Talk at EuroPython, 2015

Adopt Pytest Month was an event I organised during April 2015, to encourage new open source projects to start using pytest. In this talk I discuss how APM was organised, what the outcomes were, and make suggestions for anyone interested in holding a similar event.

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2015

I conceived of Adopt Pytest Month (APM) in January 2015 at FOSDEM, and carried it out in April 2015. (I then spoke about it at EuroPython in July 2015.) It involved pairing experienced pytest users with open source maintainers for one month, to give new projects a helping hand in getting the most out of pytest. It was a successful and interesting, if intensive, experiment in growing the user-base and community.

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2015

Yes dear reader, the document you have loaded in your browser cache this very minute was also designed by yours truly. I started with the Ascend Bootstrap template and The Pattern Library's Kale Salad background. I used Flask, Jinja templates, Flask Flat-Pages with Markdown for the content, and Frozen-Flask to make a static site.

Lightning Talk at Linux.conf.au, 2014

An introduction to a new project I started to chronicle open source and free software projects that had success (or not) with crowdfunding such as Kickstarter.

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2014

I made a set of three advertisements spoofing Industry SuperFunds "You've still got time" campaign, which encouraged consumers to switch superannuation plans (also known as retirement plans or pension schemes). These advertisements always compare two women or two men, never a man to a woman: it just wouldn't do to highligh the gender gap in super balances.

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2014

The site is a simple Wordpress placeholder for the poster images which are hosted on Flickr. c.f. the original advertisements

From a design perspective, this mostly shows how I have ported my Microsoft Paint skills to GIMP. #progress

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Talk at PyCon AU, 2013

A demonstration of one way to embed maps of gridded data in the IPython Notebook.

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Talk at PyCon AU, 2012

A whirlwind introduction to pytest funcargs (since renamed fixtures - syntax has changed significantly so the content in this talk should be considered historical).

📋 Abstract 🎬 Video 📊 Slides #️⃣ Code

2012

These were a set of Moo cards that I had printed. One side said "RTFM" (read the fucking manual) and the other said "the wiki – geekfeminism.wikia.com – the blog – geekfeminism.org".

After conversing in women-centred feminist spaces, I found conversations about women in tech in non-feminist spaces to be decidedly boring and repetitive. Just as one seeks out tutorials on topics they want to learn about, people who want to discuss women in tech would do well to read up on existing resources before launching into the converation.

Joseph Reagle mentioned these cards in this 2015 paper, "The Obligation to Know: From FAQ to Feminism 101".

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2012

Radio/Revolution was an idea for an unconference I had that I wanted to organsise. I wanted to bring together techies and diehard radio folks and see what we could learn from each other, based on my observations of strong communities formed around 3CR community radio in Melbourne. The unconference didn't end up happening, but this would have been its website. A simple Wordpress affair with retro-futuristic (or is that futuristic-retro) vibe.

Talk at PyCon AU, 2011

An introduction to Zookeepr, the web-based conference management system written in Python and used by Linux.conf.au and PyCon AU. An invitation for new contributors to join the project.

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Talk at Linux.conf.au Haecksen miniconf, 2011

A brief talk about the concept of "neurosexism" as discussed by Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, and how it surfaces in discussions around women in technology.

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Talk at Linux.conf.au Freedom in the Cloud miniconf, 2011

An exploration of how concepts from distributed version control systems might be applied to wikis, and what would be needed to make forking Wikipedia practical.

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Talk at BarCamp Geelong, 2011

A look at recommended practice in asking about users' gender in software design.

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Invited Talk at SHARISM, 2010

English Wikipedia is wildly popular, but the Mandarin Wikipedia doesn't have the same status in China. A look at if this competition ultimately divides or improves the offerings for readers, as well as what makes Wikipedia unique compared to its Chinese rivals.

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Talk at Linux Users of Victoria meeting, 2010

An introduction to corpus linguistics for web texts using NLTK, and the luv-main mailing list archive as an example.

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Invited Talk at Innovative Ideas Forum, 2010

Does Wikipedia herald the future of mass collaboration as a way to build great works, or is Wikipedia a fluke?

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Talk at Unlocking IP, 2009

Co/presented with Liam Wyatt. Discussing specific copyright-related challenges within Wikimedia. More info.

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Talk at Melbourne Hack Weekend, 2009

A brief overview of how to extract data from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, including data dumps and the MediaWiki API. Given at Melbourne Hack Weekend hosted by Lonely Planet, a precursor to events like GovHack.

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Talk at GLAM-WIKI, 2009

An introduction to MediaWiki with a focus for an audience from the cultural sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums).

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2009

A tech-centred blog I wrote from 2009-2014. I ported a minimalistic, text-centred theme called Enterprise to Textpattern.

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2009

When Wikipedia was founded in 2001, Creative Commons did not exist. Wikipedia began under the GNU Free Documentation License, administered by the Free Software Foundation. As time went on it became clear that the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license would be a much better fit. A complicated process was undertaken to allow Wikipedia to relicense its content, including a community vote. Any good poll needs a bit of propaganda to help it along, I felt. This "propaganda poster" was designed in Inkscape.

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2009

This is a small thing I put together to visualise a dataset for the 2009 GovHack weekend hosted by Lonely Planet in Melbourne. It's built on web.py, Mako templates and some Google Maps JavaScript. I'm still rather fond of the background image, which I edited from this cigar box design c1890.

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Workshop at Wikimania, 2008

Co-presented with Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals.

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Talk at Wikimania, 2008

A "state of the wiki" overview covering technical updates, community initiatives, quality and looming challenges.

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Talk at Software Freedom Day Melbourne, 2008

An introduction to Wikipedia and how it acts on the goals of the free software movement.

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Talk at Linux.conf.au LinuxChix miniconf, 2008

An introduction to Wikipedia governance, policies and processes.

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Talk at Linux Users of Victoria meeting, 2008

Discusses ways to heavily customise MediaWiki as a user, no sysadmin privileges or command-line access needed.

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Talk at ACEC, 2008

An introduction to Wikipedia for educators, arguing for an informed approach rather than "abstinence only", with suggestions for projects suitable for incorporating Wikipedia in the classroom. Also presented at the EDNA ICT workshop in 2008.

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2008

Bin the bike ban! was a campaign organised in early 2008 by myself, Chris Star and other cyclists from YarraBUG and the general community. At the end of 2007, the state government of Victoria (Australia) had quietly changed the law to ban bicycles from peak-hour train services. Chris and other more politically savvy than I organised media-friendly protests such as boarding trains with life-size cardboard cutouts of bikes. I bought a domain, put together a Wordpress instance, wrote a few blog entries documenting media coverage, did an occasional interview, and got busy making shitty logos and image banners in Inkscape.

This campaign had a happy ending, as its short life may suggest – the “back-pedal” came in February. Not only did the transport minister reverse the decision, but the campaign succeeded in putting pressure on the largely complacent state cycling group, which had been prepared to accept the change.

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Talk at Wikimania, 2007

A brief study into the behaviour of newly-registered users, looking at edits made, images uploaded (and deleted), and warnings and other communications received.

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2007

One of the first pieces of programming I ever did that served a use to people other than myself was the daily-image-l script. Back in early 2007 there was (and still is) a daily-article-l mailing list that would email a link to the Article of the Day once a day. I thought it would be a good idea to have a similar thing for Wikimedia Commons' Picture of the Day. Due to bandwidth concerns it was thought preferable to email a link to the image rather than send it as an attachment. The challenge in the script was then to extract the image's author and license information from the semi-structured wiki text, as well as multilingual captions to include in the email.

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2007

From 2007-2010 I wrote over 200 posts in this blog, on all things Wikimedia and free culture related. I apologise about the colour scheme, it didn't age well at all. It was probably poorly aged five seconds after I put it up. I'm really sorry. The background tile is from Squidfingers.

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2006

To celebrate Wikimedia Commons reaching one million uploaded files, I suggested that the community could create an image mosaic. The Wikimedia Commons logo is rather boring so we worked on the general Wikimedia logo. Once I made the suggestion the project took on a life of its own, with dozens of users putting images in place and working on improving the mosaic. People really enjoyed creating it, and appreciated the end result. An appropriate analogy for how wikis work in general, really!

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2001

MASHEO Support was a X-Files fandom site I started in 2001, maybe in 2000. MASHEO is an acronym for "Mulder And Scully Hate Each Other", a satirical dig at MSR shippers claiming to see "proof" of their "love" everywhere. MASHEO was started by Greg Lawson and I became a regular at the discussion board, and made friends that I still have to this day (well, these days on Facebook). I made this site pretty much because Greg was rather slow at updating the official site.

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1998

Noromo Values was an X-Files fansite, my first labour of love and HTML. The design hasn't really aged gracefully. It is of its time. The header image is by someone else, Greg Lawson I think, which is why it looks much better than everything else. I did put a lot of effort into the content though. I scoured search engine results (pre-Google), reviewed links, conducted interviews, wrote an episode guide, collected quotes, reviewed fanfic, wrote listicles, made terrible graphics and even constructed a calendar.

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