 My name is Melissa. I am involved with Ubuntu women, Linux chicks. I'm a blogger for geekfeminism.org who is familiar, who reads it. You need to put your hand up Valerie and Mary. So my title, title of my talk is Our Sparkle Motion, Empowering the Geekocracy Against the Kariaki. And I have invented at least one of the words in there. Who is familiar with that phrase, the one at the top? I think it is running out of battery, Donna. Okay, so there is a movie called Donnie Darko and it is a deep, serious movie about depression and all sorts of stuff. And one of the favourite quotes from the cult followers of the movie is that, it is a light hearted, cheerful way of expressing your following of the movie. So that is kind of the basis of the talk, along with talking about women and girls on the internet, which can end up being a serious discussion. It is part of a bigger problem and that is where we get to the kariaki. The kariaki is an intertwining groups of dominant and less dominant people such as males and females and transgender intersex being people who don't necessarily have the recognition of identity that they feel, whereas males and females do. Then we have heterosexual people who are going to be more accepted and welcomed than homosexual people, not because it is right, but because this is how they were born and it doesn't necessarily make it right. Temporarily abled people as compared to people with disabilities, Caucasians as compared to people of colour, Christians as compared to non-Christians, and all of these people, both the dominating and the less dominant groups, all make up what I call the geekocracy, which is the community, the way that geek communities work. Yes, I did make it up. What the geek community likes to call itself is the meritocracy, and it has a very bad way of implementing this word. What we consider to be the meritocracy nowadays is not necessarily what it was turned to be. I have actually forgotten the definition, which I meant to write down, but didn't. So geek communities aren't a meritocracy unless you are white, male, hetero, the list goes on. If you are one of the dominant, if you fit all of the dominant groups in the societies, then you are going to feel the meritocracy as it is intentioned. But if you don't fit any one of these, then you are going to feel out of place. So what I am going to say contains some, I am ladylike language, I am ladylike behaviour, is that I am being uppity. I am important. I am expressing sentiments that distinguish me from a doormat. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? That's because it is. Derailing for dummies. It's an evolving document of detailing ways in which you can derail someone's arguments against your oppressive behaviour against their less dominant group. It's meant to be funny as was Tilios's article on the escapist. Where she details how she went on to TeamSpeak as a girl with a girl voice. And this was too hard for the majority of the men on this TeamSpeak server to cope with. She was blamed for them losing, I don't know what was she saying, wow. So she was blamed for them losing raids, whatever they are called on there. But it's a matter of in-jokes. We like to call these talking about being a woman in open source discussions as being unicorn talks. If you are a woman in open source, you will eventually give a talk about being a woman in open source. As a derivative of Godwin's law which says various things about saying nasty things, comparing people to nasty people. Being as we have all these in-jokes, we are quite clearly as feminists, himless buzz kills. Absolutely himless buzz kills. No him whatsoever. So when we do make jokes, even kids coming up, but this was feminists making a joke. And some people did not entirely enjoy that joke, which is fair. It is an in-joke. We are not a hive mind. We tend to like to call ourselves something a little different. We're not a hive vagina either, to be honest. We don't all think the same. We don't all appreciate the same humor. But we do make jokes because what we are talking about is serious. It is subversive to this karyakal structure where we, because we have women, are perceived by some portion of the community as less as the men. But we're not. So this is, we make jokes, this is because serious subversive, controversial subject matter tends to bore people or scare them. And this is said by a lady blogger by the name of Sadie Doyle. She is a rape victim. She's a rape survivor. And she blogs about this. And she makes jokes because what she talks about is scary. It is serious. It is subversive. And it causes confusion. By using these jokes we can confuse the trots. We can confuse the people who want us to go away, be quiet. We can diffuse the situation. South Wales Screamy has some memes. This is called, what is it? Thank you. Privileged denying dude. It's a white guy in a professional suit looking all smug going, your ideas sound so much better when I rephrase it. Does that sound familiar to anyone in the room? Have you? I think Peter might get a little jealous. Another smug looking, I don't know is he actually white? I think for the purpose of the exercise. And it's on another, one of these meme backgrounds. It says I'm not privileged. You're just trying to control me. Which is silly. We're making a joke. We're not trying to control people. Yet this is the kind of responses that we'll get when we say please don't. Please stop. And come back to this other guy. Feminism is outdated and sexism is no more. We're going to just too stupid to see that. I think I talked a bit too fast. Questions? Discussions? The team fortress too. For people who don't know what TF2 stands for. I'm not a gamer but you will have, you're obviously familiar with the concept that any woman on a game server is a guy wanting to get free stuff. Yes. But I mean there's various reasons why people in game servers either are women presensors, women players, women, why they may choose to sound like a 12 year old boy as compared to saying hey no I'm a 12 year old guy, I'm actually a woman. Because sometimes it's easier to not be known as a woman. It's sometimes easier to be the 12 year old boy that you're not. But no one's going to pick on you, no one's going to hit on you, no one's going to. So it just could be that it's easier for them. It rotates us too. Article by Telios was in 2006 I think. So it slowly changes but the operative word there is slowly. Anyone? Taking the piss. That's the whole point of the memes is to make it so bleeding obvious what the problem is because once you see them it's like can't unsee. No please. Yes. That's our term, that's a social justice term I think it's an out turn but yeah.