The latest take on a very old theme

I’ve been mulling over this post by Tara Hunt, and though it is a week old, I want to draw attention to it.

Here’s the story: Tara takes the lead in organizing a tech conference, and in the main stream press story about it, Tara is ignored and unnamed while top billing goes to co-organizer Chris Messina. Most women in technical professions can tell any number of similar tales. This is one of the great mysteries of high tech: journalists periodically comment on (and even lament) the absence of women in tech, while simultaneously acting as if the prominent tech women in the near vicinity have all donned cloaks of invisibility.

All I can say is that this is just the latest version of a very old story. It is a well-honored tradition for those who record events to ignore the contributions of activist women. Were this not so, we’d be celebrating Alice Paul Day every January 11th.

Next Up: All Nighters

Next Up: All Nighters

The past few weeks have been a real endurance test for me. Nothing to do with Flock — no, my teensy contribution to the developer’s preview was great fun for me, especially since I didn’t have to do much. I think the rest of the team had fun, too. At least they don’t look any worse for wear, now that they’ve gotten some sleep. Okay, there was some minor carping, and loud music at night. There may have even been some drinking. But everyone is still on the boat.

The real time-killers have been home-based calamities that I won’t detail here, except to note that when an adored pet cat develops kidney failure there’s all kinds of hell to pay. She will be receiving every-other-day subcutaneous fluid, and I will be the one wielding the needle. And bearing the scars, no doubt.

But I began this blog to experience the act of blogging itself, so I can learn the universe of the people who download Flock. And I’m supposed to be recording my thoughts about returning to technical writing after a long hiatus. Here goes.

Now that I’ve authored a few pages (and I do mean few — I didn’t do much, honest), I have some feelings to report. In no particular order:

    * Deja vu: I couldn’t write much since I couldn’t really see much of the interface, right up till the end, and then I had to pull a near all-nighter. I remember doing that when the first Power Macs were introduced.

    * Exhaustion: Near all-nighters are a lot harder now than they were ten years ago.

    * My head hurts: Sometime around midnight one Thursday I was called upon to dredge up my knowledge of HTML (never really very solid anyway), and link my getting started text to one of Flock’s web pages. Fortunately there was no CSS involved; I would have never remembered that stuff. Sheesh.

    * Puzzlement: I haven’t figured out who the audience is, since anyone downloading the developer’s preview won’t want much in the way of tutorials and so forth.

    * Excitement: I remembered how to do my old job!

I hate to admit it, but part of me still suspects that the past four years of knitting and gardening and home-dwelling has erased everything I ever knew about technical writing. How exciting that I still know how to do a task analysis, and figure out new software, and learn new tools.

Now the hard part begins. I need to draft a documentation suite plan, so we know what pieces should be written. But since this is the open source universe, the plan will morph and grow as we go along, and I need to accept a certain amount of that chaos. All the pieces will morph and grow, too, and there will be inaccuracies and redundancies. I must come up with tools and processes that help to limit the pitfalls while maximizing community.

The chaotic element was the biggest challenge for me during the beginnings of Mozilla. Most exciting and promising, too. It’s not really in the nature of a technical writer to love chaos — we’re more the obsessive compulsive type. But I must embrace the chaos, or else return to knitting and say no more.

(So peaceful looking, but don’t be fooled)

Browsing… Ruminating…Words, Words, Words

Why is it that I’d rather write about anything other than browsing and bookmarking?

I’ve been here before. At Netscape the “Exploring the Web” section of the user help was always the last piece to be written. I wrote about setting preferences, using extensions (excuse me, “helper applications”), encryption — I really loved writing about encryption — but I hated telling people how to stroll about the Web and mark their favorite pages.

For one thing, I’m never sure who I’m writing this stuff for. Is there anyone who needs help browsing? At the store, when a salesperson approaches and asks if you need help, you say, “No, thanks, I’m just browsing.” Browsing is what you do when you don’t need help.

Maybe it’s just me, but I hate the sound of the word “browsing.” To me it sounds like something cows do — related in some way to “grazing” and “ruminating.” It also sounds like “grousing.”

And then there’s bookmarking. After taking great care to build a metaphor of the Web as a place, which has locations that you explore and navigate and so forth, all of a sudden I suggest that the reader “bookmark” a “page.” Poof! Now the Web isn’t a place; no, it’s a big book with lots of pages. Huh?

“Favorites” doesn’t quite do it for me, either. My quilting web pages are certainly among my favorites, but the place where I do my online banking, though handy, doesn’t quite rate the term “favorite.” No, many of these so-called “favorites” are actually places where I have to do work. How favorite is that?

Actually, as long as I’m grousing, I might as well add that part of the problem of writing about bookmarks (or favorites or whatever) is that I know damned well that as soon as the user has piled up a few of them, he or she is going to have to “manage” them. Don’t we all  have enough stuff to manage without having to herd bookmarks?

Since Flock has a much better, truly new and improved story about managing these… things, I was hoping it would be more fun to write about. But it’s very hard to put into words why Flock’s system is better. It just IS. You have to try it and see how much better it is. Trust me. I know Flock’s heart, and it is good. But how do I say that in technical writing? “Try this now: click the Star. See how easy that is? And you’re gonna love what happens next! Go check out the Search field!”

Well, I’d better get on with it. I’ll come up with something. It won’t contain exclamation points, I promise. After twenty years of technical writing, I can’t publish something that contains string of exclamation points. But I will have to include a lot of “just try this” statements. Those who prefer reading to doing (if there are any of them left) will just have to get over it.

My Web 2.0

We have a great looking dogfood build now, and I think I can begin in earnest on the Flock user documents. My top priority is a “Welcome to Flock” piece; the biggest challenge will be the appearance and not so much the text and navigation, which will both be very simple. (Simple instructions or no instructions — a good sign that the interface doesn’t need much explanation.)

So I should be focusing on writing, but my mind keeps dwelling on the issue of what features I would like to see in Web 2.0. I think what I want, more than anything, is the “hypersecretary” named Ramanujan who assisted the character Jen Wolling in David Brin’s novel, Earth.

“Good morning Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias new agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical.

“You have received six letters and thirty-five message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.

“In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to you [this count would be somewhat smaller for me], in yesterday’s scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times.”

Jen then tells her hypersecretary to “use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.” Ramanujan asks, “And the surprise factor…?” To which Jen replies, “Let’s go with twenty percent.”

Jen is dealing with what has become a gigantic problem: staving off information. In Earth, everyone on the Net uses a filter. But most filters are set to reinforce the user’s prejudices: some people read only the science news, others only the columnists whose views follow a particular political slant, and so forth. Jen, on the other hand, has set her parameters and then tells Ramanujan to violate those parameters twenty percent of the time. In others words, there’s a little chaos in her inbox. Just enough for her taste. On a particularly energetic day, she might go with a little more chaos. In the evening after an exhausting day of travel, perhaps she’ll ask for less.

I really want a tool that helps me stave off information. Or to put it more positively, I need an assistant I can send out to glean information, returning to me a subset of relevant items. I am way beyond the point of being able to handle all the information that interests me. I need something (or someone) to dispassionately filter. But my filter has got to include an element of surprise.

An organized inbox, with just the right touch of chaos. That’s all I ask.

And now, to work.

Joining the Flock

I confess to whomever may read this: I am blogging not for the sake of writing, or because I am driven to express some urgent opinion or news. I started this blog so that I can experience blogging itself. I’m a technical writer working again after a four-year hiatus, for Flock, a Web 2.0 company. If I’m going to write Help information for Flock’s users, I’ve got to understand their world, which includes blogging. So here I am.

After giving it some thought I realized that the subject for my blogging would not be politics, or culture, or every day life. No, the obvious topic for me is what it’s like to re-enter the world of beta software and new tools and daily builds. Especially given that I’m rapidly approaching fogey-status, as a 51-year-old mom who first held a computer-related job over 35 years ago.

My lineage is Apple, Netscape/Mozilla, and Eazel. This represents a clear path leading to Flock. But I think choosing to work within the open source community requires something more: a come-to-Jesus moment, when one realizes that the best way for a tech writer to combat evil and support the good is to work with companies building on open source. As an ex-hippy flower child sort of person, I want any work I do in the world to support people of good will, not empire builders and greed-motivated monopolies. But enough of my politics.

My first job in computing was as a high school junior. I was given a security clearance and a stack of questionnaires containing personal data for hundreds of Coast Guard cadets. My company was trying to help the Coast Guard understand which cadets would quit after a short stint, and which ones would stay on. My job was to take data from the questionnaires and record it on giant code sheets, which would then go to keypunch operators. The resulting punched cards could be batch processed and statistically analyzed by an IBM mainframe. I don’t know if the answer was ever found. But four years ago when everyone was raving about “hanging chads,” I knew exactly what that meant.

The best part of that job was those huge code sheets, which had the words “FORmula TRANslation” printed at the top. Also, “FORTRAN Statement.” What wonderful words! Between that and the security clearance, I felt like I was involved in some sort of arcane secret society. I didn’t resemble the rest of the company, though. While everyone else came to work in white shirts and dark neckties, I wore sandals, long skirts, beads, and the standard hippy girl long straight hair.

I attended college at Wheaton College — not the evangelical school, but a small women’s school by the same name, located in in Norton Massachusetts. It was a great place for an incipient feminist to attend college. Wheaton was too small to have its own computer, but we had time-sharing with Dartmouth. Our time to use Dartmouth’s computer always seemed to be in the wee hours of the morning. I was one of students and faculty who took advantage of this resource. I don’t recall what I did — but I suspect it had less to do with work and more to do with figuring out the computer itself. Games? Poking around? I can’t remember, but I probably did both.

Graduate school at Yale, in political science, brought me back to batch processing and punched cards. Woe to she who dropped a stack of cards! My most vivid memory is of offering up my stack of cards, including data cards and instructions for the statistical analysis to be performed, to the card reader. If you received back a thick stack of printout, you won. (If the stack was thin, you lost — the error statements were short.) The computer itself lived behind closed doors, serviced by quiet, nerdish technical people. In another room, behind large glass windows, sat the select group authorized to use the interactive terminals that talked directly to the computer. Later, as acting director of a data analysis center at the University of Vermont, I found out that the interactive users were simply entering lines of code that looked just like the data on punched cards.

It was at Stanford University that I actually became hooked. As a research assistant for the Hoover Institution’s house Democrat (political scientist Heinz Eulau), I became one of the first users of the Hoover’s brand new computers. The Hoover was late in coming to computers, but someone donated two: a PDP-11 and a VAX. With my fellow research assistant and best friend Nancy, I devoted many hours to exploring these state-of-the-art machines via the text-based game “dungeon.” No graphics, no sound… just lines of text, such as “You have entered a dark cave. There is a jeweled box in the corner.” (One must type in a reply; in this example “take box” is the obvious response.)

Soon, however, I was recruited into writing small manuals for each Hoover department that wanted to use the computers. Someone pointed out that I could be paid good money for end-user technical writing. So just as I was beginning to realize that I hated political science and could study it no longer, an alternative career presented itself.

I convinced the technical writing department at Four Phase, a company later bought out and closed down by Motorola, to hire me as an entry-level writer. The publications group was large — we had a lot to write about, since the software was hard to use — and we worked in a set of astoundingly ugly pre-fab offices on the site that later became Apple’s campus. In 1985 I left Four Phase for maternity leave, never to return. Four Phase went out of business, and I was laid off while on leave.

It was around that time that Nancy and I decided, in conversation over lunch at Chef Chu’s in Mountain View, that we needed to buy personal computers. I remember we agreed that PCs had been around long enough that most of the bugs had probably been worked out. I purchased an 8088-based computer with no hard disk. A few months later I installed my first drive, and set myself up with a word processor so I could work as a consultant. Eventually I worked on a technical glossary for Apple’s corporate library, met some of the staff writers at Apple, and after a few more years of consulting, became a regular Apple employee.

Before Apple, I had worked strictly on a command line basis. I scorned menus. Why bother working one’s way through a menu hierarchy, when it was so much faster just to enter commands on one line? (I could touch type, too.) But the Apple computer I used for the library’s project had a mouse attached to it. Suddenly the point of the graphical user interface became clear. I tried an early version of Windows on my own computer (by then a 286-based one). Apple’s version was so much better — smiley icons, cute noises, etc. — that I became a faithful Apple user, as I am to this day.

At Apple I authored many Mac manuals, graduating over time to senior and principal writer. I worked on the first generation of Power Macs, and on the first implementation of Apple’s online Help system (Apple Guide). But the romance of the browser wars — or perhaps it was masochism — enticed me to move to Netscape. Sadly, at Netscape I became mired in Netscape 6. I keep my Netscape 6 tee shirt deeply buried in my dresser drawer, but I still proudly display my Mozilla memorabilia.

Mozilla taught me about the concept and mission of open source, giving me new hope that creativity would triumph over commercialism. At the end of the year 2000, I eagerly moved on to a position at Eazel, a startup company developing an easier user interface for Linux. Six weeks later, as the economy began its long slide, I was laid off.

I admit: I figured that with the economy headed down the toilet, open source would die out and Microsoft would win. September ushered in a new era of bleakness and despair. I decided to retire permanently to spend my time gardening, quilting, and being a mom. I retreated. I made a lot of quilts. My daughters became adults. My husband continued to work, much too hard. Four years passed.

Eli Goldberg, an old friend from Netscape and Eazel, finally suggested that I take a look at Flock. Bart Decrem called me, and I wandered over to Flock’s headquarters. It didn’t take long to fall for the garage filled with computers, beanbag pillows, and white boards. I discovered that the help text I’d written for Mozilla hadn’t changed much in four years. Perhaps no one’s working on it anymore. The possibility of doing a little something to help along a noble project, and lots of coffee, have drawn me out of my retirement.

So that’s how I came to Flock, to work once again on the open source browser. It all makes sense now that I read over this saga — I can’t resist a chance to work on something that challenges that looming force in Seattle. I’m pretty confident — actually, I’m VERY confident — that Microsoft can’t dominate the Web 2.0. It simply isn’t cool enough. That, and the fact that I can walk from my house over to Flock, and the presence at Flock of many great people and one very sweet dog, makes me feel ready to work one last time on the rough edge of the software industry.

But after this, I’m retiring for good.