I Call For a Communicate or Die Convention

from yahoo news http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051014/pl_nm/kerry_dc

"Kerry was the second leading national politician this week to weigh in on California's Prop. 75 ballot initiative, which would require unions to get approval from members before using dues for political causes.

"This represents part of an ongoing effort by the Republican Party to create an unfair playing field, to change the balance of democracy in America," Kerry said.

"They are willing to try to take away the democratic rights of working Americans," said the Massachusetts senator, who was speaking to reporters at a fire station with Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), also seen as a possible presidential challenger in 2008, had appeared with Schwarzenegger to campaign for the initiative on Monday."

So where are ya'll when California are in need of help?

"The lone gunslingers of the blogosphere could work as a posse, and that's what let us raise an army"

This sounds like a good idea. Perhaps we could piggy back off of the Labor Notes conference in Detroit? May 5-7, 2006 http://labornotes.org/conferences/index.shtml for past conference info. Either way, I think it is much needed. We should use all the tools at our disposale to plan this, including wiki and open space meeting technology.

I'm always up to promote some of my favorite issues:
discrimination against women and minorities in computing, the
pitiful state of computing education and the computing job market,
and that unions need to change and be more woman-friendly and minority-friendly, and more focused on organizing women and minorities.

It is my thesis that we could really use women and minorities to
be in computing and that would enhance their political clout, but basically, I think they're too smart to go into it. :-)

http://news.com.com/Opening+doors+for+women+in+computing/2100-1022_3-555...

An interesting quote:
In fact, the top two countries for women in computer science are Ireland and Turkey, Klawe said. "Part of that is this is the dominant economy in Ireland right now…and there is a lot of single-sex education there and girls find their way into particular programs."
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1838504,00.asp

Anyway, with CS enrollments down 60% or more since the dot bomb,
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/sep05/09-12CSGames.mspx
women and minorities have mostly disappeared from the field. I could personally write a very long book on why I think that it was never a good idea for women or minorities to go into computing. However, the real question is, *why bother* trying to get women and minorities into computer science? If we were able to cure overnight the problems that keep them out of CS programs, ( I think this book represents the correct view on that
topic: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=543836 ), the real problem is what happens to them AFTER they graduate and that is a showstopper.

First of all CS has become
an undesirable career for everyone, not just women and minorities.
The well known age-discrimination problem in the field is a major factor combined with the skill obsolescence problem. Employers want
employees with vendor-sponsored certifications in exactly the versions of software and hardware they plan on using. A CS degree alone doesn't qualify people for jobs anymore, like it did in the 80's, and the value of an individual's degree drops like a rock as time passes from the granting of the degree. Experience in the field does not make up for that. No amount of experience in some other programming languages, operating systems, or equipment will sway an employer to hire you for something different in ANY way. Employers are possessed by the belief that only young guys who just graduated and got certifications are able to "hit the ground running" in computing.

The concepts and programming emphasis of the typical CS program interfaces poorly with the memory-focused very time-sensitive computerized vendor certification tests. Don't assume those calculus, linear algebra, and algorithms classes will automatically allow you to ace a vendor's timed memory-centric test, especially if you're not 22 anymore. Addicted to using a calculator? Too bad, you may be required to do base 2 or hex math BY HAND on a certification test, an ability you would never need on the job. (There will be a computer there if it's a computer job!) A university would have a tough time of justifying a curve that caused a majority of students in classes to fail, like say 80% (angry parents and all that).
But vendor tests are designed to only pass a consumable percentage of
applicants, just a tad more than the number of qualified people the job market currently requires. That is, when the number of job openings goes down, the test gets harder, to benefit the hirers with more qualified applicants in a "hirer's market". If they didn't do this, industry would not value the certifications like it does. Theoretically, with their typically low pre-requisites, the certification system could actually be more favorable to women and minorities than traditional university instruction and place more of them in the field. But I think it devalues the entire field by reducing job security and that is the strongest effect.
These certifications can be as short-lived as 2 years in my experience. There exist positions where the people have been hired on the basis of certifications and if they fail to continue to pass retests and/or progress into passing higher level certifications that the vendor provides, they are subject to being dismissed on that basis! This is all the job security of being an olympic athlete but without the royalties and free shoes. I have never heard any union nor educational institution complain about the certification industry. The mass buy in on this that certification vendors have achieved is really amazing. Even unions that have come out against for-profit educational vendors and questionable accredidation entities, do not have the completely unregulated certification industry on their radar.

But the real kicker for women and minorities that do get hired against all odds, I call "Peer Rejection". It is somewhat tolerated for women or minorities to be in computing in my experience, if and only if they are properly playing their role of being less knowledgeable than male employees. It's ok to ask dumb questions and be needy and ask for help. It might even be ok to be teary or giggly and play "poor little helpless me" and ask for help with everything. What is NOT ok in the workplace is trying to be a peer with male computing staff. If a woman tries to play the role of an expert and tries to maintain that she is also on a par with the rest of the "guys" and that her opinion counts on technical matters, all hell breaks loose. This is not tolerated. Such a person is shunned and derided forever. Career geeks tend not to be a really friendly bunch to begin with but the polar ice really thickens to glacial depths when someone is not playing their designated role as men see it: you "just got hired because personnel 'had' to hire you and you are not as qualified nor talented as the rest of us". It is never possible to prove oneself in such a system. If you work your butt off and successfully bring technical mission impossible to a good conclusion, all observers simply conclude "it wasn't as hard as we thought". This combined with the propensity to assign women and minority hires to 'problem' projects and known hostile users/customers sets up the new computer employee for almost certain failure and most of all, misery.

My first computer job I was hired to managed a computer system that
the existing IT department did not approve of (because it was not running Unix and they were a unix shop) but a department purchased it anyway but had the IT department hire the sys admin. I slaved away and overcome many obstacles to get the proprietary database to satisfy the users and be a success. But management seemed anything but pleased about that and I couldn't figure out why. When I started making another success, of windows-based programming, they started trying to fire me. Why? It took me 6 years to figure out that I had been hired originally because they thought I was incompetent and they thought that I would steer the disliked computer system to a drastic failure.
(A previous lone female hire had turned into a 'mental patient' they were fond of pointing out.) It is my conviction that the propensity of biased hirers to do this, to intentionally hire women and minorities to set them up for failure,
is the biggest of all problems and yet I have never seen this discussed anywhere.

Ok so I just argued that a pure computing job is not a viable career and certainly ill advised for women and minorities, so why
discuss this at all? I think the trends that hit computing jobs so disastrously (and I didn't even mention offshoring here) are going to hit other service jobs as well and unions would do well to focus on this. Also I think that women are definitely a group that is not properly dealt with in traditional unions and I think that if anything is going to make unions more powerful, it's going to involve much more emphasis on women and minorities in unions than exists today. And these groups will definitely need to find a voice in computer mediated communications. I don't think the way to do this is
for them to try to pursue traditional CS or engineering programs but instead go into
fields that are heavily involved with computing but also combine some
other field of knowledge that is hopefully more long-lived. This way a person can hopefully avoid the ephemerality of the programming/admin job market but still be in the game and influencing computing and communications.

BTW I am aware of only one women-centric union CLUW.
http://www.cluw.org/ I don't think the male-dominated culture in most
unions is particularly attractive to women (nor minorities) and that is one of the causes of the decline in unionism today now that women and minorities are a major percentage of the workforce. Women and minorities do not enjoy being treated as second-class citizens at the work place, which is what typically happens to them, and they will not add to their burden by paying dues to also get the same treatment from a union. Further I think women and minorities rightfully perceive they
are never as well-vested as male employees, that is they are more likely to be fired than a male who behaved the same. Thus the ceaseless demands many traditional unions make on members to put their own butts on the line against management, can really alienate the more vulnerable membership factions.
Interesting web site focused on organizing women:
http://www.bergermarks.org/

Check out http://www.labortech2004.org/ for an older version of what you are proposing. I know that when I was first getting into doing web development for unions this took place every year however I haven't heard of any taking place this year. I have not gone to these coferences because it did not seem to be of any benifit to me and I didn't have the money to plan a trip to California.

No offense, but I don't really see the value of putting this conference together. None of the topics proposed so far seem to really address union related issues and it sounds more like a conference about political blogging.

How about a session addressing this question: Why do local unions have trouble starting a website or not even bother at all?

I am more interested in seeing an organization come into place to actually connect tech people with labor unions. What kind of business relationships need to exist to make this sort of thing actually happen. Tech people like myself who try to network with labor unions can end up going no where fast. As far as I'm concerned, WashTech is not the answer. I haven't seen Communicate or Die move towards that direction, but if people want to just talk up their experiences in blogging I guess a conference is the way to go. I would rather attend a conference that actually accomplishes something.

On a side note, Go White Sox!!!!