I was at Open Source Bridge this week, with my kiddo Baz. We were both giving talks, and I was giving a workshop on interviewing with Carol Smith. Also I got to MC the slideshow karaoke part of the after-party, which was huge fun.
But the big news is that I won an award for Open Source Citizenship. This was not captured in pictures, but I literally spun in a circle, trying to figure out who behind me was also named Heidi. They were pretty clear they meant me.
I have real trouble thinking of myself as an open source contributor – sure, I go to a bunch of open source conferences, and I write for opensource.com, and I give talks about how to be a better self-documenting writer, and I livetweet almost everything I go to, but I don’t code, you know.
It’s like that moment when you recognize your internalize misogyny. Oh, I am devaluing my contributions for NO GOOD REASON. I have imposter syndrome not about my talent (goodness knows, I’m pretty cocky about that), but my place in the community. Any minute now they’ll find out that I haven’t edited Wikipedia in 9 years, and they’ll reject me! That’s not how it goes. Contributions of all types are valuable, and I’m glad to be recognized for what I do.
In 2009 or so, there was a giant fannish explosion we now colloquially call Racefail. One of the most valuable people/roles in the whole thing was “Archivist of the Revolution” – a position held by @ryda_wong and others. They read, collated, and commented on an incredible amount of data, packaging but not altering it so that we could consume relevant posts without seeking them out ourselves.
I don’t see myself as that dedicated to the cause, but it’s something I can aspire to — to offer up information, to curate what I see, to help create indexes and pointers. I do live-tweeting because I think it’s valuable and because it’s a way for me to manage my ADD. 8 hours a day of extremely thought-provoking talks is HARD.
For a little while, I thought that perhaps I was outshining other contributors because my conference persona is loud and tweety and charismatic. And I truly feel that charisma is not always the best indicator of value to a community. There are a lot of charming assholes in the world. I hope I’m not one of them, but I assume that charming assholes never notice it until someone calls them out on it.
But then I remembered that this is voted on by attendees. Individual people found what I was doing useful. And I remembered the very smart thing that my mom told me about compliments.
“Just say thank you. Arguing is insulting their judgement.”
So thank you! I’m going to be happy that I won something! It’s true: I do spend time, money, and energy on the open source community.
- I mentor other writers
- I spend hours and days crafting talks
- I quietly support other women and under-represented people, dozens of hours a year
- I contribute thousands of words to the corpus of knowledge with tweeting and blogging
- I ask stupid questions so other people don’t have to
That’s a pretty good list. I’m happy with it. So thank you, members of the Open Source Bridge community. I appreciate your recognition, and I’m honored.