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A few folks from my company are working on putting together a ‘Young Women in Computing Day’ next month.  Women are generally under-represented in the software field, particularly in the software development field. I’ll avoid stats here, but will just say that at my last job they sent out an email to the guys in the office saying that they could no longer use the womens’ rest room since there was now a girl on staff. In my career, I’ve seen women in the requirements analysts role, women in the tester roles, women in the project leadership roles, but it’s been very rare to find women in the pure development roles. So very happy to have opportunities to expose girls to fields that are harder to expose them to then the teacher that they see in school every day or the doctor who helps them get better when they’re not feeling good.  Those roles are needed – but already have plenty of men and women heading their way.  Want to have a way to more concretely expose them to the fun they can have and the good they can do in software development – and hey, the money in the field’s not bad, either.

The Wall Street Journal recently had a section, Women in the Economy, which was the result of a conference bringing business and government leaders together to talk about what’s holding women back in the workplace.  One of the phrases that jumped out at me was the statement that women are promoted based on performance, men are promoted based on potential.  It occurs to me that part of that may be that by helping young ladies recognize their own potential in the field early, we can help escalate them up both the potential and the performance curve.  What’s more appealing to a recruiter looking to fill their slots with young talent than someone who’s been excited about technology and doing things with it for years beyond their peers?

Hoping someday to look around a technical company or a technical conference and see a better mix of men and women.  Think it’s part of my responsibility to advocate and work to help make it happen.

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A few years ago, someone I worked with at the time invited folks to attend a ‘Dynamic Marriage‘ class he was facilitating at his church.  We got a lot out of it, and have in fact made some weak efforts to bring it our church.  (Weak meaning, talked about it amongst ourselves, talked it up a few times to folks at church, introduced some of the materials at a mens’ retreat…  but mostly just talked.)  This isn’t a ‘on my turf’ thing, but our friend’s church is a half hour away.  Packing up the kids and schlepping a half hour away to go meet with folks you don’t know at first?  Likely a stopper to getting this kind of information in the hands of most of our fellow church members or in the hands of other folks in our local community.  We were surprised by another reaction in class this evening, though.  When it was our turn to introduce ourselves, we said that we had been through the class before, thought a lot of it, and had considered taking it back to our church, but hadn’t really done anything substantial there.  I was surprised to hear the question “your church?”.  Realized we surprised folks by not being from their church.  May even have surprised them by suggesting that we were not considering joining their church.  May be just my read on their reaction: maybe they were just generally curious.   But it made me think some more when we got home…

I realized in “our” church, I’d likely have had the same reaction.  If someone’s in my church, I assume they’re a member, visiting to consider becoming a member, or visiting because some member made a reach out.  But not just visiting, or  visiting to interact in a program that my church doesn’t have, or heck, visiting to interact with another area of God’s church.  Intellectually I realize His church unimaginably wider/deeper/more diverse than my little pew bench.  But someone I’m still my little pew bench focused.  That pew bench focus is broken up a bit when I think about sharing with the less fortunate via missions or charitable giving, but I can’t say that I necessarily think beyond that to sharing of a less one-way directed manner.

Not sure what to do with these thoughts, as yet…  just thinking them.  Wondering if there’s some interaction there with the high school ministry, or that long thought about clowning ministry.  But it’s making me think about broadening that horizon a bit more than just that pew bench.

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I have a not-so-secret dream to be a clown.  As a kid, I dressed up as a clown for my kid sister’s birthday party.  As an adult, when I temporarily left my software development career, one of the alternates I considered was being a clown.  I’ve done the clown thing at Pioneer Girl events: dressing up, doing balloon twisting, juggling, …  I wouldn’t consider myself good at it, but it does seem to be a theme in my life.

One of the avenues of “clownship” that appeals to me is that of a Christian clown.  Clowns seem to cause polar reactions.  Folks are either clown-phobic (a few, and often little kids), or are drawn to them and interested to see what the clown does or says.   What a great platform for a whole bunch of things:  for just giving someone the gift of a little bit of enjoyment in their day; for giving a parent the gift of seeing their child light up; for distracting someone from pain, whether that be physical pain in a hospital or emotional impact; for giving someone just plain attention which in some cases is a gift some folks too rarely receive; and for expressing truths in a way that causes folks to look at them in a new light.  I’m really attracted to the concept of gospel clowning, a way of sharing God’s truths in a manner that helps folks look at things in a different manner.  If I just go up to you and tell you God loves you, you’ll treat that as an odd behavior and throw away the message.  If I find a way to show you that in a gospel skit, well, you expect odd things from a clown and might just hear it out.

So….  I’m on the lookout for gospel clown skit inspiration.  Got to do one at our church talent show a few weeks ago, and hoping to use that to seed thoughts in a few folks’ minds to start a little clown troupe.  If you’ve got ideas, thoughts, donations, interest, …  and oh yeah, that prayer stuff, too – all ears.  Or, in my case, all clown feet.

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This past week, I was part of an interview caucus at work. In these, all of the folks who interviewed a given candidate get together to make a decision as to whether to make an offer to a candidate. Each candidate at our company is typically interviewed by 5 or more people, including a mix of technical staff and executive staff. Makes for a long stint for the candidate, but at the end of it, we’ve gotten a good sense of them and they’ve gotten a good sense of us.

Our “victim” this week was a solid contributor at his previous company who was recommended by some of our current team who’d worked with him previously. I had some concerns, though – through no fault of his, his current company wasn’t really doing anything that we’d consider particularly relevant, from a technology perspective. He’d actually argued for using more current technologies, and had eventually decided to leave based at least partially on this problem. All good, so far. The challenge was that he couldn’t tell me how he was scratching his “geek itch” outside of work, since work wasn’t doing it for him. Reading blogs? Doing some coding on the side? Couldn’t even get him to give me a list of the things he _wished_ he was doing. No extra effort to get more current, other than to raise a concern with his company that he wasn’t staying current.

All of this boils down to me to a “watch what I do, not what I say I wanna do” sort of lesson. He says he wants to be more current, but isn’t doing anything about it. I called out that attribute in the caucus. And now I’m feeling accountable to myself to a bit more. Working on an OSCON brief right now, so surveying my topic and making sure all of my points look like they’ll hang together technically. Plan to poke a few components of my brief and really push ’em to their bounds, whether or not my topic is accepted. [Desperately hoping it’s accepted… need to push myself technically, and show a few more women up there, all in one fell swoop.] Looking to build these geek opportunities into my regular work-life, as well, since I’ve become more of a team enabler and leader than technical contributor over the past year.

Oh, by the way, see what I do not just what I say is spilling over into the rest of my thinking, too… called someone else on it in the work world, but I see it hitting my Christian walk, my fitness approach, my interaction with my kids and my hubby, …. starting to feel like I need to be careful when I open my mouth!

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I’m helping out with my daughter’s Upwards basketball team this season and loving it! This is her third season with Upwards – the first was cheerleading (no chance there of me helping!) and then she transitioned to basketball. [She decided that the basketball players looked like they were having more fun. Go, Cora!] This season the coach sent out a message looking for a ‘Team Mom’ and ‘another Dad’ to help with the drills. Uh…. hmmmm… snacks or drills? Think I’ll take drills, thank you very much. One email later, indicating history coaching kids’ sports and doing kids’ ministries, I had me an assistant coaching gig! Except that coach neglected to tell league commissioner, and then coach’s kid had an emergency the first night of practice, leaving assistant coach to introduce herself to the league commissioner and tell him coach wasn’t going to make it. Awkward! Commissioner, to his credit when confronted with an adult who he had no knowledge of, ran practice himself. 2nd practice went a bit more smoothly: coach was there, I knew the kids, and good basketball drills were had by all.

Can’t say enough good things about the Upward program. Kids athletic based ministry to communities. Multiple sports (cheerleading, basketball, and soccer at least), all kids play equal time, devotions both in practice and in the games… oh, and did I mention the homily for the parents at half-time in the games? What a way to intersect with parents AND kids! Very glad to get to participate and contribute. I’m not a member of the church that’s sponsoring this Upward program, but maybe I’ll get invited to stick around.

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Had a training day earlier this week. Great class, interesting topic, instructor was pretty good, and my classmates were interesting and engaging. I was fully engaged through the morning.

And then lunch hit. Eating food didn’t kill me. It was seeing the email backlog of things piling up, that I was otherwise ignoring by being in class. Lunch hour wasn’t nearly long enough to deal with them all, so I went back to class mentally prioritizing and preparing responses to the growing pile.

Not sure how to handle that well. That email didn’t interrupt me physically didn’t save the backlog of tasks from interrupting me mentally.

Worst part? The afternoon’s topic was on listening.

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One of my goals for this year was to speak at a conference. Guess what I got to do last week? See http://www.mil-oss.org. SlideShare’s not playing nicely with me at the moment, but the deck’s up at http://www.slideshare.net/onesimplehuman/mil-ossowf.

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I had the opportunity to go to OSCON last week. Great conference, great city, lots of great (am I using that word a lot?) technical topics. I was out there to learn from my peers how to run open-source software projects, so spent most of my time in sessions related to that. That means I did NOT attend the Android Hands-On workshop in which Google gave away free Nexus One phones. But, hey, I’m only mildly peeved, not radically bitter. It became a game after that to try to track down an excess phone. A game which I unfortunately lost.

However, I did discover that I am immortalized in the OSCON photo logs, an item which gives me a small amount of joy.   See me pontificating here with the (small) set of women in attendance at the women’s gathering organized by O’Reilly. Women's OSCON Lunch

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Last May I was weighing a few things related to my job: was I in a job advancing in accordance with my goals?  Should I leave to start my own business?  Was I willing to take the associated risks, given how our family financials are structured?

As it turns out, as the year went on, I discovered I was in the wrong company.  I did advance in my job, and began to see that the “quirks” I’d seen in my company as a technical contributor were a bit tougher to take in my new role as a spokesperson in the company.  It’s one thing to be in a role where you think the company’s doing things differently than you’d do them; it’s another thing to be one of the folks whose job it is to do those things.  I ended up deciding to leave.

You may notice that someone commented on that post.  That someone turns out to be my new CEO.  We both think we know each other reasonably well, having worked together before.  He knows that I’m a good great addition to his company, and I know that he runs a great company, one that I’m proud to be associated with.  As I interact with some of the people he’s brought into his new company, I’m even more impressed.

John’s comment was that he wasn’t sure if I would actually want to start a company, that I should examine my reasons.   I’ll admit that those reasons have always been of the sort “when I start my company, I’ll do it differently than..”.    I think companies should behave in certain ways, and do certain things…

Behave in certain ways… do certain things… nebulous words worthy of much more than I’m willing to go into here this evening.  Worthy of more explanation for my own sake.  All I’ll say is that the story I keep telling folks about what attracted me to this company is that in my first meeting with the team, before I was interviewing with them, I got into a discussion of business as a ministry opportunity and what that would look like.  That I could have that conversation with that group of people highly impresses me and convinces me I’m in the right place.  If I’m in the right place, though, I need to consider whether the “one [I] might consider” is my destiny.  At the moment, at least, it’s the place I’m delighted to get the opportunity to help grow, and to grow with.

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So, contrary to plans, last weekend we didn’t do a 20 miler. I had some radically sore muscles from a stupid weightlifting mistake (too much weight on a squat bar does not make for happy legs), and my running partner had a nasty cold which was giving her vertigo. So, we decided the wiser option was to run shorter, on our own. Because we’ve been good about getting in the long runs, we had some options to still get in one, maybe two 20 milers before the race. This week I’m now the one fighting a cold, keeping me home from work today to avoid spreading the contagion. Should still be able to run Saturday, though, particularly if I take it somewhat easy for the next few days.

On the fundraising front: things are picking up! I sent out quite a few fundraising letters to friends, family, and business friends, either through mail or through LinkedIn. Over the last few days, I’ve had 4 contributions, bringing the total tally in for BOMF so far to $790.93. Still a ways away from $2500, and a LARGE ways away from my personal goal of $5K, but definitely going in the right direction. See the links to BOMF on the right-hand side of the page if you’d like to help make that fundraising total go further.

I’m still 2nd in the list of fundraisers. There’s one woman in front of me, and 8 men listed behind us. I find that interesting… It looks like most of the dollars raised for the Marine Corp are through ‘Team Accenture’. Accenture is a global management company, large size, and makes a point of impacting the community. So, it doesn’t surprise me that they’d have a team. What I wonder, though, is what the makeup of the top 10 fundraiser list suggests: are 1/10 of the folks on their team women? Is that woman outstanding at fundraising, or are the set of individual men less motivated? Curious… wonder if I’ll meet these folks at the race or at BOMF events. (Note that I’m assuming, based on the total $s raised by Team Accenture, that the other 9 folks on the list are all Accenture team members. That may not in fact be true.)  If you’re interested in the list of fundraisers for BOMF’s Marine Corp Marathon team, see the BOMF Active fundraising site.