guys, to help with the problem.

And that was my point. I hope this clarifies.

There are two new events coming up for the Data Sharing group (we met last August in great camp type open space event where many interesting things developed, came to light, got solved, etc.) I'm on the advisory group, and will definitely be there and would love to see anyone who cares about attention data, both the control aspects at a site, as well as ownership issues, get moved forward in a community oriented way there as well.

Also, Mitch Ratcliffe wrote a great post today on these issues which you should totally checkout.

Here is the write up from the Facebook group entry:

* A Data Sharing Workshop at the Downtown San Francisco State University campus on April 18th and 19th.

* Data Sharing Summit 2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on May 15th. (This is immediately following the Internet Identity Workshop May 12-14).

Hopefully at the first event some more clarity will emerge about how to actually do and get adoption of data sharing technologies. The second event we can see progress (it being a month later) and may have more 'decision makers' considering data sharing implementations and vendors that have ways to do it.

The goal of these events is to work together to build consensus around and get adoption of emerging data sharing standards. As with the previous summit, the upcoming event will follow the open space (un)conference format. The agenda is created on the first day of the event, allowing everyone to participate in the discussion.

Although Marc Canter was a key organizer of the first Data Sharing Summit, he has stepped back and his involvement is just one of group of advisors:

* David Recordon, Six Apart
* Joseph Smarr, Plaxo
* Chris Saad, Faraday Media
* Mary Hodder, Dabble
* Luke Sontag, Vidoop
* Kevin Marks, Google
* Marc Canter, Broadband Mechanics

The events will be produced by Kaliya Hamlin and Laurie Rae, who are collaborating with the Data Portability community and the SFSU Institute for Next Generation Internet.

We would like to invite you to attend one or both of these events.
Please go to http://datasharingsummit.com or to go ahead and register right away to to our Eventbrite page to register. We will be charging admission to cover the costs required for organizing these events.

The Early Bird rates are as follows:

April 18-19 Workshop
* Regular, $110.00
* Independent/Startup/Non-Profit, $80.00
* Student, $50.00

Workshop One-Day Only:
* Regular, $65.00
* Independent/Startup/Non-Profit, $50.00

April 18-19 & May 15:
* Corporate, $200.00
* Independent/Startup/Non-Profit, $140.00

May 15th Summit Only:
* Corporate, $100.00
* Independent/Startup/Non-Profit, $70.00

The Early Bird cut-off dates are April 7, 2008 for the Workshop and May 7th, 2008 for the Summit. Prices will increase by $50.00 after the cut-off dates.

We can bring you this event at such a low admission fee because 1/2 our costs are paid by sponsors - both small ($200) to the large (several thousand). PLEASE contact Laurie Rae at laurierae@datasharingsummit.com if you would like to sponsor.

Please contact us if you have any questions identitywoman@datasharingsummit.com & laurierae@datasharingsummit.com

We look forward to seeing you in April and May.

Ok, there's a lot in that title. Let me explain (though I did blog about this earlier).

First, yesterday at the Supernova / Wharton event, in Jerry Michalski's session on business and social media (can't remember exact title) we spent much of the time talking privacy, online communication, games and social networks (er, social graphs but i really hate the fad where we make up a new word for something that is already working just so we can dink around with a new set of conferences, etc. but I digress. Though I would point out that one friend who attended SGP said the women at the event all seemed to get it, and then men all wanted to run calculations on our "social graphs" entirely missing the point. Oh well.)

At the end, Jeff Clavier, who apparently was at the Social Graphing conf/camp in San Diego earlier this week, gave a wrapping up of what happened. He mixed in a little of his perspective due to his investing in apps on Facebook, and threw in some perspective on the Stanford class that did some experiments on Facebook apps and their results. One example Jeff gave was about an app maker from the class had gotten 5 million people to click into his app (though they all immediately disappeared just after) in 5 weeks (correction, not 5 days -- as Jeff said to me later, correcting this, "damned French accent" because many of us heard "5 days").

I had to wonder, why would five million people do that? What's the benefit to them? Apparently the app maker, some young guy, is thrilled (and it sounded like Jeff might want to work with him or even invest). His experiment (with all of us, the greater Facebook community, as guinea pigs) worked for him, though I'd guess it wasted 5 million people's time, for a couple of minutes each.

I commented about the aspects of Facebook applications inadvertently trashing our relationships, at times, in order to get their numbers up, and using deceptive practices and features to do it, and said it thought it was really uncool. But there wasn't time to explain what I really thought, or the background of why I think this, and so, here we go:

Ok, imagine you get some sort of email message from a friend in Facebook. This is a real friend, someone you do business with and/or socialize with and maybe have known for a long time (as in, a lot longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been out of his teens and been (on paper) counted as a billionaire). Or maybe it's someone you work with (note that there's a lot of caselaw around sexual harassment.. so accidentally sending porn spam to people you work with or work for you, or you work for, doesn't seem like the greatest thing you would want to do either).

The message asks you to click into Facebook, at which point, you are asked to "install an app" (and, why? Just to read a message do I have to install an App? Oh yeah, this is about getting the applications numbers up ... so you do it, because you want to see your "real" friend's message). Then, once installed, you are taken to Slide's Fun Wall App, which shows you some porn, and says, "Click Foward to see what happen."

See this screen shot of the first round of porn spam I got (NSFW btw so be careful opening it).

I almost clicked "forward", but scrolled around past the fold. Turns out, if i'd clicked the "forward" button, Slide would have forwarded that spam to EVERYONE I KNOW in Facebook. All 500+ of them.

Now, let me explain who everyone is. Yes, of my 500 or so contacts, maybe 300 are in the tech community (and as such, expect early-adoptor screw ups and experimentation). But 200 are not. About 10 of these people are people I grew up with (we've been together as friends since nursery school). They don't know what the "tech community" is, much less care. Some of these people are religious and I would venture have never seen porn before or it's very rare in their lives. They aren't early adoptors. They expect that any communications are going to be real, and not some tech community experiment to figure out some thing that later promotes some business/VC investment, in order to see how the world of advertising can advance.

Or, take all the people I do business with, or the people who I work with, or work for me, or I work for. It would be just great to send them some porn spam. Or my brother and sister. They would luv to get porn spam from me. Not. Or how about my extended relatives in Europe? I think they are ripe for a little porn spam. No?

So.. I unchecked all 500+ contacts that Slide had checked, and wasn't able to view the message further (what was going to come next after I was asked to hit the "forward" button). So I figured out one profile I could link to who was a friend, and then forwarded the message there, "...to see what happen."

Well, guess what? Nothing "happen." Except that the message was forwarded to the one person I left checked. In other words. It's trick porn spam, features courtesy of Facebook and Slide.

So I sent in complaints to both companies (neither have contacted me back after a month -- guys, it's a social network, you know how to reach me.. give it a try!!)

After a while, I called people in each company that I knew through the tech comany. And was appalled at the responses I got. Now, these are people I know socially, and they gave me the real answers, but with the expectation that I would not attribute to them. However, I am confident that their answers reflect the culture and real value sets within these companies.

Facebook pointed the finger at Slide (the app maker in this case), and said, "There is nothing we can do. We have no control over the apps people make or the stuff they send." Oh, and if I wanted Facebook to change the rules for apps makers? I'd have to get say, 80k of my closest Facebook friends to sign on a petition or group, and then they might look at the way they have allowed porn spam to trick people into forwarding, but until then, there would be no feature review.

Slide said that they thought Facebook was the problem, because as the "governing" body, Facebook makes the rules and "Slide wouldn't be competitive if they changed what they do, and their competitors weren't forced to as well." In other words, Slides competitors use the same features to get more users (or trick more users as the case may be) and Slide didn't want to lose out on getting more users with similar features, regardless of the effect the features have on us and our relationships.

Also both companies told me that blogging doesn't affect them, because they don't read blogs. The only thing they pay attention to are Facebook groups. Because they don't look at problems that a single person discovers.

So in other words, a person with a legitimate complaint needs to have massive agreement and numbers in a Facebook group before these companies will even discuss a problem.

And, Slide and Facebook are willing to trash our relationships (real relationships) in order to get more numbers.

Now, note that many of the folks who sent the various porn spam (not just the ones in the photos above) sent very apologetic notes, because they were mortified that they had send their contacts porn spam.

Think about that. Your social networking / application software tricks you into doing something terribly socially embarrassing and you have to apologize? Wo. That's really messed up.

In other words, your social networking software / applications are, gasp, anti-social.

One guy in the Supernova / Wharton session yesterday asked how many people were in my Facebook list, and when I said 500, implied that most regular people have say, 50-100, and therefore it's not a bad problem. Well, I'd say each relationship is probably pretty important and this is an appalling justification for these applications and social network's feature sets and behaviors.

So I have to ask, if these young boys (Zuckerberg, the app makers in the class at Stanford, etc) are so clueless about relationships and social protocols, that they would build apps and a system that promotes bad behavior like this, where are their mentors? Where are their funders (who presumably have some input and sway into what's going on)? Why aren't Peter Thiel and Dave McClure or even Jeff Clavier (who sounded like he was trying to or has invested in some of the guys from the apps class at Stanford) advising these people that while they are experimenting, that these are real established relationships, and Facebook is now mainstream, and therefore the apps can't do this to people? I mean, it seems logical (and has happened in cultures around the world for millennia) that older, wiser men would advise young, clueless hormone driven boys how to act in the community. And what of Max Levechin? I mean, he's kind of in the middle, age wise, but shouldn't he know better than this?

Is the desperation for fame and money so great, that people would simply eschew social concerns in favor of ratings which then equal higher company valuations, and more billions on paper? Or do you want your claim to fame to be: "At least 15 million minutes wasted" from your experiments on Facebook (as I would imagine the Stanford student described above could claim)?

I guess the answer is yes, and so my response is, I can't trust Slide, or Facebook. Nor do I have respect for their founders if this is the way they handle themselves and their companies.

And where are the advertisers who might put pressure? The ones on the page I show above (not all the porn spam trickery I got, but the first batch) are Toyota and Gartner?

I deleted all my Slide apps after my last blog post, a month ago, and since heard from maybe 20 people in person that after reading my post, they'd done the same. But I guess we don't count, since we only have a few people concerned.

I hope the folks who attended the session yesterday at Wharton have a better idea as to why I find this upsetting, and upon hearing that more "experiments" with Facebook apps are happening, why I might get worried and distrust the process, the results and the motivations behind them.

Note: I am aware that Facebook did recently force apps makers to default turn "off" the checked names in forward (as far as I can tell from my own analysis of Facebook and via other blogs explanations). But I have yet to receive replies to my original support notes to these companies, and feel confused about an unspoken, barely there response. It's as though after barely changing one thing aspect of a feature, in order to mitigate the problem, they want to sweep it all under the rug. But I don't feel confident that these companies either care about the spam problem, the porn problem or the social abuse problems they are allowing.

For now, the answer for me is to use Facebook minimally and Slide not at all. Interestingly, at recent social gatherings I've mentioned these issues. At almost every one, people have said they are getting off Facebook and not going back, for precisely the reasons I mention above.

I guess that's the only way to make an impression on Facebook and Slide. Shut down your own use.

The
NYTimes Stephanie Rosenblum has an article in today's *Fashion* section on Girls in Tech. Wo. Not in the *Technology* section. In Fashion.

Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain talks about how girls are coding up more content online: webpages, web art, blogs and podcasts.

And then they decorate it with an image of a girl at her laptop with a devilish tail. But instead of asking one of the girls they interviewed to make the artwork, they ask Adam Strange to do the art for the article:

So when they interview people like Doc Searls, Loic Le Meur or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section or business, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical in this article than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion. I've never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Maybe they should be there depending, but they aren't put there by the editors that I know of....

This is not about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw), and certainly they don't choose the section the paper puts them in, but rather the way the editors and writers at the NYTimes see them, verses the girl geeks in this article.

My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.

Can you tell I'm pissed? WTF?

However, the number of women in tech isn't great (Which is why we need more articles in the Tech section about this people!)

The article says that less "...than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology."

Today are the Pakistani elections. Why do I say chaos? And why also in Silicon Valley? And how are they at all connected?

As Amra Tareen, who is in Pakistan covering the event, says in her report about the elections:

As the day progressed more people started to show [to the polling stations], people were staying back home enjoying their morning off and due to concerns of violence. In the last 24 hours gunmen in Lahore and surrounding areas have killed 8 people and injured 40.

Check out this ballot from Pakistan, which Amra explains:

For example PML-Q (Musharraf's party) has the symbol cycle, PML-N (Nawaz's party) is represented by the symbol Tiger or a Lion and PPP (Benazir's party) is represented by the arrow. People caste their vote by placing a fingerprint and a seal over the symbol.

I've been helping Amra, a friend in the Silicon Valley for 4 years, with her company All Voices. Amra is from Pakistan, though she spent some of her educational years in Australia, including getting an engineering degree, and then went to Harvard for an MBA. She was also a VC in Silicon Valley for 6 years. Now she has founded All Voices with Erik Sundelof and the help of a great team of engineers and other folks.

I'm still working on Dabble, but I just find what is happening at All Voices so compelling, that I wanted to help her do this. She's raised VC money for a news and a conversation site that is meant to foster discussion from people around news events.

And how many Silicon Valley founders go to Pakistan to cover the elections, to kick off their companies?!?!

That's incredibly unusual, and to me, shows tremendous passion and guts about both the company, and her desire to see Americans and Middle Easterners talk about what goes on in their world. Anyone can talk, but she specifically wants to see these two groups getting to know each other on a more personal level, as opposed to say, an AP report.

So what is the chaos in Silicon Valley? Well, it's not on par with the Pakistani Elections, but the alpha All Voices is out, and people are commenting, talking about the election (finding a few bugs too!), making events, posting videos and photos, and it's the first big exposure the team has dealt with.

The site is pretty simple, really. The idea is that events happen in the world, and an event within AllVoices can then be assembled by pulling in news stories, photos and videos by news sources or blogs and say, creative common's licensed Flickr photos.

But you can also make an event, which is really more factual in nature, than opinion, about whatever has happened in their world. Then you might blog or add photos or videos to your own event, or you could add those elements to events made by others or the system. For example, Amra has put video here and here and here of the people in Pakistan talking about the election, onto the event she made noting election coverage. After you make your event, the system will match blog posts, articles, images and video to it, and more folks can come along and share eyewitness stories, comment, ask questions, etc.

All this gets put onto the map and front page which lists recent and active events.

So when others come to the site, they can find your stuff based on where it happens as well as by searching or by finding your list of activities via your profile. Amra's election reporting is, of course, located in Pakistan on the map.

The sites definitely is an alpha, where there are bugs and things. Her engineers have been working on this for about 6 months, and it's really great to see what they've done.

As I said, I've helped with a little consulting on the side. Normally, I wouldn't blog about things I offer consulting for, and normally I'm too busy with Dabble, but I think this site and Amra's work has the potential for so much social good, I'm breaking my own rule.

So take what I say with a grain of salt due to my work and bias. Go visit the site yourself and decide if you think it's worthwhile. But more than anything, I encourage you to get involved in supporting Pakistan as it hold its election. Pay attention, comment, blog, make a stink, but support democracy and the people of Pakistan as they stake a claim for their future!

Getting rickrolled is when you get tricked into watching a video, thinking you are going to watch something else. (A Rick Astley video was the one that rickrolling was named after.)

I've been thinking Facebook and Slide had jumped the shark a long time ago, though I use Facebook daily to get in touch with distant contacts I don't have email for, and then we typically jump off Facebook. Sometimes Facebook is fun, but most of my "feed" reflecting my contacts activities is just from the few self-promoters trying to tell me how great the latest thing they just did is. Not really fun for me.

But Slide apps on Facebook have lately been Spam and Bacon filled crap, where even when I say to them after filling out some silly thing or posting something to an app *not *to contact all my contacts, they do it anyway. It's not just slide though, other apps do this as well. May be a bug but they all seem to do it, and since the value of that bug is so high to them, I tend to think it's really a *feature* of the worst spammy bacon-filled kind.

Well the last 24 hour takes the cake. This porn image (posted here: View image by clicking, but it's NSFW, for sure) has been forwarded to me by no less than ten people, including 2 VCs, 3 high level east coast media execs, 2 PR people, plus 3 others. All of whom must be embarrassed as all get out that they've forwarded me and all their other contacts this porno spam by mistake because Slide says "Forward" to find out what happens next in the picture. Except the Forward button takes them to nothing, except a big thanks for letting Slide spam your friends

Evil. It was only a matter of time before apps like Slide and others did something like this to up their use numbers. Even if someone is hacking Slide, Slide built the tools that allow this to happen. And whoever did this is preying on people's curiosity about what they would see next, since the image says "click Forward to see what happen next (sic)." In fact, the app is really spamming everyone in the person's contact list with porn, and that's what happens next.

What bothers me so much about this is that the features are built to disregard the user's relationships, their personal and professional connections, for the sake of the app maker's desire to get more users and make money. It's wrong.

I'm deleting all my Slide and other spammy Facebook apps today. This is really bad. So does this mean we need a new term, like getting Sliderolled, as in, you got tricked into spamming your friends with porn?

Tara Hunt has a post up about TransitCamp (a camp held in about a month at SocialText with the help of Heyward Robinson, Menlo Park city council, Adina Levin, Co Founder of Social Text and avid Menlo Park community activist, Margaret Okuzumi, from the Bay Rail Alliance and MTC).

I love the idea of transit camp to help people who work on those issues do better for all of us. I can't attend but I wanted to throw out a couple of ideas.

I rarely use public transit here in the Bay Area. I use it all the time on the east coast in Boston, NYC and Washington, as well as Amtrak linking the three. And in European cities like Paris, Barcelona, London, Amsterdam, Rome, as well as Euro-trains linking the continent.

The common thread across all those cities is that the interface, and the metaphor, is simplicity and instant access with little mental overhead. In other words, you don't have to know much to use them, other than to find an outlet and get in. Then after locating a map, you buy a pass and unless it's very late (after midnight or 2am depending) or very early (before 6am), you wait a few minutes and your train, bus or trolley shows up. And you're off. And it works from the airports too! Yipee!

The way Bay Area transit works is: you are a commuter, you already know the complicated and dysfunctional system section you use all the time and the rest is a byzantine mess of mismatched numerous connections, so therefore the regular user only will move say, one leg to get where you are going or maybe two at the most. Oh and you are doing this almost exclusively during commute hours in order to have any efficiency at all.

That's not really great.

I have tried to use public transit. And when I lived in SF, I had a flat rate card, took the bus, muni, BART (just within SF) and the trolleys. But even they really worked most efficiently during commute hours, with long waits before, during the midday, and after or weekend times. Though BART was nice if you were downtown and wanted to hit the mission or somewhere else along that specific line, because so many trains go from all over the BA through SF and out again. So there are a lot of options there for constant movement with little planning.

But from Berkeley, BART takes on a different metaphor, often requiring much more planning. For example, to take a train after hours or on a Sunday, you must change trains to get to SF. Recently, my car needed unexpected servicing in Mountain View, so I dropped it at a recommended shop there. The next day, after being back in Berkeley via a ride from a friend, I needed to retrieve my car.

I thought that it would be easy to go from Berkeley to Mt. View, after reviewing the various websites for about an hour or so to plan my trip. So I optimistically hoped on BART at 6pm. The online info said: "Cross-platform transfers at the Millbrae BART Station." So it turns out that my SF bound train from Berkeley didn't go to Millbrae. I had to change. Twice!

I arrived at Millbrae at 7:40pm, and saw a southbound Caltrain. W00t! I ran out, up the three flights of stairs to the overpass walkway, and just then watched the Caltrain pull out. Damn. They don't coordinate! Even as a bunch of people wanted to get on it. They just move out regardless of BART trains pulling in.
No problem, I thought, there have to be more. So I went downstairs to the Caltrain side, looked at the schedule. Which was difficult to read in interface, but said there was a train in 15 minutes. I bought my ticket to Mt. View, after which I waited, as the rain poured. Sideways too. Shelter was three stories up, so the rain and wind were going everywhere (Way to architect public spaces for people waiting for transit! But it looks pretty in the brochures.)

No train came, and I eventually made my way back to the totally unsheltered schedule. I had read the schedule, on paper, with no AM or PM specified, wrong. I had been looking at an AM schedule, so I looked all the way to the other side, where the PM side was. Next train, 75 minutes. So, I'd already waited 20. Wow. So now I really think Caltrain operators are jerks for pulling out when a BART train arrives from the North that might include riders on their train (there were 10 of us and they could have waited 30 seconds for us!).

I waited a while longer, and then called my friend in Mt. View to come get me as I was soaked and absolutely freezing, even with raincoat and umbrella and lots of scarves and things -- they don't protect you from sideways rain much, nor did the shelter 3 stories up do anything at all for us! I just couldn't see waiting another hour for the train, and then having a 25 min ride down there, and then walking in the rain to get my car (estimated arrival that way: 10pm). Actual arrival: 8:40pm.

It took him 20 minutes to drive. And that's my point.

If you plan for traffic, it's 40-45 minutes from Berkeley to Mt. View or Palo Alto, 20 minutes to SF, 25 minutes to San Bruno. I use Google maps with traffic turned on in my phone in the car, for instant planning after the general plans have been made.

My car, instead of hours on public transit, with many connections that are uncoordinated by the many agencies involved, and impossible to pay for in one lump.

I'd rather not drive, but how the heck do you manage my typical day of meetings like say, last Thursday?
AM: 9:30 meeting in the mission, 11am in Cole Valley, PM: 12pm in the outer Sunset, 2pm in San Bruno, 6:30pm in SF for dinner, 10pm in Emeryville, 11pm home. All of which I easily made in the car, but with transit in the BA, I'd have to plan two hours between each meeting and an hour home on the last leg. In NYC, each bridge to the next event would be 15-30 minutes (what I'd planned for driving between each thing I needed to get done).

Or for that matter yesterday: Mt View to San Bruno, then San Bruno to Oakland (on Mandella Parkway), then Berkeley, then Oakland, then Emeryville, then Berkeley, then Emeryville, then Berkeley. All between 1pm and 8pm. So you know, there isn't any option between Emeryville and Berkeley. And nothing between Mandella Parkway and Berkeley either that I know of... it would be a disaster if I didn't have a car.

The metaphor for transit in the BA: you use this already and if you don't, you're screwed. And you use transit during commute hours (like 7-9am and 4-6pm -- yeah.. that really works in the tech community and with all the events we all attend each evening). You have all the payments worked out in advance with monthly transit cards (not great for changing systems though some have recently connected better than in the past).

In fact, BART's own website acknowledges this:

Transit Connections to BART

Free Personalized Trip Planning Service!

We know that navigating public transit connections in the Bay Area can be difficult, that's why we're here to help: If you'd like an accurate, personalized trip plan that includes BART and connecting transit, call our Customer Service Department: it's fast, it's easy, and it's tailored just for you! (Emphasis mine)

In other words, it's so hard, they don't even bother to put the info online. They just have you call them to work out the byzantine system's details.

I'd like to see Transit Camp deal with the broken metaphor, the interface and execution (tickets and money, schedules and websites, mismatched transitions), and the assumption that this all happens during rush hour and otherwise there is no need.

Frankly, if you don't provide much after hours, people won't build it into their schedules. If you do, they will.

For me, Tara's picture in her post and at Flickr is more representative of what I see in the transit experience, where nothing quite works unless you live and operate in SF:

I'd like to see transit work holistically for the whole BA, where you just jump on and go where you need to go, up 'til say 2am. That would get me to leave my car behind. :)

Earlier today I had the delightful experience of touring the FAA's Northern California TRACON facility.

Basically, TRACON, which stands for terminal radar approach control, is the air traffic control center which, in this case, handles Northern California. TRACON handles traffic outside of each local control tower a plane might ultimately deal with as it lands. There are TRACONs all over the US for other regions. We weren't allowed to bring in cameras so I'll instead show you a news photo from SF gate that was representative of what we saw up on the wall of the facility. You get the idea there of what they are seeing on some of their screens.

Chronicle photo by Mark Costantini

This photo only shows traffic into SF, because it's a visualization from SFO traffic control, but just imagine more planes going into San Jose, Sacramento, and other smaller airports like Modesto. Also, these screens are synced between TRACON and the air traffic controllers who are local. And if anything happened to one TRACON, others would instantly fill in, as the system works somewhat like the internet in that sense.

TRACON is housed in a big, windowless building, extremely modern and cool with an air of serious importance about it (I always find that at say, buildings in Washington DC, and I kind of like it even if they do take whatever it is they do a bit too seriously sometimes). Our tour guide, a woman who is a trainer for other air traffic controllers, at one point said, "You have 10 seconds or so to make contract with a plane and move on. If you screw up, there are hundreds of lives on the line." That's pretty serious.

TRACON's building is basically an octopus design, where each leg has 20 or so terminals with about 10 people in each, manning a particular physical area (like planes coming into Sacramento) in order to follow planes as they enter the region first. All commercial flights must fly IFR -- Instrument Flight Rules -- which means they have to be in contact with TRACON, in case they can't see or there is bad weather, or there is simply a pile up of planes that need to be moderated into an airport. Planes that fly VFR -- Visual Flight Rules -- don't have to contact TRACON, but some do anyway for a variety of reasons. TRACON has longer range radar than the local air controllers, but the longer range radar updates more slowly. So that is the trade-off between regional (TRACON) and local control.

Once TRACON has the plane logged, they make a little block of data on their screens (a different type of screen than the one shown above) that shows the flight number, its altitude, and other information that will help them keep planes apart, on track and moderated as they reach the range of the local control towers who then take over moderating the planes.

In the cycle of life for a controller (who has to quit at age 56 and can not be considered after age 31 to start training), they typically have military training or attend a special school after college, and then are trained at the local site. Our host said that for the first few years (maybe up to 10) controllers are pretty tense on the job, but after 10 years they relax some. She said the most dangerous situations come when people are relaxed, and less is going on around them, rather than more. That's when mistakes are made.

Another thing our host said was that they have to keep the chit chat down, because if there is an accident, they don't want to have some controller chatting away on the transcript, just before it happens. They are pretty businesslike when talking to pilots. She talked pretty fast, she said, due to the edgy situation needed to quickly regulate the flow and placement of all the different planes they are watching, and that's how she trains people. I know from riding in a friend's plane frequently where I can listen to lots of this talk, that they are pretty succinct, and yet both pilots and controllers have a kind of cultural humor that is pretty funny, in those few words they exchange, and this allows some kind of personality to come through often. If you want to check out what happens, here are some example live sound feeds from a bunch of different air control areas.

So.. what were the information systems like? Well, I thought they were fascinating. The premise in building, training for and using them is very different than say, the web based systems I typically work on in my day to day life. In fact in many ways, they had the exact opposite goals and metaphors I use to build systems and interfaces. First, they train their people between 6 months and 5 years on these system -- but our guide said 2-5 years is typical.

Think about that. Training your user for 2 years. What would that mean to interface architecture and design? You could certainly do a lot different with it than what we do now on the web.

Their top menu, interestingly, is literally a series of very-1993 buttons, big squares, in rows, maybe 8 across and 12 down, though all those gorgeous 22 inch screens are touch screens. Each controller has two of them, not horizontally placed, but vertically, in the workspace. Some of those buttons go to pages that help track planes, but I did note one, placed furthest away from the user's sitting position, for that day's cafe menu. It appeared that all possible items were options at the top level. Nothing appeared to be pushed back to a lower level or made less important or secondary in the interface other than two items described below.

When you go into the main menu items, there is little to cue you back, and in fact many of the screens were missing back buttons. Some had them and some didn't. But with that much training before you can even get into a real working station, it doesn't seem to really matter. You know the system inside and out, as well as how and what to do with it and all the planes you have to manage (typically 10 - 20 at one time).

A lot of information is stored in the user's head, and as new plane info comes up, only the abbreviation or shorthand block code describing the plane is on the screen along with various map-based data to place the plane. This means that instead of giving lots of data on one plane on the screen, the data is offloaded to the user and the screen just has the shorthand.

That shorthand for a plane is shown in the middle screen (below the menu in the top screen), which has the map with blocks of data representing planes. Their systems look much like map systems we use online in a way but with way cooler visualizations because they have radar and more info about airspace restrictions and well.. I don't know any web service that has radar. Imagine "Google Radar" overlaid on Google maps? That would be a cool product launch.

So in other words, what the information systems metaphor seemed to be was the exact opposite of what we do in web systems: TRACON systems are built with high mental overhead -- you have to know a lot to use and understand both sets of systems before you start to navigate because nothing in those buttons really helps you know what is below, other than the word on top. During actual use, when you enter and track planes, you get that overhead in the years of training you do before you can operate the system in play. The information systems below those button also have little style that would take any one piece of information and make it more important than any other on the same screen. Information is chunked or grouped a little on those secondary pages, but that's it. So there is no expectation that anything is pushed back or pushed forward, other than the menu, where each little button represents a page/function, and each page has the function represented.

Instead of the software deciding what is most important at the moment of use, and emphasizing it in some formated way, the user just has all of it equally represented and therefore has to decide what's necessary or relevant. In some cases, there was a mini system below a secondary page via a link, to find backup documentation on a plane (if the controller asked the plane to do something, and the plane wasn't built for it, they could check the specs on the plane) or on a small airport (to get backup data on landing strips and landing directions). But these seemed to be relatively rare use cases that allowed the backup information to be lower down to a third level.

Our other tour guide, a man who'd checked us in, did an introduction presentation in power point to explain the basics, and then finished up at the end. He told a couple of stories like what happened on 9/11. He said they grounded every plane everywhere coming and going anywhere in the country. It was eerie, because all their screens (which we were seeing, depending on scope, with somewhere between 20 and thousands of planes) were almost completely empty. Black. With little white map lines showing various air, altitude or other restrictions and weather. They spent three days watching military jets fly around, and that was it. Nothing else.

My take on this sort of system was that it could stand visual and architectural improvement, but that without a lot of study and planning, it would be dangerous to change it. And, the users are so adept at the system they have now, and have so much responsibility and pressure to perform quickly, that changes would likely be unwelcome. Extensive study of user behavior and needs would have to happen, and then extensive testing would have to follow before anything could be put into practice. I can see why they maintain the same system (it's not from 1993 though.. it's much more recent), and just update it with new air space data and plane info, and don't do much to mess with a working system.

But it was still fascinating to see the TRACON information and understand the motivations for its construction and use. And comparing that to what we do building web systems? The best!

Britney Spears remix parody on her life and that of her little (recently pregnant) sister. Not to mention the spot-on parody of pop culture as it currently stands in Hollywood today.

V. v. funny. By Leeni (click on that link and play "be like me" under her music player to hear it or download it.

Pip Cockburn wrote an essay about how among other things: .1% of the long tail is directing privacy issues online, and how those who do care about privacy are judgmental about those who don't, etc. Read it.. it's an interesting take.

This is my response to Pip and his arguments and ideas:

One, there are a lot of studies on privacy issues that show that most people don't want to spend the time to understand or defend it, but if one percent of the populace, that the other 99% cede their interest in privacy to and are trusted, express distrust of something, the other 99% will follow. Chris Kelly, privacy czar at Facebook, has conducted some of those studies and therefore probably saw the tipping point coming and urged retreat. Just a guess, but that was my interpretation of what Facebook may have been discussing internally.

Two, digital natives or kids or whatever you want to call younger folks do care about privacy once they discover a breach. They often don't understand what is happening until it's too late. And to ride a stereotype that has a lot of truth to it, when we are young, we often don't think as long term or at our vulnerabilities as well as when we get a little older and have a bit more experience.

So dismissing those kid's now, at this point in time, when the first digital natives haven't hit their thirties, is premature. As they mature, I think they will care more and take on similar trust relationships with the 1% who will monitor privacy issues. When I tell 15 year olds about privacy issues, they get pretty scared and conservative about protecting it. So my anecdotal evidence is that they care more than most older folks think. For now, many just don't understand and see what effect they are having over time.

Three, having noted your .1% as directing the long tail of "consumers" (I hate that word too), I still think the writing was on the wall for Facebook reaching the 1% who really care and having a worse problem than they do now. When I worked for a congressman, we used to "count" correspondence with our constituents in the following ways: those who took easy and inexpensive routes to tell us their opinions might get a 1x or 10x count, but those who took the time to express in detail, or followed more expensive or harder routes were given 50x or 100x counts. Well, if .01% are taking the expensive or time consuming routes (blogging, writing your complaint up in your own words, etc) or less expensive routes (joining the Facebook group made by MoveOn -- which requires clicking on a button or clicking a DIGG button) well.. we still have to count those folks as believing in the premise that Facebook violates privacy and social norms with users with the Beacon system as originally configured. The question is, how much do we count the activists. If you apply the multiple to certain harder actions, you get a lot closer to the 1% factor that Chris Kelly found can define and shape what the other 99% feel is appropriate when it comes to privacy issues.

I don't think that means a tiny percent of people are dictating policy, I think that means that they have achieved trust by the other 99% (more so than the advertisers and Facebook, in this case) and therefore the 99% have spoken by following the 1%. Power relationships are never onesided in favor of the dominant or leaders. Enrollment is a concept sociologists like Bruno LaTour know well and respect. Those who follow in this example do so because they enrolled. Facebook wouldn't have budged otherwise.

Lastly, I don't think this relationship regarding privacy issues where 99% are willing to cede to the 1% they trust on these issues applies to other areas. We've seen over and over how this privacy based relationship falls off on other issues around digital and other rights, like copyright abuses by traditional media, or other complicated issues like the DMCA. So I don't think we have to fear that a small percentage will continue to direct all policy on or offline.

My 2 cents.

UPDATED: THE DINNER HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO JANUARY, 2008.

Thursday night at Google in Mountain view there is a fundraiser dinner for the making of the documentary about the ENIAC prgrammers, and one of them will be attending and discussing their story.

They happened to be 6 women, and when Kathy Kleinman was getting her computer science degree, she found a photo of them, in front of the ENIAC. Her CS professor sent her to a computer historian to ask about it. He told her the 6 women in a photo she'd found, taken in front of the ENIAC were models. In fact, they were the programmers of the ENIAC and it was the first demonstration of it. She's now making a documentary about these 6 women, and the funds raised at the dinner will go toward the film costs.

If you have any interest, you should join in and attend the dinner.

Here are the Event Announcement and Links:
Did you know that sixty years ago, six young women programmed the ENIAC, the first all-electronic programmable computer?

And when LIFE magazine published a post-ww2 story about the ENIAC, the women were not mentioned. The article only featured information on the machine, not the engineers who made it work.

Today, Kathy Kleiman, a software engineer who was inspired to stay in computing because of the success of these 6 women, is making a documentary (using Adobe software, naturally!) to highlight these achievements. Google heard about it and kicked in support, Laszlo Systems is behind it, and I think we should be, too.

How we can help:
1. Buy a ticket (or better yet, get some friends and buy a table) to the fundraising event to help get this documentary made.

Information about ENIAC can be found here
http://eniacprogrammers.org/index.html

Information about the event can be found here:
http://www.google.com/events/eniac/

Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers.
Thursday, November 8, 2007 6pm
Google Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA

I'm visiting with some friends in Sherborn Massachusetts. They previously had dial up internet access, but sometime in the last two years, everyone (3,000) in this town, as well as more surrounding towns, got fiber optic lines put in by Verizon.

They have 5 mbs of downstream service for $35 a month, and if they pay $7 more per month, they can get 15mbs. It's rocket fast, so fast, as my host says, "it's too fast to take advantage of much besides video and VOIP because no one else has a fast connection to talk that fast with you." But it still rocks.

Everywhere I go in the Bay Area, work, home, friends offices, public places.. I wait for every website, video, voip connection, etc that I use. It's just amazing the contrast here. And every window I look through in my host's house has gorgeous forest and fall colors .. it's at least 100 yards to the next house., and all the houses here have that sort of spread. How do they do it when we can't get this in the denseness of Berkeley, San Francisco, Mountain View?

I'm sure the telcos that took $200 billion from the FCC and then didn't install fiber optic service have some excuse, but it's BS. They just need to install it since we paid for it, and then we can all move on.

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T was at Esme Vos' Muniwireless conference yesterday, spewing what I would kindly call the greatest of spin, and unkindly as BS.

Net Neutrality is not about people telling network providers what to charge for tiered service. That's bull. Net Neutrality says that video packets, no matter where they come from, will get through at the same rates. Same with text or photos or VOIP or anything else. The network can't under Net Neutrality distinguish and discriminate because it doesn't like where something came from or the place the packet came from didn't pay the telco's any money to prioritize the packet.

To quote muniwireless (emphasis is mine):

It's Day 2 of the Muniwireless Silicon Valley Conference and they have an executive from AT&T talking about municipal wireless networks.

AT&T has not changed its tune. It is still against cities using public funds to compete with private enterprise and believes that communications should be left up to private firms like AT&T.

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T claims that there is no duopoly and there is enough competition in the market for telecommunications services, so cities should stay out.

What is AT&T's position on net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a challenge for all companies. You spend billions to deploy your assets and net neutrality means someone telling you what you can do with your assets - what you can charge, tiers of service, etc.

"All bits should be treated equal" is a problem for network engineers because one bit is porn another bit is heart surgery, another is email, yet another is voice, another is spam. That everything should be moved equally end to end is ludicrous. It's a more costly way to do things. It's not efficient, according to AT&T.

AT&T cannot build and maintain assets quickly enough to meet the demand. They are spending $19 billion this year. Some of the demand is driven by video. What happens when people start delivering high definition film? They can't build networks fast enough! What's the answer? Effective traffic management.

The antitrust laws can deal with the problems of net neutrality (side note: unfortunately these are not being enforced today). Why should AT&T want to degrade traffic? They will go to someone else (side note again: in a duopoly, you've got Comcast which has been blocking Bittorent traffic).

I don't know about you but where I live and work, we have two choices: AT&T for dsl or Comcast for cable internet access. They are both Mid-band services, and not great but better than dialup. And we pay exorbitantly for them compared to other countries.

So of course they want to take their AT&T/Comcast duopoly and spin Net Neutrality as being all about people interfering with their pricing models for tiered service when it's really all about prioritizing packets. They want to divert attention from the reality which is that they want to put their videos through first, their media, their VOIP or media/VOIP from people who've paid them off. Instead of letting users have what they want. The telco's want to own the pipes and the content.

It's wrong and we can't let the telcos win on this.

Today at She's Geeky, during the session with Jodi Sherman Jahic of Voyager Capital and Patricia Nakache of Trinity Ventures, we talked about a lot of different things.

Patricia and Jodi are really wicked smart, accomplished women, both of whom have engineering degrees and MBA's, who articulated some of the subtle and complex issues we face as women in the tech community, or as technologists starting ventures or as business people trying to figure out what is going to happen next in markets and with funding.

Jodi had a great list of the four things that matter for VCs when assessing an investment:

technology risks
market adoption risk
financing risk
execution risk

And we spent some time on board composition, funding questions, how people become VCs, why they may have different backgrounds than entrepreneurs (they often have MBAs) and why VCs don't necessarily want to fund MBAs (in other words, being different is good because getting an MBA is a risk-averse step and they want to fund risk-takers). I really liked that last one, because I've heard from time to time from other women founders that they can feel intimidated by the pedigrees many VCs have (often Harvard or Stanford or other Ivy League schools) and yet, it's a plus to not be just like them. The answer is to have as much diversity on your team (the founders, the rest of the team, the investors, the advisors and the board).

Another thing I brought up were a couple of stories I'd experience when working through funding issues.

One was about how a year ago, with a VC who has a small fund and targets companies at the stage Dabble was then, who decided not to fund us. About a month ago, I saw him, and asked to tell me why, for real (at the time I got a sort of "non-excuse"). He said that, and I do think he was sort of thinking aloud, that well, he thought at the time I might not stick with it. And I asked why, what did that mean. He said that when a founder is by themselves (no cofounder), he often assesses whether he thinks they'll quit, and he realized as we discussed it more recently that he had a sort of idea in the back of his head that I might quit easier than a man in my position. He knew this was wrong, but he hadn't thought it through until I pressed for feedback, and he'd only been willing to tell me this after the target size and stage of his investments didn't match where we were.

I think this is one of those things that isn't really black and white. I mean, of course I'm angry by the idea that this why he didn't fund us, but at the same time, I really appreciated that he was honest with me, and that it became a learning experience for him as well. That he learned he had a stereotype he didn't see in himself previously. My hope is that he thinks about it and stops himself the next time he finds himself thinking this sort of thing. I don't think he's a bad guy, and in fact, I think the better of him for sharing it and noticing the problem, for agreeing that it was wrong and he should do better.

I think that's all you can ask of someone, because frankly, we all have our stereotypes, our biases, our prejudices. They aren't going to go away unless we can face them, and it's hard to face them if you can't discuss them or bring them out into the open. Women are just as much a problem for other women as men with these issues. And one thing VCs for sure face, as Jodi pointed out, is a lack of upside for being honest. She said one motivation is that a VC will shy away, because they don't want to miss the chance to do a Series B if they pass on a Series A with someone, and tell them why. If they instead hedge on the reasons, they keep their options open. But she encouraged women to ask anyway for feedback, because it does help with what you are doing.

But I have to say, with the man in my story above, if later he wanted to do something with me, I wouldn't say no. Because I believe he's open to change and learn, and to figure out how to do what he does better, with a more diverse crowd than the men that so typically start companies in Silicon Valley.

Anyway, regarding the black and white nature of these issues, or lack thereof, Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News wrote up She's Geeky, with this article, and as many reporters do, wrote up my story in two short sentences causing it to seem more black and white:

A venture capitalist who rejected Mary Hodder's start-up for funding later told her he did so in part because Hodder had no male co-founder, and he thought she would quit because she's a woman. Hodder didn't quit.

And while I appreciate the need for this way of telling it, and it is technically true, I also think the issues are more complex. If we chastise folks for having "bad thoughts", we won't air them and make it better, and they will sit, just under the surface, keeping anyone but the default culture from succeeding.

I believe that Silicon Valley culture is pretty open and accepting of people. I'd suggest that compared to many other industries, it's a better place for a woman to start a company or work again type than most. But the reality is many people in positions of power and authority -- often men but sometimes women -- have some variation on the thought themes that keep people out.

But I also think we need to support our geek sisters, make better networking and figure out how to up the numbers of women VCs, women founders and women engineers. Or our products and companies will suffer, and our ecosystem will remain stilted and in some ways, closed.

She's Geeky starts shortly, and one session during the scheduled portion of this otherwise unconference is with Lura Dolas. It's today from 3:30-5:30pm at the Computer History Museum.

I've taken two classes with Lura, one at the Berkeley Repertory Theater (2 hours) and one full day at Citizen Space. One thing I noticed was that during the session, as we practiced the exercises for better speaking, I thought what we were doing was a "little bit helpful" in focusing my speaking and helping the audience connect better with what I was saying. But it wasn't until a few weeks later, as I found myself using some of what I learned with her, that I realized she'd brought about a significant change in my speaking effectiveness. She had changed both my small group and large public speaking.

She is a very clear and respectful teacher, and it's obvious from talking with her that she's got years of experience, but I think what is most amazing is her presence. She can speak loudly, but she's not a loud person. Rather, she commands attention as a very small woman in a room full of larger and often louder people. But everyone listens to her and they do this because of her presence and clarity. Her techniques and tools help her students get closer to this sort of presence.

One thing I have high on my list of things to do for the folks who work at Dabble is to bring her in for a day to train folks to communicate and discuss better. I think every company or organization could use her remarkable skills as a teacher to improve what they need to accomplish, even as most of the people in an organization do not speak publicly. It's a matter of achieving clarity and strength, confidence and setting people at ease as a person expresses ideas. No matter the size of the conversation.

Here's the write up on her session (which is free with the conference admission - a great deal considering what speaking coaches charge but she's doing it because she believes in our mission to help women develop further professionally in the tech community):

Why pubic speaking at She's Geeky? Because we know that there is a dearth of women speakers at events and conferences, and we know that there is a kind of feedback loop between women speaking at an event, showing her expertise and experience, and being asked to work in leadership roles. Many women fall into technology development, and into positions that might allow them to progress to positions of power, but good speaking skill is critical for this.

Lura is a renowned speaking trainer and acting coach. She offers a 2 hour session to practice techniques that will help you realize your goals in your career outside and within your workspaces. She has taught one day workshops at Citizen Space and teaches privately. We are lucky to have such a talented speaking trainer and if you have any interest training, I'd highly recommend that you attend her session.

She's Geeky is a unconference organized by Kaliya Hamlin with the help of Deb Roby, Melanie Swan, Susan Mernit, Julia French, Laurie Rae, Mary Trigiani and Heather Vescent among others. I've helped when I could but I think my major contributions have been minor compared to the rest of these women who've worked hard to pull this meeting of the minds together.

The conference will be held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It's an unconference in the sense that the attendees are going to make the agenda on Tuesday. Monday afternoon will consist of sessions set up ahead of time so that certain topics and speakers could be arranged in advance. The conference fee of $175 covers the cost of the location, insurance and food. And you can get a small discount if you use this page here, for $25 off.

The two sessions I'm organizing include one with Lura Dolas, a professional speaker's trainer. She's phenomenal, and my only regret is that she has to be there during my other session, on VC's and entrepreneurship, which means I can't attend both at the same time.

I have attended Lura's speakers training twice, once for a two hour session that was the taste I needed to know that she was amazing and I needed a lot more help from her. The second was a full day held at Citizen Space, where 20 of us practiced speaking techniques and talked through what's needed for great presence and interaction.

Look for the schedule for Monday here at this link. And here's some information on the VC session:

VCs and Women in Tech: A Brainstorm with Women VCs and Entrepreneurs

Session Leaders:
Jodi Sherman Jahic
Angela Strange
Patricia Nakache

Moderator: Mary Hodder

This session will engage in an open discussion between VCs and women entrepreneurs and those thinking about entrepreneurship. We will start with a short information sharing about what VCs are, how people become VCs, how they make their funds, where they get the money, who they are responsible to, and what they think about in their capacity as VCs. We'll hear about why VC's do what they do, what they like and dislike, why they think there are few women in the business, and how it affects funding and the kinds of technologies developed. Next, we'll get to the meat of the problem: addressing what an entrepreneur needs to know about funding when starting a company. And we'll brainstorm with everyone there about how to solve problems, who to go to for information, what elements are needed for a presentation, what gets funded, and how to get a VC over the line to get something funded.