“Barbielicious” LEGOs. Does LEGO design only for boys? Or does it sell stereotypes? #dontdumbdown #lego #geekgirl

space-rocket-lego

Iconic toy brand LEGO recently launched a new line of toys meant just for girls — but two young women, Bailey Shoemaker-Richards and Stephanie Cole, think the products are unfairly “dumbed down” for girls.

The new line is called LadyFigs, and it’s made up of busty, pastel-colored figurines that come with interests like shopping, hair-dressing, and lounging at the beach. The uninspired toys even come with pre-assembled environments — so there is no assembly (or imagination) required.

Bailey and Stephanie say they’re frustrated that LEGO is pushing outdated gender roles on girls and cheating them of the opportunity to build and discover. So they took to the internet, blogging about what they call the new “Barbielicious” LEGOs and petitioning the toy company to lose the sexist LadyFigs line and go back to empowering both boys and girls with its original products. Click here to sign Bailey and Stephanie’s petition today.

LEGO hasn’t always thought its toys were only for boys. In the 1980s, the company was actually celebrated for a major advertising campaign that spotlighted a young girl and her LEGO creation with the tagline “What it is is beautiful.” But since then, LEGO reversed course and decided to market its products only to boys.

The company claims its research shows girls just don’t appreciate the original LEGO line. But Bailey and Stephanie argue that with LEGO’s renewed emphasis on boys — featuring only boys in its ads and stocking products in the boys’ aisles of toy stores — it’s no wonder young girls wouldn’t think LEGOs were meant for them.

Bailey and Stephanie’s fight to get LEGO to return to its gender-neutral toys is already making waves, with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Time weighing in on the issue. But LEGO is stubbornly holding its ground and told Business Week that the LadyFigs launch is a “strategic” move to “reach the other 50 percent of the world’s children,” as if girls have never been part of LEGO’s focus.

Public pressure can prove LEGO wrong. If enough people sign Bailey and Stephanie’s petition, it could convince LEGO that the new LadyFigs are bad business and the company should return its focus to empowering boys AND girls with toys that inspire creativity and innovation.

Tell LEGO to stop selling out girls — sign Bailey and Stephanie’s petition today.

Editor’s note: Not everyone agrees and there have been some pretty funky designs built by gurls & boys using the new vibrant brick colours.. (One used them to build a spaceship.) I think it’s a personal choice if you want to condemn LEGO for being driven by what their marketing department tells them what girls actually want. LEGO has tried to counter-act the bad press (even though it’s damage control, rather than genuine insight): and it never hurts to make them think about delivering product to a mixed market with several different goals and interests.GG xox

‘The art of Hacking’ with all my favourite gurls #hacking #ethics #code #geekgirl

With works by: Heath Bunting, Harmen de Hoop, moddr_, Cornelia Sollfrank, The Yes Men, ÜBERMORGEN.COM <http://xn--bermorgen-p9a.COM> and Nancy Mauro-Flude / Mez Breeze / Sara Platon. 
 
‘The art of Hacking’ focuses on the artistic side of hacking. The artists in this exhibition highlight the imperfections of our surroundings and daily lives. The projects subvert, improve on or circumnavigate ‘official’ systems and practices and offer alternatives. Superficially, hacking is often associated with spreading online viruses and other digital attacks. Officially these criminal activities are not really known as hacking, but as ‘cracking’. The real practice of hacking is done based on far more positive and artistic motives. It’s a state of mind and there are elaborate ethical codes within the hacker community. 
 
In short creative hacking combines artists’ technical skills with the optimism to solve problems and the urge to overcome artistic limitations. The basis for these works lies in a technical, online methodology that spreads into the physical world through the tangibility of the artworks. 
 
About the works:
The British artist Heath Bunting gives insight into the networks at play that constitute an identity, like banks, health care and education. By using these different networks Bunting creates new synthetic identities. In his ‘Identity Bureau’ one can purchase official and legal UK identities. This project has been made possible in collaboration with SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain. http://irational.org/ 
 
The American creative activism duo, a pair of notorious troublemakers The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) targets leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else in order to publicly humiliate them, a practice that they call ‘identity correction’. Next to displaying a few projects by The Yes Men, NIMk collaborates on a ‘Yes Lab’ together with the Amsterdam Fringe Festival, the Dutch Theatre Festival, SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain, and Partizan Publik. http://theyesmen.org/ 
 
The office installation “DOUBLETHINK Knowledge Bureau” reflects and demonstrates both the Austrian art collective UBERMORGEN.COM’s artistic actionism as well as the necessary tools and rules for any clandestine media hacking operation today. http://www.ubermorgen.com/ 
 
The Rotterdam based lab moddr_ has hacked digital ‘footprints’ with projects like ‘Web 2.0 Suicide Machine’ and continues to do so more recently with the ‘Bin Lover’ project; a new piece by moddr_ residence artist Philipp W. Teister. ‘Bin Lover’ gives trashed files a new lease of life. The piece cleverly uses the apparent security of desktops, and will be shown alongside a number of related projects. http://moddr.net/ 

The German artist Cornelia Sollfrank presents three works in which art hacking strategies are being used to deconstruct myths about genius, originality and authorship. http://www.artwarez.org/ 
 
And by using the work by the Dutch artist Harmen de Hoop, you yourself can get started as an activist by copying and spreading pamphlets containing the text ABOLI$H CAPITALI$M NOW! in the public domain. http://www.harmendehoop.com/ 
 
Error_in_Time(v.t_3)_ sister0, Ko66 and Netwurker_Mez give us insight into geek space from the perspective of a female hacker. This isn’t a work about identity – its about identity theft. Nancy Mauro-Flude: Artistic and Conceptual Director, in collaboration, like any good homebrewed craft, with Australian artist Mez Breeze explores environments that involve online socializations or encounters. http://unhub.com/netwurker
 
Swedish/Dutch Sara Platon founder of www.genderchangeracademy.com deals with computers the hard way, demystify its senses, follows the busroute to the CPU and touches it innerparts.

Nancy Mauro-Flude exiled co-founder of Moddr_&  a Genderchanger Academy convert, is based in Tasmania and continues her performance-based collaborations&  interrogations of the possibilities and constrictions of media technologies. http://sister0.tv/ 
 
  With:
 • An artist talk by Heath Bunting, Harmen de Hoop, and moddr_ on
 Sunday the 11th of September at 15.00 hrs.
 • A panel discussion on the subject of hacking moderated by Jaromil
 and Cecile Landman with Rop Gonggrijp, Karin Spaink, Patrice Riemens
 and Heath Bunting taking place in October.
 • moddr_ presents several workshops within the framework of ‘The Art
 of Hacking’. 
 
 Information about these activities will be announced on www.nimk.nl and via other social media. 

Make More Monsters – Deborah Kelly #monsters #geekgirl

beastliness by deborah kelly

Gallery Projects
20 July – 21 August 2011

Make More Monsters consists of two interrelated components that use the gallery space as a site of both presentation and production. The exhibition is an exhortation and an open-ended proposition: let us work, what can we make?  In the form of an evolving month-long workshop, interested participants will be invited to come and engage in a collective collage, using the vast array of sources and elements Deborah Kelly has collected since adolescence. 

Dedicated in part to marking twenty years since the publication of Donna Haraway’s 1991 Cyborg Manifesto, the workshops will consist of shared readings of this seminal work, and other texts suggested by participants, informal discussions thereof, as well as the collaborative creation of a large-scale collective collage. Make More Monsters is intended to prefigure optimised social relations; to rehearse, in the words of Sydney collective Squatspace, a brief utopia.  

Kelly will also present her most recent work Beastliness (2011), an animation based upon a series of analogue paper collages completed over the past three years, having worked with animators Christian Heinrich and Chris Wilson, as well as The Brutal Poodles who have produced the original soundtrack. Beastliness manifests and exemplifies a number of the central concerns within Kelly’s collage practice: the vigour of hybridity and the representation and mythologizing of the feminine.  

The workshops will be held at Artspace on Sundays 2-4pm for the duration of the exhibition, with a final session 2-4pm Saturday 20 August in which participants will decide the fate of the collective work.  

ARTSPACE, Sydney
43 – 51 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Sydney Australia

T: +61 2 9356 0555
F: +61 2 9368 1705
artspace@artspace.org.au
www.artspace.org.au
Gallery Open 11am – 5pm Tues – Sun
Office Open 10am – 6pm Mon – Fri
Closed on public holidays
Admission is free, except for special events

Australia Post launches 100 Years of International Women’s Day stamp #purplepantsday #stampcollecting #IWD #geekgirl

iwd-stamp

Australia Post is commemorating the centenary of International Women’s Day (IWD) with the release of a special stamp issue.

The centenary of IWD is being celebrated around the world on 8 March 2011 and provides a unique and global opportunity to reignite, inspire and channel women’s equality for the future.

“I am delighted that Australia Post is supporting the centenary of IWD with a commemorative stamp. The stamp recognises the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future and is an indelible channel through which we can promote positive change and raise awareness of the issues women face in their everyday lives,” said the Minister for the Status of Women, Kate Ellis.

The first IWD was launched by Clara Zetkin (Leader of the Women’s Office for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) on 19 March 1911 when more than a million European women and men united to call for an end to discrimination and for the right of women to vote, work and hold public office. The success of the first IWD exceeded all expectations.

The first Australian IWD rally took place on 25 March 1928 in the Sydney Domain, with marches in Sydney and Melbourne following in 1931 and involving hundreds of participants. The first official government-sponsored IWD in Australia was held in 1975, when the UN declared International Women’s Year, and was witnessed by one of the biggest street marches in Australia. Today IWD is characterised by a mixture of celebration of past achievements and looking ahead to the future challenges and opportunities for women.

The centenary of IWD stamp was designed by Stacey Zass, using a combination of images and graphic elements, including the symbol for women.

Ada Initiative launches to promote women in open technology and culture #opensource #adainitiative

Open source activists Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner announce the launch of the Ada Initiative (http://adainitiative.org/), a not-for-profit organization to promote women’s participation in open technology and culture.

Open technology and culture, including open source software, open content, and related communities, suffer from a dearth of women at all levels.  ”Open technology and culture are shaping our future and must reflect all people.  Involving more women in the creation of our
future is a critical step in building a healthy Internet world,” says Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation.  The Ada Initiative will concentrate on focused, direct action programs, including recruitment and training for women, education for community members, and working with corporations and projects to improve their outreach to women.

The Ada Initiative’s first sponsor is Linux Australia (http://linux.org.au/), which promotes the development of free and open source software. Sponsorship funds will allow the Ada Initiative to retain expert staff to focus on major projects which are beyond the capacity of purely volunteer organizations.  The Ada Initiative is currently seeking additional partner organizations and sponsors.

About the Ada Initiative

The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media.  Co-founders Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora each have 10 years of experience in open source software, open social media, and women in computing activism.  The Ada Initiative is advised by a team of experts from open technology and culture fields including open source software, open government, Wikipedia, hacker culture, social media, remix and fan culture, and online activism.

Digitise The Dawn: help the NLA digitise the first Australian newspaper to be run by women. #feminism #geekgirl

Digitise the Dawn

Donna Benjamin has started a campaign to raise funds to give the National Library of Australia so that they will Digitise the
first Australian newspaper to be run by women.

Louisa Lawson founded The Dawn: A Journal for Australian Women in 1888 and ran it for 17 years.  She was a pivotal figure in winning women the right to vote in Australia, and her publication played a key role in the struggle for women’s suffrage.

Donna discovered The Dawn is not yet online whilst doing research for her talk she gave at this year’s Haecksen miniconf. She contacted the library to find out if / when they might intend to add it to the Trove collection at http://trove.nla.gov.au

A brief email exchange with the Director of the digitisation project spurred her to try and raise the relatively small amount needed to see this happen.

After initially setting up a chipin, she has now set up a website with a direct paypal donate button – but will also accept direct deposits, cheques and money orders.

Even more than your money – Donna would appreciate all of us  helping to spread the word. Louisa Lawson is one of our founding feminists – and The Dawn trumpeted the charge.
–
Digitise The Dawn
Raising funds to digitise Louisa Lawson’s Journal for Australian Women
http://digitisethedawn.org
http://twitter.com/digitisethedawn

Bloodbath Roller Derby – still time to win tix #bumpp #geekgirl

BLOODBATH double pass giveaway.
Want to win a double pass to the BLOODBATH Oct 9th at the Hordern Pavilion, Sydney? Post your best photo of A PRIOR ROLLER DERBY EVENT, be it as an audience member, in costume, or team-mate or war wound focused; we want to see you at your Roller Derby best!

Join the facebook group, post your pic to the photo album, and tag your name to enter the contest! Winners will be revealed on Friday 8 October 2010. C’mon! Do it!

BLOODBATH is a collaborative distributed artwork by Bump Projects in association with the Sydney Roller Derby League. BLOODBATH features artists Linda Dement, Kate Richards, Sarah Waterson, Francesca da Rimini, and Nancy Mauro-Flude, each with recognised track records in new media, data visualisation, mediated performance and/or work with embodiment or violence. At an all girl flat track roller derby game, Sydney, 9 October 2010, sensors on the helmets of players feed data to their five artworks, generating digital elaborations of the moves and collisions on track.

Some mugs will believe anything – #geekgirl sets the record straight.

It must have been a slow news day when this piece
http://www.zdnet.com.au/claws-out-over-geekgirl-trademark-339303290.htm was published.

It was either that or a PR bull-terrier behind an item adorably titled,  ”Claws out over geekgirl trademark.”

Lads’ Mag slug aside, it was the content that really ticked me off.  While the piece has been edited many times since it appeared last Friday, it did initially paint me as a copyright thug.

In the hope of beating down this beat up, I elected to do the “no comment” thing.  I’m a feminist, for goddess’ sake.  The last thing I want to  do is add fuel to the flame of a “catfight” story.

But, I’ve had enough of staying quiet. I won’t repeat the threats and insults pelted at the geekgirl door. Let it suffice to say that they have  been loud enough to tempt me out of silence.

Since the piece first appeared, the editors have amended their words.  As the edits took place, I changed from a freedom-eating monster into an unwilling partner in a dispute I didn’t start.

I’m glad the reporters actually got their reporting freak on and bothered to change this PR spin.  In the meantime, though, I’ve become the target of some pretty outsize abuse.

In recent days, I’ve been drenched in the sort of bile you only find on the internet.  For a day there, I became a trending topic. For a week now, I’ve been the object of scorn from a number of prominent online commentators.

Enough. Let me set you straight.

In 1995, IP Australia awarded me trademarks for ‘geekgirl’; this was in large part due to my recognised contributions to cyber-feminism and in mentoring women in IT.

In April 2010, IP Australia rejected the January application by Sydney-based IT consultant Kate Carruthers for the same name.

Kate’s initial reasons for her January application are still unclear to me. What is clear, though, is she has been building a PR narrative in which I star as the Copyright Monster with Fangs.

In recent days, she has claimed in media and podcast interviews that all she really wanted to do was “liberate” the phrase “geek girl” for use in everyday speech.

I might be able to understand Kate’s public and private actions if I was, say Time Warner, or Oprah Winfrey instead of a cyber-feminist nerd running a small business. And, you might be able to understand them if there was clear evidence of me running around issuing cease-and-desists to everyone and their dog.  Which I wasn’t.  Which I wouldn’t.  Try me. Say “Geek Girl” in conversation now.  Anything happen? No.  Marvel as I do not beat down your door and demand an immediate retraction.

Of course, you could be forgiven for thinking that’s how I’ve behaved. Kate did, after all, do an A-Grade PR Number.  If you ever need some good spin, use her people.

What catalysed the hate-storm was Kate’s assertion, expressed in direct quotes to ZDNet, that I had told her directly not to use the Twitter hashtag #geekgirl.

WTF?  She has since retracted this statement and admitted it is not true.

I just don’t “get” this absurd situation. I don’t get why Kate felt it necessary to protect something I was never contesting.  I don’t get why she’s nominated me as this month’s bete-noire. I don’t get why she never thought to pick up a phone or a mouse to talk this through. Most of all, I don’t get the hate expressed by a handful of hatey haters.

Things can move at such high-speed.  It would be great if we could slow down just a bit and wait  for the truth to arrive before hitting ‘send’, ‘post’ or ‘tweet’. It might also be nice to remember that behind those avatars you’re tearing apart to make your important point about IP, mindshare, liberty or whatever, there are people.

To be clear: yes, I want a fair and reasonable control of IP that is demonstrably and legally mine.  While I acknowledge and understand the many arguments against ownership of any kind: seriously. It’s not like Leo Tolstoy has called me to task, here. No. It’s a person who lists Business Process Reengineering, e-Commerce and Strategic Planning among her professional specialties.

I suspect that Kate, with her impressive business résumé, understands trademark law. I suspect that Kate, with her impressive business résumé, has a fairly cosy relationship to capitalism. So, I also suspect that she’s being disingenuous when she says she wants to “liberate” and “share”.  It feels to me that what she may want to do is “take” rather than “share”; all the while building up the “online reputation” successful business people talk about in Digital Marketing workshops.

I am proud of the little virtual place I have built. I am proud to bursting of the women I have mentored.  I am proud of never having gone  to business school or writing the words “Business Process Reengineering” on my résumé.

I am also proud to launch the new line of my merchandise, starting with:  ”Some mugs will believe anything” Buy now

*hugs* geekgirl

hashtag-geekgirl-mug

midlife express

Inspired by archetypes - The Creative and The Daredevil, Sue Bell is the founder of midlifeexpress.

midlifexpress.com is for women between the ages of 35 and 60. The site is a resource for women at midlife and was established because there was nothing for women in this age group on the internet (other than sites about menopause). the site connects women to various events and workshops, reading material, discussion groups and more!!

Sue Bell: Sue has worked as a Lecturer in Information Technology, a multimedia teacher and as an entertainment writer for magazines in Australia and the UK.

linux.conf.au 2010

linux.conf.au will be held in Wellington, New Zealand from Monday 18 January to Saturday 23 January.

LCA2010 (the conference usually known as “linux.conf.au”, but in New Zealand for 2010) has an initiative to sponsor diverse attendees. Google is sponsoring the LCA2010 Diversity Programme in which Open Source contributors who are members of a minority group, including women, can apply to receive up to NZD1000 towards attendance at LCA2010 in January in New Zealand. Applications for LCA2010 assistance from this program close on Friday 2 October 2009.

They’ve also just announced their programme (I co-chaired the selection committee, but aggravatingly can’t attend due to conflicting commitments re bringing new life into the world, talk about poor timing kid). Women speakers are:

• Angela Byron, Drupal Under the Hood
• Anne Chin, The implications of using FOSS under Australian copyright & contract law
• Claudine Chionh, Unlocking the ivory tower: Free and open source software in collaborative humanities research
• Gabriella Coleman, Tuesday keynote
• Selena Deckelmann, Survey of open source databases
• Liz Henry, Hack Ability: Open Source Assistive Tech
• Emma Jane Hogbin, Self Help Guides for World Domination
• Denise Paolucci, Build Your Own Contributors, One Part At A Time
• Silvia Pfeiffer, HTML5 video: how to process and publish video in an open format
• Sarah Sharp, SuperSpeed me: USB 3.0 for Linux
  

Source: Geek Feminism Blog