Tim's journal

Since the beginning of this year, I've been volunteering at the Berkeley Free Clinic doing HIV and Hepatitis C testing and counseling. The section of the clinic I'm in has recently changed its name to Street Medicine Team, towards the goal of doing more expanded medical care particularly for houseless people. BFC is a rad organization that's based on the principle that health care is a human right. Please help me get to my goal of raising $739 (since I'm turning 39, get it) by donating, either through Facebook or on the clinic's web site! If you do the latter, please tell me how much you donated (comments on this post are screened) so I can keep track of progress towards my goal.

(Text adapted from my 35th birthday fundraiser.)

I'll be turning 38 on December 18. If you would like to celebrate with me, please make a donation to ACCESS Women's Health Justice and let me know. Since I'm turning 38, I suggest a $38 donation if you can afford it, but any amount matters, even $1. I recommend that you donate directly, because that way, ACCESS gets the money faster. You can also use the Facebook fundraiser that I created, which might be faster for you (though not for them) if you use Facebook already. My goal is to get 50 people to donate to ACCESS.

While Medi-Cal covers the cost of abortion in California, there are many expenses that people who need second-trimester abortions incur; only a small number of clinics in the state perform these procedures, so many people, especially those traveling from the Central Valley to the Bay Area, face transportation and lodging costs that can be challenging for many people. ACCESS operates a help line and helps callers by giving them money for gas or bus tickets, as well as setting them up with practical support volunteers -- I'm one of them -- who can house them overnight and/or give them rides.

Since I volunteer with ACCESS, this group is important to me. However, I'll also count you towards the total of 50 if you donate to your local abortion fund.

My goal for this year is for 50 people to donate, so, if you donate, please let me know. (Unless you use the Facebook link -- then I'll know automatically.) If you don't let me know, I won't be able to know if I reached my goal, and I'll be sad. You can let me know by commenting on this post, tweeting at me or commenting on my Facebook wall, or -- if you prefer to be private -- emailing me (catamorphism at gmail.com) or sending me a private message on any of the services I use. You don't have to tell me the amount that you donated, and I'm not going to do public thank-yous this year unless you ask for one. (In other words, it was opt-out in the past, but now it's opt-in.)

By donating you'll make me happy, piss off the people who are dangerously close to turning the US into a theocracy that denies bodily autonomy to everyone who's not a cis man, but most importantly, help make sure nobody in California has to go through a pregnancy and give birth because they're short $100 for gas money. So do it now! ACCESS WHJ is a nonprofit 501c3 organization, so if your US employer matches funds, please request a matching donation from them so that your money goes even further.

Apropos of nothing, bunnies!

(from awesome-picz on Tumblr)

I like bunnies. I also like expanding access to abortion. If you do too, you should donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds. For my 35th birthday in 3 days, I'm trying to get 40 people to donate -- so far, 32 awesome people have given! Here are their names, and if you comment saying that you gave, I'll add your name too. (Or let me know privately so I can update my tally without using your name, if you would rather be anonymous.)

We can do this!!

Here's a kitten! (image by Instagram user veggiedayz)

Now that I've got your attention, why not donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds? You'll be helping somebody get the abortion they need. You'll be annoying a forced-birther. And if you do it within the next 4 days, you'll be helping wish me a happy 35th birthday. If you let me know that you gave, I'll be one step closer to not having to post nag messages multiple times a day ;)

Here are some dogs (courtesy samoyedsbot):

Now that I've got your attention, how about helping wish me a happy 35th birthday by donating to the National Network of Abortion Funds? Please let me know if you do so I can track whether I reached my goal!

Here's a cat who adopted four baby hedgehogs.



If you think everyone has the right to choose to either be a parent or not be a parent, then please donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds for my birthday! 2 down, 38 to go 4 down, 36 to go, 13 days left :)

Edit: I've reached my goal of donations from 30 people, but don't let that stop you :-D

I had some grand plans to write blog posts as part of encouraging folks to donate, but over the weekend I caught a case of the creeping crud, and other stuff happened. Even so, at this point 22 people have donated, which means I just need 8 six five three more people one more person to donate by 23:59 PM Pacific time on December 18 in order to say that I achieved my goal of getting 30 people to donate to the Ada Initiative by my birthday!

In lieu of a longer post, here's a short one that connects two of the topics I mentioned earlier.

I'm male, obviously, so you might think I wouldn't care on a personal level whether or not the open-source community is 2% women (as the best estimates currently place it) or 50%. Sure, I used to be perceived as female, and for obvious reasons, that made it less comfortable for me to study computer science and to participate in open-source projects than it would have been if I'd been recognized as male all along. But, you might think, everything's okay now, right? I might still want the scene to be safer for women out of some abstract moral obligation, but it certainly wouldn't bother me on a personal level to not see any women in the room.

You would be wrong if you thought that, because when I'm at work or at a conference and notice that the people doing work on my level are all men, or almost all men, I wonder why. I wonder what else is going on, what I may not have noticed yet that is happening to drive women away. I wonder what I'm being complicit with without even knowing it. Perhaps more than any of those things, I notice the tone of conversations (both work-related and not) and how, in a strongly male-dominated environment, the tone reflects the lack of gender balance. No, I don't mean that guys at software companies are putting up Playboy calendars and sitting around scratching their crotches all day... not usually, anyhow. I'm referring to more subtle things, like whether a project meeting resembles a group of people cooperating towards a shared goal, or whether it looks more like a contest to see who can display the most knowledge and prove himself the winner. And I'm also referring to whether, during lunches or happy hours, people on a team are capable of talking about anything at all with each other besides just work.

It's not that I think women are intrinsically non-competitive or that they're less likely to be singularly obsessed with work. I do think that given the ways women and men are rewarded and punished for certain behaviors, women in tech are more likely to have interests outside tech and less likely to prioritize displaying how much they know ahead of getting a job done.

I find it depressing and toxic when the only people I work with are men. And I find that to be a distraction from getting my job done. Some people might see it as a distraction when I bring up sexism in my workplace -- for me, it's just something I'm doing in the hopes of creating an environment where I can do my job better, like getting an ergonomic keyboard or sitting near a window. It's not that women's place in tech is just to make guys like me happier, of course. Rather, gender ratios are something that can be measured and that are quite likely to be one proxy for a workplace that's functioning well. A company whose hiring process systematically excludes women is likely to be one whose hiring processes are broken in many other ways as well, and more broadly, that has a culture that's hurting productivity in more ways than just gender imbalance. (Gender imbalance hurts a project or company because it means that people who could contribute more are being pushed out in favor of people who can't contribute as much, just because they're the wrong gender -- and gender is a trait that's irrelevant to performance as a programmer.)

Nothing is going to change without concerted effort, because many men feel they benefit from a professional culture where they don't have to work as hard because they don't have to compete with women. And as I wrote before, one of the groups that's most likely to be remembered as having had an effect is the Ada Initiative.

Thanks again to the people who have donated so far:

1. Angry_Lawyer
   
2. josephcorcoran
   
3. ffee_machine
   
4. ArdaTisya
   
5. nerdonica
   
6. chrisleague
   
7. cynthia1960
   
8. nou
   
9. substitute
   
10. +n tung (gatoatigrado)
    
11. miang
    
12. anemone
    
13. Eugene Kirpichov
    
14. scouttle
    
15. sixty4k
    
16. atombeast
    
17. Eli Lebow
    
18. etrolleybus
    
19. aeolianharp
    
20. Summer and Carl
    
21. acfoltzer
    
22. nentuaby
    
23. sebfisch
    
24. Rohboto
    
25. flippac
    
26. kowey
    
27. gfish
    
28. gwillen
    
29. ImreFitos
    
30. pseudomonas
    
31. yam
    
32. PerceptibleBlue
    
33. callmesquinky
    
34. rjmccall
    
35. musingvirtual
    
36. karlht
    

In ten days, I'm turning 0x20 (that's 32 in base ten). I'm asking anyone who would like to celebrate my birthday to make a donation to the Ada Initiative. Since I'm turning 32, I suggest a donation of $32 (which, conveniently, makes you an "Ada's Supporter") if you can afford it. However, donations of any amount, no matter how small, matter and are useful.

Conveniently, I already wrote about why I support the Ada Initiative, if you're looking for a reason why you should too. To quote myself: "If you're someone who has enjoyed the privilege of working in the tech industry, particularly in open source, and particular if you haven't had to fight exclusion because of your social placement, I encourage you to give back just a little bit of what you've reaped by donating to the Ada Initiative. That is, at least, if you think everybody should have the same opportunities that you had."

In the past, I've used causes.com for this, but this time I'm just asking that people donate to the Ada Initiative directly. If you donate because of my birthday posts, please let me know, because my goal is to incite 20 people to donate, and if you don't let me know you donate, I don't know. You can let me know by commenting on this post, tweeting at me or commenting on my Facebook wall, or -- if you prefer to be private -- emailing me (mylastname at alum.wellesley.edu) or sending me a private message on any of the services I use. Also, I will assume it's okay to thank you in a public post by the name or pseudonym that I know you by unless you tell me otherwise. You don't have to tell me the amount that you donated.

If you've donated to the Ada Initiative this year already, great! Please donate a little more for my sake :-)

I am going to try to post something on my blog every day until I reach my goal of 20 donors, even if it's a link to a post written by someone else. I'll have the first installment up either tonight or tomorrow!

And thanks!

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Donors (i.e. wonderful people):

1. juli
   
2. etb
   
3. Henry Andrews
   
4. miang
   
5. yam
   
6. Anonymous Liyang Hu
   
7. cidney
   
8. nentuaby
   
9. leilazilles
   
10. pseudomonas
    
11. davidcarr_2001
    
12. pastwatcher
    
13. anemone
    
14. Anonymous gwillen
    
15. kyriacarlisle
    
16. sonia
    
17. DRMacIver
    
18. agent_dani
    
19. aeolianharp
    
20. scazon and we're at 20! (but please keep donating!)
    
21. wilkieii
    
22. GreenSkyOverMe
    
23. another_order
    
24. ivy
    
25. joxn
    
26. Tash Shatz
    
27. SpencerShiraev