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While the video that has been recorded will not be ready for next weeks as we heard, I would like to reply on some points of criticism, and react on some very stereotypical antifeminist "criticism".

The discussion during Q&A was very well on the topic, and positively interested. While we got questions, we were informed that the discussion on twitter that had been going on while we were talking, was mixed at best. In a recap of the twitter search for #SIGINT for the time of the panel, I got the impression, that some people have accidentally or because of bias not heard what we said. At least as I recall it, we gave lots of disclaimers, like saying that we come with different experiences, have different angles and are in different communities. That we would like to talk about sexists, which can be male and female, and that there are men who can be feminists. That we have different feminist theories and practices. We still wanted to talk about problems we meet when interacting in geek groups and spaces. While having in mind that woman* is not the only potentially excluding factor, and that there is a set of "others" aka non-white, non-male, non-ablebodied, not-young, non-rich people that can be excluded from groups such as in geek culture.

Something, that went very wrong, was someone sending this tweet, and it being retweeted several times. It says: "So. Now 10 breasts are talking about feminism... #Sigint" by fussl.

This was unneccessary at best. It objectified the people on the panel, reduced us to our body parts. The only explanation I got from the guy who retweeted this from his friend fussl, was that it was an accurate thing to say. I especially called him on his panel-related tweeting, because it was not only resentful and wrong, but also because he had been one of the people who initiated the process to get a talk or action on gender (in)equality and feminism on the SIGINT. After initiating he never got really verbose about what he wanted and how it would be achievable. All in all the mailing list conversation was uffering from all the people being undermotivated or having little time to put some effort into getting something handed in to the organizers of the conference. Close to the deadline of the CfP, Svenja and I handed something in, all the time informing the list and giving people time to react. Noone cared.

So, after the panel, I was wondering if I should confront the guy, or if I should just ignore him. I less decided, than acted on an impulse and asked him to tell me that stuff he twittered again, and face to face. Here is what he came up with (said in my words, from memory:

1. It was not wrong to tweet the breast-tweet. Because the panelists all have breasts, because women have them.

WRONG. In which universe is it okay to objectify people and reduce them, and what they say to their body parts. Even if the inital tweet was not meant like that, a slip, the multiple retweets of it made it impossible for us to feel like what we say is taken seriously. Also, breasts can't talk. Also, in which universe do most men not have breasts? And nipples? How so is having breasts significant when talking about feminism? I could go on, but I won't and I didn't.

2. He does not give square about gender or gender roles and we did too little explaining and acted as women so we didn't deconstruct our gender enough.

WRONG. Obviously he does not give up his gender role (how would one, this is difficult and you would at least need to make an attempt). And for making a statement like that, you would have to know people on the panel better. How the frakk could we who were sitting up there show our non-binary gender identity to people, who obviously can do nothing but define us into the binaries? Before we even start talking? Also, why in hell are we obliged to give a freakshow? And since when is "femme" not a valid play on gender roles? So, I beg you pardon, but we really don't have to strip our personalities and our innards or outwards to you just to prove you that we really are circus freaks. Period.

The main problem with gender binaries is, that you are constantly being thrown back to them, whether you want to or not. And if you come into spaces or groups, that are (mostly) by tradition, society or self-defined male spaces (because they deal with science, machines and computers). So, if we are treated as women there, and women are treated in specific ways, we have all rights in the world to talk about it. Actually, more than half of the people on stage are defining as queer, if we choose to participate in a panel like that, and we choose the topic and what we want to say, we have our reasons. And the right to do so. You can actually not think any part of queer theories or debates without the existence of feminism, antisexist and antiracist theories and practice.

3. Putting pictures of naked, beauty standard women in ASCII art on the wall of the hackcenter (or any other temporary or permanent hackerspace) was a display of art, and should not be critisized. Also, think about how huge the porn collections on the guys' computers are, this is nothing. This is an act of consent, and for some magic reason consent means majority vote as soon as there is no consent anymore.

WRONG. Even though it might be art, showing it in a place where a minority of women* come, is potentially excluding them. Saying this was an act of consent means there is a democratic poll every minute another person walks in. If someone disagrees, and is not listened to, they are being defined out of the group. So, if a woman disagrees, she is not part of the group anymore. This is excluding and sexist. Now, to me the ASCII naked woman was not particularly excluding, though I liked the "looong cat" better. But someone did not feel comfortable, and so the picture should be taken down. Because it is not a "boys room", but a room for everybody.

Also, calling me on naivety, really? Of course, you boys are all supposed to have huge pr0n collections, and I am supposed to be a "sex-positive" feminist, and if not, to shut up. I don't think, feminism has ever been "sex-negative". And being called for naive is certainly not a first for feminists. Any feminist, actually. This would actually be a rant in itself. However, watching pr0n does not make you a hacker. Hacking does. Critical thinking does. Listening to others and learning from them, and applying knowledge to form something new spectacular, does. Inspiring each other to reach new aims, does make you a hacker. So why don't you try to read up a little on feminist criticism on the topic (aka RTFM), and try not to make a hackerspace exclude less-privileged (by society and groups) "other-than-you's"? What you watch in private on your computer is your deal, while what you show in public or semi-public spaces concerns everyone who enters. Is that so hard to understand?

I feel like I could go on and on. I'll leave it at that, and maybe contribute in comments or write more posts if I feel like it.

Let me just once more thank the volunteer group organizing this community-driven event to give us the stage to talk about this topic. Special thanks to Nika, who really supported us contentwise and with practicalities. I hear there have been lots of thinking about and discussions on the panel afterwards, and that makes me really happy we did this. Also thanks to Heather, Ella, Leena and Svenja to get up there together with me and talk about the F-word. More blogging about this at I heart digital life.

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There are many books available for students who looks for free textbooks. Ask your public or academic library for advice on their databases and which books or article could be relevant to your research. In Norway there is an excellent service with volunteering librarians who answer your questions via phone, email or chat - and most recently also facebook and twitter. It is called Biblioteksvar.

The synchronizing of content that doesn't come from the store your device is locked to, can, however, be a pain. Calibre is a tool that can help you there. The software collects all your ebooks in a library, you can convert them to other formats and push them to your reader when it's connected via USB. Calibre has also predefined tasks of collecting news from feeds, converting them to easily readable ebooks, and pushing the daily news to your device. This works for Google Reader and ReadItLater, too.

The nook is root- and hackable. It runs Android, and if you follow the instructions of the nookdevs, some neighborly concerned Android hackers, you can get around some of the nasty restrictions when you have bought a nook and want to use it outside of the U.S. It voids your warranty, though. You get a web and file browser, a feed reader and lots of other functionality. Someone has even started developing a twitter client, Twook. You will also get the chance to get familiar and comfortable with the Android SDK, and you should be comfortable about using the command line to do all this.

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I like paper. I really do. I am a big fan of paper hacks, book binding and paper as a note taking tool. But my fandom only bears so far. I do not wish to carry a big stack of heavy paper books with me when I am traveling, which I do. Or when moving. I do not wish to break my back, or the backs of my helpers. Not every book is worth reading twice, and when it comes to design and typesetting only very few books are that beautiful that you want to collect them because typesetter, printers and book binders have done such a good work. So the ever so often sigh of librarians ("but, what happens to the books!"), well... Let's just say, I am not very worried.

So, why the nook. Right now there are only two devices to my knowledge that feature what is important for me in an ebook reader on the market. (Like, really on the market, not long waiting lists for especially interested people.) Both the Amazon Kindle, and the Barnes & Noble nook have wifi and 3G capability. Both of them have a long battery life when reading, and both seems to be somewhat longlasting. Also, both of them have e-ink screens. (I consider the iPad to be crippleware and not an ebook due to little battery capacity and backlighting. I like shiny devices. But not this one so far.)

I like the nook better, simply because he has a touch screen instead of a keyboard. And because he runs with Android as OS, which also runs on my phone. Although I do not wholeheartedly agree with Google on development decisions and privacy issues, Android is pretty great when it comes to smart phones. Its somewhat open character makes problems set by Google and carriers circumventable.

What made me hesitate to buy either of the two devices, was the decision of the two book stores (and others along with them) and the book publishers to lock down the reading material as much as possible. Every ebook you can buy on Amazon are only readable on the Kindle reader. And you can only buy ebooks from Barnes & Noble if you have a US IP adress and a US billing adress.

Of course, there are other book stores. But a lot of pubishers have said no to selling their material outside the US. I fail to find the appropriate words for this stupidity. I am still looking for ways to buy books. Not to talk about checking out ebooks in a library. Apparently inhabitants of Denmark and Sweden can already do that. But in Norway, librarians and politicians are still busy with letting themselves get scared off by the lobbyists of publishing houses.

I don't want to be locked to Amazon. I buy the occasional book there,
because they have almost everything. I knew before about how tightly the Kindle is linked to Amazon. But experiencing how you really can't use any book that they offer in their store on your *reader, whatever reader that might be, made me really angry. And sure, there are ways of circumventing the lockdown of the Barnes & Noble store. But I ask: why should they be able to do that? Why should publishers and book stores be allowed to be so strict? Why would anyone want to prevent someone from reading a book. Let alone a book he or she wants to purchase?

Ebooks can be a great device for students, people with problems in reading can increase the font size to their liking. If people have their books with them, they will have so many good reading experiences, it could actually make reading popular. Or at least better apprehensible for those with attention deficits. You have a full-fledged full text search at your finger tip with every book that you read. What kind of information society locks down reading of books?

People, some of them librarians or teachers, are worried that people read less books now that there is the internet. Well, do you have to kill trees and emit lots of chlorine in the water, not to speak about the resources used for Transportation of physical books? Only to read a texts longer then 20 pages in a proper more or less linear manner?

Even if you are not against DRM in general. Trust me: You don't want DRM on ebooks.

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The outcome is quite fascinating. While the one about Meland focuses on words and animations with the (very nice and sympathetic) head librarian as, the other one focuses on the youngest target group of potential patrons: A - mostly silent - kid boy with his curious discoveries in the library. Both the films are charming. I like the approach of presenting the librarian as a person and give the library not only a lot of meaning, but also show a friendly and smart human face. And I also like the approach of the other film that shows very well how you can go on a discovery in the library - and find besides the fishing rod (that you really can borrow at this library" and all the other stuff, what could be an interesting discovery for you.

The film about Meland bibliotek:

The film about Fjell folkeboksamling:

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PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by divisionparis. - Explore more music videos.

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New modules have been tried. I am very satisfied with using the Organic Groups module for making subsites for the involved community libraries. Although they don't use the full spectre of social media capability og the module, it is quite powerful for managing the workflow and adding more areas for publishing. That way both the collaboration between the libraries and the profile of the individual library is preserved and managed. If the libraries will have use for this, their patrons can authenticate on the site and get notified about new articles and events. Maybe they will even have forums or other features for their users one day. While Drupal is somewhat more complex to administer than WordPress, it makes it so easy to add new features and areas without programming in PHP. Two library consortia needed calendars that would show the individual libraries events as well as the whole consortias events in different views. This was easily deliverable with Organic group calendars, the Date and Event modules  and the Views module. I learned a great dal about Views, which has a learning curve. But once you understand the essentials (what means what), you can do powerful reorganizing of content and list every type of content in new ways.

One difficult issue was the question: Where to host the Drupal sites? The library department in the Hordaland County Council could not do it in-house and had special needs: The Drupal core and the modules had to be kept up to date for them. It took me a lot of time to research which companies could do this for a reasonable price. We ended up finding a collaboration of two smaller vendors of free software for libraries. Which gives the department both the possibility to get support in Norwegian, as well as the vendors are experienced in the field of library catalogue software, as both vendors sell installation, migration, hosting and support of the Koha and Evergreen ILS. So, Libriotech and BibLibre will take on this task in the coming weeks.

It may not sound like a big deal, but having capable people ensure that the sites are running really wasn't easy to manage and secure the future of this project. It also takes some pressure of my task list as the updating processes will not take that much time anymore when we will come into the critical phase of launching the sites for the public to see.

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