A recent incident reminded me that even adults can slip up on this. Anyone who spent time on Facebook in the previous decade saw many viral “quizzes” where people shared answers about their hometowns, favorite movies, foods, sports heroes, vacation spots, etc. Lately I’ve seen posts in Substack Notes about “My One-For-Life Picks” where people share the one thing they like most in a bunch of categories, then tag others to answer too.

Guess what? Publicly posting answers to these quizzes and posts can give away answers to common security questions. Yes, sharing is great, and getting to know people better is fun. But sharing everything (especially in public, where scammers can scrape it into an AI-powered hacking tool) can be risky.

📗 Sneak peek: I’ve decided to revamp that article so those reuse permissions aren’t relevant or required. I’m now working on turning it into a small illustrated book for kids and for their adults!

I hope my book will help with teaching kids of all ages what AI ethics mean in today’s world, and how to stay safer. It will combine illustrated, large-print content aimed at kids with more detailed explanations for adults, for each of 10 concepts. (Target child age range TBC, maybe 6-10 or 8-12. Target page range 30-40.)

If you’d like to be an “ARC reviewer” and receive a free advance copy of the book in return for sharing candid feedback, please let me know:

In the meantime: For very young kids (4-6), I found a new book that might interest their adults: “Privacy Please”. The author is a CMU professor with 3 kids who has researched privacy. See this article about her book.

Stay tuned for more updates on the new book, and other news about staying safe and using AI effectively!

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Volunteering to be interviewed

Since I started the AISW interview series in August 2024, every announcement and post and newsletter edition has openly invited anyone with a story about AI — and we ALL have stories about AI — to be featured as a future guest. (Details are at the end of this article.1)

In over 60+ interviews, only 1 person has taken me up on that open invitation.

But so many people have responded enthusiastically when asked.

It seems that interested people want to be asked. But why?

Some people drop hints trying to encourage an invitation. Subtle hints doesn’t always work, though. Some of us (including e.g. autistic folks) are not wired to recognize and respond to hints. 😉

A comment from an interview guest about this, on how they were hinting and hoping I would ask them, got me thinking about why people don’t just DM or reach out to take me up on the offer.

Volunteering a comment

Then a related incident popped up. A newsletter post reported on results from asking some engineering leaders for inputs about how they are using AI. The post featured answers from 11 men and — you guessed it — zero women.

I asked the author about it privately. His response was that he had posted an open invitation in his subscriber chat channel, and no women had chimed in. In his estimation, maybe 15% or so of his (quite large) subscriber base was women. (Substack doesn’t exactly make it easy for us to know gender distribution among our subscribers, or among who does and doesn’t engage in subscriber chats.) Still, with an 85-15 split in a pool of thousands of people, getting 11 men and 0 women is less than 17% likely.

What’s the deal?

These are only two cases. And there are so many variables, including the culture of the newsletter and the gender & persona of the newsletter owner. We don’t have any data on whether women join some or all STEM-related subscriber chats in proportion to their newsletter membership or at lower rates than men. Or maybe, like the questions on why women use AI less than men on their jobs in some cases2, women’s “double shifts” mean they have less time to engage promptly in subscriber chats or volunteer to be interviewed. I’m still wondering if we can find some clues.

My estimate is that about 1/2 to 2/3 of my subscribers are women. And about 2/3 of my interview guests so far (some of whom aren’t even on Substack) have been women or nonbinary.

I wondered for a bit if the hesitancy, waiting to be asked individually, might be gender-related conditioning. What some people call “imposter syndrome” is reputed to affect women more than men. So perhaps women are thinking “oh, she doesn’t mean me, I don’t qualify”. But other than that 1 exception, the men in my network haven’t been volunteering for interviews either. So it can’t be just that.

My recent guest mentioned that their habit of waiting to be asked might be culturally-based — a tradition of being modest. Their theory was that Americans would be more assertive. But that hasn’t been my experience. Just over half of my interview guests have been from the USA, and only 1 of over 30 USA guests was a volunteer.

What would *I* do?

On the flip side, I’ve been asking myself: if I saw someone else post an open invitation like mine, would *I* have the courage or confidence to speak up and invite myself?

As recently as 5 years ago, my initial reaction would likely have been “oh, they don’t mean me, I don’t qualify” and my own answer would have been no. 😆 When our Chief People Officer invited me for my first podcast interview a few years ago, an internal episode on DEI & other topics, I hesitated deeply. But she persisted & talked me into it, and it went fine.

I’ve now done 60+ interviews for “AI, Software, & Wetware” and even guested a few times on other people’s podcasts. Now, if I can do it without overcommitting myself and the topic’s important to me, my answer is a ‘yes’ for written interviews or articles. For audio, it’s a ‘definite maybe’ if I already know & trust the host or if I am confident about knowing up front what we’ll be discussing.

Looking back, I’ve been mulling why I was so hesitant before. With audio, especially, I suspect it was a trust or fear factor, not knowing how much care the interviewer would take after we recorded it. Like, what if I made a mistake or tripped over my words, and the interview host let the mistakes go into the published interview?

I’ve tried to address that kind of fear in my FAQ for guests3 and in how I process interviews & ask guests to review before I publish it. But perhaps there’s more I could be doing? Or is this fear not what’s holding most people back?

What do you think?

I’d love to hear any thoughts you all have on this!

Have you ever responded to an open invitation that interested you? Why or why not?

If you see a writer post a comment asking for opinions on a topic you know about or have experience with, do you ever chime in? Why or why not?

If you’ve ever seen my invitation to be featured as a guest, and you’d love to be featured if I asked you but are hesitating, can you share why you’re hesitating?

Is there something I could change or say in my invitation to help people feel more welcome to invite themselves?

(Comments, subscriber chats, DMs, or replies to this email are all welcome)

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“We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.” - Thomas Jefferson

"Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote." - Daniel Webster / George Jean Nathan / William E. Simon

But many US citizens don’t vote. Voter participation in the US has been well below other advanced democratic countries for decades. It has varied widely, from a low of 35% in one state to 75% in another state. Nationwide turnout (based on VEP1) has mostly been stuck in the 50-60% range. On the plus side, voter participation has risen a bit recently; it was 65.9% in the 2020 presidential election.

Why do so many American citizens not vote?

It’s understandable when citizens don’t vote in the face of obstacles, such as voter suppression, disenfranchisement, inaccessible polling places, or lack of transportation. I fully support the people who are working to register and support voters. (Don’t get me started on the ridiculousness of not being able to give water to people waiting in long lines. Policies that limit polling places and hours to create long lines and inconvenience people are just one insidious form of voter suppression.2)

I recognize that there’s also “internalized voter suppression”. We’ve seen decades of gerrymandering, cynical rhetoric, and even outright harmful lies (like in western NC about aid for Hurricane Helene 3) that separate people from each other and from the government. (The Electoral College used in our presidential elections also skews how much people’s votes count for those positions.)

Some people have come to believe that their votes don't count, or that their government has failed them, and it’s hopeless. They see no point in voting because they think nothing will change. Others feel that not-voting as a protest will somehow cause change.

Why is not-voting a problem? Because not-voting definitely won’t change anything. Voting is the only way things CAN change.

“Not voting is not a protest. It is a surrender.” - Keith Ellison

“Be depressed, discouraged and disappointed at failure and the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption, and bad politics — but never give up.” - Marjory Stoneman Douglas

“Not everything that is faced can be changed.  But nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin

My voting history

I haven’t missed an election since I turned 18. Why would I abdicate my decisions, about outcomes that affect us all, to other people who may not share my values?

"You can either vote by voting or vote by not voting. If you don't vote, someone else's vote counts more. IT'S MATH." - Occupy Pragmatism

“Our political leaders will know our priorities only if we tell them, again and again, and if those priorities begin to show up in the polls.” - Peggy Noonan [I assume here that by ‘polls’, Peggy means ‘voting booths’, not ‘surveys’.]

"If you don’t vote, you lose the right to complain." - George Carlin 

I vote for people - not a party. I’m an “independent”. I’ve been officially registered as Unaffiliated for over 25 years. Both major US political parties have serious dysfunctions, none of the other parties’ candidates have a real chance of winning, and neither major party is entitled to my straight-line vote. Although I don’t always vote in primaries, I have voted in primaries for both parties in various years. (Glad to be in a state that lets independent voters do that.)

“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” - Abraham Lincoln

Over the years, I’ve usually voted ‘purple’ split tickets in the general elections in November. But my shade of purple has gotten bluer lately. The red party has gotten so toxic and corrupted by its leadership that I’ve almost despaired of finding red candidates this year whose values and behaviors and policies I can live with. Our human rights have been steadily attacked by people in positions of power who see the world as a zero-sum game that they don’t want to lose.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H.L. Mencken

Our 2024 choices

This weekend, I’ve been reviewing candidates’ websites and several printed and online voter information guides, in preparation for early voting this week. I haven’t yet found ANY red candidates I can vote for in good conscience. The few I remember liking earlier this year got ‘primaried’ by their party.

I’m still looking at the candidates and initiatives for the down-ticket elections. But the top of the ticket is an easy decision, because it’s been clear for many months that there isn’t a real choice.4

At the top, on one side, the choice is a party whose Project 20255 plan and advocates propose to teleport us back to the 1960’s or earlier.

• They fear-monger and rant and whip up hatred & resentment of ‘others’. They want to roll back civil, voting, marriage, religious, and healthcare rights for people who are not white cis/het Christian men. They managed to do this to some extent already, by stacking the Supreme Court and lower courts, and by gerrymandering their way to biased congresses at federal & state levels. They’re not going to stop. They need to BE stopped by voting them out.

• The last 3 SCOTUS justices crossed their fingers behind their backs and swore in their Senate hearings that Roe v. Wade was settled law of the land and wouldn’t be overturned. Then they undid it. My (and everyone’s) daughter and granddaughters now have fewer rights to their own bodies than I did to mine as a young adult. And women are dying as a result. Maternal death rates are way up in Texas (and the US was already disgracefully high before this happened) 6. This isn’t pro-life and it is absolutely unacceptable.

• The VP candidate has openly advocated that women should stay in abusive marriages, not work outside the home, and are only of value to society if they have children or raise them. He has even gone so far as to suggest that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Oh hell no.

• Project 2025 has been led and authored by over a hundred people closely tied to the former president. They want to start operating like a dictatorship in January 2025 to ‘make it so’, and he’s openly said he will be a “dictator on day one”. My ancestors did not fight dictators and fascists overseas so that we could someday allow one to rule us here at home.

In short, this red ticket for President and VP is not a viable choice at all. It’s the polar opposite of what I want for my granddaughters and my grandson, nieces and nephews, friends, or anyone.

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” - Maya Angelou

“There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world.” - Lady Marguerite Gardiner

“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.” - Thomas Sowell

On the other side, at the top of the ticket, Harris has lived experience with inequities, and has talked and walked the talk already. Walz, her VP, has demonstrated his active support for rights for all, not just for cis/het white men like himself. And Harris has succeeded in spite of the many barriers in her way as a woman with African American and Asian American ancestry. Her elections and candidacies to date support faith that she is paving the way for fewer barriers for everyone - including other women and people of color. From her 2020 acceptance speech as VP-elect (quoted in ’s article):

“While I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities. And to the children of our country, regardless of your gender, our country has sent you a clear message: Dream with ambition, lead with conviction, and see yourself in a way that others might not see you, simply because they’ve never seen it before. And we will applaud you every step of the way.

Now is when the real work begins. The hard work. The necessary work. The good work. … To rebuild our economy so it works for working people. To root out systemic racism in our justice system and society. To combat the climate crisis. To unite our country and heal the soul of our nation. The road ahead will not be easy. But America is ready.” - Kamala Harris

I’ve looked at her policy proposals, particularly the economic and health care policies. They’re not perfect, and they will undoubtedly change based on the Congress she gets to work with. But they’re unarguably better for our country than the alternative proposals, which are either atrocious (Project 2025) or laughably sparse (merely “a concept of a plan” for healthcare, after 4 years in the White House and nearly 4 more years since to work out a plan).

That’s not to say that I like every position or policy Harris has put forward. I don’t. I’m still appalled that neither party’s leaders have come out firmly against the atrocities in Gaza. It’s unconscionable. Saying you encourage a ceasefire and two-state solution is fine, but doesn’t go nearly far enough.

“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.” - Albert Einstein

Still, we have far better prospects of stopping the genocide in Gaza sooner with Harris. And our chances of avoiding economic and social hell, continued erosion of our courts and rights, and the death by suicide of our democracy, are going to be better with a bluer Congress.

I want my family members - and everyone in this country - to have a steadily-improving democratic republic, fewer systemic barriers to everything they do, and a world view and governments that actively support (rather than fear) equal rights for all.

I have a dear niece in Texas, a mother of two. I’m hoping she’s already tied her tubes or had a hysterectomy, because if she ever has a miscarriage or needs a D&C for another reason, she might not survive the maternal mistreatment that Texas abortion laws are spawning.

I also hope we can get this mess fixed before her young daughter is at risk of getting pregnant or needing gynecological care. But what I really want is for it to be fixed today, across all of the US. Other women and girls are already suffering and dying, and it’s inexcusable. And they shouldn’t have to be related to me for their lives to matter. (And I hope my niece, and all Texas and US women and men who care about them, see this situation clearly and will be voting accordingly to fix it.)

The bottom line

I think the only way we can get back to a reasonable red party, with candidates I can seriously consider voting for in the future, will be if the current party leadership loses BIG - at as many levels as possible.

It’s a positive sign that SO many red party members have crossed party lines to endorse Harris. I know that some ethical people, like my friend , advocated from the inside for years for the R party to return to real values and principles; many have now been pushed out. I’m hoping that widespread red losses in November will enable the ethical conservatives to carve out the current rot and reclaim the core of their party, so we can restore a healthy balance and cooperation in governing.

This needs to happen below the federal level, too. The legislature in my own state, North Carolina, has been nearly locked up by conniving politicians who care more about power and control than they do about democracy and people.

I’m hoping that enough blue seats are won statewide to break the red super-majorities, so we can fix the gerrymandering and align our house and senate better with the overall views of our citizens. And I’m praying that Josh Stein and can win, and mitigate the damage our legislature has been wreaking (and may continue to wreak if the balance in the NC house and senate doesn’t improve).

The outlook

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” - John Adams

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." - Abraham Lincoln

Some people fear that it’s too late to stop the demise of our democracy, and it’s already a lost cause. I deeply hope it’s not.

I guess we’ll find out in just a week, when, hopefully, we ALL vote to preserve this democratic republic, and not to hand it over to a fearmongering wanna-be dictator and his cronies. As said much more eloquently than I can, we all deserve better 7 - but we’ll only have a chance to get better if we vote for it.

“The future of the republic is in the hands of the American voter.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Voting is not only our right, it is our power. When we vote, we take back our power to choose, to speak up, and to stand with those who support us and each other.” - Loung Ung

“Voting isn’t the most we can do. But it is the least.” - Gloria Steinem

A personal note

I’ve commented and liked posts and Notes along these lines many times. And people who know me well already know how I feel and what I think (even though some of them don’t agree). But speaking out for myself to the world, to people who only know me through Substack, feels important now.

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

Writing this - well, publishing it - feels risky in our highly-polarized environment. But it’s not nearly as unsafe for me as it already is for other folks, or as unsafe as it will be for many more people if this election goes sideways. So here goes. Are you with me?

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Credits

Thank you to and for their feedback and encouragement on this article, and huge thanks to everyone who is helping to inform people and get out the vote for this election!

End Notes

1

There are two main metrics for voter participation: “Voting Age Population” (VAP) and “Voting Eligible Population” (VEP). VAP includes VAP who are not eligible to vote. Reasons for ineligibility could be because they are not US citizens. Also, some states bar people with previous felony convictions from voting. This makes VEP a better measure of participation than VAP.

VEP has been calculated on US election data since 1980. In the 2020 presidential election, the lowest state was Oklahoma at 54.43%; the highest was Minnesota at 79.21%. Overall participation was 65.9%.

This chart based on VAP shows trends by state, and the overall US participation, from 1976 to 2020:

7

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz

We All Deserve Better, America. It's Time We Elect, Better.

I love this country…

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2 years ago · 436 likes · 14 comments · John Pavlovitz

A fresh reaction today on a 5-year-old comment I made on Cory Warfield’s LinkedIn post brought this back to my attention. Here are two pieces of Cory’s advice to people wanting to get more views on LinkedIn:

1. “I also believe that finding your flock (not tribe) can level up your life & humanity. … A tribe has a chief & rivals. A flock are likeminded & prioritize each others’ well being. Use #hashtags & engage with those likeminded”

2. “Tag lots of people in your comments (IMPERATIVE).”

The first point clicked immediately for me, on why ‘flock’ is a better term for a social community (like the ones we’re building here on Substack). It also fits well with a post I made in April about geese and how they work together for the good of the flock. So I’m all in on this one.

The second point puzzled me a bit. Sure, tagging more people would likely draw attention and boost post views (the stated goal). But overdoing it could annoy people and impair a flock’s sense of likemindedness and well-being.

Five years ago, my comment on the post was:

“Cory, I just gave a panel talk on Friday referring to tribes, but I like your flock analogy much better, and will adopt that term going forward.
May I ask why you advise to "Tag lots of people in your comments (IMPERATIVE)"? I am hesitant to tag people unless they are *directly* involved in what I write about. My experience is that not everyone welcomes being tagged, and I've even seen some influencers write about their objections to being tagged. When do you recommend tagging people in the post vs. in additional comments? Can you suggest some guidelines for selecting and tagging people who aren't directly involved in a post? Thanks!”

It drew 4 likes but no replies, and I let it drop then. It’s been 5 years, and this isn’t LinkedIn. I’d like to get a sense of what Substack writers and readers think now about tagging your ‘flock’ or others in posts or comments.

To tag or not to tag, why or when?

Please like, restack, and share to help this poll gain a more diverse and more representative set of views!

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Can you suggest other words that might be even better than flock for a community of like-minded Substackers?

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In honor of today being Father’s Day: I credit my dad for helping me build my own curiosity through reading. He was an avid reader and taught me to read before I started school. In hindsight, I was kind of a lightning-struck Number 5 kid (“Short Circuit”); “more input”! Dad was always on the lookout for cheap or free used books (or music!) for us. 

Back in the day, people sold sets of World Book encyclopedias door to door. My dad picked up a used set from a friend that was a few years old. Every time I finished my weekly library loaners early, I picked a letter of the alphabet, pulled a World Book off the shelf, and just started reading. I learned about things I didn’t know existed and would have never known to look up. 

My dad died before I finished high school, but among the many things he gave me, this gift of curious reading was huge and has dominated my whole life. Thanks, Dad. 

😊 What’s your curiosity story?

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The Intelligent Friend

Why I love reading papers

The Intelligent Friend - The newsletter about the AI-humans relationships, based only on scientific papers…

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2 years ago · 5 likes · 6 comments · Riccardo Vocca

I quickly began squirreling away my birthday and holiday gift monies to buy it 126 film and cube flash bulbs. From using it, I learned early that photography helps me see and think, just like writing helps me learn and think, and I’ve kept at least one camera in my life ever since.

Here’s an example ‘seeing and thinking’ photo, the story behind how I took it, and some thoughts it prompted. My next post will be on how this photo also helped me to think about software development and changing the world. Subscribe to automatically get my future posts in your inbox (it’s free):

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‘Seeing’ More Through The Viewfinder

When I took this fall pond photo in 2008, it quickly joined my favorites for three reasons.

Reason 1: Like many of my favorite pictures, this one was a serendipitous snap. My daily commute from 2001-2008+ took me past this pond every morning and night. From the street that morning, the mist and foliage colors on the water caught my eye. I pulled into the lot to enjoy the pretty scene for a few minutes before going to my office. Then I remembered that the small Nikon Coolpix I’d bought while living in China in 2007 was in my purse, and I could photograph the scene!

Reason 2: Taking this photo reconfirmed that early lesson about how taking pictures helps me see. After going down to the water’s edge, I spotted the big group of geese on the right. I started to compose a photo of them with the mist and reflected fall foliage. Then, through my camera lens, I noticed the trail in the water in front of the flock. I visually followed the trail to see the solo goose way out in front, and quickly recomposed to get them all in one photo before they sped out of view.

Reason 3: As an adult, the experience of belatedly seeing the lone goose way out front, and then taking this photo, gave me a new lesson. It made me wonder how often I might miss noticing a 'water trail', and thus remain unaware of the 'goose' that caused it (in real life, not just in scenes I’m photographing).

Nowadays, I keep this photo in rotation as a laptop background, to remind me of both lessons. And I’ve gifted starter cameras to my grandkids 😊

If you’re a photographer like me, does taking pictures helps you see & think, too? Or do you ‘see’ the process differently? Please share your thoughts & examples!

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Credits and References

Thank you to and for their kind feedback on drafts of this post 😊

Camera info links:

• Kodak Hawkeye Instamatic II Camera (brochure in a museum in Australia)

• Nikon Coolpix L10 camera (manufacturer info page)

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My husband and I are huge music fans. Lyric snippets emerge naturally in our conversations, usually triggering a chuckle and “I know that song too” 🙂

Occasionally a well-written lyric snags my brain. Lately, while reflecting on the new-found sense of expressive freedom I’ve been enjoying since leaving the corporate world at the end of 2023, I’ve been mulling an old Eagles song snippet: 

“So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains
And we never even know we have the key”
- The Eagles, “Already Gone”

(Friends, this post is going to be a bit more on the philosophical side than my usual; feel free to skip if that’s not your cup of tea.)

Looking Back

I worked in the corporate world for several decades. Out of necessity at first, and then by preference ever since, I’ve been self-supporting since college. 

Although I only learned about affinity bias many years later, I realized while still in school that making it (more) obvious to the guys that I was (even more) different from them would likely make things harder for me. (And yes, it was mostly guys, i.e. men; being a geek & engineer and working in industrial domains made that the norm.) 

🤫 So I studiously avoided expressing my political or religious or other potentially controversial opinions, and stayed non-committal when they spouted off with theirs. I quietly did what I could to personally support the few other women, and others who were marginalized, and I joined some protests outside of work, but stopped there. 

😞 Those emotional chains were heavy. But the potential consequences of unlocking myself (i.e. being fired, laid off, or unemployable) loomed so dire, being on my own, as to make staying ‘chained’ seem sensible. 

In hindsight, I let my head (minimizing financial risks) win the tradeoff against my heart (enduring emotional costs). It wasn’t a conscious, well-deliberated decision at the time. I don’t recall feeling like I really had a choice.

My tenure at my first employer after college reinforced this school-based strategy of keeping my opinions to myself. It was a big corporation taken over by a raider, then divvied up and sold off in pieces after the raider stripped the pension fund. I survived, I don’t know, maybe 15-20 layoffs in my 10+ years there. I stopped counting; they became quarterly blood-on-the-walls events. The clear risks of job loss and my survival of their recurring layoffs indicated that I was probably doing the right (safest) thing by keeping my opinions to myself. 

After I left that company, a few moves later, I ended up at an awesome telecom startup in RTP. We almost made it big and changed the world, but the startup ran out of runway 2 years later, went bankrupt, and closed down. Although I was fortunate to land a new role quickly, the stress of being unemployed and needing health insurance for myself and my soon-to-be-husband further reinforced my sense of caution, and stayed with me.

Once social media became a thing, I felt similarly constrained on commenting on controversial topics, even with the disclaimer “All opinions are mine only”. I was always concerned about offending my network, people at my current employer, or possibly at a future employer, and jeopardizing my livelihood and self-sufficiency. 

Later in my life and career, I got braver and began speaking up more often about equality, and participating & launching & leading ERGs at my workplaces. By then I was more financially secure, although I still needed & wanted a paying job (and health insurance for my family!). 

I was still somewhat wary of being too outspoken, though. Even in corporate cultures advertised as supportive of equality, it was obvious that many people didn’t value the activities.

Less than two years after I started speaking up & taking more action internally and externally, I was part of a selective layoff for the first time ever, due to a reorg. This was at a company I’d already been loyal to for 15+ years, and where I’d survived ~4 other huge reorgs and layoffs. 

My next two positions, where I became even more active and outspoken, also ended in layoffs. One was due to COVID-related business cutbacks, and the other was due to aftereffects of an acquisition. 

🔑 As the Eagles song said, even though I didn’t know it then, I clearly had the key all along. I could in theory have ‘unchained’ myself years ago by just speaking my mind and discounting the consequences (“damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”). Why didn’t I?

My key tradeoff on speaking out seems to boil down to weighing emotional vs. financial risks & freedoms. Here’s what I’ve been mulling:

• Should I have stayed quiet longer?

  • What harms would have come to others I was able to help, if I hadn’t spoken up and acted?

  • Would I still have been impacted by the first and third layoffs if I’d continued to keep my mouth shut about inequalities? Or was being laid off in one or both cases more likely driven by ageism, which coincided with me getting braver as I got older, rather than activism? 🤷 (There’s probably no way to know.)

• Should I have unlocked myself to speak openly in my earlier years?

  • Who could I have helped if I’d spoken up more, and what price did they pay for me not doing it?

  • What emotional or financial costs of speaking up would I have paid for this freedom? Would it have been worth it, or would the costs have outweighed the benefits? 🤷 (Again, probably no way to know. Being long-term unemployed would have definitely impaired my personal freedom in very practical ways!)

• How are things different now, and what should I do now?

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Looking Ahead

Now that I am out of corporate life and I’m “on my own” (with collaborators), the financial risks are clearly lower: I have no corporate job to jeopardize, and no worries about whether work colleagues devalue equality-related activities! Yes, writing is my chosen new job, but haters can’t fire me from it or stop me from writing; all they can do is stop reading, right?

I obviously don’t expect everyone to agree with me. In fact, as I used to tell the software and AI teams I led, if we never have or express differing opinions, we are not getting to the best understanding and solution. As a team, we need to “disagree without being disagreeable”. 

So I’ll always truly want to hear what you think about my posts, whether we agree or not. Email me, restack, or use that comment button below!

Beyond constructive discussion, I realize not everyone will like hearing my opinions and ideas, and not everyone will be kind about it. I’m preparing myself to handle the emotional consequences of any hard pushback I may get, and be ok with it. ❤️ I love this advice from TS (and am now starting to get to know her music):

“If they don’t like you for being yourself, be yourself even more.”
- Taylor Swift

Net result: since leaving corporate, the tradeoff between emotional and financial risks seems to have unquestionably tipped the other way. I feel like I can now, in relative safety, follow my heart to:

• write or speak on whatever topic I wish, and 

• say what I really think, still respectfully but candidly

❓ This feeling of safety is clearly an assumption, and perhaps a naive and optimistic one. Writing publicly still feels a bit risky, even with no job at stake. Social media in general is known to be horrid to women who speak up and become visible. Three things (more assumptions than facts) make me feel somewhat safer: 

1. My collaborators, and pretty much everyone who has subscribed so far to this newsletter, know me from my past 8 years or so of speaking up, or from what I’ve already written here. So hopefully my future frank opinions won’t surprise or faze any of you. 🙂

2. I don’t expect to actually become so famous that my writing gets attention from trolls 😏 

3. Substack feels different than other SM. From what I’ve seen so far in the community, I’m optimistic that you all will tolerate (and perhaps even welcome) hearing what I think, and will engage constructively, whether we agree at first or not. Thank you in advance for that. 💕

Within the past few weeks, I’ve still caught myself questioning “should I really say that out loud?” when reviewing before clicking ‘publish’. But overall, I feel a huge sense of relief to be mostly free of the self-censorship burden. I finally ‘get’ what my late husband said he cherished about turning off his “self-monitor process” with me.

It’s going to be interesting to look back at this post in a year, or 5 years, and see if my assumptions about safety were valid, and if this new tradeoff decision has been a good one …

In the meantime, I plan to “be myself even more” and strive to follow RBG’s excellent advice (simple, but not easy):

"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." - Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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In between, the schedule holds a single track of sessions on:

• Tools I: Support and Use

• Processes and Practices

• Management Environments I

Yesterday afternoon's agile GSD tutorial was interesting and offered a nice preview of Erran Carmel's forthcoming book, as well as a review of Yael Dubinsky's HOT framework (humans, organizations, technology). However, I was a little disappointed that more time wasn't spent on the GSD challenges of implementing specific agile practices. (It could have easily been a full-day session.)

While waiting for the keynote session to start, I enjoyed a good chat with Darja Smite of BTH, who gave yesterday's REMIDI talk. It turns out that we have similar views on measurement in GSD, as well as knowing some mutual friends/colleagues in Sweden!

• 90-min REMIDI workshop (Tool Support Development and Management in Distributed Projects)

• the first part of the PARIS workshop (Methods and Tools for Project/Architecture/Risk Management in Globally Distributed Software Development Projects)

• after lunch, a half-day tutorial on "Implementing Agile Software Development Across Time Zones".

The conference also includes:

• a full-day tutorial on "Requirements Engineering for Large Systems-Processes and Tooling",

• a doctoral symposium,

• a half-day session on "What Did You Say? Cultural Influences on Communication and Understanding", and

• the KNOWING'10 workshop on knowledge management in GSD.

I chatted briefly with one of the organizers at registration. Attendance for ICGSE 2010 is expected to be around 70 people, lower than usual, and about 70% university attendees, 30% industry. He attributed both the low attendance and the low industry percentage to the still-weak global economy: usually it's over 100 people, and usually closer to 70% industry and 30% academic participation.

Petra’s slides can now be downloaded from the conference site here, or from the Agile Teams publications area. The papers from SEAFOOD are published through Springer (if you’d like to read ours, drop us a note).

Our GSD Collaboration research team also has a paper accepted at ICGSE 2010, on “Causal Analysis of Factors Governing Collaboration among Global Software Development Teams”. We’re looking forward to further discussions in Princeton on how to help globally distributed development teams be more effective!

• thinking about and comparing software development methodologies (e.g. TSP and agile), in theory

• examining the impact of culture and value mismatches when tailoring development methods with an organization, in practice

I don't think the applicability of the insight is limited to agile, though. Rather, I think it's true that adopting any significant software development process change (like piloting TSP, or changing how the organization handles sustaining engineering) affects, and is affected by, culture and values. (Of course, I happen to believe that TSP is pretty compatible with agile values.)

What do you think? When you have learned (or taught) agile, did you learn/teach culture, process, both?

If you have introduced agile into a team or organization, did you observe cultural mismatches which impacted acceptance of the process transition?

This post was first published on the agile Teams WordPress blog on March 4, 2010. As of July 12, 2024, all agile Teams content has moved here to Agile Analytics and Beyond. Minor edits have been made to support audio voiceover for the podcast.

On Feb. 16 I participated on a panel session on Practical Software Development at a meeting of the Eastern NC chapter of the IEEE Computer Society. The plan was that co-panelists (Andy Hunt and Bob Galen) and I would give 10-minute Point Of View talks, then moderator John Baker would open it up for audience questions.

My POV? I thought carefully about what I’ve observed in companies of various sizes and styles, across different industries, and organized my thoughts into slides. This exercise made it crystal clear to me that I’ve witnessed and experienced way too many success and failure factors to fit into 10 minutes … which should I choose as my main point of view?

In the end I chose to focus my one major topic not on technological issues, but on people issues. I believe that:

• Teams and people matter (most),

• Good communications are critical,

• And collaboration effectiveness can almost always be improved by considering the relevance of the key aspects of globally distributed software development, or GSD (culture, language, physical distance, and temporal or time-zone distance) – even if your team, stakeholders, and customers aren’t globally distributed.

During the panel session, a show of hands with the audience supported this last assertion: of the 20+ people in attendance, only two were working in situations unaffected by GSD factors – and one was currently between jobs.

Although I didn’t actually use the slides I had prepared (a great example of planning being invaluable even if the actual documented plan is useless), I’ve posted them in the Agile Teams publications area for reference. A detailed writeup of the panelists’ points of view and the Q&A session is available in Agile Teams blog post “Practical Software Development” (now with photos). Comments welcome!

At first I didn’t notice that the article was written in early 1999: it seemed completely relevant today, if not even more so due to the explosion in virtual communications (blogs, microblogs, Second Life, email, waves, smartphone texts, etc.). Hallowell defines “the human moment: an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space.” While co-location is necessary, it is not sufficient: “The human moment has two prerequisites: people’s physical presence and their emotional and intellectual attention.” His concern, which appears to have been well-founded, was “as the tide of electronic hyperconnection rises, the landscape of work is in some ways changing for the worse.”

Electronic hyperconnection hasn’t just been a rising tide over the past 10 years; it’s been more of a tsunami. And the use of globally distributed software development (GSD) teams has increased significantly as well. Does the combination create a perfect storm, or can these virtual communications offset the risks of GSD?

We’ve been experimenting with telepresence-style technologies, and they clearly do have the potential for conveying emotional and intellectual attention (if the participants provide it). What seems to somehow still be missing, and perhaps this is why videoconferencing isn’t yet a true substitute for face-to-face meetings, is enablement of a sufficient level of interpersonal energy.

Have any of you ever had a virtual ‘meeting’ in which you experienced the same level of interpersonal connection as F2F? If so, I’d love to hear how you did it.

Next up: Cultural Intelligence: A Guide to Working with People from Other Cultures (and, nowadays, who isn’t?).

To help me better understand these factors, and so I can assess whether they might be useful references for our development teams, I've picked up a few books on the topic, including:

• Gestures: The DO's and TABOOs of Body Language Around the World

• Cross-Cultural Dialogues: 74 Brief Encounters With Cultural Difference

• Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands (updated edition)

• Cultural Intelligence: A Guide to Working with People from Other Cultures

Also, towards the general topic of GSD and cultural differences, I'm [re-]reading:

• The Psychology of Computer Programming

• Cultural Diversity: Its Social Psychology

Recommendations for other good resources on this topic are welcome! I'll summarize my opinions of the usefulness of these books for GSD purposes in this blog.

Conclusion? Most of my testers expressed the opinion that it was more confusing, funnier, or both to read the translation than to cope with the English. The Asian languages were especially noted as not being well done. The European languages which are closest to the origins of English, not surprisingly, seemed to fare the best.

Certainly the content of this blog, which focuses on software development, is not representative of everything that anyone might want to translate from English to another language, or from another language to English. The engine may handle general personal correspondence much better, and given that Google just announced this week that they now support built-in translation in Gmail, that's probably the focus of their engine development efforts. I expect the capabilities of translation engines will continue to improve, and I plan to monitor them. But for my purposes, I don't think they are anywhere near ready for 'industrial' use yet.

I know I am lucky to have such great, helpful friends!  Thanks to Elizabeth, Sayuri, Qingfeng, Aldo, Dright, Yonghee, Sami, Jan, and Jim for their kindness and assistance.

I have yet to find a good aggregator or portal that collects relevant blog posts, topics, etc. on GSD, either. If you know of one (or more), please post it in the LinkedIn group or send me a message via email or twitter. Thanks! (Eventually, if none turns up, maybe we'll build one ... 'better to light a candle than to curse the darkness')