Perl: The Next Generation

"Perl: The Next Generation", the YAPC 2012 keynote by Michael G Schwern.

This is my "secret" diversity talk aimed at the guys and focusing on how good, but homogenous, people can create an unwelcoming community without realizing it. The solution lies in restructuring how we make decisions, it lies in Kirk vs Picard. And anybody can be a Picard.

Further reading can be had at http://bit.ly/YAPC2012_Keynote

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at [e-mail] or ask them in the comments!

Get my notes ready

So, uh, part of the theme this year is

"Perl the Next Generation"

and what will the next generation of

Perl people look like?

And before I can answer that

I think we first have to answer this:

"what do we want them to look like?"

and before we can answer that

we have to know what we look like right now.

So — and why.

So we're going to take a little poll

So first off please everyone that can stand

please stand up and if you can't stand up

just raise your hand.

A little exercise in the morning.

Oh God!

Yeah I've got to stand here for 45 minutes.

[laughter]

So this is our control, everyone's that's

gonna stand up stand up.

Looks like everyone has stand up, good.

So, whoever wants to take a picture

do it right now.

Now I'd like everyone who does not identify as a guy

to sit down and put your hand up.

Now if there's any question:

your choice, seriously.

All right, now look around.

This is the question I want ask you is

why is this room overwhelmingly full of guys?

[laughter and applause]

Why are there?

I can make a bet that there are probably

more Michaels here than women.

It's funny but it's also very sad.

All right, thanks, have a seat.

So how can we talk about the next generation

when this room looks more like my Dad's generation?

So Perl is — and Open Source in general —

is overwhelmingly full of guys.

And why is that?

And you might think well just because computing

is in general dominated by guys.

Or maybe that we're just better at math or something

because you know Perl programming

involves a whole lot of math right?

Or basically that we're just reflecting

a larger problem that's out of our control.

But it turns out it's not true.

There's been some fantastic data on this

from an organization called FLOSSPOLS.

Commercial software is about 28% female.

Open Source is somewhere between 2 and 6.

Pretty consistently. So, what the hell?

And we could talk all day about

the exact numbers

I really don't do that right now.

We'd be just be arguing about whether

it's merely terrible or truly appalling.

But no matter how you feel about the topic

there is one conclusion you can draw from this

without argument or judgement

which is quite simply that

Open Source is doing something to lose women.

And like it or not we have to face that

and decide what we're going to do about it.

But honestly this isn't really about women.

The problem isn't "how do we get more women?"

or it's not even "why are there so many men?"

The problem is "why are we so damn homogenous?"

[laughter and applause]

And despite knowing that there is a problem

— I didn't think you people would be so

chipper in the mornings

[laughter]

you're laughing at my jokes —

and being so concerned about it

we remain homogenous.

I came into Perl in 1995.

I can't do math right now but that was a while ago.

And we look basically the same as we did then

maybe a little worse.

There's more of us but basically it's

made up of the same type of people.

Ah and there's so many other points of diversity

I could go on about besides gender.

I could talk about race, language, time zone,

physical ability, economics, education, culture and so on.

Ah but quite honestly

gender is so damn obvious that that's what I'm going to use

and I only have 45 minutes.

So apologies for not covering all the axes,

there's a lot of them.

So, if Perl and Open Source have one thing in common

it's their belief in the meritocracy

the idea that you should be judged

based on your merits

your code and your contributions

not on how much money you have

or say your gender or whatever else.

It's all about the code, your contributions,

your work and so on and so forth.

If we had a healthy meritocracy

this room would be about 28% women

matching commercial IT and I'd be talking about something else.

If we had a healthy meritocracy we'd have

28% female speakers.

I had to do some guessing on the gender

so my apologies if I got anybody wrong.

If this were a healthy meritocracy

we would have had at least one female

[??] by now.

And it really pains me to say this but

our meritocracy is broken.

[applause]

And like I said this isn't really about women

this is about us.

This is about — demographic diversity is the

canary in the coal mine.

Gender is simply easy to track.

It's the most obvious thing in front of our face.

If gender is out of whack

if demographic diversity is out of whack

then there's a good chance that other things are as well.

And have we optimised ourselves for

thick-skinned male library developers?

[laughter]

And even now beyond that

if we're doing something to drive away women

who else are we driving away?

What other sorts of people?

What ideas are we losing?

And what viewpoints and skills?

So who do we tend to have trouble

finding in the Perl community?

And what skills are underrepresented?

Tech writers, mobile developers, Windows users,

yeah how often do you need to fix something

on Windows and you can't find anybody?

Grant writers, interface designers, community managers,

GUI developers, new programmers,

new to Perl programmers,

conference organizers, graphic designers,

teachers, trainers

— my list is cut off at the bottom —

[flicks pages]

young folks, old folks,

marketing people, business people.

All of these skills are needed

for a healthy language community.

And when I talk about growing the Perl community

I don't mean just more of the same.

I mean different kinds of people.

Different ideas, different thoughts,

different viewpoints.

So we can adapt and change and grow

and be healthy as the world around us

and technology changes.

If we don't change with it

we just get left behind.

So, I don't want to turn this into

a finger-pointing guilt-fest.

Because I know when I was kind of struck with all this

many moons ago

I you know felt the weight of

you know white male privilege coming down on me

or you know not weight, shouldn't go off script,

[laughter]

So I believe that the people in this community

are overwhelmingly good people.

And I view it as something like this:

we have a small chunk of loud-mouth assholes

and a vast majority are good people

who just kind of want to be left alone to code

and not think about this stuff.

And then a small chunk who do want to think

about this stuff.

And unfortunately the people in the middle

sometimes are a little loud

about how much they don't want

to think about this stuff.

And the problem is

not that we're bad people

or that we do awful things.

The problem is that we're so damn alike.

Back to homogeny.

That 95% in the middle that's

primarily male library developers and sysadmins

who are thick-skinned, socially passive,

and don't want to hear about community issues.

[laughter and applause]

So I'm glad this is going —

homogeny breeds more homogeny,

it's inbreeding.

And unless you do something about it

it just doesn't go away.

So it's perfectly natural to want

to make a community that

you're comfortable in.

One that works for you and your friends.

But if your friends are all like you

and if the same things make them comfortable

and uncomfortable

if you all want the same things

then you're going to optimise the community for them.

If you — the more you optimize for you and your friends

and people like you

the less it will work for people on the fringes.

And they will start to leave.

And they will start to, they will not come back.

It's very easy to put your head down

and just write code and not notice

that their voices and opinions and ideas

will get quieter and quieter.

Individuals will come and be made uncomfortable

and leave.

And without being able to build up

enough people to get themselves heard.

Until one day there's more Michaels than women.

And we're all just agreeing with each other

while the rest of the world moves on

and forgets about us.

And that is why I think this room is full of white guys.

[laughter]

So the women are sick of trying to tell us this

And it's about time the guys started to deal

with their own crap.

And I'm sick of the situation after 17 years in Perl.

And I'm sick of seeing my friends leave

or be immediately turned off.

I'm sick of seeing people told they

just have to deal with it.

Or if they don't like it

they should go start their own group.

I am really not the best person for the job.

I've honestly been freaking out about

this keynote for months.

And I'm really glad you were laughing.

[laughter]

And I'm not the first person to

come up with anything that I'm going to tell you.

But I was given the keynote spot

and this is all too important to ignore.

And there are so many things that

I want to talk to you about this subject.

Systematic discrimination and privilege

being two huge issues I unfortunately won't be covering

because I don't have time to do them right.

So I'm going to do the best I can

to get the most of you I can

thinking about the problem

and deciding if you want to solve it

and how you're going to solve it.

Because you are smart people, you're good people

and you're very good at solving problems.

But once you understand it's a problem

and once you decide it's worth solving.

So I'm also going cover some solutions

I'm not just going to berate you all day.

And solutions that we can do as a group

and that we can do as individuals.

In order to do that, first I need to bring up

a really touchy topic,

one that you probably have very strong feelings about

and it might divide the community just by bringing it up.

I am of course referring to Star Trek captains.

[laughter and scattered applause]

So, let's take another little poll

you don't need to stand up this time.

Raise your hand, you can vote more than once,

you can raise your hand more than once.

Raise your hand for Kirk.

OK.

Piccard?

Oh wow, OK, excellent, that's a good sign.

Uh, Cisco?

OK, less for Cisco.

And Janeway?

OK, and finally Porthos.

[laughter]

We know who was really running that ship!

And let's talk about the two most iconic captains

Kirk and Piccard.

Two very different star ship captains, 25 years apart,

each for a different generation.

Captain Kirk from the original 60s TV show

what's Kirk do in a crisis?

Kirk? Kirk takes action. Kirk gives orders.

Kirk is decisive. Kirk beams down to the planet.

Kirk punches the alien, Kirk kisses the girk.

Kirk, Kirk, Kirk, Kirk, Kirk, Kirk, Kirk.

It's all about Kirk.

Maybe he talks to his two best buddies.

But it's all about Kirk.

[laughter]

And that's great for Kirk and Kirk's buddies.

Now, Captain Piccard, from the early 90s

Star Trek Next Generation.

What does Piccard do in a crisis?

Piccard holds a meeting.

Piccard gathers his senior staff

and he gets their opinions.

Worf wants to fight it.

Geordi wants to study it.

Beverley wants to know if it's hurt.

Riker wants to have sex with it.

Troi wants to know how you feel about it.

And Data feels bad because he doesn't have feelings.

[laughter]

So Piccard listens to all their different viewpoints

and only then does he

[laughter]

only then does he make an informed decision.

Now Piccard was given a huge job

and it was not the Enterprise-D.

Piccard's job was following 20 years of Kirk.

Following 20 years of the same thing.

20 years of one captain, 20 years of one way to do it.

The Next Generation brought in all of this change.

How many people watched it, watched Next Generation,

when it first came on the air?

OK, good, a good number.

So you remember like "oh my God

the bridge looks like the lobby of a Hilton Hotel!"?

[laughter]

They have interstellar HR.

Piccard surrenders the Enterprise in the first episode.

Aw, why can't the captain just shoot the bad guys

and kiss the green women, seriously?

Well, it's all different and complicated

and that was the point.

20 years went by and the world was different.

Things were different and complicated

but also better.

Piccard updated Star Trek for a new generation.

And Piccard introduced Star Trek to a wider audience.

Come to think of it

Larry, how old is Perl?

[inaudible reply]

20, 25 years old? OK, just checking.

[laughter]

No, no reason.

[laughter]

So Kirk gave us three seasons.

And Kirk kicked it all off and that

and we wouldn't be here without Kirk.

Piccard, Piccard gave us seven seasons and

kicked off two more shows with fourteen more.

So there you go.

A good segue to talking about why I'm getting old.

In the finest tradition of Larry's keynotes

I'm going to talk about my eyes.

So now I'm getting old you get to hear about the medical issues.

12 months ago I went to get my eyes checked

ah the wonderful American healthcare system

it hadn't happened in a while.

And I found out I have a blind spot.

I've lost some of my field of view in my left eye

to pigmentary glaucoma.

Now interestingly enough

I can't see the blind spot

even after it's been pointed out.

Which is kind of weird, right?

I can't even trick myself into seeing it

it doesn't work.

My brain tricks me into thinking it's just not there.

And if my doctor hadn't pointed it out

I never would have known.

And I would have inevitably lost all sight

in my left eye, irreversibly.

Now I can keep it from getting worse with some eye drops.

So once it's pointed out and once I know about it

even though I can't see it

I believe what my doctor said.

And I take my medicine.

It's a good thing I went to an expert

and it's a good thing I listened to them

and it's a good thing I did something about it.

So Perl has a blind spot

and I feel it's lack of diversity.

Perl has lost you know, 80, 90% of its field of vision

it's lost people and their ideas.

And even after it's been pointed out

Perl cannot see that blind spot

because we do not know what we do not know.

And if we keep going like we've been going

we never will.

Now fortunately, unlike my blind spot that's nerve damage

Perl's blind spot can be fixed.

But if and only if we do something about it.

Because I can tell you if we do nothing about it

it'll just stay the same.

So Perl's blind spot looks like this.

And let me tell you

we had machines rendering for hours on these.

This is how much of the Perl community

that we can see.

That you know is on the IRC channels

and mailing lists and everything else.

These are the Perl users that we know about

These are the Perl users we don't know about.

And this is kind of all the potential Perl users

that we could be hauling in.

And we like to think that we are the Perl community

that irc.perl.org and p5p and the perl.org mailing lists

and YAPC and CPAN and Perl Mongers

and all that is the Perl community.

But we're not.

And I'm just going to give us a name

I'm going to call us the perl.org community

just so that we don't keep saying 'community'

back and forth. Maybe I'm talking about the TV show.

Now, who is the community and

who owns the community, these are very good questions.

And who gets to set the rules for the community

which is very very important?

The people who currently make up

the perl.org community, do they, should they

be setting the rules?

The people who already use Perl?

Well that's a little better.

If we're getting more people.

The people who you want to see using Perl?

Almost there.

The people who want to use Perl

should be the ones that we're

building the community for.

The community should be built not just

for the people here at YAPC and not just

for those on IRC and not just for

the people on the perl.org mailing lists

and not just for the Perl Mongers.

It certainly should be built for all those people.

But it should also be built for the people

who use and want to use Perl

that we don't yet know about.

How do you do that?

Well, you start by getting people representing

all the different types of people

[tongue noise]

you start by getting people representing

all the different types of people

at the table as you can.

You give them voice, power and responsibility.

You give them empowerment.

So they can't be ignored or forgotten about

in the sea of white male thick-skinned developers.

And then you all build from there together.

Just like being Piccard with his bridge crew.

You build a senior staff representing

all the important viewpoints on the ship

you have them present for all the important decisions and discussions

and you listen to them.

So little segue

most of you know I maintain

a bunch of really important CPAN modules

such as AAAAAAAAAAAA

and you know, other things like Test::More

that everyone uses for testing

and Test::Builder that all the other test modules are built on

and MakeMaker that handles most modules installs.

So if you're installing a module

you're probably using my stuff.

So let me ask you something:

why am I allowed to control

how you write tests and install modules?

And you might say that it's because I'm doing good work

and that's not really, well, that's not really true.

[laughter]

But that's not why.

And it's not because I'm the best person for the job

it's not because you all decided

on the best person for the job.

It's not because you think I should take care of it.

So 10 years ago I led a drive to build a better testing system

and grabbed the namespaces for Test::More and Test::Builder

along with chromatic and a bunch of other people

and 10 years ago I led fixing up MakeMaker

and shoved it onto CPAN and got the namespaces.

And so 10 years ago I took over

some areas that were languishing

and did some things of merit.

10 years later why am I still controlling

how you write tests and install modules?

And there is one and only one real reason.

I own the namespaces.

And nobody can take them away from me,

at least not in the current system.

So 10 years ago I did some work of merit

and now I have total control.

Benevolent-ish dictatorship. Not meritocracy.

But dictatorship.

And when I'm done with them

I'll hand them off to someone I trust

which now becomes inheritance.

And a government of inherited dictatorship

is an aristrocracy.

Most of Perl works this way.

Perl has become an aristocracy, not a meritocracy.

Now there are some projects that

buck the trend and the system.

But the system continues to encourage aristrocracy

and dictatorship.

You can do some homesteading on the edges

but more and more and more

the center of Perl development is an aristocracy.

And aristrocracies are very resistant to change.

Dictators have blind spots.

If the dictator has a blind spot

the whole project has a blind spot.

If the dictator hands off the project

to someone of their choosing

the successor will likely have the same blind spot.

And this is why we're so homogenous, the aristocracy.

Year after year, it becomes harder and harder

to break into the core

and the core gets larger and larger

And I don't just mean the core of Perl

I mean all the big CPAN modules.

It's harder to break in and effect real change.

So we need more Piccards.

Kirk, Kirk is overworked and at times

a bit paranoid and narrow-minded.

Piccard? He has time to learn the whistle.

[laughter]

Maybe play some space squash.

Piccard has a carefully crafted senior staff

and they make up all the different stakeholders

on a Federation starship.

Defense, science, engineering, medical, social,

discipline, even the teachers, parents,

families and so on and so forth.

Each of these represent a different

viewpoint, a way of thinking

and a set of ideas.

They have not just a voice,

but they also have power and responsibility

and importantly respect, the respect of

Piccard on the Enterprise.

They are empowered.

And when there's a decision to be made

none of them can be ignored or forgotten

because they're all right there

represented on the Bridge, in the crisis.

So Perl and Open Source in general

is made of up Kirks.

And this is I believe the root of our problem.

This is why we find it so hard to

gather and maintain diversity and ideas.

It doesn't do any good to make an effort

to think about diversity today

if the people in power don't really get it

and are going to forget about them tomorrow

if they're just going to go back to

optimising for themselves and their friends.

It's like letting carnivores do the meal-planning

for vegetarians.

Oh boy.

Another raw veggie platter.

Or letting car drivers design bike lanes.

So nobody eats the boring veggies

[laughter and applause]

nobody eats the boring veggies

nobody rides in the dangerous bike lines

that go nowhere useful.

You might wind up concluding that

there are no vegetarians

there are no cyclists

why are we putting in the effort?

And that's because it's not

"if you build it they will come"

it's if you build it for the people

and maintain it, it will come,

they will come.

So I became really convinced of this

by a conference in my town called

Open Source Bridge

shameless plug!

There's still tickets available!

This is my favourite conference.

OS Bridge came about in part because

they were sick of how Open Source conferences

are run.

Open Source Bridge is technology agnostic.

It's not so much about how you do it

as what you're doing, what you're doing with it.

Nobody cares if you're optimising your Postgres database

they care about what you're putting into it.

OS Bridge is explicitly about having all the

people involved in Open Source

not just developers

users, admins, businesses, institutions

designers, journalists, newbies, oldbies, whatever.

The talk proposals are all public

and they're open to community comment

and anybody can apply to be on the talk selection committee.

OS Bridge has 25% women speakers.

And I was told that Linux Conf Australia

hit 25% this year.

Woo!

Men and women speak at the same time!

It's you know amazing!

You know, women appear everywhere,

and it's really no big thing.

And they solved this

they solved reams of typical Open Source conference problems

with a fairly simple trick

equity at the top.

When they set up the conference committee

they made sure that it was made up of different kinds of people.

Different genders and races and viewpoints and languages

and jobs and interests and concerns,

all part of Open Source.

They all had responsibility and they all had

power and they had voice.

And they all made sure that,

they were all right there from the start,

and they all made sure that when things were getting

set up, everybody was being taken into account

because they're all right there

with their voice and their power.

Right from the beginning to the end.

And this isn't to say that it wasn't hard

and tricky work and dedicated

but it worked and it continues to work.

I think they're on year 3.

So instead of building a broken system

dominated by a single set of concerns

and then trying to fix it later

[laughter]

and having a big fight about it when people are upset

because you didn't think about them

or your fixes stink

or and winding up with something half-assed

and we know how frustrating this is

in a software project right?

trying to turn a ship after it's been designed.

They designed it right from the start

and like the best designs

you don't even know it was designed that way.

It just all works and it flows beautifully

from equity at the top.

And the rest of it works itself out.

There's a reference, I have a reference at the end

if you want to hear more about this.

"Open Source Citizenship", at the end of it.

So you might be thinking

a lot of people say "right, that's a conference,

are there any software projects that work that way?"

And the answer is "yes, quite a bit".

The Apache Software Foundation,

not just a webserver.

Apache has over 100 projects of all different types

and different languages.

Most of which started as Kirks, all of which are now Piccards.

They will not allow a Kirk.

So we're very lucky to have

Nóirín Plunkett here, Executive Vice President

of the Apache Software Foundation

and she's going to give a couple of talks

about they do it, so we get to see another way to do it.

So she's giving one called

"There's More Than One Way To Run a Project:

the Apache Way"

and that's at 11 o'clock in Pyle 325

and I kind of recommend that as a followup

to this if you're interested

and then tomorrow she's giving a Q&A called

"Becoming a Better Benevolent Dictator"

again at 11 o'clock in the Lowell Dining Room.

If you want to hear about another way to do it

go to her talks.

Because the Apache Foundation is nothing to be slouched at.

Find out what you don't know you don't know

Learn a new way to do it and

fix your blind spot.

Now I'll admit it.

I'm a Kirk.

But I want to be a Piccard.

But I can't just shave my head and call it all good.

So I'm going to be doing some work

in the future to change how my CPAN modules are run.

And one of the things I'm going to be doing

is writing down my policies and procedures

which are basically generally just in my head

so that people know where they are

new people know where they are

existing people know where they are

and they can be discussed, they can be changed,

they can be followed and so on and so forth.

It's not just rule by man, it's rule by law.

I'm going to move towards a concensus driven

approach to accepting patches.

Which basically means

well basically it means that I don't dominate

every decision.

Nóirín will talk more about what consensus is

and how it works. It's not voting!

And keep my blind spots from dominating.

I will try and have, I will have

a public roadmap of where the project is going.

Written down so that the community knows

where things are going and they can have some

say in the matter.

Right now?

All in my head.

It's going to be awkward.

First season's always awkward.

But that's how you learn:

by doing and by failing and by trying again.

So who can be a Piccard, here?

It sounds like I'm talking about doing it from

the top and that means it must be

like p5p and that. No.

Perl is interesting in that we have

21000 CPAN distributions, something like that?

So that's 21000 potential Piccards.

21000? No, 5000 authors.

There's 5000 potential Piccards, just from CPAN alone,

each with their own project.

How many people here have a module on CPAN?

Yeah, OK, you can all try and be a Piccard.

If any of you control a mailing list

or Perl Mongers group or IRC channel

the more Piccards we have

the more comfortable we'll be

with Piccards. And the more Piccards we'll have.

What else can you do?

Well, if you see something,

you can say something.

If you see an incident, if you see

something that should be taken care of

say something, but say it privately.

Both to the person at fault

to let them know that what they did is not OK

but also to the moderator

to ask them to do their job.

Because we do not moderate anywhere near enough.

Why not publicly?

Well it just tends to fan the flames.

We just get into flamewars

and the poor person who had the incident

winds up in the middle of this furbull

and then they just leave.

Or they don't talk about it anymore.

What else can you do?

Well, you can be a mentor for someone who isn't like you.

Different job, different gender, different language,

different way of thinking, just something, something different.

Maybe they're just really young

maybe they're really old, whatever.

Bring them into Perl, stick up for them,

sheperd them through, you know,

teach them all those secret handshakes and everything else

and kind of actively change the way

the what our community is made up of.

What else?

You can think about it, you can talk about it,

you can blog about it.

Part of the reason I'm doing this keynote

is to bust open the topic.

So guys?

You're allowed to talk about diversity

and gals?

Help the guys.

I had a lot of help from a lot of women

making this talk. It's hard.

And help the guys that are willing to speak

check their work, back them up.

So Nóirín has told me she's having a much more

enjoyable conference knowing

she doesn't have to give the unicorn talk.

A unicorn talk being "so, you're a woman in

Open Source, why don't you talk about that?"

Well, she wants to talk about something else.

So I'm giving it.

I know a lot of you have things to say on this topic.

There's so much more to cover

there's so much more to talk about

there's so many people

who are so much better at this than I could be here.

Don't be afraid to include topics in this talk,

topics like this in your talks,

keep the conversation going.

Because I'm not going to solve this in 45 minutes.

I'm amazingly on time though.

So if, so this is the last thing

so if you've tuned out up to this point

just kind of wake up, this is all the content you need to hear,

if after all this you're still unconvinced

or you tuned out or you don't care

or you're on the fence or whatever

this is all that I ask of you

just one thing:

when somebody reports an incident

or somebody suggests running a project differently

or when someone wants to talk about social oversight

or community issues or codes of conduct

or something else

here's what I want you to, if you do nothing else,

I hope you will do more,

but if you do nothing else,

do this one thing for me.

Shut up.

[applause]

Now I want to elaborate on that

[laughter]

so the other Perl motto is "try it".

And a corollary to the other Perl motto

is "let somebody else try it."

When somebody has a new idea

particularly if that person is new to the community

it's very easy to overwhelm them with nit-picks

and why the idea won't work

and this is known as 'stop energy'.

When it comes to social ideas

we have lots and lots and lots of people

who want to nit-pick

with lots of concerns, lots of FUD,

it's just something we're not used to.

Who want to say why it won't work

why they're uncomfortable about it

and so on and so forth.

We're a very homogenous community

of socially passive know-it-alls.

We overwhelm most attempts at social change

with stop energy.

So what I'm asking the people in this room to do

is don't do that.

Think and stop.

If you don't say that we can't change things.

don't say it's futile, don't say the sky will fall,

that everybody will leave,

don't tell someone that if they don't like it

they can go make their own project instead.

Don't tell, don't quibble over definitions and semantics,

don't people they should just deal with it.

Just let somebody else try it.

If you must comment, do it on your own blog,

or a different thread or whatever,

don't hijack their energy.

Let them have their spaces succeed or fail.

And if you have concerns, maybe try working with them

instead of stopping them at the start.

Cos we've been doing it the same way

for 20 years.

Let somebody else try another way and see what happens.

It might just work.

There might just be more than one way to do it.

[laughter]

But we'll never know unless we try.

So what I ask is please please

honor the other Perl motto

and please let someone else try it.

Otherwise we're just going to have

the same generation over again.

But this time it's going to look a bit awkward.

Er.

So we've had so many Kirks for so long.

Let's see what happens when we get some Piccards.

And then maybe we can have a Cisco and maybe Janeway.

And then hopefully once we reach that point

nobody will have to give this talk again.

So, thank you.

[applause]

Um so like I said

these are not fresh ideas.

I want to reiterate that Nóirín is

having her talks "There's More Than One Way

To Run a Project" at 11 in Pyle 325.

She's doing "Becoming a Better Benevolent Dictator"

which is basically a Q&A.

If you are a benevolent dictator

and want to know how to run your project differently

she will talk about that.

There's a, I don't have the URL up here,

she has a URL for questions that you

might want to have answered at that Q&A.

I presume it's in the schedule.

What's that?

[inaudibie]

bit.ly/nationbuilding all lower case no spaces?

bit.ly/nationbuilding

And for further reading

I've basically put together notes and stuff

it's a little low sorry

http://bit.ly/YAPC2012_Keynote

and that contains a lot of the references here

the numbers that I've been using

things like Audrey Eschright's Open Source Citizenship

the various 'meritocracies are broken" arguments

a fantastic one called

"Why Biology Demonstrates Why There are No Women In Open Source

(Hint: It Doesn't)"

Everybody got time to get those things?

Great. Thank you so much.

I'm going to collapse now.

[laughter]

[applause]

Am I under time?

Jokes!

Jokes? I could just show you images that I didn't

put in the— no.

[laughter]

I had one hour of sleep,

I'm not taking questions, sorry.

Catch me in the hallway

catch me anywhere else seriously

but I really do have one hour of sleep.

Ah, I can't field them.

But catch me anywhere else.

Oh and also you can ask me on email

[e-mail], and uh I'm pretty easy to find.

[applause]