I went to Seattle Mindcamp a little over a week ago, and it’s interesting to note which conversations have really stuck with me. The first was the one on encouraging women in technology. There’s always a nature vs. nuture tension in those conversations, whether the gender differences in career pursuits of technology have to do with socialization, cultural forces, and/or inherent differences in intelligence and sociability etc. An examination of the distribution of gender differences in intellegence- suggests men score higher than women because there are more of them at the extreme end of the distribution: if you cut off the extreme outliers, the differences go away. That, combined with my own experience working with developers at Microsoft, and the fact that the incidence of aspergers amongst kids born in Redmond and the Bay area is so high, certainly suggests there’s a genetic component to a person’s ability to sit isolated in front of a computer for hours and days at a time….
Even so, whatever the cause of these differences, there’s no doubt that the computer industry suffers from the disproportionately male presence, particularly in the growing area of social computing which should be largely influenced by those with expertise in the social sciences and design. I think it’s extremely important to separate out conversations about the causes of gender differences and the solutions towards minimizing those differences. The variability within gender is so much greater than the variability across gender. If our culture actively supported and lauded women for entering the computing technology fields, there are enough women out there inclined in that direction.
The other conversation that I have found myself mulling over is the use of social technologies for supporting collaboration and community in the Burning Man groups here in Seattle. Mailing lists in particular largely dominate as the tool for social coordination and social awareness amongst these groups (which are comprised of sociable individuals who collaborate around large scale art, often year round). It was noted in the conversation that as much as these mailing groups have an impact on coordination for collaborations, they have an impact on community and identity development. Seattle is a very technically connected city, with many individuals conversing and tracking the activities of their groups over the course of the day. People often report feeling “left out” if they aren’t online at least once a day. A friend who recently moved to Seattle told me that he found that people are online and using mailing lists much more in Seatle than in Chicago. “It really makes it much easier to get things done” he said.
Gmail has proven to be a valuable tool for the mailing list junkies because of its search and filtering capabilities, but there are many features that would increase it’s effectiveness: their emphasis on search and filtering over folders makes it difficult to simply sort conversations from mailing lists. I would actually like to sort out mailing list messages out of my inbox into certain folders. Also, I would like Gmail to automatically tag my mailing list messages with the names of the mailing lists. I would also like to be able to sort my contacts by mailing list. I would also like to save or tag certain messages as event messages specific to a certain date, since so many of my mailing list messages are around events. I could go on and on, really. I highly recommend that Gmail and Yahoo (and MSN, for that matter) think about examining mailing lists in particular, with a mind toward understanding their prevalence and impact on people’s lives and how mailing list systems could be improved with mailing list overload in mind.
If I could get my hands on all that mailing list data, I’d have a field day. I’ve seriously thought about just exporting my own data and examining it but I do recognize I am at the extreme end of the sociability scale…
