meyerweb.com

I had most of a followup to yesterday’s post written, all reasonable and spiked with some humor and maybe a little dry, which I suppose is what most people have come to expect from me in general, and then it fell apart in concert with my inner stability.

I’ve definitely incurred a lesson in “post in haste, repent in leisure”. The internal aftereffects of the post have been extensive and unexpected. I don’t have them all sorted out yet; it may take months. I don’t even have names for all the things that have roiled up. I may be undergoing a drastic phase change in my thinking, or I may just be grieving something I didn’t know I mourned, or perhaps I’m raging against a world I sometimes feel powerless to alter. I don’t know. I do know that if I’d known this would be the effect of posting, I’d never have done it—which is one of the best arguments in the world for having done it.

I’ll not mince words: I screwed up pretty badly yesterday. The real question is how. I’m not sure I’ll know the answer for a long time. Was my mistake in speaking honestly? Was it in how I wrote it all down? Was it in the rhetorical approach I took? Was (is) the flaw intrinsic to me? Am I the very problem I so much want to eliminate?

If I have erred and caused harm by that error I apologize. I am as ever human, mistakes and all, flaws aplenty, and while that’s an explanation, it’s not an excuse. It is never, ever an excuse.

I am deeply sorry today, but not for what I was trying to say. I might be sorry for how I said it, or for a number of other things. I know I’m sorry for causing hurt in others. That was the last thing I wanted. I was trying to make a positive statement, trying to detail what I find to be an empowering concept. A lot of people were supportive, but a number of people, many of whom I respect and some that I care for and a few that I love, were disappointed by what I had to say. I disappointed them, some very badly, which means I’ve let them down. And I really, really hate letting people down.

And here’s the worst part, the absolutely darkest most awful painful part of the entire situation: I let them down by being myself.

That tears. It rips ragged claws of paradox across my throat, up my jawline, through my brow.

In my head, I know that the recipe for failure is trying to please everyone, but my heart doesn’t buy it. I’m human, and no matter how impossible the task I want to be what everyone wants me to be. Which I can’t be. I can only be myself. I can only hope to improve myself. And I can only do that according to what I truly believe, down at my core, because one person’s improvement is another person’s step backward, and changing oneself to meet the expectations of others is a fool’s game at best.

I am who I am, and it will not be to everyone’s liking. I will never see the world in the ways that everyone wishes me to see it. This is an essential truth, something that should be obvious to anyone, the sort of thing one should never think of trying to contradict.

And yet.

I know that there were a number of people who understood what I was saying and agreed with me, who in some cases were proud of me, and that they are no less important than those who didn’t understand or who did understand and were disappointed. I should concentrate on that balance, see the whole mixture, but I’m just not wired that way. For whatever reason, my genetics or my upbringing or whatever it is, I can’t help but focus on the negatives. In this case, on those I let down.

There’s no reason for sympathy here. I knew the third rail was fully electrified, and I chose to tap dance upon it. The outcomes of that choice will serve to teach me, if I listen—but what I will learn is still very much an unknown. I only hope that, in the end, it confers a net positive effect on me and the world around me.

This post is probably going to get me burnt to a tiny, mewling crisp, but that’s okay. I can take it.

I also want to make it very clear that what I write here reflects my personal views. It does not in any fashion represent the official policy of An Event Apart LLC or its associated conferences. However, it’s obviously the case that, as a co-founder of the company and an organizer of said conferences, my views influence what happens there. Just don’t think for an instant that I speak for Jeffrey in this, nor that I am declaring official company policy. This one’s all me.

So, here it is: as a conference organizer, I don’t care about diversity.

All right. Take a minute to reduce the boil in your blood to a bare simmer, and bear with me. I’m going to explain what I mean, and illustrate as best I can. I hope that by the end, you’ll better understand my point of view, even if you don’t agree with it.

Yesterday, Jason Kottke posted the percentage of female speakers at recent and upcoming web conferences. I note he didn’t include the one-day Event Aparts from last year, where our speaker lists ranged from 0% female (most of them) to 25% female (Austin) to 40% female (Seattle), but that’s okay. Maybe he was only considering “bigger” conferences. Early on, he wrote:

Each time this issue is raised, you see conference organizers publicly declare that they tried, that diversity is a very important issue, and that they are going to address it the next time around.

Well, I’m hereby bucking that trend. In my personal view, diversity is not of itself important, and I don’t feel that I have anything to address next time around. What’s important is technical expertise, speaking skills, professional stature, brand appropriateness, and marketability. That’s it. That’s always been the alpha and omega of my thinking, and it will continue to be so the next time, and time after that, and the time after that.

You’ll note that nowhere in that list do you find gender, race, creed, or any other such parameter. Those things are completely unimportant to me when organizing a conference. (Or, really, when I’m doing almost anything.) Hopefully, you’ll also note that I have not said that speakers should always be white males. If that’s what you think not caring about diversity means, then sorry, you’re wrong. At least you’re wrong in my case. I can’t speak for others.

I will admit that we’ve seen a little bit of pushback on this issue. The gender imbalance of the upcoming Boston show was pointed out to us by one of the speakers, and I’m sure someone’s eventually going to ask us where the women are in Seattle.

I’ll slightly sidetrack to address Seattle, since it illustrates one aspect of how speaker lists are decided. With Web Directions North just concluded in Vancouver, we made a tactical decision to try not to repeat any speakers from WDN at our Seattle show. Retaliation? Nope; simple marketing. If our Seattle speaker list looked like even a partial re-run of WDN, then where’s the incentive to go to AEA? Unfortunately, that left us fairly high and dry with regard to many of the best-known names in our field, including the best-known women. Nothing against the WDN crew: we’re all friends here; they had the earlier show; and nobody held a gun to our heads and forced us to go to Seattle in June. That’s just how things turned out.

So that left us four women down in terms of who we could consider inviting to Seattle. You might say: well, that’s fine, but what about getting other women on stage?

Okay, who?

Before you answer, remember that An Event Apart is a web development best practices conference. Our brand promises to bring you the biggest names in the field of standards-oriented design and closely related fields, and to have those people talk about what they see next, to push the envelope just a little further out, to show the audience old things in new ways, and so on. Therefore, it relies on populating the stage with widely known and respected people, on having speakers who are instantly recognizable as relevant to what the attendees do and what they want to learn.

So someone might suggest that we invite, say, Natalie Jeremijenko. I’d immediately sit bolt upright with interest: I love her stuff. She’s the kind of artist-engineer-hacker I would want to be if I were to choose that sort of career path. Her ideas and projects completely fascinate me. I would love to see her present on what she’s doing and thinking and seeing in the world, and to have the chance to meet her in person and express my deep and abiding admiration.

But then the conference organizer in me would slump back. She’s not well known in the web design/development field, and she doesn’t really work in that field anyway. As brilliant and talented and amazing and wonderful and female as she is, she doesn’t belong on our stage. Other stages, absolutely! (If MAKE: ever does a conference, they’d be idiots not to invite her.) But not ours.

Call that decision a manifestation of old-boy clubbiness if you want, but it isn’t. It’s the natural result of defining a brand and sticking to it. Should Slipknot be the opening act for a Tim McGraw/Faith Hill tour? Should Rick Santorum be the opening keynote at the Democratic National Convention? Should I be a speaker at the Blog Business Summit? Should men be on stage at BlogHer?

No.

Look at the authors of the best-selling books in the field. Look at the folks behind the most widely followed web sites. Look at the names that come up whenever someone asks who are the most respected and influential people in web design and development. How many are female?

A few. Not many. (And most of them spoke in Vancouver.) So is the gender imbalance in the eye of the organizers, or is it in the very fabric of the industry?

Allow me to illustrate by way of digression. A couple of years back, I was asked to do a book project that I couldn’t take on. So I posted here, asking people what recognized names in the industry they’d recommend to write such a book. I got over one hundred responses before I closed the comments. Know how many women’s names I got? Six out of fifty-six; that’s about 10.7%. Two of those women landed in the top ten, and the rest got a mention or two. (Anne van Kesteren doesn’t count, since he’s male; he’s also Dutch.)

Still, we might take that list and assume that of the most respected names in the CSS field, 11% are women. You might conclude, then, that any CSS-centric conference (which AEA is not, but bear with me) should never have less than 11% female speakers. Fine. So that also means that no CSS-centric conference should have less than 89% male speakers, right?

Hey, how come the room got so suddenly quiet? And why all the pitchforks?

For me, when it comes to planning an A-list conference, I look for A-list speakers, by which I mean speakers who will be regarded as A-list by our audience—the same audience that came up with a list of 56 people, 10.7% of which were female and 89.3% of which were male.

For that matter, it’s very important that our speakers be good public speakers. Bobby or Bobbi Speaker could be the very top name in their area of expertise, but if they’re a train wreck on stage, then no thanks. In our internal discussions, we’ve rejected some names because they are known to be poor speakers. (They were all men, as if that matters.) We’ve also pursued some speakers who we know are simply fantastic on stage. (From both sexes, as if that matters.)

So, like I said before, when I’m thinking about a speaker list, I care about expertise, speaking skills, stature, appropriateness, and marketability. I’m just not interested in a person’s plumbing. I care about what they know, how they’re perceived in the industry, how well they fit the conference’s brand, and how well they do on stage.

Now, here’s where you get to show me my blind spots: let me know who has been overlooked by conferences in general, female or otherwise, and why they shouldn’t be overlooked any more. As an organizer, I’m interested for the usual business and brand reasons; personally, I want to know because I always want to learn new things and hear from new voices. I’ll absolutely give consideration to any name you mention for AEA speakership—but everyone will be considered using the same set of criteria, and their plumbing isn’t part of that set.

Addendum 24 Feb 07: my poor use of language created a massive ambiguity which has left many with the wrong impression. I used “diversity” to mean mostly “gender diversity”, as it was used in the piece to which I was responding. I did not say, nor did I mean to leave the impression I was saying, that I am uninterested in conceptual diversity, diversity of thought. It seems that I did leave that impression, and for misleading others, I very much apologize. (That the misleading was unintentional is beside the point.)

Here’s a fun Friday question for everyone: what do you consider to be some of the most important events in the history of CSS and web design? How about some of the most overlooked events in that same history? (And yes, an event can be both.) I’m not looking for the “best” answers—I want to know what you regard as important, overlooked, or otherwise worthy of mention. So tell!

Among all the other stuff this past week, I let something slip off the radar: an interview with me over at the Lunartics blog. The interview was conducted via e-mail by Amy Armitage, who I briefly met last year at the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas. It’s not your usual “why is CSS important” kind of interview; Amy likes to keep things fun while still covering serious questions. It’s definitely worth a read.

It also scoops news of a development I’ve never gotten around to mentioning: in October 2006, I was inducted as a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. It’s a pretty incredible honor, given that it’s an invitation-only body of 500 members including “David Bowie, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Internet inventor and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton Cerf, ‘Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, and fashion designer Max Azria”. The fact that my name appears on the same list as those people is jaw-dropping enough. To me, it wasn’t the most stunning part by a long mile.

I’ll admit, though I’d heard of The Webbys, I assumed the IADAS was one of those name-collector groups, like those “Who’s Who in America” books where you pay to be listed. Instead, I found that the IADAS levies no membership fees, and I was deeply surprised and pleased to discover that they invite people based on their actual qualifications. How do I know? Because my welcoming letter didn’t praise my web design work. Instead, it cited my “dedication to promoting Web standards”, my “international recognition on the topics of HTML and CSS”, and proclaims that I’ve “helped inform excellence and efficiency on the Web”.

Yes, the text string “HTML and CSS” was actually in the letter.

It’s a little difficult to express how important this recognition is to me. See, most of the time, I’m introduced and perceived as an influential web designer, which is frankly insulting to actual web designers everywhere. If you aren’t reading this post via RSS, look around. Does this look like influential web design? Hell no. At best, we can call meyerweb’s design minimalist and maybe—maybe—possessed of a certain elegance. And it only took me five years and ripping off ideas from Khoi Vinh to get here!

But I’ve never claimed to be a designer. I think the perception that I am one arises because I get linked to from people who really are designers. I’ve always claimed to be a communicator. I’m someone who’s done his best to explain, promote, and advance the technologies that let designers do their work. I’ve invested tons of time and effort into making good web design easier without sacrificing clean and semantic markup. I wouldn’t say that work is done by any stretch, but there’s been a lot of progress. Sometimes I forget just how much.

And so, to be invited to join the IADAS not for what I’m usually thought to be, but actually for who I am—it’s an indescribable feeling. A fantastically good one, certainly! But not one I could describe no matter how many words I threw at the problem.

It’s a delicious irony, and I do so love my irony: my powers of communication fail me when I wish to express my feelings over being honored for my communicating, over all those years, my love of the web and my passion for getting it right and the inner workings of how to make that happen.

But I can at least say this:

Thank you. Thank you for coming to read my posts, for reading my books and articles, for listening to me speak. Thank you for being the other end of the conversation. Thank you for being open to what I have to say, and for responding with your insights and perspectives, all of which have changed me in untold ways. Thank you for making everything I’ve done and said and written about the web worth far more than what I put into it.

Thank you for making this honor possible.

In case you’re one of the people who’s been following the Twitter stuff, and you’re on OS X, then kindly allow me to direct your attention to Twitterific 1.1. Despite its paltry 0.1 increase in version number, it’s acquired some great new features.

The most wonderful addition, in my opinion, is a preference setting that lets you make the window act modal, or not, as you prefer. Having set my copy to “act as normal window”, at least half my problems with Twitterific were abolished. They’ve also changed the auto-hide behavior so that it will auto-hide a short interval after popping up, whereas before it would only auto-hide after a manual refresh (at least, that’s how my copy behaved). This makes it a lot easier to ignore in the background, since it won’t behanging around until you bring it to the foreground. Perhaps this is a side effect of it acting like a normal window. Regardless, it’s welcome. In addition, I like the ability to define a hotkey to bring up the Twitterrific window and the “launch when I login” option.

They’ve also added a post character counter, so you know how close you are to hitting the tweet cap. That’s nice to see, though as I understand it, the number of characters permitted for a post is dependent on the number of characters in your username. Twitterific just gives you a flat 141 characters—which, given the basic nature of Twitter, seems like it really ought to be more than enough.

Now, if it just let me define my own background-foreground colors and made it easier to replace the alert sound, I’d regard it as being pretty much perfect. (Yes, I can dig into the package contents and replace the alert sound, but I’d rather there was a preference setting so that I don’t have to futz around inside the package every time I update the software.)

Oh, and if you’re a Twitterific user, you absolutely want to add Twitterific as a friend, since they use that channel to tweet release announcements and tips on using Twitterific. If I’d had them added to my Twitter account, I wouldn’t have had to post about my frustration over trying to change usernames—they’d tweeted the answer the day before I posted here—and could have thus been spared the shame of broadcasting to the world my ignorance of the proper spelling of “terrific”. Though I suppose in that case, I’d still be ignorant, so maybe it’s better I posted after all.

Well, either way, if you’re using Twitterific 1.0 or an OS X user interested in using Twitter, check out the new version.

After a couple of months of fairly determined avoidance, I finally joined Twitter a week ago. I’m already thinking about leaving. Have been for the last six days, in fact.

There are two easily-explained reasons why I want to just walk away. The first is that in order to have a public comment stream and also be able to share more private messages with my friends, I have to have two accounts. If I could post friends-only messages to an otherwise public account, then I’d only need one account.

And why would I use a public commentary service for private information? Because it is a very good way of keeping my friends informed of where I am, where I’ll be headed next, what’s happening in my family life, and so on. That’s not public information, to my mind. Using Twitter is a lot easier than setting up a private blog to distribute the same information. (Side note: if you had a friendship request with me declined, this is why. No, I don’t hate you.)

The second reason is that I don’t have a way to filter out people who are swamping my Twitter stream. Yes, I’m very glad that you have so much to say, but you’re burying the other people who are just as interesting but not quite so loquacious, obsessive, or just plain bored. In my current short list of friends, I have two that are, um, extra-expressive. (Both women, in fact. No comment?) I want these people to remain friends so they can get my updates, infrequent though they may be. I also want to see what the rest of my friends and followed are saying. How to resolve it?

Sadly, “leave” only filters their stuff out of phone and IM updates, neither of which I use. It doesn’t take them out of the RSS feed nor the web view, both of which I use. Is the solution to de-friend them and let them just follow me? Sure, for the public account. For the private personal-info account, that solution fails; they’ll stop getting my updates. I just wish there was a way to say “this person is my friend, but I’d only like to get updates from them through the following services”. That way I could set the chatterers to show up in the web view and nothing else, thus restoring some sense of balance and diversity to my RSS feed and thus to Twitterific.

Then there’s the bonus reason I want to throw the whole thing into my bit-bucket: the way people are using Twitter right now, it’s rapidly becoming the most inefficient and unusable version of IRC ever. Look, people, if you want to chat, then get a chat room. You know?

I know, Twitter is new and growing. Feature sets and social conventions are still in flux and expected to evolve. Personally, I feel like there’s the kernel of a really good service in there, only not quite the one they’re offering. I’m not saying Twitter is useless or somehow wrong: it clearly provides something that some people want, and it does what it does fairly well. I just have the sense that there’s a similar service with a different focus that would provide something that some other people want, myself among them. Anyone else feel the same way?

Looks like the idea of a professional organization for web designers is back in the feeds. Mark Boulton, after listening to the Hot Topics panel from @media 2006, had quite a bit to say about the idea. Richard Rutter followed up with thoughts of his own, and then D. Keith Robinson chimed in. There are probably more posts out there by more people, because this is one of those topics that just spreads like a virus, infecting host after host with a copy of itself. (If you have one, feel free to drop a link in the comments.)

Since Mark started things off by mentioning my comments about education being behind the times (but didn’t actually link to me like he did everyone else; where’s the love, Mark?), I’ll start there. I still hold that certification is much too premature for our field. Even if we could wave a wand and create a good set of certification criteria in the next week, it would be out of date within a year. Anything that wouldn’t go out of date that quickly would be so basic as to make a mockery of the whole idea of certifying someone as competent in the field.

I’ll concede that if a relatively well-funded organization took on the task of creating and (more crucially) keeping up to date the criteria, they could be kept useful. Hey, maybe an independent W3C! Well, it’s a thought.

The deeper problem is in deciding what constitutes professional competence. Does using AJAX get you bonus points, or automatically disqualified? Does absolutely everything a developer produces have to validate, even if that breaks layout or interactive features in one or more browsers? Web design isn’t like chemistry, where the precipitate either forms or it doesn’t. If chemical engineers had to work in conditions equivalent to web developers, they’d have to mix their solutions in several parallel universes, each one with different physical constants, and get the same result in all of them.

Richard’s take is that certification could be based on relevant education and cross-discipline experience. Well, that leaves me out: my degree in History isn’t likely to be considered relevant. Then again, I’m not actually a web designer, so maybe Richard’s organization isn’t for me. I might be considered a developer, but on the other hand, maybe I’m just a technology writer and need to go apply for membership in their club.

Richard’s approach doesn’t really seem to make the “what qualifies” problem go away so much as it abstract it into a non-issue. You just have to have experience in a discipline. Nobody says it has to be particularly good or bad—though evaluating that would, apparently, be up to the peers who review your application. This introduces an interesting subjective element, one that I think may feel foreign to those of us who like to work with computers. In any organization composed of humans, of course, you’re not going to get away from subjectivity.

In all this, though, the people who are interested in creating a professionals’ organization will have to answer a fairly tough question. Given that both the World Organization of Webmasters and HTML Writers Guild already exist and offer certification, why aren’t they more widely known or highly regarded, and how will any proposed organization do better? What will make it better or more influential?

Of everyone, I think Keith’s got the best idea with his proposed professionals’ network. It’s probably game-able, but heck, so is entrance into a professional society. I know I’d be very interested in participating in such a network, especially one that let people indicate who they’ve worked with, and on what. Analyzing those link patterns could be endlessly fascinating. If it includes community features similar to those of the original MeetUp, thus encouraging physical meetings of members, as well as the endorsement and networking features of LinkedIn, I’d be there in a hot second.

So… who wants to start forming the team to make that network come alive?

Jeffrey wrote yesterday about some Flickr problems he’s having, and while he’s found resolution, his post brought to my forebrain some problems I’ve been having with Flickr. So I’ll record them here. Wooo! Flickr pile-on!

Actually, I really only have one problem, but it manifests itself in multiple ways. The problem is this: any photo with a privacy setting other than “Public” doesn’t ever show up in Flickr RSS feeds.

Here’s why that’s a problem, instead of a good thing:

• If one of my contacts has marked me as a Friend, and they post a photo that’s visible only to Friends & Family, that photo does not appear in my RSS feed of photos from my friends and family. These same pictures show up if I go to the “Photos from your Contacts” page on the Flickr site. In the feed, they’re entirely absent.

• If I post a photo that’s visible only to Friends & Family, any comments made on that photo do not appear in my “Comments on your photos and/or sets” feed. So I don’t know what anyone’s saying about pictures of my wife and child unless I go to the “Recent activity on your photos” page on the Flickr site.

• Bonus related limitation: only comments appear in my recent activity feed; things like added tags and favorite-photo designations don’t show up in the feeds either. In fact, the feed link on the Flickr site says “Subscribe to recent activity on your photos” but the only activity shown in the feed is comments on public photos.

There may be other, even more subtle hindrances in that vein, but those are the ones that have annoyed me the most.

So why is it that stuff I want to know about—in fact, the stuff that I probably want most to know about—is only available on the actual web site, and not in the RSS feeds? Flickr knows exactly what it can show me and what it can’t when I visit the site, but when viewed through the lens of RSS, it suddenly forgets what non-public access I’m allowed to have. To steal a perfectly appropriate line from Jeffrey’s post:

A user experience mistake like this feels quadruply wrong precisely because user experience is what Flickr typically gets so right.

Update: it seems to be a security thing, as a few people have already commented. I guess I understand the concern, but it’s hard for me to give it a whole lot of credit: if I were that paranoid about people seeing photos I consider truly private, I wouldn’t put them on a central server that anyone can visit in the first place. Yes, I’ve withheld some photos from being fully public, but that privacy effort is one security breach or late-night coding goof away from total failure. (Remember when Amazon accidentally showed the real names of reviewers instead of their account names, thus exposing some authors as having slammed books competing with their own?) So if my personal “recent activity on your pictures” and “photos from your contacts” feeds were based on long randomly generated tokens, and not the discoverable user IDs, that would seem to be private enough—for me, anyway. Your paranoia may vary.