Latest thoughts, if any, of Rachel Lawson...

Last night, along with thousands of other free software and open source community members, I signed the open letter calling for Richard Stallman, otherwise known as RMS, to step down from the Free Software Federation's board, and the rest of the board to also step down.

Thank you to Josh Simmons for bringing the letter to my, and many other people's, attention:

Tech(k)nowday is an online conference, featuring over 200 women in tech and it is taking place on Monday 8th March. Not only that, it is FREE to attend so why not take a look at the program and see what interests you?

I knew I wanted to allow "social" login on this website as it made me happier that the usernames I might see appearing are more likely to be the people I assume they are — they will have some sort of "background check" by virtue of their activity on those other social sites, whatever they were. Well, thanks to drupal/openid_connect, I have successfully implemented login via GitHub, LinkedIn, and Google.

There are a few things we do as a community at Drupal that really warm my heart and recognising those displaying the very best values and principles of the Drupal project through the annual Aaron Winborn Award is one of them.

Whilst everyone in the Drupal community can, and should, nominate those they think deserve such an award, it is one of the few truly lovely tasks of the Drupal Community Working Group to read all of the nominations, select a recipient, and present the award at DrupalCon North America.

Well, I don’t think it will come as a complete surprise to hear me say that. After all, I’ve made it no secret that I have a trans history and I do talk about it, on occasion, when I feel the moment is right. 

The reason I need to state “trans women are women”, though, is because the more people who see others stating this, the easier others find it to accept and, crucially, it exposes the often vitriolic replies such a statement prompts on social media. 

So, it seems that this website does pretty well from an energy usage point of view - a good sign for an essentially "out of the box" Drupal 9 site. The Drupal community working on the new Olivero theme should be proud of themselves.

Had a bit of a wander this morning with the camera. Still getting used to my new (to me) FujiFilm X Pro-2 but LOVING it so far!

Whilst I fully appreciate I am no fan of Slack, for many reasons, not least who they seem to like to associate with, I do accept that not everyone shares my views and that Slack is at the heart of many open source communities.

Whilst I have really enjoyed building this little website, and slowly beginning to write a little more, one thing that has troubled me the whole time is how to facilitate conversation on the topics I bring up in a way that I can believe that the person making a comment is actually who they say they are. Or, at least, they are the same person I interact with on other platforms as that identity.

"Oh that's easy!", I hear you say, "Just use a tool that allows someone to login using their identity elsewhere - lots of ways to do that, such as OpenID."