[Music]
good morning and welcome to the yuma
theater
my name is greg jones and i'll be your
host for these two days
we have six presentations here today uh
two sessions in the morning before
reconvening after lunch at 1 30 pm for
another four presentations in the
afternoon
our first speaker today will be yvonne
perkins speaking on when stem becomes
steam will benefit
evon enjoys demystifying technology for
others
now a professional writer evon uses
technical skills to explain technology
simply and clearly
there'll be time for questions at the
end of this presentation
please enter any questions in the
question session
section in venulis
over to
yvonne
thank you very much greg
and welcome everybody good morning um
i'd like to start by acknowledging the
waranjari waywarang people of the kulin
nation on whose land that i am standing
in melbourne and i want to pay my
respects to the elders both past and
present and i also offer my respect to
any aboriginal and torres strait
islanders who may be participating in
this program
today i'll be speaking quite directly on
the conference theme
community i'll be drawing on my work
experience moving from one professional
community to another
i will talk about the benefits to
communities from welcoming newcomers
from encouraging the mixing of people
at between communities that requisite
variety that kathy reid um spoke of
yesterday in her keynote
i will talk about the rich space that's
in between professional communities that
we need to encourage people to explore
and along the way i will share my
professional journey because i'm one of
those people who has gone from
rotated around various different
professional communities
ask with the question about why do we
limit ourselves and we all do it every
one of us
we are brought up in a society that
obviously has structure
but unwittingly has introduced
needless restrictions um on ourselves
we live in a world of hyper
specialization and categorizations which
start at a really young age
and that is through the operation of
stereotypes of who we should be who we
can be
the use of those stereotypes stifles the
potential in us and the communities of
which we are passed apart
i've talked i'm talking about
professional silos a lot in this talk
specialization is absolutely needed we
start working a particular creek we do
need to get particular skills to be of
service of helping others in our
society
and also to earn a living
many of us stay in that career and
that's fine and i think of the people
that built these silos they built really
good sturdy silos in the 1920s these
silos have
served the community very very well in
the area we absolutely need
specialization
but also we do need a some people to be
traversing their boundaries between
these silos
throughout this talk i'll be talking a
little bit about my personal
professional um
journey
and just to give a bit of background my
father is an engineer nothing
particularly unusual about that but
while i was growing up my mother did a
science degree at university and she did
programming coding in that in that
degree fortran algol were words that i
heard quite often in
growing up
and then she started work as a
programmer at the elizabeth computer
center in hobart and became a cobile
programmer and cobol is still out there
lurking somewhere
endangered species we might need to
explore the habitats of the environments
but it's still there
specialization is great and has helped
us greatly and will continue to do that
but we can do better
we can dream of something much more
inspiring
this is a picture of some silos on the
silo art trail in
north west victoria this particular
silent set of silos is in shape hills in
the
region of northwest victoria
and look honestly this is not a region
that i would
travel to at all but i was attracted to
visit this area on a 40 degree day
because of the art
art lifts us it inspires us it moves us
it's that inspiration that keeps us
going that keeps humanity achieving a
lot more
so what is the art that i talk of
obviously i'm talking about creativity
and imagination that connects with the
emotions
this can be through the senses such as
the visual and the oral
art communicates deep truths in an
imaginative in an evocative way it gets
us thinking in a different way
art connects with our emotions to
engender a response in us it moves us to
actually do something just like i did by
actually driving to sheep hills which
didn't see the hills didn't see the
sheep flat
at sun sun-baked country
really really hot
but the art had moved me to travel there
i've got a broad conception of arts that
i'm going to be using in this um talk so
obviously there's the immediate creative
arts um that we're all familiar with you
know the painting the music and all of
that kind of stuff then there's another
conception of the arts and that is the
arts that you might find in a university
arts faculty
so it would include you know english
literature the pure arts um but it would
also include things like anthropology
um
linguistics
history things like that
but there is also a third conception of
art
and that art can be
um explored
it's the art of
albert einstein actually
touched on this
he said imagination is more important
than knowledge for knowledge is limited
whereas imagination embraces the entire
world stimulating progress giving birth
to evolution
it is strictly speaking a real factor in
scientific research
there is an abundance of the art of in
technology and brian curnahan in his
keynote presentation yesterday referred
to the importance of creative people for
the emergence of unix
we have got this
kernel of creativity that is in all of
us
what i'm interested in what has
interested me all my professional life
is exploring the space between solos
silos between the professional silos and
in this talk i'll look particularly at
that space between technology
and arts
what lies in between
this is a really interesting movement
that is happening right now in his talk
simon loffler from acme referred to the
clip model from open api from open ai
sorry when the code was released
creativity and experimentation by people
online
changed
the way that this ai was used
and some very interesting machine
generated art was
created now for a really good um look um
at experts in this field have a look at
rivers have ring wings on twitter
what i did is i actually got into this
into the
big gan model and i actually inserted
the
topic of my talk
and just let the ai generate some art
now i'm not talking about
is this particularly highfaluting art is
it particularly
worthy
but it's an interesting it's exploring
and sometimes like when we explore the
creative things it might end up in a
dead end but it might
but it might not it might open up a
whole world the importance is exploring
and opening the world of possibilities
and i rather like the way that this is
configured a must talk with a person
isolated in their silo and another
couple of bunch of people in separate
silos
and steam uniting both of both of
them
another
example is text analysis in the field of
english literature and history is
actually becoming incredibly important
and using sophisticated models for that
and here is like and this opens up new
worlds into our understanding of
literature and this is something that i
have personally explored with the
meaning of the word secular in this
particular instance
this particular lab is look at women
writers from the pre-victorian era so
that's before queen victoria came on the
throne so before
the 1830s
um
and and it's there's a corpus of the
texts and here i've explored the word
respect
and looked at respect we don't often
actually think of maybe deference
or reverence with respect it it causes
us to think
about how meanings of words
are different for different people
the next example i want to show you is i
think
we've seen a lot of a great advance in
storytelling online and exploring the
possibilities and i really like this
example from mitchell white law and sky
watson's from australia
and i've got the urls here if you want
to look them
up later this is an audio visual story
from the knapnap swamp in new south
wales
and
here uh is a soundscape visually
represented that you can click on and
you can hear the sounds of the swamp at
different times of the day and at
different times of the year depending on
the water levels there's also an
explanation of the sounds that you're
hearing so this is exploring audio
the oral landscape
in a visual means online and looking at
how this landscape changes over um
over the time over the time of a year
people don't often think that historians
people who can code but increasingly
with our digitized world
we've got a lot of historical
evidence like on trove that is coded
that can be explored by code that should
be explored by code we also have a lot
of historical documents that are
actually born in code that are born
electronically that don't have a
physical representation increasingly
it's going to be very important for
historians to be equipped with coding
skills and also telling the stories on
websites so now historians are doing a
lot of telling stories on websites
um
i have to put take my hat off to tim
sherritt he opened this world for so
many of us in
australia through glam workbench through
his blog posts through his twitter
through his
conferences
programming historian that's where i
learnt python
and i learned to scrape websites
legally of course
and it's a wealth
of possibilities
by now you probably say yeah i know that
yes i can think of other examples i can
think of lots of examples and the
question is is art already in tech i've
got this example of a graphic novel by
that wonderful service postman
but we can also think of user interface
design marketing storytelling through
online games
and at linuxconf are you i love this
visual um storytelling of the keynote um
speaks at speak speeches
so
arts
as i was developing this talk you know i
realized that arts really are already an
integral part of
the technology world
but are we limiting ourselves
by not properly recognizing that arts
already are a part of the technology
world
should be a part and are an integral
part
what i'm talking about
is also our adherence to this idea of
stem science technology engineering and
maths no mention of the arts and i have
just mentioned
several areas that are integral to
the technology world and i could add
documentation as well and documentation
obviously through that graphic novel can
be incredibly creative and we can draw
on the skills of people who are very
skilled in in arts
i'm talking about diversity of thought
why do we want diversity
we're not seeking diversity in
technology or in the building industry
or in nursing or so many other fields
we're not seeking diversity because we
just want to see a dress or hear a
different accent fewer or more wrinkles
or was still just so we can have a
diverse face that we can shove in our
marketing photos to show that how
diverse we are
i want to pick up on kathy reid's talk
yesterday about resilience diversity
really does give us resilience it gives
us much better services much better
products it makes us much more nimble
and i've got this picture of a garden
quite deliberately here
because of the diversity in this garden
you've got the diplodinas here you've
got rhododendrons in the background
maple here cyprus here um in the
foreground here miniature cypress in the
foreground you've got a community here
some parsley
this garden
has flowers all times of the year so we
don't have in this picture an abundance
of flowers but we have it all times of
the year this is a resilient garden
it it actually supports a great
ecosystem there's always some food there
for birds and for bees if there's a
plant disease that strikes out a
particular plant it won't wipe out the
whole garden and i think we can use this
analogy
in our working world as well
and just um and in our industries we
actually do need to have diversity
and i get to the you know job
advertisements
there's a increasing hyper
specialization that's creeping into our
job interest advertisements and into our
industries
the problem of hyper specialization so
i'm not complaining about specialization
but the hyper specialization of
requiring five years experience with a
particular job title
in exactly the same industry that is the
kind of hyper specialization that
completely knocks out any possibility of
having this very
productive
working between people of
different backgrounds of thought
we need diversity of thought
so moving on to desirable communities
what do we need what makes a community
desirable so i'm indicating here that we
want to have
some ability to enter and to perhaps
exit that fluidity between communities
i just want to share some of my personal
experiences
so
i started off in accounting encouraged
by my parents and that's where
i learned cobol programming i did had
already done basic programming at school
i worked worked in the world of
accounting then i moved into public
information which is also about sharing
information but rather than through
numbers i shared it through words
and then i entered this world of digital
humanities and professional historians
and this is where tim share its um
wonderful contribution with his
unconferences
but um and his and his blogging has been
so important for my professional
development but there's also so many
hundreds on twitter on blogs that i've
learned from the program historian stack
overflow fantastic resource
the documentation particularly the
documentation of the trove api that
opened my eyes to the world of apis
that's that was my grounding in apis
i also move in the world of professional
historians and there's some fantastic
professional bodies and professional
historians australia and the australian
historical association put on great
professional conferences have the
opportunity for face-to-face um
meet-ups and smaller conferences
tutorials seminars there's a huge amount
on twitter historians and aussies
hashtags on twitter and of course the
blogging
and wordpress shout out to mitch mingy
of the parramatta
wordpress meetup group
that was my first foray into website
development and i just went to so many
sydney wordpress meetups
and shout out also obviously to will
brown
fantastic
i went to three meetups a month while i
was learning skills and that
face-to-face was really important but
obviously there's a blogs and articles
by wordpress developers there's slack
which has been a fantastic forum there's
also importantly documentation just like
the trove api documentation was
important for my professional
development
and write the docs the conferences and
slack and linux this conference
so all of these professional communities
have been very welcoming
of me entering as a newbie and enabling
me to explore and to grow professionally
into these communities fantastic
communities i'm very grateful to all of
them
so some basic elements in my story about
about these particular professional
communities what are the basic elements
that are really important um
for
to be a great community i'd have to say
documentation for a professional
community
the
um and i'm not talking about just read
um just written word documentation can
also be
videos can also be those podcasts and
online tutorials and um and all of that
kind of stuff
documentation is important because this
removes the barrier of not understanding
a particular community not being able to
work with a particular community not
having the skills
regular face-to-face opportunities
is also important and this is like the
networking thing and actually starting
to become comfortable in a community
and having people that you know having
friends and friendship is actually
important even in professional um
community
regular face-to-face
local
opportunities are great
but also the national opportunities like
this conference it's really important it
is those um between the sessions in the
back halls
that you really cement the feeling of i
belong
and this i belong is really important if
you want people to stay
in your professional community and then
of course there's the online access and
that's absolutely essential today online
access is incredibly important well
accessibility not everybody can come to
the uh to the face-to-face
meet-ups they might not live close they
might have disabilities that prevent
them they might have family caring
things that you know prevent them online
access is absolutely vital so the three
of them i think are vital but we need
more
organizations and and this is we're
focusing on communities but i realized
as i was talking
i was developing this talk
that there really is a very rich
interplay between organizations
communities and individuals so while
i'm not going to be talking a great deal
about the organizations but if you think
about it in every community
there is
often
a governing body
any community of a particular size
um so it might be the committee of a
club if you if it's a sporting club and
in our instance obviously there's linux
australia
and the organizations help facilitate
online and face-to-face spaces good
organizations offer great documentation
and good organization enforce clear
codes of conduct fairly
because if there are no codes of conduct
that
unwittingly we can have barriers we
might not even be aware of it or we
might just be a bit lazy about it so
those codes of conduct are incredibly
important
but also what's
important are the individuals
and they're really important for making
communities great and as i said i've
given a shout out to several individuals
that have made a particular
um a particularly strong contribution
and there are many that i have not
mentioned um to communities but it's
actually
the little people like you and i even as
entering a community
is turning around and giving a hand up
to the next person that's just a little
bit behind who is also just entering the
community and this is where i got into
technical documentation because i wanted
to share um
the with others how to use the trove api
and the people who are using drive a lot
of them don't know programming now most
so i did a series of um blog posts about
how to use the trove api with excel
worksheet
spreadsheets now this is not because
excel is the superior resource for
accessing an api of course it's not but
this is because for so many people this
is the only tool that they know and this
being able to um
use an api through excel is their first
entry into the world of apis now they
might just settle there and that's all
they want to do that's fine
but also i did this
technical documentation
as my own personal learning because
there's nothing um it is often said that
if you're a learner sitting in the back
of a room you'll only learn 10
of what is said in that room
but if you're a teacher
you learn that the rest of the 90
because you have to teach it you're on
the spot um and so i put that into
practice i wanted to learn how to use
this api really well well then
i need to write about it share and be
vulnerable and share it with others and
tim sherritt and others you know helped
me develop this series
of tutorials
i also having a look at the conference
theme and there was um talk about the
global aspect and how we um
how important it is during this pandemic
to keep those global connections
but i was thinking what is really
missing i think in a lot of what we're
talking about we're just starting to
explore this
through the pandemic
is micro communities and the importance
of it
when we were put in lockdown we suddenly
realized how important our neighbours
were
how important living with at people
inner households are
and sometimes that is very very
difficult if especially if it was not
working terribly well to begin with
but the pandemic has really forced us to
look at the micro the local and the
micro scale
and i think that we need to do more
exploration of this because i was
thinking about the stresses that people
are under that was so evidenced um
through
um the global forums that were on the
various social media channels
i have a feeling that a lot of them stem
back from aside from the grieving
process of how limited we were are and
what a terrible situation this was
the third element i was thinking was
this issue of micro communities we spend
most of our waking hours
in micro communities these might be
households work teams neighbors
and it made me think i've just mentioned
codes of conduct that organizations have
for communities
well what's the code of conduct for our
micro communities
even in our micro communities
we need to be giving back
we need to be considering what others
like and it's harder in our macro
communities that's a place where we
spend most of our time
that's a place where we particularly
might be tired
we and and we just kind of let it all
hang out
and it made me think of personal codes
of conduct
and this is a question for each one of
us
but
i was thinking i think it's actually
important that we have a personal code
of conduct we focus on ourselves
and what we should be what we can be
doing better
and getting back to the codes of contact
i have also seen in workplaces lots of
workplaces have value statements codes
of conduct
but there's a dissonance between
the code of conduct and the value
statement
and what actually happens in that
workplace
and there's a lot of parroting off and
talking about it
but making sure each single person in
that workplace
looking at themselves and abiding by
that code of conduct and likewise on the
personal scale
we have a responsibility to other people
around us
to give
and to help make things better
it made me think of
we quite often do a lot of finger
pointing at others and nitpicking and
that's just exhausting
but what about
doing the work on ourselves
and maybe that if we actually focus on
ourselves less nitpicking and fault
finding on the micro you know the little
niggle kind of thing and more focusing
on well how am i making this situation
better maybe that
will make a great difference to how our
communities work and particularly the
micro communities where our lives are
grounded
okay so in conclusion
i have argued
that actually i think we need steam not
stem
we actually need to recognize the role
of arts in technology
and actually be really upfront about it
and it's not just an add-on it's an
integral part
of technology it's already part
and that leads us to thinking of well
how are we paying the people that
are providing these value and this value
added that is so important for our
technology we've already got it in there
also training of people if we only train
people in science technology engineering
and maths
and we devalue the training in all of
the other
aspects of life including the arts
we're limiting the possibilities of our
technology
i have also
demonstrated that people from arts
backgrounds are already scaling up and
playing with technology there's a lot of
stuff out there and i'm sure that you
have already explored a lot of that once
again i think that there is a
recognition that there is a lot of arts
there's a lot of creativity and there's
a lot of playing around and technology
is absolutely engaging with this
but i think this acknowledgement
of the central part that arts and other
disciplines have
in this technology space is really
important
so we limit our possibilities by not
properly recognizing the importance of
the arts
in technology
[Laughter]
when we have more diversity of thought
in our teams
we all benefit
now that's not to say it's easy
and certainly initially
i mean how many how many of us go oh
wonderful i've got somebody that comes
from a completely different industry
who's going to join my team
may not have the technical skills
there's work that's involved at the
beginning but that work will reap
benefits
and prac and that's where thinking about
training
how much effort do we put in training
and each person being a trainer taking
that responsibility to guide others who
do not know so much
rather than just being oh gosh i've got
to deal with this person again with the
same question taking those few minutes
to explain
you know the process explain the lingo
each individual in a community
contributes personal qualities
that makes their community welcoming
and helps people to thrive
and i think this is what we need in our
project teams in our workplaces as well
as i can see there's a lot of work that
linux australia and the participants in
this conference have done
to make
the linux world a welcoming space
let's put that same work into our other
communities
and i have talked about communities
comprising sub-communities
sub-sub-communities the local and
microscope needs more attention from all
of us
we need to break out of our silos
and i'll leave you with this thought i
just had to put that in there steam not
stem
and thank you very much for your for
listening
i'll open up for questions now
okay thank you evan
it seems that the
the comments uh in total agreement with
your presentation and we do indeed have
one question
i'll just have to read that off a
different screen
so
here someone says uh hi i'm curious to
know yvonne's thoughts on how to
encourage informal face-to-face
discussion during pandemic uh induced
online only events
i know that this is a million dollar
question sorry
oh gosh it is a million dollar question
because um certainly during this
conference and look i'm so grateful for
this opportunity to linux australia this
is my first experience of a linux
conference and i have
found it very difficult to actually
follow those conversations while i'm
concentrating on the presenters and
learning about how this community works
because i think when you're entering a
community
um there is a lot of listening that the
entrance need to do
and i talked about personal qualities
and i think humility has to be one of
them and listening comes with humility
um so i found that so how to encourage
those informal conversations
look honestly twitter um i have found
has been great for those kind of on
informal conversations at the moment
unfortunately people are
a bit over the online
um and this is where
getting um i'm hoping out of this to
actually get some new
connections
and maybe
explore them offline as well
um
i think in terms of digital humanities
and my experience there because that was
the first online community i entered the
hashtag was really important and i think
the welcoming nature and the
conversational so actually answering
questions on twitter and responding to
people
is really important but that's not
private that's very
public
unless you're doing it through dms of
course
um
so no i haven't got the answer but i
think the motive behind the question is
the right motive and i think with the
right motive and with creativity we will
actually um
be able to explore this and learn the
about this and understand this more i
think we're all learning about this at
the moment
so i hope that answers it um
somewhat adequately
yes okay so
there is another
question just popped up now so
let's have a look at that
uh hi uh sorry how do you uh we derive
uh the context of our symbolic
interactions which have now been
objectified from the data and the
metadata it comes with
to establish the true meaning of our
interactions and not a misinterpretation
is there a digital gap in society
how has this changed how we relate to
one another
yeah
look i actually saw a question similar
to that on um keynote speak yesterday um
and i did actually note that i think
that's a very interesting
question um to
explore
misinterpretations
and i think i'll just go back um am i
still screen sharing
um yes you are yeah yeah i'm still
squished and so this is actually that
question and thank you very much for the
questioner
um if it and particularly if it's the
same person i mean really got me
thinking last night about the micro
communities this issue of
misinterpretation
it's
and also thinking about the face-to-face
and my gut feeling so i'm not a
psychologist so i'm just saying i've got
a gut feeling i think as human beings we
do need face-to-face regular daily
face-to-face contact
and we also need
friendships you know deep friendships
and through that through those
deep friendships then
we can iron out misunderstandings and we
can have reflected back how a little bit
about how the world sees us
so sometimes the misrepresentations come
because we have not communicated very
well and we don't realize that um
sometimes the misrepresentations come
from a really nitpicking attitude
and
i think that
we've just got to stop the nitpicking so
i'm not talking about i mean pulling
people up for really egregious behavior
absolutely that's an issue of fairness
and we do need to um
you know make sure that everybody is in
a safe space and everybody's treated
fairly but there can become a real
nitpicking
that is unnecessary that creates anxiety
and the kind of anxiety about being
misrepresentation and then you're
watching what you're saying and you're
going oh my gosh have i said that right
we've all got limited experiences
and we're all on a learning journey and
i really think that we need to
work on ourselves
and stop like nitpicking on others but
also be um
have a sense of humility when somebody
does pull you up um now i don't know
have i got the time i've got a story
actually to share about that have we got
the time we are pretty much out of time
now it's 11 31 so
we need time 10 minutes for a room
changeover and we can meet everyone here
again
uh at
11 40 i think it is
yeah uh look i really appreciate those
questions they have very
thought-provoking questions and
certainly this is not the end of the um
discussion about this i think this is
just an earlier exploration of it so
i'll be very you know be online and very
interested in ideas that um other people
have to share about this topic
okay thank you yvonne that was a
wonderful talk on a a very important
thank topic