Sunday, April 13, 2014

The cost of Grrrl Power

The GNOME foundation discovers that a devotion to the advancement of feminist propaganda can get in the way of any actual work being done:
The Foundation does not have any cash reserves right now.

Why has this happened?

The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) has proven to be extremely popular and has grown quite rapidly both in terms of the number of interns and the number of participating organizations. GNOME, as the lead organization, has been responsible for managing the finances for the entire effort. However, as the program grew, the processes did not keep up. The changes were not tracked effectively from the point when other organizations joined the OPW. This impacted not only our ability to manage the OPW administration, but also to keep up with the core financial tasks of the Foundation -- tasks which already needed the full attention of the Foundation's employees and the board.

As a result of these issues, we have only just now finalized our 2014 budget. In the meantime, we made assumptions based on previous years' incomes and expenditures, and we authorized expenditures for this year based on those assumptions. Those assumptions proved to be more optimistic than reality. In addition, while our outgoing payments to interns must be strictly timed, the incoming payments from sponsoring organizations are very fluid, thus we have had to front the costs of OPW. Fronting these costs has resulted in a budget shortfall.
Well, I think we can all agree that reaching out to girls who don't have any real interest in programming is more important than whatever it is the GNOME foundation was formed to do. Why not simply continue the vital work of the Outreach Program for Woman with their sole compensation being the ability to bask in the approval of all right-thinking individuals?

It would be unfortunate if the Open Source movement was strangled by its misguided insistence on getting more women involved. In fact, one almost wonders if Microsoft might not behind it somehow....

13 comments:

tz said...

That and arbitrary UI and API changes. And general stupidness and brokenness. I'm not surprised but this clears things up.

Note how Bill Gates' solution to starvation is to send condoms.

While I think he is.overstating and a bit.much conspiracy theory<, he notes much of the gnome undermining.

Anonymous said...

I once read an article by a woman who went to a liberal arts college and, because of a housing shortage, got stuck living in the Women's Collective for a while. She said they made all decisions -- including ordering pizza -- using feminist process. That's where they all sit in a circle and randomly take turns expressing their feelings and talking about how much they value them until a consensus magically appears, however long it takes. (There's no voting because that would imply someone's feelings lost out; so instead the people who would have lost the vote have to pretend to agree with the consensus so they can order the damn pizza and eat already, which is obviously much more healthy.)

For some reason it reminds me of Douglas Adams's Bistromathics, where the robots move things around the table until it all adds up to the bistro being where it's supposed to be. I suspect any chance of getting important work done with feminist process is just as much science fiction as that. I don't know whether things had gotten that bad at GNOME, but if you have many women in charge, things are going to tend that direction.

Revelation Means Hope said...

Reading this reminds me that I'm going to need to up my game at work.
Already doing it at the individual level, have actually had to recalibrate a couple times as the women couldn't concentrate and speak coherently when I sat down to talk with them one on one.

But getting large groups of women to move on an initiative, when they are so risk averse....I can see why the previous 5 people have failed to improve the performance of that group. They thought showing the logical "do this to get that result" would change minds and inspire passion. I've caught myself a couple times almost saying "it's hard to argue with the facts". Currently their solution is to hire more employees to get marginal decreases in the growing backlog.

Time to get my strategy hat on and start thinking like a charming leader who somehow moves groups of women in the direction he wants them to move....

tz said...

Grrls Never Optimize Much Engineering

tz said...

I don't remember seeing any gnomes in Selenoth. Are they maybe gnomadic?

Whiskey said...

Why I switched to XFCE and Xubuntu years ago.

LP2021 Bank of LP Work in Progress said...

have no cash, lies!


henhouse, busy body women like this belong under the foot of a man.


Robert said...

In the Gnome world, the function of organizations is to produce paychecks for people, especially minorities and women. By those lights, this org. was doing everything right. And it didn't work out! Who could have imagined?
And Obama hasn't had a budget for five years and he's doing great. Right?

Unknown said...

I use Linux. I use KDE as a UI because Gnome absolutely sucks.
This OPW thing must be the explanation of why Gnome sucks so big time.

Harambe said...

As a software developer reliant on getting paid for what I do, I couldn't care less if a communist organization goes belly-up. I'm already seeing wordpress and its plethora of free(read: copied from premium versions) plugins eat away at my meal ticket. Granted, Gnome doesn't affect me except in a very indirect way, but they all share the same philosophy: profits are bad, relying on handouts is good. Yet no one wonders where the money is going to come from when, one day, everyone is working for some non-profit organization.

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