On 1/18/13 11:30 AM, Andromeda Yelton wrote:
>
> I also think some sort of 'what's zoia and how can you contribute' link
> would be useful in any welcome-newbie plugin; it did take me a while to
> figure out what was going on there.  (Just as it took me the while to
> acquire the tastes for, say, coffee, bourbon, and blue cheese, tastes which
> I would now defend ferociously.)

Having read through the c4l IRC FAQ (which has maybe a dozen Zoia 
commands) and later been pointed to the github hub for the plugins, I 
would say that Zoia is very complex and quite under-documented. For 
example, nowhere could I find the @mf plugin -- and then found out that 
the commands and plugin names are not always the same. While python 
isn't the worst language to read, reading code isn't the greatest way to 
make things understandable -- especially when we've agreed that one 
doesn't have to be a "coder" to be included in c4l.

The zoia bot in c4l IRC strikes me as being a type of adventure game 
where you have to pass certain milestones to gain more power. I think 
that is very appealing to lots of folks. Unfortunately I don't think 
that it's going to be possible to have this tight c4l culture based 
around irc and also be broadly inclusive. In fact, that isn't the case 
today. As I said to someone offline, if you want the classical music 
folks to join your music channel but you primarily play heavy metal, 
it's just not going to work. So maybe trying to make c4l IRC everything 
to everybody isn't a feasible goal.

You may have noticed (although it has been unremarked) that a larger 
number of men have listed "zoia-play" as a reason they do not hang out 
in c4l irc than women (1, me). So there are those who love it, and those 
who find it annoying. That's fine. But it does leave c4l with a kind of 
a dilemma -- try to make everyone happy? Or accept that the irc channel 
and its particular "flavor" may not be as inclusive as the community 
would like it to be. This would mean not seeing the c4l irc as a 
"primary community" space but as a "particular flavor of the community" 
space, and taking pains to make sure that c4l IRC is not billed as or 
treated as the "main stage" for c4l and those who do not hang out in the 
channel should not be viewed as "non-participants" in c4l (and I think 
they are not). However, by doing so we do lose the one central "go-to" 
place for quick questions when you're stuck in some technology 
nightmare. Some of that takes place on the list, but sometimes you want 
to find a real person and do a quick back-and-forth.

This isn't an easy situation, and we might want to discuss it more at 
the conference. If the folks who aren't into the IRC banter aren't 
missing anything, then there's not really a problem. If, however, there 
is a desire to gather c4l-ers around the IRC channel (and there seemed 
to be when we proposed a channel for women, which was seen as 
"splintering the community", then we have some negotiating to do.

kc



>
> But not having zoia would make me sad.  And defining zoia to be
> woman-unfriendly, when zoia-lovers and zoia-haters appear to span the
> gender spectrum and have a variety of reasons (both gendered and non) for
> their reactions, would make me sad too.
>
> @love zoia.
>
> Andromeda
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 10:38 AM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> ... and BTW, if people see Zoia as a bit of a problem during the
>> conference, doesn't that mean that Zoia is a bit of a problem all of the
>> time? Is there a reason to be polite and inclusive during the conference
>> but not every day? Could this have any relation to the felt need to create
>> #libtechwomen?
>>
>> kc
>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>> [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet
>>

-- 
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet