Author Archives: Nancy

Women who helped get us here #wmnhist

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This isn’t really “women’s history” and it doesn’t fit in 140 characters, so I’m posting here instead of on twitter (and its women’s history Wednesdays).

However, with recent posts about “where are the women?” in the tech discussions in general and the fortieth anniversary of the Internet in particular, I just want to list some of the women who’ve been beacons during my journey through the open source world.

My role has always been on the support/administration, not the coding, side of the world. I’d like to give a shout to these women who were important leaders in that area than more than 20 years ago. [Check Google or USENIX archives for details of their contributions, many in areas that were not visible to me,  and “where they are now”.]

  • Evi Nemeth
  • Debbie Scherrer
  • Elizabeth Zwicky

Who would you add to that list? or put on a list of “women tech leaders” in a field that’s important to you?

Facebook live feed/news feed

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I’m starting to think about a workshop on Facebook that I’ll be doing at a couple of AAUW state conventions next spring. I may start using this space to write up notes and  test ideas. If you’d like to be more involved in the workshop development, or would like to have me attend your state convention, let me know.

Facebook crossed the 300 million users threshold last month — and it continues to be a grand experiment. Somewhere there’s a group that’s figuring out how that very large population can best communicate with each other, while maintaining the Facebook principles of simple, streamlined user interface and a focus on messages from one person to another (as opposed to messages from groups/organizations to people). As things change without warning, this can be disconcerting. Following the Facebook blog can help, but we are still pretty much powerless to effect change in the Facebook juggernaut. I find it best to just “go with the flow” and tweak around the edges when my motivations for using Facebook don’t mesh completely with the Facebook view of the world.

Anyway, Facebook’s recent change to the “home page” allows users some control over what they as they first bring up Facebook:

  • The default “news feed” shows some collection of items that Facebook predicts will be “interesting.” Their algorithm is clearly undergoing some changes and has occasional hiccups when it will emphasize something from a week ago even though you’ve checked Facebook regularly since then.
  • With one click you can change the “news feed” to a “live feed” that shows, in most recent first order, all the traffic from your friends — what they posted on their status, notes they wrote on others’  walls, links they posted, pictures they uploaded, friends they made, groups they joined, and more. This is more information than appeared on the old home page, but is closer in spirit than the edited news feed.

Note that both of these view are configurable. Look for an “edit options” down in the lower right. In the news feed options, you can hide friends and fan pages that you don’t want to hear about on a quick check of Facebook. In the live feed you have a “hide” and a “show me more” for both friends and pages. You can also change the 250 default limit on the number of friends who will appear in these feeds. Note that you can still “hide”  friends and pages (and the applications they may use) by clicking the “hide” at the top right of a particular story for the options that pertain to that story. Any users you’d hidden before carry over to the new views.

There’s also an option that some are recommending to configure the home page view by looking at the left hand side and dragging “status updates” to the top of the list, above “News feed”. [You may need to click “more” to see the “status updates”.] This, then, shows status updates from your friends — but doesn’t appear to show their other activities that would appear in the “News feed” or “Live feed”. Therefore choose this carefully.

Another option is to create “friend lists” that will then appear in that right hand menu. Add Jane, Sally, John and Paul to a list called “relatives” and you can then click the “relatives” list to get caught up on all of them. Spend some time thinking about how you group your friends, maybe who you’d expect to see at the same party, put them into groups and then you can click through to see their content in the context of each others remarks. This doesn’t prevent you from “introducing” someone from one area of your life to someone from another area (one of the key benefits of Facebook), but it may cut down on the information overload — especially if you have a “really important” list that you drag to the top of the left hand column so posts about those folks will be what you see when you start Facebook.

So, keep in mind that Facebook is offering a way to “follow” friends and acquaintances that is sometimes hard for our brains to absorb — particularly for those of us who remember when phone calls were expensive and communicating over long distances usually involved paper. Facebook  hasn’t figured it out perfectly, but they’re trying. Take some time to experiment with different options and find one that works for you and the circle of friends and organizations you’ve chosen to follow. And be prepared to change again in a few months.

Finding me …

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The links at the bottom of the left hand column are provided so you can find me on twitter, facebook, and LinkedIn. I’d inadvertently tightened the security of my Facebook account so those who weren’t already in my network (friends of friends) couldn’t use that link to find me. I’ve partially corrected that — but it turns out that widget is not working for some reason in Internet Explorer.

So if you want to find me on Facebook, use http://facebook.com/nancy.e.shoemaker for now. I’ll check into the IE problem later.

A few final comments

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[Okay, I’m cleaning the office preparing for a whirlwind of work, and found these notes that have no good place to be filed. This’ll be a quick “get things off my chest” that have been pending since Convention.]

Appointed officers

Aside from reinserting the degree requirement, one change made at the convention was changing the split of elected/appointed board members from 7/6 to 10/3. I fail to see how this is going to help anything (though given the timing of appointing the directors this year — within hours of the election results — perhaps it doesn’t make much of a difference).

I’d like to see the board move towards more thoughtful recruitment of appointed officers, with time to consider the skills and interests of those who are elected to the board. I don’t see why those to be appointed have to apply months before their term starts. And while I honor all those elected to the board, finding another 3 willing to go through the process of educating the entire membership on why they should serve seems an unnecessary expense that is unlikely to improve the overall quality of the board.

Election results

While all the candidates were pretty circumspect in their stand on the change to the degree requirement, one did break ranks and say she was in favor of retaining the requirement. Evidently there was a pact to “let the members decide” (see previous post), but the message I got in St. Louis was that all of the other candidates were in favor of the change (and there were many who took the “Open Membership” buttons to wear after the polls closed and before the bylaws vote).

So what can we learn from the defeat of the one candidate who supported the requirement? Well, those supporting the degree requirement had some odd views of what should be in the bylaws for a national organization (see above on elected/appointed officers and note there was a call for the quorum of an “every member” ballot to be something like 50% instead of the realistic but perhaps optimistic 5%). It’s not the bylaws, people, that will make or break the organization — but the skills, interests, and commitment of those who volunteer and are hired to lead the organization. So I’m baffled that they didn’t make that connection and elect at least one supporter to the board. Small victories, I guess.

Again, bylaws are the bones of the organization, but its heart and soul need to come from the people who are involved. This was the motivation behind the election2009.bbvx.org campaign that tried to raise awareness of the importance of the choice and provide the delegates with the information on the candidates. We’ll see how this evolves as we move into the age of “one member/one vote” where all the members will have a say in choosing our leaders.

How we are different

I continued to be amazed at those who ask “Well, if we drop the degree requirement, we’ll be just like NOW, the League of Women Voters, and all the other women’s organizations.” I actually had one friend (who wasn’t in St. Louis) ask how we’d be different from the garden club.

Get a grip, people.

Take a quick look at the public policy program and ask if that looks like a garden club? Well, no. And it doesn’t look like NOW or the League, either. I’d missed the rewriting of the public policy program (which had grown crufty and disorganized over the years), and I was cranky enough after the outcome of the bylaws session to skip the Sunday morning session where the 2009-2011 program was debated and passed. So when the program was posted later in the summer, a lot of my angst from St. Louis melted away and I was able to tell myself “yes, there is a reason I’m still active in AAUW”. ?The 2007-2009 public policy committee deserves our hearty thanks.

I find the new mission easy to talk to and the value promise is okay, but the public policy statement captures “who we are and how we’re trying to change the world” in a way that neither of those statements addresses. If you haven’t read it lately, check it out. [The diversity statement is still on target, too.]

Other things that make us different:

  • A focus on fellowships, grants and local scholarships and a corresponding focus on fundraising. In many communities that means book sales, and in others it is giving circles and other strategies that recognize that women’s economic power has increased so that larger gifts with less time involved make sense now.
  • An advocacy focus that, in my mind, includes the work we do in our communities. This isn’t just the voter guides and candidate forums, but the projects in the schools that “advocate” for financial literacy, getting more girls to consider the STEM fields, and quality education and higher education opportunities for all.
  • Our connections to campuses that include special grants as well as the fellowships, and the National Conference for College Women Student Leaders and other opportunities to increase the probability of that the next generation of women leaders will make strides to bring about gender equity.

So, in my mind, our focus is clear, and there is nothing in who we are and what we do that would be devalued by including those without degrees in our work. Those who want to join us are welcome. To paraphrase a quote from Susan McGee Bailey from a few years ago — the problems are so large, and the resources so small, that we can’t afford to turn away anyone who wants to work on our issues.

Editing the branch bylaws

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Here are a few comments as I edit the branch bylaws for conformance to the changes passed at the AAUW convention in June. There are two documents with information about the changes — a memo to all branch presidents and bylaws chairs, and the new model branch bylaws. See aauw.org/About/bylaws/ for copies of those

The bylaws committee had a difficult job since there are hundreds of different instantiations of the branch bylaws “in the wild” — so how do you say what to “change” when you don’t have all the starting points? Of course any time there are two sets of directions, there’s apt to be some inconsistency. While the model bylaws say certain articles are “mandatory” many of those who are updating current bylaws will have no reason to review the model bylaws. I started trying to make my bylaws conform to both the strictures of the memo and the model bylaws, but I’ve decided that the final document will be some combination. It will be reviewed by the branch bylaws committee to make sure I’ve not slipped in something too egregious.

Some issues with the memo

  • The memo says to replace “Association” with AAUW — but it evidently doesn’t mean to do that in the heading and the “Name” section since in the later section on Governance it says “American Association of University Women, hereinafter called AAUW”. On the other hand the model bylaws start using “AAUW” right away and only write out the full name in the heading. I’m going with the model bylaws for the Tar Heel Branch.
  • The memo says to replace the old wording “purpose of AAUW is to promote equity for all women and girls, lifelong education, and positive societal change” with the new purpose for AAUW approved in St. Louis. However, that language (the mission that was in use for at least ten years up to 2006) never appeared in the model bylaws and doesn’t appear in my branch’s bylaws. A solution here (which also resolves a reference to the Educational Foundation and removes the problematic “unite graduates of different educational institutions” which did appear in the 2008 model bylaws) is to simplify the branch’s article on the Purpose and use the language from the national bylaws (and the model branch bylaws).

Some issues with the model bylaws

  • The Fall 2008 version of the model bylaws had two articles for Name and Purpose. The new model combines them. However, since that would renumber all the other articles, for ease of understanding and discussion, I’m not going to make that change.
  • The change in wording from having the name be “AAUW XYZ Branch” to “XYZ Branch of AAUW” is more pleasing to the ear but flies in the face of years of work to get our name listed near the top of alphabetical lists. For now I’m going to favor the Style Guide over the model bylaws since the memo doesn’t require this change.
  • The membership and dues article includes many changes not referenced in the memo. For instance, the model bylaws do, for the first time, I think, reference an at-large member joining a branch by paying state and branch dues. This is more complicated than that, and I do hope the policies governing the transfer from MAL (expiration date depends on when the member joined) to branch member (expiration date is June 30) are posted (along with all the rest of the policies that affect branches, states, and individual members). The change isn’t mandatory by the memo, so I’m not going to include it or the other changes in the model Article IV.
  • AAUW NC in its bylaws explicitly grants membership benefits to representatives of AAUW college/university partners in the state and says that they are charged no dues. It would be helpful if the model bylaws had language to cover this case. The difficulty comes since the representatives’ renewals are billed by AAUW to the college, not (as with other branch members) by the branch to the individual. So the simple solution is to charge no dues and call the representative “renewed” when the national dues are paid. On the other hand, some branches/states may want to charge local dues — and, indeed, the MPP pushes the branch in that direction. If AAUW will continue to bill for national dues for partner “members” (and, one assumes, their representatives), then they should be classified differently from ordinary branch members, the model bylaws should offer suggestions on how to handle the local finances related to them, and the  MPP should be enhanced to cover their local/state dues (if any).

Issues not clarified in either document

  • The new AAUW bylaws removes the classification of “Associate Member” which was used for those who had completed two years of study towards a degree, who were admitted to membership no later than 1957, and who have maintained branch affiliation ever since. There are a handful of these women still affiliated with the organization, and according to the old bylaws, they had the right to transfer to another branch. A member of the bylaws committee advised me to leave that language in the branch bylaws. However, since there are no Associate Members in North Carolina, and the language has been removed from the model branch bylaws, I am going to remove it from the branch bylaws for the sake of simplicity and because of possible confusion with the 2005 change to admit those who have earned an associate or equivalent degree. I do hope the board will make a statement recognizing the surviving Associate Members and their more than 50 year commitment to AAUW.