Radixhound

I recently had an interesting idea bubble up in my mind while I was thinking about the problems in open source project surrounding documentation. It went something like this. “The documentation progress is positively entish. We need to find the entwives!”

What in the world does that mean? Essentially that we need some “feminine genius” in the technology world.

I was recently watching Lord of Rings movies again. It’s been a yearly tradition since the movies started arriving. This year for some reason I was struck by the story of the ents and the entwives – even though it is glossed over in the movies. I have read the books a few times so I know the background. It is such a profound tragedy and it makes me reflect more on how Tolkien plumbs the depths of tragedy all through his writing.

The story in a nutshell is that the ents were fond of the wild things and the great forest. The loved to wander through the great wilderness and enjoy every nut and berry and growing thing. The entwives, on the other hand, were fond of gardens and the cultivated, orderliness of things. Eventually the entwives got fed up with dealing with the ents and went off looking for a better land that would suit them – since the wild forest wasn’t their cup of tea. The ents didn’t really notice and eventually after thousands of years forgot where they went and completely lost them. So there can be no more entings.

I know why this came to mind. It’s because many programmers love to tame the wild code and take on great coding challenges. They are always looking to the horizon and adding new features to their projects. They love the wild. This is really a typically male trait. Is it any wonder that it’s a challenge to develop a good, solid set of documentation. Besides the fact that things are always changing, who is going to settle down and cultivate a garden?

Another interesting concept is that the internet is truly a SLOW form of communication! This is similar to the fact that the ents take all day to say “good morning.” I start to wonder if I should work on adopting the new technologies like voice chat and video chat? Maybe we could speed up some of these communications?

I don’t think I would be out of place or incorrect to say that open source projects are dominated by men, and that the women who participate are probably of a more wild at heart nature anyway. My class at BCIT had a handful of women out of close to two hundred. I don’t know of any of them who were ‘coders’. How can open source projects attract and maintain a strong relationship with women? It is so important to bring in their genius – their ability to ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance – into the mix.

Ultimately this leaves me with the question “how can technology serve people?” Maybe this entishness is one reason that so many people feel disconnected from technology and confused.