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stories of shitty behavior don’t make me want to leave…

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It sucks to read about more shitty behavior at a tech conference. The sad truth of our society is that shitty conduct is common in every industry, especially those dominated by old power structures of white, straight men. I don’t like to hear those stories, but they don’t make me want to leave. They make me want to stand up and be counted. They make me proud to be part of a community where brave people speak up.

There are times when I’ve stood in awkward silence or simply left an uncomfortable situation.  I’m human and flawed and sometimes weak or just plain tired. Other times, I hope more frequently, I speak up. I rarely call people out publicly. I think it is important to focus on the inappropriate behavior, rather than vilify the person.  We need to focus on how we can all notice it a little sooner before it gets out of hand, and how we can each act to eliminate or mitigate the behavior, especially when we are not the target.

I can understand someone who has been abused not forgiving the abuser.  I can understand wanting to exile that person from our society.  However, they are going to hang out somewhere and there are other people like them whose stories have not been told in blog posts and broadcast via twitter.   We need to do the hard work of staying alert to make our conferences and workplaces safe for everyone.

I’m so proud of all friends who are allies, especially the straight, white guys.  I try to be an ally for the folks who don’t have my privilege and power as well.  More of us need to speak out in the moment, to be on the lookout.  These stories need to be told until we grow up as a community and learn how to eliminate this behavior.


civic hacking at the smithsonian

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A few weeks ago, the Smithsonian American Art Musuem held the first Smithsonian hackathon as a way to include volunteers in the process of re-imagining what a kiosk of the future might be for the Luce Foundation Center for American Art.

Twenty-three people from the DC community spent the weekend in the museum, writing code and creating innovative designs for a next generation virtual museum experience that let’s people connect both during a museum visit and from home.

Most of the time, it was like every hackathon I’ve ever attended. Folks sat in teams, furiously typing or drawing, collaborating in small groups.
Untitled
But something else magical happened… at one point, someone stood up and suggested a “brain stretch” — one team was struggling to come up with ideas for particular use cases. People from various teams got together and brainstormed:

Luce Foundation Center Hackathon
After drawing dozens of ideas, we asked Georgina and Bridget, who were the organizers from the Luce Center, which ideas they liked best. There were so many great ideas! The team that organized the brain stretch integrated some of them, and another team mocked up and implemented other ideas.

People were less fixated on winning, than they were to create great solutions to solve real challenges, to make more of our nation’s treasures accessible to a wider audience.

It was inspiring — and well worth all of the extra advance work to make it happen. It was so hard to judge the winners that we ended up making new prizes. Here are some of my favorites:

Once Upon a Time: stop motion live action envisions the museum of the future

GeoSafe: this Windows 8 app is shippable!

I really want an ArtPass on my next museum visit, and just part of the submission from the winning team, LuceMatch is like hot-or-not for art.

Check out the rest of the Luce Center hackathon submissions!

work in government, save the world?

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Working as a Presidential Innovation Fellow has changed my perspective on the US government. I still believe there’s a bureaucracy that threatens to crush us all under its weight, but I no longer see that as immovable or inevitable. There are people working in our government, relentlessly in pursuit of excellence. They are passionate about the need to solve problems and provide opportunities for the American people. Where I work, at the Smithsonian, and at many agencies, the mission is much bigger than that, we are challenged to solve some of key problems facing our world. If we don’t, who will?

The following positions are not for just anyone. You need to have amazing experience as an entrepreneur and some real experience working through and around huge organizations with byzantine rules.  You need to be a leader, and maybe you never considered working in government before this moment.

I’ve taken a stab at providing a feel for what each position will need. Why don’t we have better job descriptions posted on the gov website? Because our Federal hiring process sucks. I say these words as a citizen, not as a government employee.  Come help these good people make it better.

  • Director, Presidential Innovation Fellows: Work with dozens of people like me, position us where we can make the biggest difference, then stand back and watch shit happen. Some of that you may need to untangle, when we ask forgiveness, not permission.  Some things will be magical and powerful that you never believed possible.  Articulate the strategy.  Compromise on the method, not the outcome.
  • Director, GovX: You know how hard it is to create great software that solves real problems and gains widespread adoption.  You’ve created web and mobile products, as an engineer, product manager, designer, or that role you can’t pin a name on where you just made it happen.  Maybe you have run a consulting company or maybe you have an amazing talent for matching the right people with the right problems and won’t be satisfied till you see the best they can come up with. You believe in starting small, creating pilot or prototypes that are validated with real users. You know how to create software that starts with ten users and then scales to 310 million happy customers.
  • Communication Specialist You are not just a story teller — you discover amazing untold stories just by talking to people.  You know how just a few words can resonate with people, such that they become a phrase that is reused and gain power with the retelling.  You have a sense of how to build a brand.  You understand that a solution doesn’t really exist until people know it is there.

We need you.  Or someone you know.  Tweet this, post it on Facebook.  There are three people who we need to find, who don’t yet know what they are doing next year.

Unfortunately, the timing is very tight. I encourage you to apply ASAP if you are interested. The Communication job will stop accepting new candidates at 11:59pm Eastern on Wednesday December 4th, 2013.

The PIF and GovX director roles end not much later, Tuesday, December 10th and Wednesday the 11th (also 11:59pm Eastern)

Jason Shen also writes about “3 federal jobs that just might change everything.” You should read his post, the job descriptions and FAQ.

learn to code: no math required

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When I learned to code, I was not very good at math and didn’t like it much. I had just started pre-algebra and struggled to make sense of abstract equations and abitrary rules that seemed to serve no purpose and were disconnected from my real world. I didn’t care to discover answers that were already known to imaginary word problems that some textbook writer made up.

If someone had told me that I needed to be good at math to be good at programming, maybe I would have avoided learning to code. Instead, when I was 12 years old, I sat down with a BASIC manual and an Apple II and taught myself to code for fun.

Earlier this week, President Obama called on every American to learn to code. His message is spot on, mostly. Unfortunately, he said “No one’s born a computer scientist, but with a little hard work and some math and science, just about anyone can become one.”

Perhaps some colleges require advanced math for a Computer Science degree, that wasn’t true in 1990 at Brown University. I did end up learning a lot of math and science. After I learned to code and struggled through algebra at school, it all started to click with geometry. Maybe it was the shapes and a connection to art and the real world, maybe computer programming actually helped me understand mathematics. I went on to study Calculus in high school and Linear Algebra in college. At the university level, I studied computer graphics, which does require math. In my first startup, where we invented the software program After Effects, we used math to let artists create video special effects. In both cases, it was mostly geometry and matrix math, which is technically part of linear algebra, but the equations I needed for graphics were no more complex than what I was doing in high school geometry. For most software development, especially these days as a web developer, you would be fine with elementary school math.

Of course everyone should learn math and science — those are just not directly related to most computer programming. Yesterday I recorded a short video message, a public service announcement, to help clarify this for parents and educators.

origins of the smithsonian

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In 1826, James Smithson wrote in his will that, if his heir were to die without children, his entire estate would go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” This unusual bequest was even more strange in that James Smithson has never been to the United States of America in his lifetime.

At the time, President Andrew Jackson didn’t feel that accepting this bequest was within the powers of the executive branch, so it was up to Congress to decided what to do. There were great debates on how to interpret this strange bequest. Should it be dedicated to our scientific knowledge? to understanding our world through the arts? should this institution be the keeper of history? or even create an observatory to look out at the stars and understand our universe? Finally in an Act of Congress on July 1, 1836, the Smithsonian Institution was founded to do all of those things.

In my first few of working at the Smithsonian, I toured the Smithsonian Institution Archives where I saw this hand-written will:

I learned more about about Smithsonian history on a tour of the “Castle” with curator Rick Stamm, author of an illustrated history of the Smithsonian Institution Building.

We don’t know exactly why James Smithson made this strange bequest, but it was in an age when our understanding of the world was changing. Smithson had been born in Paris, as the illegitimate son of first Duke of Northumberland. In The Lost World of James Smithson, Heather Ewing notes, that due to the circumstances of his birth, Brittish law declared that he

shall not be hereby Enabled to be of the Privy council or a Member of either the house of Parliament or to take any Office or place of Trust either Civil or Military or to have any Grant of Lands, Tenements or Hereditaments any inheritable property from the Crown to him or to any Person or Persons In trust for him.”
p. 46

However, he still was able to attend Oxford and became a citizen scientist of his day, distinguishing himself as a chemist. He joined several phillosopher’s clubs — gatherings of young men who would discuss theories of the new science. Reading about this history makes me wonder if tech meetups are the modern day equivalent, where men and women gather to exchange ideas and evaluate the latest inventions and discoveries. It strikes me that James Smithson must have seen America as a place where a new institution could thrive, dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge, rather than simply promoting the progeny of the privileged.

James Smithson, of course, was quite privileged, but perhaps his own struggles for recognition provided some perspective that caused him to strive for a higher ideal. Or perhaps he just wanted to make sure that the Brittish crown was never able to seize his assets, even after death. In any case, he left his fortune to our country almost 200 years ago, and the folks at the Smithsonian take its mission quite seriously.

To this day, the Smithsonian museums have no admission cost and are free to the public. Its archives, libraries, research institutes and observatory offer scientists and researchers, facilities and unparalleled historic collections that enable new discoveries every day.

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what is big data?

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Svetlana Sicular (@Sve_Sic), Gartner Research Director, offers a Big Data roadmap (via rww article). One of the delightful surprises in her report is a definition of a data-driven enterprise that includes process and people:

  • Fact-based decision making
  • Treating information as an asset
  • Business people responsible for analytics and acting on outcomes
  • IT people responsible for information management and provisioning

rocket ship with data: analytics, cloud, social, mobile

She also clarifies that Big Data is not just about volume

Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.

Structured data is still valuable. She argues most valuable, but I’m not sure about that — at least not the structured data we already have. If we can turn our so-called “content” into data and see behaviors of our customers, our visitors, even ourselves as data, those insights can dramatically change our perspective. Arguably, big data allows us to turn large, quickly changing, or complex data into small, simpler, structured information that we can act on.

I love the term “dark data” — data we already have, but aren’t looking at.

When mining big data, you’ll find unexpected (but real) results. Don’t start a project if you’re unwilling to deal with the findings.

The most exciting aspect of Big Data, from my perspective, is that data formats are less important, the structure of the data can be inferred later. For our most critical and urgent challenges, we don’t know the questions at the time that we start collecting data. Sicular notes that with big data, we can ask bigger questions. We can also ask different questions.

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why more women conference speakers?

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In 1997, I attended the Grace Hopper Conference for the first time. I was already quite accomplished in my career. My first startup had been acquired. I had worked as a software developer on both After Effects and Shockwave. My code was used by hundreds of millions of people. I believed that I had eradicated all impostor syndrome issues.

The Grace Hopper “celebration of women in technology” was then held every three years. There were a few men scattered about the conference, but every speaker was a woman and every talk was a technical talk. I sat there, surrounded by more technical women than I had every seen in my whole life. I listened to talk after talk that stretched my technical abilities. I remember ones about parallel processing, new compiler tech and how one researcher was making chips to sequence genomes. It was amazing. This was a great conference independent of the gender of its speakers and audience. I started to think about the innovative work I was doing and what parts of it might stand out and be interesting to speak about. I caught myself thinking: “I could do that.” And then I snapped to attention: I had never realized that I had been holding myself back.

Later as I searched for role models, I struggled to find well-known women who were pursuing a technical leadership role where they would continue to “do the work” rather than pursuing a management track. Often, I would suddenly realize in a conversation with a male engineer that I served as an “existence proof” of a competent woman engineer.

There’s a lot of research that supports the need for more, visible women (ditto for other unrepresented minorities). The stereotype threat, where simply being reminded that you are part of a negatively stereotyped group can cause your performance to falter, is easily enacted when you see no one like you on stage, and few like you in the audience. Not to mention, the simple discomfort of a professional conversation mistaken for sexual invitation. The book Women Don’t Ask referenced research that showed: if there are less than 30% of a visible minority, and someone from that minority speaks, most people (both from the majority and minority group) will assume that person speaks as a representative of their minority group. XKCD has a delightful illustration of this phenomenon.

When Sarah Mei and I started the RailsBridge workshops, we had a hypothesis that there could be a simple solution to this problem. Statistically there were more women engineers in the SF Bay Area than there were Ruby engineers, which may still be true today. I had been wanting to learn Ruby for a few years before I did. There’s alway new tech that we all want to learn. What if, we simply taught more women Ruby… could we change the balance? Sarah Mei gave a great talk on how that succeeded.

For the first workshop, we struggled to come up with women teachers. Of course, those we found or remembered, had been there all along, but had stopped attending the male-dominated events. There were women in the community — not 50% by far, but a lot more than the 3% we were seeing. Once the workshops created a community where women felt welcome, more women started coming to the meetups. These events are social, as well as professional development opportunities. Research supports that people don’t learn well when they feel uncomfortable. Experienced engineers don’t actually need meetup events or conferences in order to learn new tech. However, I believe the conferences need us. The industry needs us to be visible and outspoken or we will never overcome the very real, though often unintended, sexism and racism that exists in the world today.

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inspiring student films

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Last week I watched the first ever White House film festival. A couple months ago, students all across the country were invited to make short films about the technology in their classrooms or how they imagined their classrooms could use tech. The results are quite amazing. Of over 2500 submissions, 16 were selected and the kids were invited to the White House to see the whole festival in person. The event was kicked off by seventeen-year-old Shelly Ortiz, of Phoenix, who introduced President Obama. Later Neil deGrasse Tyson and other science and popular media celebs introduced film categories.

I believe that great film making is one of the highest forms of applied critical thinking, problem solving ability, and communication skills. I would love to see this kind of challenge emulated by governors in every state or mayors of major cities. We need to inspire our kids to surpass us in their creativity and use of technology.

Here are my favorites:

Double Time. Two boys across the world collaborate on a school project — 8th graders Joshua Leong and Stephen Sheridan from Longfellow Middle School in Falls Church, VA.

Hello From Malaysia. Fictional story of girl sent to boarding school in the US. 17-year-old Kira Bursky from Asheville, NC.

Tomorrow’s Classroom. Real story from today: amazing vision of what a connected classroom can be. Alexander Emerson from Manchester, MA, 8th grade.

Technology in Education: A Future Classroom. Beautiful sci-fi vision of the future classroom. Daniel Nemroff from Wynnewood, PA, 11th grade.

Alex. How one kid’s access to technology accelerated his ability to learn despite severe dyslexia and dysgraphia. Aaron Buangsuwon from Atladena, CA, 11th grade.

Art Tech Collaboration Elementary “Mr. Wood, Mr Wood, come to the 21st century.” Two schools in Naperville, Illinois came together to create this dramatization of how they might interact in the future.

They are all truly wonderful. Check out all of these inspiring student films.

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a first conference talk pitch

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Interview with Valerie Liberty of Balsamiq who recently submitted her first talk proposal.

Val: My name is Valerie Liberty and I work for a small bootstrapped startup called Balsamiq Studios.

Sarah: I don’t know if you can call Balsamiq small anymore. It is a bootstrapped startup that has emerged to become a force in the user experience world.

Val: We’re so proud.

Sarah: Tell me about the experience of submitting your first talk proposal.

Val: Oh, it was so much fun. There’s a conference coming up here in San Francisco. It’s called Office Optional. It’s for people who work with or without a hard-walled office. As Balsamiq Studios is a distributed company with only one office in Europe, the rest of our employees are all distributed. I got a heads-up about this conference, and after taking a class at Stanford about neuroplasticity and happiness I was motivated to answer this call for talks. My pitch was meant to be a two to three-minute video that took about 10 hours to prepare.

Sarah: Wow. 10 hours… why so long? or maybe I should ask: why so short?

Val: Yeah, it was long because I had never given a talk before, so really, that was a lot of preparation for what the content would be, and working out the technology of videotaping me, what was I going to wear in the video. I probably made 20 two-minute videos trying to hone my message, but I’m really excited about it.

Sarah: Why give a talk?

Val: Yeah, for a bunch of reasons, one, because I’m really excited about what I’ve learned, and really want to share it with other people in my situation who, I think, are first of all growing in numbers. There are people who are just becoming work from home or work-remote employees. I’ve been doing it for six years, and that’s long enough for me to see some cycles. Second of all, because one of the things that I’m dealing with is loneliness and connections with other people while working remotely and only having an online presence with people. To go to a conference, and actually press the flesh with other remote people will be, I hope, super-beneficial and refill my emotional tanks for a few weeks.

Sarah: Excellent. That’s kind of meta.

)

Val: Yeah. I’m really excited about this new Skype feature, where you can record a call so do let me know how it turns out.

Interview recorded with Skype ecamm Call Recorder, transcription via Rev.com

Note Upcoming Course: Positive Psychology and the Keys to Sustainable Practice: Happiness at Work: Using Science-Based Practices to Increase Success and Fulfillment (starts May 13, 2014)

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linking people through history

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Many museums, archives and libraries are exploring Linked Open Data to make their online collections more meaningful to researchers and to the public at large. From the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands to the Cooper-Hewitt in New York, our cultural heritage can be explored in digital form with links to help us dive deeper. These aren’t just spiffed up websites, these are living representations of the physical collections with hooks for developers to build new applications that link back and let us look, listen and learn in new ways.

What if we could use this emerging foundation to allow researchers to publish links from one institution to another, connecting a letter in one archive to an artifact in another museum? People have been talking about these ideas since Vannevar Bush imagined the Memex the 1940s. Making it actually work requires a lot of disparate pieces: standard protocols, ontologies, digital representations of the physical works, and an audience with the digital tools for easy access.

I’ve been investigating a very small part of this challenge: connecting people through their things. Through interviewing researchers, archivists and museum collections managers, I’ve learned about traditional research techniques that suggest how an online system could work. Instead of linking as a post-process, the act of linking data could be part of the experience of researching and exploring online collections.

An illustration of what a page might look like for Doris Cochran, a scientist who worked at the National Museum of Natural History.  The page shows the specimens she collected, publications, papers, as well as "known associates" and "mentions" from other institutions.

A Social Network of Dead People?

What if we could pull all of this information together across collections in different organizations and present it in a unified way? Last year, working as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the Smithsonian, I imagined what this might look like (illustrated above): a social network of historical figures linking archival documents to give us insights about history.

I quickly discovered the SNAC project (Social Networks and Archival Context) which started investigating this idea several years before me. SNAC takes structured data from EAC-CPF files, and connects people through annotations made by archivists all over the world who contribute their data to the project.

This published biographical data with links back to the source archives provides a valuable resource for researchers. SNAC name matching used automated techniques, leaving “maybeSameAs” connections where there is uncertainty:

While refining the computational techniques used continues, such techniques alone will always fall short. The most fundamental problem is identifying when similar names are for the same person or different persons. Even for human editors, identity resolution can be an exceptional challenge and sometimes cannot be reliably achieved due to insufficient or ambiguous evidence. — SNAC Research Use Notes

Identity Often Requires Research

While there may be many people named Russell Hatch, these boots only belonged to one of them.

Mrs. Sydney Blake travels to South America on a scientific expedition, but her colleague’s field notebook talks only about Doris. Archival research reveals that Doris Holmes Blake, wife of Sydney, was the travel companion.

Establishing an identity, based on a name is often an act of scholarship. Researchers explore the written record, piecing together history from different pieces of paper, photographs, or physical objects in museums

Even with clear records, facts can be disputed. There are errors in the archives that do not besmirch the disciplined care of the archivists. A birth certificate may show one date and a newspaper article a different one. One historian may assume the birth certificate is correct, until another finds a diary entry telling the funny story of a town hall clerk who got the date wrong. One researcher told me of his challenges recording biographical data from Canadian Civil War soldiers because some thought it funny to write Feb. 29th as their birthday. We know an individual was actually born at a specific date and time, but once that time is in the past, facts can become subjective.

People have always researched history by looking at the artifacts left behind. Even today, researchers travel from archive to library, often across the world, to piece together stories from letters, diaries and even notes in guestbooks at historic homes. They build a picture of what a life was like from prized possessions or everyday objects now housed in museums, from news sources, and from the stories written by friends and colleagues, both positive and slanderous.

Thousands of researchers create these kinds of links every day. They are footnotes in scholarly articles, books, and research papers. They are the tabs open in a grad students’ browser. Interviews with researcher suggest that if we could allow them to leave a trail, they would contribute to the world-wide store of knowledge.

A New Model of Publishing

We’re starting to see new patterns emerge online with new interfaces that allow people to take part in linking historical artifacts. Volunteers transcribing field notebooks link scientists, subjects and specimens using wiki-like markup at FromThePage. Jazz enthusiasts can read transcripts of conversations with musicians at LinkedJazz 52ndStreet to build a social network that with links back to the oral histories.

Emerging on the web, there’s a new model of publishing. Instead of links being created with markup and behind-the-scenes tools gated by a webmaster, connections can be added with simple text annotations or the touch of a button.

Search results for "Dr. Charles Hendrickson"  in the 1966 Field Notes of Laurence M. Klauber show image of the field notebook and text with links.
At BalboaParkOnline volunteers transcribe documents and add links.
Sarah Vaughan in the center with lines connecting to other jazz musicians.
Sarah Vaughan’s social graph at LinkedJazz created by volunteers annotating transcripts of oral histories.

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