 We're starting now starting right now. Welcome to the Deb and Molly show. It's the end of the day and we're a little silly Thanks for bearing with us So we're going to talk about how to build a movement and all ages movement And I have the great pleasure to be presenting with Molly who was my one-time intern and is now like a free software Superstar in her own right recognized speaker and various countries and Newly-minted official employee of the free software foundation. I I feel like I can't stand stand live up to that. I'm Deb Deb was my mentor one of my mentors at the free software foundation when I interned there She's a rock star, but literally and figuratively And she's also inspired me a lot in music, which I think is cool She's at the open invention network right now doing pretty cool work and helping to fight the evil of software patents Cool. Oh, thank you. I yeah, this one. There's a lot of business here on these these earpieces, but thank you for the patch Great. We have some young people and some older people got the whole range of Debbie and contributors in this room right now Awesome. So we're gonna if you want to tweet about this topic or find previous tweets There's not like like thousands, but Or if you have some thought about this leader and you want to share it on this topic you can I'm bacon and coconut on Twitter and I'm millions this Molly so So we believe that in order to be successful the free software movement needs to be diverse and inclusive Bringing together people from a lot of different backgrounds. We can't a minor culture is not gonna get us where we want to go So We're gonna cover first just broadly so you know where we are in the program here Why we care what's going on with age in the free software movement and some solutions that we like So, why do we care? Well, I care because I I really like free software and I I want to live in a world where users are empowered to use their computers for whatever they want I Care because I think user freedom is very important and that strong communities help that happen Also, I learned that I'm old in tech at this point in my life So I'm a little nervous about what's gonna happen next. Yeah, no I'm actually old Molly is only fake old like Molly's only like old in I'm tech old like cat ears or something No, I looked I looked it. We'll get to that later. All right. We'll get to that So so we I talked earlier this week about passing the torch And so that's part of that and this is gonna be a more specific how to use and a little less on the like Why you should? So This is you. Yeah Let me see what the next thing right We care a lot about user freedom and we care a lot about movement building So we're gonna be focusing more on free software at a higher level as opposed to talking about specific projects and specific tools and Getting into the weeds of what it means to have like a free software project. That's successful and broad Following up on that we're gonna be focusing more on the philosophy of rather than developmental models Which in this case means we're gonna be talking more about what it means to to be in all ages movement and kind of what comes out of that Rather than a lot of specifics about how to make that happen though. We're happy to talk about that later So the philosophy and the development models tend to sort of feed off of each other like yeast and They happen to be both served by some of the same like nice hippie stuff that we like so for instance like shared decision-making and Transparency consensus building are great tools and they tend to also produce great results That said communities need to focus on the people as Individuals in ways that companies might not want to or be able to so if you if you aren't paying people Then they need to be having fun How whatever that looks like it might look like this Because if they're not feeling valued and appreciated then they're gonna stop showing up We're gonna talk a little bit about diversity and inclusivity Because that's important when you're thinking about community building But when you're actually just talking about people who have different demographics like that's basically what you see when you get diversity There was this quote That you like that I like one of us like it. Yeah diversity jolts us into cognitive actions in ways that Homogeneity simply does not right so people actually prepare better arguments for people who aren't just like them So if I was gonna prepare an argument for Molly like we agree on lots of things maybe not hair color I don't know but but on most other things we tend to agree So I if I was gonna be like Molly we should do this thing I probably wouldn't prepare the most robust argument because I wouldn't expect her to be like I don't know coffee sounds like a terrible idea But if I thought she might not agree with me I would prepare a much more robust argument and this turns out to lead to better processes and better decision-making Additionally the kinds of ways you might talk to different people who fit into these different demographic categories change right when you're trying to talk to I don't want to say your parent because lots of people's parents are like very technically skilled But when you're talking to a friend of yours, and when you're talking to a child You'll be coming up with different kinds of arguments and different ways of explaining things Which is very useful when you're trying to like actually change people's minds So so we talked about like diversity versus inclusivity and diversity is when you have a really nice like end of the year Picture and it looks like lots of different people showed up, which is awesome But that's just the place where you start a lot in like traditional nonprofit Fields we look at if you have like a lot of say white people and then the non-white people don't show up from year to year in That picture then you've got diversity But you haven't got inclusivity and that means that you have to make sure they're receiving the same kind of training and Professional support and that they're being invited to the meetings where decisions are being made and that they're being included in their processes And they're able to envision a place for themselves within your organization from year to year So you might think about like welcoming people with open arms Not literally if they're not into hugging you should ask first, but figuratively right and so so that the challenge with diversity is to make it feel like Welcome is always the default as opposed to the like You know like oh most of our meetings are secret except for the one where we take the picture at the end of the year and so So when you're doing that and people are coming to The meetings where the actual decisions are being made then you have a situation where you are sharing power It might not look pretty and it might take it might feel a little rough at first, right? But shared power is the only thing that keeps people involved in your project If if they suspect that they are the janitor or the like oh No one likes doing that pile of stuff kind of person then they're not gonna stick around So this is how you do movements. Cool We want to do a little bit to just make people aware of minorities in tech And a little bit about intersectionality You know, there are a lot of different groups who are minorities in tech and We're not going to talk about them all right now But it's worth remembering that things that like the kind of tools we have to affect change for one specific group You usually also carry over to others So who is a minority in tech? This is a good question to ask ourselves I think Karen talked about this a little bit earlier when she was discussing outreachy I believe this was also covered in the diversity buff as well this is kind of an example of What it means to like what a group of diverse people can look like this particular photo is from walk in tech Chat on flicker. That's women of color in tech They did this photo shoot and actually they've done several photo shoots at this point to create stock photos of women of color So when you need to have a cool picture of a hacker for something you don't have to use another white dude You can instead like find a picture of one of these awesome people looking cool There's also cool people like this as a point of diversity, you know, I I love this photo so much She's just like a badass hacker totally gonna de-doss someone. She's up to no good But but you know so so another thing that like you talk about when you talk about minorities is age Here is kind of an incomplete list we wanted to put together This is very North American focused as we are North Americans and we did our best to find terms that Seemed like they would be accurate and like they were polite But if you feel as though you fit into any of these categories and we didn't do a very good job Please talk to us about it One of the the points here that you might not have thought of before is thinking about background Right so when we're talking one of the things about background is not everyone has to be or is college educated, right? Not everybody Came from a middle-class family. Not everybody actually has technical skills or any desire to develop technical skills Also people over the age of 35 As for intersectionalities Intersectionality is the acknowledgement that people fit into different categories at the same time, right? So again when we're talking about what we can do for a particular group chances are that also works for another group additionally somebody who's perhaps a Woman in tech might also be over the age of 35 or Over the age of the average Facebook employee That's me So there are lots of marginalized people and we have to kind of think about all of them even though we're focusing on one particular group right now Yeah Oppressive institutions are interconnected things that make women feel bad It can also be the things that make women of color or people of color feel bad Can also be the things that make older people feel bad Still we need to talk about these things separately sometimes to acknowledge that these are actual issues in and of themselves Okay, now it's yours So what is going on with age? There's a I spent a little bit of time about two years ago looking particularly into like what was going on with Representation and then how that was reflected in older women's actual experiences in the technology sector and it's Like if you can think of a woman over 50 that you've seen portrayed as technical on TV or in a movie That is one of the five I haven't already heard of then let me know There's not very many and in fact like some of them especially in science fiction It's because it's like a show that's gone on for like 20 years. So like lieutenant over She didn't start out over 50, but she's there now or Lieutenant Samantha Carter from Stargate, which keeps going and going and going as well and so You know, so I ended up talking to women and they said You know, they got a lot of like culture fit things they'd go and interview and people would peep out the door and be like Oh, no, and and then they would just like sit there for a little bit and eventually the receptionist would come over and be like I'm sorry our CTO is busy and we have to cancel your interview and she's like, oh, yeah Yeah, I saw him come and take a look at me and notice that I was not, you know Under 25 or something like that. So so there's definitely an age problem I think this is you. Yeah, I like talking about how tech has an age problem Here's something Mark Zuckerberg said when he was a young in I'm not gonna read this right now. I'm sorry if you're watching the video But we'll put the slides up and those will be accessible as in if you're watching the video But you can't read it because it's a slide Anyway, when Mark Zuckerberg was 22 or 23 he said this thing about how young people are just smarter than older people Um, thank you for laughing at that. I hope you guys think it's funny, too and and he kind of like builds off of that to to emphasize that Young people also have fewer responsibilities So it's not just that you're smarter for whatever reason you're smarter But that you have more chance and more opportunity to do the kinds of things like not having a family means you can stay up all night However young people aren't the only ones or when Mark Zuckerberg was younger They're not the only ones making these kinds of disparaging comments to people who are older The Nadkosla is a venture capitalist and at 56 he said I'm gonna read this one young people Oh people under 35 are the people who make change happen and older entrepreneurs fail to innovate Because they are falling back on old habits I really hope that's not the case and I've seen some pretty cooler people doing really neat things Including some of the people in this room who I'm pretty sure are over 35 Not positive. I haven't checked your IDs Yeah, but I only checked clint's So so there are actually a few cases in practice of this idea coming out one particular one was in 2011 Google had a settlement with someone named Brian Reed. Brian Reed had been fired. He lost his job and He believed that had been a discrimination point based on his age people in his team had been using a lot of disparaging language Referencing who he referencing like this particular identifier of him. He was called obsolete sluggish and an old fuddy-duddy I didn't know people still used that But apparently he is other companies in addition to this have gotten themselves in trouble by using terms like new grads right this is considered a point of discrimination based on age by Referencing or specifying kind of the age range you would expect someone to be in based on the point of their life that they're in This is in the United States at least age is a Is a age is a protected class in anti-discrimination laws and policies? Despite that despite that see I am older that now y'all know I'm older than 26 Tech really does have an age problem. These are median employee ages from 2012. They're not the most recent You see them varying from Facebook at 26 to at the time HP. It's a little old Not the age the the data That was 39 oracle was 38 IBM was 37 new Google was 29 and Apple and Nvidia had that at 31 There's also a correlation if you get down more into like the Like the statistics reported by employees at these companies that people at HP were working fewer hours a week than people at Facebook You also see like you know IBM HP. They are there are more well-established companies that have been around for longer Oh, this is up now We got to do this really cool thing. Thanks to Zach I hope many of you responded to the Debian community survey that happened At the beginning of the year. These are some of the results from this. We did a lot of aggregation of data There's no access to any of the raw data For most people So one of the things we found which was very unsurprising is that a small percentage Of contributors were under the age of 20 We definitely have had contributors in high school who have done amazing wonderful things Specifically in Debian and you see the percentage go up, you know, the median is 30 to 39 I guess that's what people are doing who no longer work at HP now Thank you Ah Valid percent is the okay, the percent is from the total Number of respondents to the survey including those who didn't respond to this question Since all question almost all the questions were optional Valid percent is among the people who actually responded. So that's 820 as opposed to the 1,400 of almost 1,500 who responded to the survey at large So this is a global survey people responded from all over the world But you'll also know that people over 60 is 1.8 percent of total contributors or total respondents So that's very similar to like the high school students of the people at the beginning of college If you're thinking about retirement as being something that happens over the age of 60 or over the age of 65 And we'll talk more about retirement later That's kind of where you'll you'll see this this huge drop-off. Oh, this is me. Don't you still know you like the young ones? I don't know the young ones paradoxically is too old for Molly The way we treat older and younger people in our communities is often based on a lot of assumptions about what their Competencies are what their technical level is and of course those assumptions are pretty different and we're gonna take a look at the young people first So young people we're talking kind of not in that sweet spot of just having graduated College with a CS degree and getting a job at Facebook But before that You know like in high school though place where we saw 1.7 percent of Debian contributors and this is I Think these are people that we want to bring into our communities to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid before they you know Get tainted or wherever and So so I we have a lot of opportunity here not in the The Kool-Aid is it's good. Oh, yeah, I'm just thinking of lots of jokes about Kool-Aid in my head I think there's less cereal What do we say about cats there's something about cats. Oh, that's still a cat slide But there's always has to this is we both have cats. This is not either of our cat But but what was I saying here? I'm so sorry guys. Thank you for your appreciation, right? one of the reasons why Companies prefer younger like recent grads and younger employees ties back to what Mark Zuckerberg said when he referred to older people As have as you know having families when he's like younger people don't have the same kinds of responsibilities that keep other people from be that keep older people from being good tech employees and Coincidentally, they don't have as much experience negotiating salaries So it's a it's a win-win if you want someone to do an 80-hour work week at kind of chump money for tech Yeah, this was an advertisement that was in the New York subway Yeah, Fiverr is a as a platform that allows people to perform small tasks I think if they're all $5 each And this this light as a picture of a woman who looks like well her makeup's good but she looks particularly tired in theory and It emphasizes this idea of the things that you do instead of taking care of yourself and how this is a desirable trait That you'll see in people Okay, great And you know following from that to the the next point which is actually younger people don't take time off of work I don't know how many of you felt unincline to do so. I know I did there especially during my first few jobs I didn't feel as though that was an acceptable thing to do It turns out a lot of other people who are millennials or self-identifying that age group or I put in that age group Have the the same the same thing, you know, they they are worried that they'll be fired They'll be worried that people think that they don't have a commitment to their job. They're worried that like they'll lose their positions at work or not have means of advancement in those cases Do you want me to talk about Leslie? Oh, I talk about Leslie pressure. I talk about Leslie pressure Oh He's on the next slide. He's on the next slide So our question is that you know our our younger people actually contributing to free software And as we saw we have some concrete numbers of that and the answer is kind of yes, but not really all that many So I'm actually curious how many of you Like since most of you at this are probably contributors in some way whether that is by using software by talking to people about software Or like, you know, having a leadership position within a technical community So I'm curious who here became involved when they were like in college you can like raise your hands Good point probably age 17 to 21 Okay, yeah, how many of you when you were in high school a few of them Sorry 17 age 14 to 17. Okay, you got a few of them and and even younger than that. Oh Yeah You're forgiven My follow-up question to that is is how many of you are Wesley crusher right because Wesley crusher was this magical kid Who knew everything? He was the most brilliant person on the ship. He could fly it. He could fix things He you know, he was he he was this person that we have is this ideal of The young contributor or the young person involved But you know, we're actually not like that Most of us are like the rest of the Gryffindor quidditch team We're gonna ignore Harry from this photo because he also much like Wesley crusher Shows up with this wonderful magical skill set that makes no sense based on his background Magical staircase Meanwhile you have the rest of the group the rest of the team the rest of these young people who are You know, they need to practice. They need to try hard. They need to have mentorship They need to have other people and older people and more experienced people as well as their peers who know more than them help them along To become good contributors, right Having mentors is great. Your mentor can be slightly older than you your mentor could be your age your mentor could be a lot older than you And mentors actually might not mean what you think they mean It isn't necessarily somebody who helps you with your project who sets aside time each week to talk with you It could be a friend who can help you do things like not be universally Stupid who can help you, you know dress better so you don't look like your mother dressed you Also when we're thinking about younger people getting involved with free software It's kind of important to think about the tools we use to make free software work There, you know, we a lot of us we use wikis, you know, we use Like what's up there? Will you get or in some cases even subversion still? And then we use IRC and these these are all tools that I love to use and I assume you like them as well She's on IRC sometimes But they're hard to use they're crunchy it's easy It's many people interact with them with these old clunky systems directly through their terminal And that can be like a hard-starting point for someone Especially someone who's young whose early interactions a majority of interactions with technology are these very smooth Processes where they can't even take apart their tablet to see what's inside of it So now they've talked about so now we've talked about young folks. We're gonna talk about the old so I mentioned that representation really matters, but We also have this situation where you know people are going out to try and get jobs and And the way that they're perceived is that they won't know what they're doing or they won't be able to you know To do this thing A lot of the women that I talked to about their experience as an older woman in tech said that they were somewhat or very afraid of Trying to find their next job that they were they were worried that they weren't going to find another place and that each one would be The last one that they would be able to find in tech And in fact this I have one quote from this woman who said discriminating against older workers men and women is Seems socially acceptable You have to work hard not to hire of anyone over 30 But just about every startup in Silicon Valley manages to do this Which is like at a time when companies are poaching each other's employees at a time when everyone is loudly complaining about this shortage of technical people and You know they're working hard to make their company seem the funnest like we've the ping-pong and the candy and the you know like whiskey Wednesdays and all this kind of stuff and And a lot of times companies are courting each other's employees and trying to you know pull them away With ever-increasing benefits and funness at work Meanwhile, there's a whole category of other folks that are like I'm actually smarter than those three people You just hired put together But I don't care about ping-pong actually So I like ping-pong okay, but I can do it at on my own time So so discriminating against older workers is is pretty rampant And some of the older women that I spoke to were basically just kind of like Yeah, I'm too old for this shit They just they've moved out of tech. I've met so many women who I don't know if you know this in the US Public libraries now have a lot of computers But they don't exactly hire sysadmin so like some technical women have sort of drifted over to be like an Unacknowledged sysadmin at a library or something like that and and there's other places like or they've found like some other Corner that's like a little bit technical, but not not like playing the Silicon Valley game another thing that older women Said to me that happened to them is If it felt like they were putting pushed into this sort of den mother role where it was like Oh, yeah, you don't need a code anymore. You can maybe help these folks work on their projects and this thing where women get pushed into Management and like a mentoring role and not doing their own technical work is Is pretty common and so some women do want to move into a management role But not all and it's a lot of the ones who don't want to move there feel a little bit pushed So this is you I'm gonna talk about volunteering. I think volunteering is great And that's what free software is powered by volunteers I'm assuming that most of you in this room aren't get paid aren't getting paid Directly for your free software contributions. I know some people at the conference in general are and that's really cool Most of us are volunteering our time because we care about it Volunteering is great and it's a highly intergenerational activity It's one of the places where you'll go and you'll be able to work and learn from people who are both younger and older than you at The same time one of my like little anecdotes about this is I volunteer at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston And I'm the youngest volunteer by like 20 years It's great, I love it. I love hanging out with those people Um, here are some numbers on on how volunteering looks like when you're young Between 12 and 18 actually about like a little over half of younger people Younger people being between the ages of 12 and 18 are Volunteering and maintaining volunteer roles 29 hours per year is the median number that they're putting in that's not a lot that you know comes out to Yeah, one every two weeks or something like that Approximately um And a lot of those are in youth or religious organizations things that are focused on getting young people involved in things So so this is kind of useful for us to think about when we're thinking about how to bring younger people Into free software how to take advantage of this group who are participating for the sake of participating and helping Also, you know, it actually turns out that in the United States for high school schooling between the ages of You know 14 and 17 or 18 You're required to volunteer at a number of schools It's it's something that will help you get into college and university and your post-secondary education And and actually it's like a super competitive thing now So it turns out that over this was from I believe a Harvard admissions counselor Who'd said they they'd seen an application from someone who had 250 volunteer hours over four years of their education? And they weren't impressed by it. They're like, yeah, this is great, but 250 hours. We've seen more That's kind of depressing because that's a lot of time On the other you know on the other side of it when you're looking at retirees That's where you're also getting a large number of people who are volunteering It's 42 percent of people age 65 plus as opposed to 55 percent from the younger group However, generally retirees aren't required in some way to volunteer But you will see younger people fulfilling this performance. They are hitting more hours at 96 Again, many of them are in religious organizations One of the metrics when we talk about volunteering when we're judging the success and an involvement of volunteers is looking at groups contributing more than 500 hours a year in this one particular demographic elderly meaning over 65 10% of those Volunteers accrue more than 500 hours per year. That's a really impressive number So since many of these people are also participating, maybe we should think about what they can do with us It's it's like the general trend for volunteering Outside of free software is a huge number of young people almost nobody in their 30s and 40s and 50s And then a whole ton of people in their 60s and 70s and 80s and free software is the inverse of that This these are kind of some examples of Organizations that we think do a good job at creating intergenerational volunteering and intergenerational communities We'll save some time by maybe not going through all of them But I would like Deb to mention political work. Yeah, political work is something that Commonly like they'll find something for if you show up with your seven-year-old they will stuff envelopes Also at the FSF you can show up and step on The FSF too But political campaigns will find something for you to do at any age And it's the same with many of these other organizations girls rock camp as a feminist organization that you know all women's space and and that's the population they serve is girls from 7 to 17 but the volunteers like go from 18 all the way up to 60s and retired so it's a Lot of organizations do a great job of bringing together an intergenerational group of volunteers So so younger people and older people like to use their time to do good Except in free software So think about that so what we're saying is this is not a It's more of a like wow look at all this opportunity So we're gonna talk about some organizations and solutions that we like that are starting to Do some of this work in the free software space So so we would really like to see a movement built where You know young people old people in the middle people I'll show up and find something to do and and they don't feel unwelcome There's not a lot of like oh, yeah, go ahead and sit over there old lady or well, you know like it's got to be like we said inclusive and and truly Part of the of the movement so I Say we have about 10 minutes left. So rather than going through these exhaustively I'll instead point out that so these are some organizations and projects and things happening to get younger people involved a lot of them are Education-based a lot of them are community-based and a lot of them are active Participation-based where you're getting people getting their hands dirty either in terms of like really learning this non-physical thing or working with a physical thing Kids days at free software conferences Especially are really cool And then there are some great things happening to get older people involved who are there technical or non-technical When I work on is open source comm that has a lot of older people who are Interested in tech, but that wasn't their career and so they're excited to write about it But there are some some other great places for older volunteers to plug in either technical or non-technical And learning those skills as well, which you'll see in both groups there There are lists of Educational resources that are geared towards different age categories. And so and some of these things Some of them do a good job in places of being non-age specific others not as much obviously like many of them could improve especially I know like Some of the fast conferences that I've gone to it's like cool Now we're gonna like cram into a bar up a little rickety pile of stairs and listen to techno music Speakers that are placed all over the wall and like, you know, I know I said I'm old But I'm not that old but even I'm not like, yeah, that sounds like a fun time where we shouted each other kind of thing So some of the stuff that we'd like to see happening, right? We'd like to see more non-coding options for kids coding learning to code and learning technical skills as an advanced Thing that takes a lot of time. It's pretty easy to get anyone to stuff envelopes But there are other things people can do as well projects big projects successful projects Have people who are doing work across a wide range of different things whether that stuff is coming up in speaking And I've seen I've seen youths like I I is that I was at one conference when I saw a 13 year old Presenting about things that she was doing With free software technology, so she's technical skills But there were projects she worked on on her own and she talked about her experience in contributing, right? You can have people do all sorts of other things that we won't talk about now But if you look at awesome lists of stuff people are doing they're all over it Deb is a great example of someone who does a lot of non-technical stuff. Oh, yeah Well, and I was gonna say that some of the other things we'd like to see happening is more support for moms returning to the workforce That want to do technical work We have a lot of affinity groups within some of our Some of our technical Communities, but you know, maybe we could have this is something that churches and other organizations do a lot of they have like a junior or a youth affiliate group and then The Southern California Linux Expo does a great job of having a knowledge of social event where like the first two hours There's not loud music and there's like games all over and then kind of as kids go to bed like people Show up and it gets a little darker. Oh Affinity group means like Like a group The question was what's an affinity group and an affinity group is like a group within like so a group within a larger group So it might be like the women's auxiliary or something or a lot of colleges have Like an Asian American club or something like that so to like within a larger group to be like Hey, we have something else in common Additional to the larger group that we would like to hang out and talk about or do activities that are particularly interesting to us As a tech specific or Debbie in specific example somebody There might be a group of journalists who are interested in technology and how they can incorporate tools like Debbie in And some of the wonderful things like GPG into their work. So those are groups with similar goals trying to work together So We're at the important part Called action called action. Okay. We ask you to do stuff. Yes, and and then after that we'll take questions Only actual questions though, I don't want any statement in answer. I'm just telling you now so So our call to action is to find ways to bring people in and make them feel comfortable and really truly part of your team and To empower these people to become real members of your community where you know They get to vote and they get to come to the secret cabal meetings that aren't secret anymore. I know they're not secret and and then You know, there might be something that you're doing that like you could pass on to someone and I Would say look for ways to like kind of get out of the way a little bit and pass on some of those things like you don't need to be Completely indispensable. I feel like it would be much more exciting to be like look I made 20 new people that want to like contribute to Debian instead of I do 20 things that no one else knows how to do So we'd like to hear from you You can still you can still get us on Twitter or IRC. Well, you know and Did I forget anything before you know questions? Okay. Debs on mastodon. I am on that. Yeah I think I have a good new social account if you're not into Twitter if you're not into Twitter, it's true. We have a or IRC. I'm freed up there. I'm not no I am on IRC. Yeah, for some reason I thought he said I see Q. I was really confused All right cool, so I hope you're excited to help us build a knowledge history software movement, so Thanks, and we'll take your questions. It seems there is a microphone if Yeah, who has questions or comments? One way in the back Did someone run the mic, please? Great young people stepping up to volunteer. I love it. Look, I'm sorry. I came in late So maybe you've already answered this But I'd just like to ask how how do you define a volunteer? I mean one thing you mentioned is that That people are required to do volunteering and for me, that's not a volunteer Yeah, it's not required. It's I think you meet not legally required. It's just that High school students in the US. They know if they want to go to prestigious schools that they Yeah, so I Philadelphia and in Philadelphia When you're doing your high school education, you're actually required to have a certain number of volunteer hours in order to graduate And then I guess you get to pick what organization. Yeah, you do get to pick what organizations you do that All right, I think we're good volunteer work is Most easily defined as things you are do you are choosing to do To ideally help some good or produce some good that you're not getting paid for you might get other wonderful perks like coffee like coffee and snacks pride Okay, we'll take one here and then if there is someone who's not a man that would like to ask a question Not after you that but I just want to throw that out there because I know like myself It sometimes takes me an extra minute to think of my question. So this is your minute ladies or if you're under 25 or over 65, okay, so I'm from Europe. So and I'm I was listening to your presentation, but it was like from other world or something like this So it seems how much you as specific it's this because I'm I was working in Poland now I work in Germany in my Polish company We used to have two groups of people middle-aged or something and younger just students and students were Jumping through jobs and middle-aged People tend to stay longer the same I can observe in Germany in my team. We are dealing mostly with With administration and we don't have anybody below 30 So it's not just that we are discriminating basically people tend younger people tend to jump through jobs And we need more stability in jobs So how much specific it is to us and to seek culture called Silicon Valley? so Our numbers are specific numbers are from us companies and us numbers about volunteering Anecdotally, I have been told that some of these ideas about hiring only people under 26 have been sort of becoming contagious and Not necessarily. I don't know specifically about Poland or Germany But in some of the other countries that I've been to where there's a lot of software being developed Another note is us on a US specific note here It is it is becoming more common for people all across the age range to be in jobs for shorter periods Of time, especially in tech Do we real quick? Do we have any like women who are interested in asking questions or? Now we're putting everyone on the spot. That's oh, sorry. All right. You can you got another chance in a minute All right. Go ahead. It might be a political statement, but One thing that I have experienced is helping a lot in this area is that having young people actually Act as old people Aka having a job where they say oh, you know what? I'm not going to work more than 30 hours and the ping-pong is fine But I'm going home at five and that's that's it and that that leads in the direction of saying It has to be a cultural change also in the wider just job market as well as in the tech job market saying and We as young people or maybe I should not say we now probably Once you're older, that's a moving target once you're over 26 We should all be also requiring correct job conditions and that's I mean part-time and all all these Conditions that are better also just make it easier for women who also wants to work part-time or all the people Who want to work part-time if it's a default also for young people that we hire It's just easier to not be the special snowflake Political change that needs to happen as well. Yeah, if you're asking if I'm pro-unionizing tech work the answer is yes Since I'm over 65. I guess I'm one of the marginalized groups In the first part of your presentation you raised some very interesting I things about issues about paid work not just volunteer work that I think link to what you're saying about volunteer work and One way of looking at the link is the degree to which people Co-operate with each other in wherever it is. They're working or volunteering the there was a list of Points that you had about why young people work too long. It was things like afraid not to get Promoted or seen not pulling away. No that kind of stuff This may be on you this may not be something you're familiar with in the US But in Canada a lot of IT people are unionized If they work for the government if they work for universities Health institutions and so on it's very frequent that not always but it's very there's a lot of IT people are unionized I was I worked at a university as staff and I Within the union. I was very active in Union for about 20 years and those points that you listed are Exactly the things that we tried to build in to our contracts so that people weren't wouldn't be worried about Working at a healthy pace and working To meet their own needs and so on right, but we could only gain those sorts of things through cooperation And that's why there's been more talk at least again in the US. Sorry guys. I live in the US. I hear a lot about that That's where there's been more talk around things like unionizing technical workers and people who don't just work at universities or small nonprofits Yeah, Molly and I have both been workers at Both union workers and in a technical capacity. I like to think that gives me mad leftist cred Yeah, so do you have any theories as to why? Why we are not Attracting all these volunteer Demographic like why are we Attracting work mostly from the people that are already too busy doing work. Oh Yeah, so I think we didn't make this point today But the those folks who are getting hired between 21 and 27 literally don't have any extra time And so that's I think why we're not getting a lot of volunteer work there. I mean the young people There isn't a lot of obvious spaces for people to participate unless they already have intense technical skills All of the high schoolers I have met in the Debian project are amazing But they're also all coders, you know when I first started when I got first started getting involved in free software Mostly what I did was stack chairs at events Because that was the skill set I had but it was a very unique thing. I was definitely the youngest person there And it's like it can actually feel a little degrading even to be the person stacking chairs when you're like Oh, there's Dev Nicholson and she's like doing all this cool stuff and going around and like fighting patents And I'm gonna stand here and stack some chairs. You should ask me to help you with the chairs Everyone should volunteer help with the chairs Everyone should help with the chairs, but it's also it's it also is things like oh We're having our meet-up and you can come to our meet-up, but it's gonna be at a bar It's gonna start at 9 p.m. And it's gonna go till midnight I So I I just think that tech and free software doesn't do a good job reaching out to younger people Doesn't do a good job by creating specific opportunities for them and Doesn't do a good job making it clear all the different kinds of things they can do that are valuable contributions All right, I think we have just one more and then it's on to like the party part All right, it's dinner then party dinner then party. Yeah Oh Yeah, so we take that one or no, I'm sorry, we didn't see any of the science make it quick what about working with high schools and You have examples of things that have worked working with high schools and colleges where people have tasks assigned to them and Working with teachers to assign tasks related to free software projects Is that how it's that we all know that exists but statistically how does that there is a really great example? And we kind of blue past it on here. It's the pen manner program Red has been really involved with them and what they've done is you know They get some older computers and they have like a hodgepodge of different stuff donated by parents or whatever And the kids are the sys admins for the school computer systems So that's something that we could replicate at other schools I'm not gonna go any deeper because it was completely ran out of time, but thank you so much for coming Thanks for sticking around. Oh, yeah. Yeah, all right. I also just kind of want to add after the fact I really appreciate TZ's enthusiasm at getting involved with free software look at it and try to come up on the stage It's great