Deirdre Saoirse Moen

Molly Holzschlag has been one of the premier people helping define the web over quite a few years. I was honored to be an attendee at a workshop she (and a few others) led at Foothill College in 2005, which led to my really learning web standards, which later led to my job on the Safari team.

So I feel like I owe her a lot.

The tl;dr version is: cancer sucks and, as a side effect of chemo, she now has another life-threatening illness, and she’s going to need a metric ton of money.

If you have any, she’s a worthy person to throw it at.

I snagged the following from her gofundme page, which has a lot more details about her situation:

Some of her numerous accomplishments include:

• Authoring more than 35 books on web design, CSS, accessibility, and more;
• Speaking at more than 60 different industry events for web professionals in over 15 countries; Molly is a GREAT teacher!
• Leading the Web Standards Project (WaSP), which pioneered awareness of the W3C standards and brought browser makers into alignment on following those standards;
• Actively participating in the W3C HTML and CSS Working Groups as an invited expert, and chairing its Accessibility Community Group.
• Forging the way for today’s bloggers at molly.com;
• Being voted one of the Top 25 Most Influential Women on the Web by the San Francisco Women of the Web;
• Embracing the opportunity to be a leader, role model, and teacher to other female technology professionals;
• Passionately advocating for a free, inclusive, and accessible Web.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

I’ve had a blog for 10 years, but I’ve been irregular for periods about posting to it before WordPress had a good spam solution. These days, an average day for me is between 100 and 250 page views and between 70 and 150 unique visitors. Obviously, this excludes people who turn off tracking.

For reasons related to upcoming projects, I’d moved deirdre.net to WP Engine. I’m so glad I did, because they were able to handle the massive sudden spike.

At the peak, in a 24-hour period from June 10-11, I had 28,000 page views, almost entirely unique visitors.

If you need a really great hosting platform for your self-hosted WordPress blog, I’ve been really impressed with WP Engine.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

No, I’m not going to be less active on Twitter.

Here’s the problem: when I wake up in the morning and open my Twitter client, I can see 31 minutes of tweets. A few weeks ago, that was 47 minutes, but then I added a couple of people.

I want to get that back to where I saw all the tweets since I went to bed.

That’s going to mean I’m going to unfollow some prolific tweeters. I’m going to follow people whose news I can get elsewhere. Etc.

What this will mean is that I’ll be far more likely to read that tweet posted by a friend in a distant time zone.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

You know what I respect most about Sweden? They had a great engineering disaster. One of the best of all time, frankly.

Did they try to erase it?

No, they built a fucking monument where you can see the order of magnitude of the folly of a bad decision they made in the 17th century. And how people died.

It’s called the Vasa museum.

So, About Kickstarter.

They blinked. Or did they?

My opinion: no. They tried to erase what they did and write a small check, and that will be enough for some people.

I woke up this morning. As I often do first thing, I scrolled through my Twitter client.

The overwhelming reaction from the men on my Twitter feed was that Kickstarter had done enough.

The overwhelming reaction from the women on my Twitter feed was that they had not done enough.

They did not do enough.

So here’s my guess: while we’d like for them to have paused or canceled the campaign while it was still running, they lacked the infrastructure for that to happen.

However, it doesn’t say why they didn’t, say, edit a database table that would change when the Kickstarter campaign ended (effectively giving more time to raise money), add a warning they were investigating and that’s why they’d changed the end time, and given themselves more time to deal with the problem while the campaign was still running.

Brilliant, right? I know. I’m a fucking genius. But I’ve been a DBA in a crisis, and that’s what my first thought would have been, and it was totally within their ability to do. Maybe not within their policy, but within their technological capability.

The big thing there, and it would have been misinterpreted, was that it would have prevented the Kickstarter from being funded while they decided what to do.

Now, on to what they did do.

One of the motes in American character, especially American business character, is to try to erase what one did that was wrong. You’ve already admitted you were wrong, why not own up to all of it? Have the stones to go there.

Instead, they e-mailed the bad decision sub rosa to several blogs saying that the campaign was not a violation of Kickstarter policy, and now they do a big official oops on their page, hoping you will forget that they in fact said the project was okay. Because, of course, they didn’t say it was okay on their official company page.

That’s the typical American chickenshit way of “fixing” a problem. It lacks moral character.

So let’s not forget this part, okay?

Update, 6:51 p.m. EST: Kickstarter emailed a statement to The Raw Story regarding both the project and the public response:

Kickstarter reviews projects based on our guidelines and the information creators share on their project pages. It’s a process we’ve refined over four years and continue to refine daily. We strive for fair and thoughtful policies that maintain the health of the Kickstarter ecosystem.

This morning, material that a project creator posted on Reddit earlier this year was brought to our and the public’s attention just hours before the project’s deadline. Some of this material is abhorrent and inconsistent with our values as people and as an organization. Based on our current guidelines, however, the material on Reddit did not warrant the irreversible action of canceling the project.

As stewards of Kickstarter we sometimes have to make difficult decisions. We followed the discussion around the web today very closely. It led to a lot of internal discussion and will lead to a further review of our policies.

With that in mind….

I’m a rape survivor, so I get to say what would be enough reparations from Kickstarter for me. So, without further ado, here’s the list:

1. $25k of reparations is not enough. How much is enough? I like $163,690 as a number. That’s ten times the amount raised in the Kickstarter campaign. It’s also obviously symbolic. It also hurts more than $25,000. Hell, you probably pay some of the people involved in these decisions that much per year, right? Maybe the person who made the bad call?
2. 732 hours of off-site sexual assault recognition and crisis training and/or volunteering, paid for by the company. One hour for each person who contributed to the campaign. Given that Kickstarter has 61 employees, that’s 1.5 business days per person. Exactly, weirdly enough. When I say everyone, I mean including the CEO. Write a blog post when this is done. It’s important to do it off-site so you all are taken out of the context of the office for the experience.
3. Un-erase the Kickstarter campaign’s page. Instead, put a warning on it. Make sure it’s a monument to Kickstarter’s folly.
4. Edit the blog post and acknowledge that Kickstarter made an earlier bad decision saying that the campaign was not in violation of Kickstarter’s guidelines. Do not erase the mistake.
5. Admit that you were deleting facebook wall posts like crazy. Look, I get it. Honestly, I don’t care about this one, but other people do. At least admit that you did it.
6. Publicly commit, with a deadline, to building a “Pause this Campaign” infrastructure that has, as a minimum, the following:
   • Permits linking to a blog post explaining why a Kickstarter is paused.
   • Has great big old “Paused” wording, preventing any additional monies being contributed to the campaign, but allowing any existing contributor to back out.
   • Until that is implemented, commit to extending the deadline (for above-stated reasons) on any controversial campaign.

Let’s not forget the important part: some asshole has the lion’s share of sixteen grand to write a book that includes sexual predator tips, and 732 people funded it and want that book.

All because Kickstarter failed to show moral character in a crisis.

And Kickstarter would love the concerns of those of us sexual assault survivors to be erased just like the campaign page.

No.

Twenty-five grand and an oops (especially reversing a prior decision they won’t publicly acknowledge) is not enough.

Erasure? Just pisses me off more.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.

First of all, while I do care about Wikileaks, I don't particularly care about Julian as a person, except that I think that he should be treated the same as any other rape suspect -- and he hasn't been. See, for example, this post about the treatment of Polanski by comparison as well as some other points worth reading.

I think that people are entitled to a good defense, no matter how reprehensible a person they may be or how reprehensible a deed they may have committed (purportedly or actually).

I'm never one to assume that someone is either guilty (or innocent) of a crime until the case has been ruled upon -- that said, I generally have an opinion. On rm's comment, "[I] am somewhat uncomfortable with the social requirement that we pronounce him guilty outside/prior to legal proceedings to which we are not party" -- I'm almost always very uncomfortable with that, especially in cases that could constitute libel per se.

I've found some of the timeline peculiar, particularly alterations of Twitter after the fact, and I note them as odd, perhaps significantly so.

That said, Julian does seem narcissistic; it is perhaps an unfair bias that I consider narcissists more likely to do things like that which Julian is accused of.

tl;dr: I wouldn't call anyone a rapist until they're convicted -- unless I was the victim or had personal knowledge of the situation. Which I do not in this case.

A cool blog post about social media, both the upside and the downside.