There was a skillshare on Information Handling held just a few minutes ago, with DS leading and me assisting. The main idea for the session was to discuss how the participants are gathering data / information on various issues, mostly related to human rights abuse and the freedom movement.

I'm really grateful that the participants engaged the discussion, sharing with us how information flows from within to outside their borders. From accounts from grieving mothers to internationl human rights databases. But beyond the information flows and cycles, beyond the technologies and strategies employed, what I think I'll remember most from the training will be when one of the participants said: "we're gathering information for the Transition".

Or in other words, for when they finally achieve freedom for their country.

There you go: the real point of all this in a nutshell. The heart of the matter. The raison d'etre.

Gave me goosebumps, to be honest.

Of course, my (possibly) ADHD-addled brain called up Ingrid de Kok's "The Transcriber Speaks" two seconds after the goosebump break-out. And now that I've had about three cigarettes after that session, I think I know why.

These particular lines (or my mental paraphrases of them) have been playing on replay in my head:

"But how to transcribe silence from tape?
Is weeping a pause or a word?
What written sign for a strangled throat?"

"And if the silence seemed to stretch....
Was it my job to conclude: "The witness was silent. There was nothing left to say"?"

These lines speak of things that we have no technology to fully capture as these activists are documenting the facts of human rights violation/s. A spanky, effective human rights database might be developed. Martus might be deployed to key organisations and activists. But how can bits and bytes fully capture what can't even be articulated? How can we even begin articulating the full extent of trauma?

Tags: activist stuff, bts, geekery, tripping away
state of mind: contemplative

Had a much-needed break from the training yesterday. A small group of participants headed for the Chiang Mai Zoo and a few temples, while the majority of the group (including ALL of the facilitators) headed to Pantip Plaza to ooh and ah over gadgets and other geek stuff. With multiple screams of "Skillshare!!!", we were off.

I had no real geek shopping agenda, so I wandered around Pantip Plaza aimlessly. I looked around for lenses for my camera, hoping to score a good deal. Goddamned 55 - 200 mm lense costs about the same as my camera! So I wandered off to see where the rest of the boys were at, joined some of them as they checked out various wi-fi access points / routers / cards, GPRS modems, video cards and whatnots. They spotted a massive antenna and dish at one of the shops, but when the drooling over it lasted more than 15 minutes, I left them. Ran into DS and scoped out a few digital camera options with him.  I eventually joined Uber Geek God to the Mac, and we headed to the open market to de-geek ourselves by spending money on things that (1) don't need electricity to work, and (2) had no wires and cables and other metal parts in them.

Everyone met up for dinner at The Riverside, a nice restaurant / pub by the river (duh!). The food was pretty amazing, but it was soooooo humid lastnight, I ate dinner with sweat in my eyes. After half a pack of ciggies and a drawn out game of "What will happen to the flame in the lamp if I put paper / cucumber slices / glass holders to cover the flame?" with the Bulgarian Chuck Norris (real superhero name pending) and The Liberator, we headed back to the resort, sharing the back of the pick-up with Emperor Dirkatin and the Uber Geek God to the Mac.

Within 15 minutes after arriving at the resort, the pool was pretty packed with participants and facilitators, most of them shouting "Skillshare!" / "Poolshare" before diving in. I stayed in the shallow end, half-submerged (needed to cool my aching feet down, but couldn't have my face soaking in chlorinated water without serious repurcussions from my dermatologist) while enjoying a fresh pack of cigs.

The conversation immediately (and not surprisingly) turned geeky --with references to Star Wars, Chuck Norris, Open Source, Lord of the Rings in every other sentence. The Bulgarian Chuck Norris captured it all with his Yoda impersonation, saying:
"Linux leads the path to the dark side. Linux leads to fear. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to suuuuuffferring!"

And someone capped it with "Microsoft is going Open Source, I sense a disturbance in the Source."

It was one of those You Had to Be There kind of things, but it's still making me laugh at random times today.

Tags: bts, geekery, pointless posts, tripping away
state of mind: relaxed
background noise: dirk's cool dance music

Sitting here with DS, disussing the session on Training Skills tomorrow, and thinking up ways to demonstrate bad training skills. It's going to be a stand up riot tomorrow -- I hope the rest of the trainers are willing to ham it up and be The Top 5 Worst Trainers in the world:

• The Mouse Dominatrix -- this one gets cranky with trainees who don't quite know where to point and click their mouse (or can't get command lines right) during hands-on session, and eventually takes over the mouse (or keyboard), missing the entire point of a Hands On session.
• The O.C. (Overly Corrective -- this one likes barking out "No, that's NOT how you do that!", and "That's wrong! I'm right! Do it my way!"
• The Powerpoint Reader -- the trainer who spent the last 48 hours pasting every bit of text about his/ her topic on his 73-slide long power point presentation, then proceeds to spend his / her session reading straight out of the screen.
• The Monologue-r -- the trainer who not only beats around the bush, s/he gets lost in the forest and misses the point.
• The Jargon Monster -- this one speaks in acronyms, weird words and culturally irrelevant references.

I reckon the same boys who did this would be up for it.

And  this one would probably be leading the pack.

Tags: activist stuff, bts, geekery, tripping away
state of mind: dorky
background noise: airconditioner humming in the fridge room

Even before I got here, I've been having problems with words -- specifically about matching particular words to specific concepts.

Had a long convo with CGR about what we meant when we said "adaptation" -- was it the process of adapting something or the output of that process? Both are true and correct, but for the purposes of conceptual clarity, we had to agree what we meant when we used that term, and then agree on consistently using the term to define one or the other but never both.

I should have learned my lesson then and I really should stop believing that the world lives in my head. Just because (I think) I understand something doesn't mean the world will understand it. Just because I think the words "crappy" and "government" should never be placed together doesn't mean that:

• it doesn't exist
  
• other people agree with me that it should officially be an oxymoron
  
• other people know that when I say "crappy", I mean governments that (a) take a dump on electoral processes and then proceed to clamp down on anyone and anything that dares to raise issues against the said government, and / or (b) curtail necessary freedoms within their domains.
  

It's the third bit that's doing my head in at the moment. It's the third bit that makes any tech training a challenge. As it is, the terrain of technical terminologies is wrought with metaphors -- it has to be. Otherwise, we would be calling a "mouse" "The Device Connected to Your Computer that Lets You Direct the Cursor". Or "drivers" would be called "Small Applications that Allow Other Hardware to Work with Your Computer". The Worldwide Web would have been called "A Gazillion Networked Computers Serving Various Kinds, Types and Formats of Information Using Mark-Up Languages".

In the past decade, new mutations of words (where "mouse" becomes so much more than that animal that likes cheese and has an on-going war with cats) have come from the information technology field. These technologies have been so pervasive that the metaphors it has developed to assign names to particular tools and processes have been quite universal (and universally English, at that).

In technical training,there's another layer of metaphors that one has to deal with. Not only does a trainer need to interrogate assumptions of the understandability of universal (or what is perceived to be universal), predominantly-English metaphors, s/he also has to be able to explain these metaphors and what they actually mean using more metaphors -- in English.

Information Architecture, for instance, is a metaphorical term for the process and product of organising information (to be simplistic about it). The term is derived from the process of designing physical structures and applied in designing virtual spaces like web sites and software programmes. So the metaphor of a website being a space is reiterated by the term Information Architecture.

Now try explaining that without using other metaphors, or using metaphors that speak to a specific audience. Then pop a painkiller and see me in the morning.

*****

In other news, the inverse (and perverse) proportions between the rate of technical breakthroughs happening globally and the decreasing freedoms in some areas of the world just slapped me in the face today.

So much hype about Web 2.0 and all the collaboration, sharing and other funky stuff people can do with it. So much hype about how bridging the digital divide will lead to all things good. Meanwhile, some governments are clamping down so hard on their citizens and political refugees that (a) ICTs are becoming yet another freedom denied, and (b) those who do have access to these technologies expose themselves to government surveillance and persecution. 

If it wasn't so real, the irony would have been hilarious.

Tags: activist stuff, bts, geekery, tripping away
background noise: Burmese Karaoke

[Had to blur the context of this entry because there are bad governments and people out there who may stumble upon this blog and think "Hmm... maybe I should report this to an Authoritarian Government". I was stupid enough to think that the world is a safe place for a while there. Never again.]

There was no reason for trepidation, after all.

The trainers... err ok, I was a bit worried that the training curriculum we had designed for the activist techies was not really relevant to their and their communities' needs and realities. I waffled between thinking it was too advanced or too basic -- which I think shows my inexperience in doing trainings for a highly-unique group like this one and training men.

Yeah, I think I will have to admit that part of my trepidation has to do with being a female training a largely-male audience (and when I say largely-male, I mean, there is only 1 female participant), but most importantly, these are men I can't hate. If these were men I could hate, things would be easier for me. A defensive stance is much, much better than a tentative one  (pretty much like the difference between striding into a room wearing big, combat boots and  sauntering in wearing 3-inch platform sandals). If these were men I could hate, I could easily deliver what I need to deliver and not care if it is relevant to them. If these were men I could hate, I wouldn't even be here.

I honestly can't go around believing pre-conceived notions about groups and categories of people. There was no way I could have 100% believed that all these activist techies were 100% sexist bastards. But, I've met enough Sexist Freedom Fighters that there was also no way I could have 100% believed that they were all good and nice and Feminist-friendly. I may want to assume the best of people but I'm not stupid.

There was no reason to not give these men the benefit of the doubt. My own biases has already given them about a million points simply for being refugees from their own country, and another million points for being self-taught techies supporting their freedom movement. I was also quite aware that reason why this was a predominantly-male training was because there were hardly any women from their community doing this kind of work. I can't really hate these men for that fact.

So in the absence of any rationale to take on a defensive stance, I was left with trepidation. Or Trepidations. The general trepidation of wanting to deliver a relevant and meaningful training to support the tech work within this movement coupled with the specific trepidation of a lone female trainer going into a 98% male training on technology. Basically, I worried about  my lack of skills and how that reflects (maybe even reiterates) sexist notions of women being useless in technical fields. 

Turns out, there was no reason for the Trepidations.

Day 1 went off swimmingly well. So far, these techies are blowing away all former memories of Sexist Freedom Fighters. They have been nothing but open and welcoming. And not once have I ever felt odd for being one of the three women in this crowd -- not from the participants and definitely not from the other facilitators.

But more importantly, beyond my own self-centred concerns, it seems that the curriculum that we have designed for them addresses what they need / want. We did a needs assessment as the first session of the Open Publishing Track and we found out that we were not so far off the mark.

So for tomorrow, I think I'm only going to need to worry about butterflies that take up residence in my tummy prior to any public-speaking part. Is speaking in front of 6 people considered Public?

Tags: activist stuff, bts, geekery, good days, tripping away, women and tech
coordinates: chiang mai, thailand
state of mind: satisfied
background noise: geekboys planning info security session