britta

"Guys" as a fairly neutral term for a mixed-gender group of people or group of women is a very very informal usage; it makes sense that a group of really close friends might choose to use it with each other in a casual and affectionate way.

The idea of the bot is to be mindful of gendered language when talking to your coworkers in your workplace, which is a different and slightly more formal context.

They might be interested in Code for America's Brigade groups, which are civic technology volunteer groups that meet regularly in many cities (including outside the US): https://www.codeforamerica.org/brigade/

These UK and US government tech efforts have a friendly relationship: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/09/24/uk-and-us-meet-fo...

Double Union has never had a laser cutter, but it has two small milling machines (a Shapeoko and a Handibot). It has a bunch of other tools as well, such as screenprinting equipment (exposure unit, screens, ink, squeegees, drying racks, paper cutters, etc.), a Silhouette vinyl cutter, button maker, woodburning tool, Dremels, light box for drawing/tracing, hot plate for dyeing fabric, etc.

Even if you don't mean this comment to be insensitive, it is pretty insensitive to people mourning the permanent loss of a talented and loved person who contributed much to their communities and friends.

Pretty much all projects can benefit from these kinds of skills. I'm a community manager and technical writer, and I make non-code contributions to open source projects. My process is something like this:

1) Find an open source thing that I use or think is interesting. This has included OpenStreetMap, LocalWiki, MediaWiki, an interactive map project at my former university, a tool my hacker/makerspace has built for itself, an educational website about open source, a tool made by the local Code for America brigade, etc. The important part is just that I like the thing.

2) Get in contact with the people - join the mailing list, IRC channel, forum, meetups, or whatever they use to communicate; look at the bug tracker and blog. Start learning about how the people work and what they're working on, and start asking and answering small questions, pretty much making friends with them in a low-key way. At this point you can probably tell whether they're reasonable people to talk to - if they're unfriendly or non-responsive, abandon ship.

3) Ask for suggestions for what to work on, and find tasks for yourself based on your expertise. Things will come up as needing improvement, and you can propose solutions to the group and start getting them done. For me, this can involve recognizing and filing bugs about user experience issues, improving website copy, writing marketing materials like social media posts and blog posts, organizing documentation, identifying holes in documentation that people have overlooked, and so on. This kind of non-technical work usually requires getting some amount of buy-in and trust from project collaborators, which is why step 2 is important.

4) Yay, you are now contributing useful things to a cool project.

I've written a little more about this as part of one of the projects I volunteer with, OpenHatch (https://openhatch.org/), an organization that helps people get involved with open source: http://blog.openhatch.org/2013/how-i-found-an-open-source-pr... + http://mergestories.com/s/improving-a-project-homepage/. The second post is from Merge Stories, our collection of posts where people explain how they made an open source contribution, to help give newcomers a realistic picture of what contributing looks like: http://mergestories.com/

This is also a helpful article: http://blog.smartbear.com/programming/14-ways-to-contribute-... - a list of ways to contribute to open source that aren't just writing a pile of code.

There are some people who call it the Space Claw: https://www.flickr.com/people/spaceclaw

Saying that these problems look like bug reports is dismissive of the depth of the problems. Stopping development of products and removing access to features isn't unintentional, and a lot of people have already complained about each of these problems over the years. Andy's article is making a larger point that what has happened to these products is part of a pattern, that Google is not being as responsible in stewarding its information as its mission statement said it would try to be.

For a specific example of real problems caused by killing Google News Archive search, it affected the work of Wikipedia editors. I and a lot of other editors had found it very useful as a high-quality and fast way to find good sources for articles we were working on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_English_newspap...). There's not really anything else like it, so you end up combing through tons of general Google results that don't qualify as reliable sources in order to find a few newspaper articles.

Edhat also allows lots of nasty racist commenters. Not so great overall.

EveryBlock tried to be that gathering-together service, but it got shut down: http://www.niemanlab.org/encyclo/everyblock/ + http://www.holovaty.com/writing/rip-everyblock/ "We showed you nearby public records (crimes, building permits, restaurant inspections), pointed you to automatically indexed articles (newspapers, blogs, forums) and provided a sort of "geo-forum" that let you talk with people who lived near you."

It's sort of maybe being revived: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/02...

Yess, and a local Facebook group and/or subreddit can work really nicely in coordination with a LocalWiki. To share local knowledge you totally need that conversation part, where the oldtimers and newcomers sit around and chat (or comment) about what's interesting today and what happened a while ago, in a casual and amusing and timely way. But then you also need the reference part, where bits and pieces slowly get collected and organized and cross-linked to tell a more comprehensive story, and to make sure individual memories don't get lost if people move out of town (or get busy, or die) and aren't around to tell their stories anymore.

For inactive regions, I'd rather see LocalWiki put up a signpost in the form of "This region got a start with five articles and two contributors but hasn't been edited in six months - would you like to help renew this project? Here's some guidance about how to contact those existing editors, find new collaborators, and set up local editing meetups; here's where to share advice with fellow people also starting and reviving LocalWikis for their regions." (I think this is quite possible, and I should probably file a suggestion for doing this...)

Instead of sweeping the inactive wikis away, LocalWiki can use whatever is there to help motivate newcomers to contribute - to say "you don't have to start from scratch here." I find that LocalWiki's inclusive and neighborly attitude is one of its strengths, and I think it can build on that strength instead of needing to develop Wikipedia-style rules.

Aw yay, I took that photo on the new homepage! It was during an editing party at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco (https://localwiki.org/sf/Prelinger_Library).

I've been a Wikipedia editor for many years, and last year I started splitting my editing work between Wikipedia and LocalWiki. There is so much I love in the places I've lived that can't fit into Wikipedia's notability/verifiability rules but is still important to me and other people who live in these places, and it's nice to have a collaborative thing to work on that is very relaxed.

So I wrote some articles about curious bits of my neighborhood in SF (https://localwiki.org/sf/Old_Mission_Police_Station for example) and then realized I should start a LocalWiki for a place I spent tons of time photographing and researching when I lived there, Isla Vista (next to UC Santa Barbara): https://localwiki.org/islavista/

Isla Vista is very interesting but doesn't have a lot of documentation of its history available online, and a lot of residents don't know much about it. It's been fun to use LocalWiki to start organizing and sharing what I've learned about it, and to get other people working with me to build a collective document that goes beyond my own perspective & interests. Also on Metafilter a couple days ago: http://www.metafilter.com/146431/An-Unincorporated-Historic-...

Yes! I attended and spoke at the second conference in Portland, and it was great.

One thing I valued from it: getting a sense of the careers of a whole crowd of people who also do documentation as an important part of their work (and care about it), since in a lot of technical contexts we're unusual compared to engineers and designers. I noticed that many of us started in support, not just me, and that it's common to wander around job titles over the decades - from community to technical writing to engineering to product and back. I really liked that the conference had a range of attendees and speakers in different career stages and types of companies, so I could get a little more of a glimpse of where I might be 10-20 years from now.

Fanfiction writers are creative with all types of media - it's part of the culture to go wild with experimental ideas and have fun with them, laughing together about it. Well-established characters mean that you have more common elements between stories, but humans find infinite stories to tell (and when you get bored of telling normal stories, you make up "alternate universe" stories for your favorite characters). The various kinds of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction are usually more serious than these Minesweeper stories, but that's more about them being based on more serious/complex material. (I have read a lot of fanfiction.)

A sticky can only be updated by the original poster, while a sidebar can be updated by all of the moderators. For sidebars there's even a diff log so that all of the moderators can understand how it's been updated. Most subreddits have multiple moderators, so putting the sidebar in the sticky isn't practical.

As an iOS-related subreddit, we have few readers using Android devices. There are of course people who don't read the sidebar even when it's very visible (such as in the standard website view), but we also had a real pattern of people saying "Sorry, I didn't see that part of the FAQ/rules, I'm using Alien Blue." (This is better now that Reddit added the sticky feature and we put up an Alien Blue info sticky.)

Interesting, that's not too terrible for sidebar access, but that choice of featured screenshot means I can't officially recommend it. It doesn't matter as much now though; with Reddit's endorsement, Alien Blue is the app we have to support.

I moderate a midsize subreddit where many of the 35k daily readers use Alien Blue, and this is a bit of a headache because Alien Blue makes it hard to find the subreddit sidebar, where we list important FAQs and rules. Our sticky post is dedicated to explaining how to find the sidebar in Alien Blue (http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/2ic349/how_to_see...).

I actually installed a bunch of other iOS Reddit apps to see if I could find one that supported sidebars better, so that I could officially recommend that app to my subreddit instead. The other ones didn't support sidebars at all though!

What I want most is for Alien Blue's tiny arrow buttons that lead to subreddit sidebars - http://i.imgur.com/ygWOV91.png - to be detail disclosure buttons instead, with a tiny "i" (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userex...). I believe that icon makes more sense and will help readers realize they should tap there for sidebar information.

Ha, my friend used the same photo as the example for his mathematical analysis of the rolling shutter effect: http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/post/54400376441/playing-detec...

The questions he investigated: "Can we figure out the rate at which a propellor is spinning by analyzing this kind of photo? And can we figure out the real number of propellor blades in the photo?"

Assuming your device is jailbreakable, the problem is that your phone is vulnerable to jailbreaking, whether you've decided to jailbreak it or not. In the relevant scenario (the one described in the article, with "a few minutes alone with the smartphone of the person being stalked" and the passcode), if the victim hasn't already chosen to jailbreak the phone, the stalker can easily jailbreak it and install the spyware.

Every day on Caltrain includes unexpected delays, and it's interesting to look at how those delays affect the system. Check out the linked visualization of Boston-area trains: http://mbtaviz.github.io/ - a single day had two major train problems.

Caltrain also runs extra trains for special events such as baseball games. Those are planned, but not on the regular schedule.

This is great. I want this information to be in a form easily accessible and readable for any project maintainer who wants to learn about concrete ways to improve their projects. So, question: what form should that be? A blog post explaining the highlights, with a title with good keywords? A YouTube video with explanations and anecdotes, like a talk without a conference? Where do maintainers learn about this kind of thing (other than occasional news posts on HN with advice), so that we can make this information show up there?

I volunteer for OpenHatch (https://openhatch.org/), a non-profit open source project that aims to help newcomers contribute to projects + help projects make themselves more welcoming. What do you think is the most effective step OpenHatch could take for helping maintainers? It has some efforts already, and I have some ideas, but I'm curious to hear more ideas. (Also if you want to help, OpenHatch is already a loose collection of people who care about this; come join us.)

You can educate yourself and others! There are lots of resources for learning how to do more, including speaking up to other men and putting some money toward supporting people who are making a difference.

Here's an article with a bunch of options ("What Can Men Do? Men working with other men against patriarchy in technology"): https://medium.com/tech-culture-briefs/a1e93d985af0 - and here's an allies training workshop that you can encourage your company (or your friends' companies) to do: http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/workshops-and-training/

I'd suggest checking out http://growstuff.org/ to get your fill of more literal open source gardening! It's a neat project: "Growstuff is a community of food gardeners. We're building an open source platform to help you learn about growing food, track what you plant and harvest, and swap seeds and produce with other gardeners near you."

There is also a PyLadies meetup group in San Diego: http://www.meetup.com/sd-pyladies/ - I know one of the organizers and she's great.

Nice, thanks for editing the post. Sociolinguistics is fascinating; at least not every kind of mismatch/misunderstanding is loaded. And there's a paper for some linguist to write on the hybrid tone of friendly and authoritative that forum moderators find to use.

(Edit: Part of why I consider clear use of "you guys" to be so limited is that when used in professional/quasi-professional tech industry contexts, it can accidentally annoyingly remind readers that we're among very few women around: http://subfictional.com/2012/07/02/language-matters-stop-usi... )

The meaning of "guys" (as "men" or "people of either sex") depends a lot on its context and a lot on the person reading the words - here's a survey with some examples: http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/27/guys-guys-guys/ (But a moderation note probably isn't a great place to try to shift interpretations of words.)

It's not so clearly neutral; this confusion could be a language register mismatch issue. "You guys" as a gender-neutral term is a very informal usage - it's something I might say in person to a mixed-gender group of my close friends. But even slightly more formal language isn't as slangy, such as a written post on a forum of mostly strangers and acquaintances, so the "you guys" doesn't read as obviously gender-neutral.