| Follow @mairin
Boston, Massachusetts USA
Máirín is a senior principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape (http://inkscape.org).
Authored Comments
"The first is a certain breed of rabid feminism has found themselves a new front to wage their war on men. They've figured out that attacking men in corporate board rooms gets them ignored, and attacking men in blue collar industries gets them a vulgar response and then ignored."
This kind of language makes me really uncomfortable. It reminds me of
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Angry_feminist_mob
Here is my paraphrase of your comment. Note this is based on my interpretation, and may not be what you meant:
"I like this article, because it doesn't threaten me personally. The angry feminist mob (the 'other' feminists that I feel threatened by) is ineffective in the boardroom and against blue collar workers, but IT professionals are powerless against it as they are sensitive and socially obtuse. They are now afraid because their peers are getting blacklisted from conferences and are getting attacked by the angry feminist mob's allies. Men who behave badly shouldn't suffer consequences; women need to work harder to prove to those men they are worthy to earn their respect."
It feels to me like you are making generalizations and using stereotypes to paint feminists as an angry mob and to paint IT professionals as sensitive and socially obtuse people. Women should not have to work harder to earn respect in order to be treated as equals. They already do work harder just to be in tech in the first place. Not all IT professionals are male, and not all IT professionals have any issues with social skills.
Also, there isn't any reason for anyone to be afraid of being blacklisted or losing their job unless they're actually doing something inappropriate. If someone is afraid, then my guess is that they don't understand why the people in the incidents you seem to be alluding to were in the wrong. In that case, the solution is to educate YOURSELF and do not try to dictate to women on what terms they are allowed to stick up for themselves in your community.
Just my thoughts. I don't mean to offend. Reading your comment gave me a very strong negative reaction and I wanted to explain why.
Hey Luis!
You don't mean creating the badges in terms of artwork, but actually setting up issuers and stuff like that?
The Fedora project created an upstream project to do that called Tahrir -
https://github.com/fedora-infra/tahrir
Does that do what you're looking for?