Women of High Standards

Ada Lovelace Day is a celebration of women in technology. 

In honor of this day, I would like to use this wonderful opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of not only one, but three fellow technical women. I shared a lot of experience with them in Standards Bodies. I loved working with them, learned from them and continue to correspond with them as this is a rare friendship. 

All the women in this blog demonstrated excellence in their contributions to the standards as they have high standards for their work. They are detailed, yet never lose the sight for the big picture; they excel in  understand the implications of the technology vs political decisions yet try to achieve to serve the community in the best way possible; they strive to produce easily consumable documents so that mere humans can read them; they are approachable and very nice to work with. Consequently, I enjoyed my relationship with them tremendously. Many specifications you may encounter, especially in the Web Services and XML area, owe a portion of their development to these women who never sacrifice quality. Further, they are multifaceted as they are also artists, musicians or athletes. 

I am honored to work with them and look forward to the next opportunity where we may work together again or simply discuss where the technology is heading to and how it is changing. 

• Maryann Hondo is an architect who is an expert in security and policy at IBM. We first met during a WS-Metadata Exchange meeting and I had the chance to work with her in WS-Policy working group in w3c. We collaborated on the guidelines for WS-Policy assertion authors document and contributed to the working group. Maryann has been instrumental in getting me enlightened about the security implications and the relationship of the policy framework as one feeds on the other. She brings perspective as to the challenges of a design may exist and what pitfalls one may fall into across multiple specifications and assertion families. Further, beyond our shared experience in standards, she is very versed about emerging technologies and how can shape our future. Maryann is my sounding board. 

• Eve Maler is a technical director at Sun Microsystems. I met Eve when I was involved in XML standards in Sun and she was our AC Rep to w3c. Her understanding of the evolving standards and how certain players may help or hinder the evolution of a certain specification never ceased to amaze me. She certainly understands how standards can help or hinder. Her contributions to XML and Security standards are too numerous to mention. Further, her positive personality is simply contagious. I look forward to a meeting to sync up with Eve and learn about the larger perspective. 

• Monica Martin is a program manager at Microsoft. She has contributed to with many vertical and XML/WS/ebXML standards and acted in leadership roles. Her keen eye in making the specifications coherent is impeccable. She can see the relationships and implications between specifications that others will miss and will work hard to correct inconsistencies between them. Further, Monica is always willing to share her knowledge with others. I learned a lot from Monica beyond our technical experiences in together. My regret is that I never had the chance to work with her on business processes. Hoping that one day it may change. 

At these uncertain times when many technical women are either forced to leave standards or technology altogether, these women and their invaluable work should be cherished. The institutions where they work are very lucky to have them. 

Hence, this blog. 

The Past and The Future at Bay Area Geek Girl Dinners

I am stunned and amazed. There are many technical, geeky women are out there in the bay area (and beyond who were visiting) that participated in the Bay Area Geek Girl Dinner. The third one in the series.

There were themes listed on each table. I sat at the cloud computing table. There was not much discussion on the topic though, rather who each other were and how we ended up at the dinner, what we do, and our thoughts about technology and its role. I did not even have time to tweet about the event, during the event.

The crowd is a younger crowd. Things are different, but also a lot the same. I was involved with systers mailing list very early on. No social media, no facebook, no twitter, no websites back then. Plain email. Word of mouth. I saw today the video circulating on the web/twitter about the birth of internet news http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/29/you-need-to-see-this-video/ and realized there is a similar analogy here. It is like an old Virginia Slims ad that stuck in my mind. "You've come a long way, baby". There are many tools, many communities. Technical women like to connect, but there are many other channels, now including She's Geeky unconference, as well as subinterest groups from technie women in SF to Linux geeks, women 2.0.

Systers mailing list is still there going strong. There were attempts to put the discussion on the web, but resorted to the simple "push" solution, email. Many many years later, the contrast reminds me how a younger generation is embracing different tools for the same purpose to create communities. The word of mouth is no longer in a single email, or with a friend, it is also on Facebook, it is on a news tweet, it is everywhere. The need to link up and feel part of the community is the same.

Just this week, my company is nominating me to be one of the Anita Borg Institute of technology ambassadors. I am looking forward to it. To my surprise, there are women in my table who did not know about ABI, the systers mailing list or the Grace Hopper Conference, YET. I am glad that there was a lineup of introducing the existing organizations geared towards technical women. Thanks to BJ Wishinsky who introduced ABI and distributed systers stickers and people had the chance to learn about it.

The internet, the way we work, connect, and communicate are changing. One wonders though whether the challenges that technical women face in the industry are, though. The technology is different, but
the road to success and recognition is still uncertain. Despite this new wave and energy, we have not succeeded in making more CTOs out of the talented technical women. YET. The problem is well documented in this study, Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level women in Technology by Caroline Simard. The problem is real. Still real, after all these years.

My hope is that our new advanced ways of communication spread the word about this problem and get corporations to acknowledge it. Our collective thinking and cooperation may then allow us to help solve it, attracting more and new generation "sisters" who then in the future, hopefully, would not even know that such a problem ever existed.

How many profiles must a (wo)man write down...

Social networking and communities are so "in" these days. Gone are days when one complained about multiple IM contacts and enviroments, and the desperate aim to link them together in one single interface. Welcome to the new world of chaos, and following events and people around like a stalker in the making.

The rate that tools and communities are exploding is making even myself dizzy. I created a thought provoking quiz to make us realize where we are with respect to this craziness. It is all for humor, so take it that way. Please take the following quiz to find how popular you are, shall we start?

Count the number of times you answer "yes" to the following questions.

• Are you a member of Facebook? Were you an early user of Facebook and recruited other friends to create specialized groups?

• Do you have your linkedin profile? Was one of your old-time buddies involved in linkein early on and get you connected right away? Does your profile get regular hits from 10 people a week?

• But how about these Plaxo friends? My God, do you have a profile there? Wait, hang on. Your buddies from Microsoft want you to be part of the Microsoft Live network. Did you forget to sign in there? Haven't you forgotten to register with Spock, get your glorious ratings also in Namyz? But, your "professional profile" and contacts are in Linkedin and you have some hefty reviews of your ah-so-glamorous professional accomplishments. How about your Flickr buddies and your groups and your interests? Did you post your latest and greatest photos that show what an artistic one you are on flickr? Maybe picassa?

• Of course, you discovered twitter, haven't you? Aren't some of your contacts on twitter? Do you retweet snippets of wisdoms from famous people in twitter?

• How about FriendFeed? Maybe you prefer laconi.ca, or thinking how grouping functionality may benefit for those secret and private conversations on yammer? Yes, you think you are probably popular, right?. Ah, wait. Since you are so so glamorous, there are new social networking tools and their product managers are so eager to talk to you. They start sending you email messages and reports so often with the diminishing hope that their companies tool may be the next "enterprise 2.0 solution"? In the meantime, did you get a your dopplr account? Did you broadcast in your next trip just to make your budget-cut-grounded friends at other companies envy? But, they want to see you anyway, since you are coming their way. Is someone broadcasting your twitter statistics to your colleagues?

• Is there a nagging feeling in your stomach that "big brother is watching you" and probably someone is creating a "stalker 2.0" or "housethief 2.0" app based on your online and so public activity?

• Do you know how to link your facebook, dopplr, flickr, twitter, .... accounts all together so people can see everywhere how intelligent, artistic, wonderfully connected and smart you are?

• Do you broadcast to the world where you are using your coordinates and utter a smart thought for the day?

• Are you beginning to get connection requests from people with whom you have nothing in common and they look awfully suspicious to you?

• Has your company installed an internal social networking tool and "encouraging" you to use it? Are you one of the early adapters? Do you feel compelled to participate because your companies executives started to appear in the chats? Do you see all your contacts who were silent all of a sudden become extraverted?

• Does your company experiment with several of these beasts internally? Do you participate in more than one? Are they fighing among themselves to be the next "enterprise 2.0" breakthrough product?

• Are you part of a community in your company which is externally visible? Does your company have multiple communities? Do you belong to all of them? Do you have a separate profile for each? Do you feel you are out of touch when you do not post to these communities at least twice a week?

• Do you feel compelled to microblog every day? Every hour? Do you tweet during the family vacation while you are taking a boat ride on the ocean?

• Do you wish that just like the good old emacs days, someone will come up with a universal interface to all this "activity" and allow you to look at only a subset of them instead of opening up all these tools, multiple twhirl windows, web pages, etc? Don't you wish Facebook and the next "Enterprise 2.0 wanna be" thingy merged to be the single interface to save you some time?

• Do you wish you can share a single profile with all these environments? Surely, one can import your social graph from one another, but anyone who knows about unsynced replication will tell you that one of them will get stale. Of course, it is in each products benefit to be the owner of your social network, or portion of it. However don't you feel that you own the entire social graph as a user and you are just lending a piece to one of these tools, not the other way around?
  
  Until a single integration interface which allows you to "export" (not import from one another) and expand subsets of your social network based on utility/function comes along, are you afraid that you will have to continue to replicate your data, who you are, and also your so called profile from one place to another? In the meantime, do you wonder why you are not getting any real work done? Aren't you sick of typing where you went to school for the nth time? Or who your favorite rock band is? Or where you live? Or your supposed birthday? Don't you wish someone could also replicate it, but you do not have to import it from one environment to the other?

• Are you developing another networking tool because all of the others just suck or you feel they are just crap? Are you in a team that develops such a tool to change the world?
  
  

The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind...

Now, count the number of positive, "yes", answers to the questions. You belong to one of these categories:


Social Butterfly: 80-100% yes answers

Congratulations. You are a social networking butterfly. You are probably the reason why Right Said Fred wrote a song, because you are absolutely too-sexy for your keyboard. You can not keep up with your social life and it is making you absolutely crazy, but you will never admit it to your friends. You have 200+ contacts in linkedin and facebook. You are trying to make it grown even larger every day. You appear to do work, but you worry how you will brand and portray yourself in this distributed network of yourself and wonder everyday whether you left something inconsistent. You appear to do work, but it is getting harder everyday as your colleagues and your boss has just connected to you in Facebook.

Desperately-Seeking-Meaningful-Connection 60%-80% yes answers

You are using social networking tools but still have the hope that they will fill a void in your life by not making you question why you do not know your next door neighbors, or why you have not really seen your best friend for a week (online chatting does not count, of course). You have a sense that this is all useful, but afraid that it may be getting out of hand. It is nice that you discovered your college friend Mike online, who knows you may be better friends now. Organizing all these photos and posting them online is becoming a chore. Further, you really do not like other people know what you think that much, but have a deep suspicion that you may actually like being recognized as an expert if you were to tweet more. You really wonder how Guy Kawasaki does it and finds all this time. Your best friends are on all the social networking sites you subscribe too. However, getting on their calender to go out to a simple dinner is a daunting task since everyone is so sooo busy these days. You secretly wish for more time.

Naively-Optimistic: 40% -60% yes answers

You discovered the online communities and tools! Wow. Aren't you excited that technology can be used this way. You are connected in a very new way. You spend more and more time to increase your friends and connections. You just discovered your old friend Fred is now in Alaska. Wouldn't be fun to go and visit him? You started a new community for reverse-knitting practices with the hope that you may find and meet new people. You are watching many people and your connections online, but your activity is not upto par yet. You are happy to expand your horizons and think that by being in a community, somehow your life is going to become more meaningful and you will finally connect with people like you. You are out to change yourself and the world. Here you come!

Too-Private-or-Suspicious-for-good: 0-20% yes answers

You are deeply suspicious that people are out to get you and collect information about you. You may be a hermit, but do not want to admit it. After all, you do not know who is reading what you are doing. You do not like to let others know what you think. That wiki thing came along and required you put words and publish them online, but you only like to write carefully crafted messages to those you want to impress. Let alone, being recorded from here to eternity gives you a chill. You would not want your colleagues to see that you were a zombie commander in Facebook, or your fishing buddies know that you have a red latex nightgown fetish. No sir. You have an account on some of the tools, but everything is set not to reveal who you are or your "friends". You follow what people are doing at twitter, but never ever post anything so that it will be related to you later in life. You hate the fact that your old classmate Stan found you online and now insists on connecting in Facebook. You never liked him, why now. After all, he may show up at your door in Alaska. That would not be good!

Umit means Hope, hence the new picture

Today, I was sent this photo of me. Since my name means Hope, thought that it was very apt to use it here. I am posting it here with the hope that the new regime, the new year would be kind...

Some Facelift was needed

I finally upgraded my online CV. I am happy about the font (for the first time in 15 years). More confident that I got the big picture right this time instead of the bits and bytes.

I also realized that I have forgotten about some of the member contributions to various submissions to W3C. All those MTOM stuff, position papers, presentations, etc. Well, they are in the additional publications list. One can download and have a look at the stuff where my name appears, sometimes indicating my sincere participation with body and soul, sometimes just as a simple contribution. You decide. My friend Dirk did a good job in listing our collaborations well, so I did not miss these.

I did not include my patent/patent applications either. They are in the pubs list that one can download. When one's life partner has more than 500+ issued patents, some of our accomplishments appear miniscule in respect. Yep, you read the number right...

Art Exhibit in SF Art Institute Diego Rivera Gallery

Those who wonder what I do in my spare time, please note the following.

I am participating in an art show which concludes this week with a reception at the Diego Rivera gallery in SF Art Institute.

The reception is on August 22nd, between 5:30-7:00pm at SFAI.

Probably I should also broadcast this in facebook in some fashion, too :-)

How not to Blame Sally

Sometimes good things happen accidentally. Attending the Kate Wolf festival was one of these things. Just spur of the moment, we head to some small town, Laytonville, north of Ukiah on a Friday afternoon, packed camping gear and grabbed some dusty spot in the field next to some other folk who travelled in an RV and plunked ourselves somewhat too close for comfort next to another tent. Among many.

I always wanted to do this festival. After all, folk music was my first passion learning how to play guitar and imitating Joan and Bob on stage at the age of 14 and continuing afterwards on and off. Kate Wolf was not that known where I came from at the time, but one learns quickly later.

Those of you who know me are probably chuckling as porter potties and fake camping is not my kind of thing. This was necessary for attending the festival. For a long time, I will probably associate the smell of cinnamon with freshly emptied toilets on that field of scurcing heat. But, such is life. As they say, the one who loves the rose bears the thorns. One of the vendors quipped "This is one the most mellow crowds that I have seen. I love it here!". That was true. I met many interesting people who are just friendly and willing to share tidbits about their lives just waiting to get food or coffee on line or just holding their hand on the Mr. Music Community choir project. Ok, ok. It is not that sappy. Further, there were conveniences like a portable ATM Machine (eww. techology!) if you feel like you were stranded without money or hot water showers.


There were two gigs I wanted to see in the festival. Greg Brown whom I admired for a while and my new discovery, the Greencards. Unfortunately, Ani DiFranco was scheduled in a godawful time (late Sunday) which made returning to SF somewhat a very dreadful and next-week-killer endeauvor.

One of the cool things about the set up was that there were several activities going on parallelly. The main stage had the major line up, but the smaller stage with bails of hay provided the more intimate, small club experience that made the whole experience completely worthy. Further, the same acts that would appear on Saturday played also on Saturday. In this manner, one could schedule to see the gigs on Saturday and could potentially return back home on a reasonable time on Sunday.

I saw both Greg Brown and the Greencards on that smaller stage. It made my attendence to the festival really memorable. Although Greg did not play one of my favorite tunes, "'Cept and me babe", i really enjoyed seeing him up close and personal.

Greencards did something exceptional. Since they were scheduled to play at the same time with Los Lobos, their gig was delayed by the festival organizers for sometime as Los Lobos took the stage late. It was way after 12:00am on Sunday they started playing and no one was sorry that they waited that long as they started to play. As the name applies, the band members are all foreigners in US and make a killer Bluegrass sound which also reminded me some of Solas. They have the energy to keep you moving and smiling. Do not miss them if you have a chance to attend one of their shows.

Having said all this, the highlight of the festival for me was probably "Blame Sally". Just like children, I like to discover new things. When they took the main stage on Saturday, I was thinking to myself as they are playing the first tunes "those women are really exceptional". My appreciation grew as they moved on from one crafted song to another, singing in English and Spanish with harmonies to match and very nice poetry in their lyrics that should not be missed. (As a matter of fact, I used one of the lines in my art class writing exercises and got quite a response last week). Each of them can play several instruments, have very artful arrangements and it is hard to classify them. Is it rock, folk, pop or something in between? If you like Indigo Girls would you like them? One thing I know is that their recent album "Severland" is fantastic and my favorite of all their albums with its creative, catchy tunes. Do run, but not walk to get it. And, they ARE from San Francisco.

Discovering Blame Sally brought interesting coincidences and discovering other cool people to our lives. On our way back, we accidentally met a folk music singer in the bay area, Amy Meyers at a winery while we were talking about the group. She has her new nice album out, Lucky which I got recently. The first song, "I hate to cry", in that album speaks to me. Just the way it feels at the end of each summer. Check it out. She frequently performs in the bay area which I am looking forward to attending.

We followed Blame Sally to Big Sur this weekend for a more intimate setting in the Henry Miller library. I have not been there before. As it is written in the description of the library, it is hard to classify that too. It is not definitely a place where you buy your touristy gizmos pf Big Sur or the best-seller-du-jour. It provides however memorabilia of Henry Miller, his writings/books, other interesting books and a nice intimate setting to listen to an outdoors concert on a summer California night. A perfect way to end a wonderful day in Big Sur.

Blame Sally gave us the glimpse of what may be coming down in the new album. Can not wait. What was cool about the whole thing is to be able to meet them during the break. Yes, my dear friends. Now i have become a Blame Sally groupie. Hope you can join me/us in the next trip. Further, i think Jeri was playing a Santa Cruz guitar which looked and sounded just like mine. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask. And unfortunately, I can not play the guitar like her, either.

One rumor is that the name of the group is about the imaginary friend that one of the group members used as an excuse for being late to rehearsals. I do not know. However, if they are blaming the results to this Sally person, I sure want to be friends with her! It sure works.