Most people working in technology, especially the ones who write code, don't understand the underlying needs and use cases that drive their work. Under the guidance of an effective architect/manager, a few of those get it right despite their low level of communication skills.

I've worked in IT and related fields for a while, as have many of the people who call themselves my friends. I've seen and discussed a lot of getting it wrong and getting it right, and mentored a handful of folks along the way to improving their empathy, communication, execution, and humility. You don't do good work by acting like a bro. If you don't understand why someone's upset about an action of yours, you may have committed a bro behaviour -- even if you are not a bro. I myself am not entirely free of bro nature and sometimes err.

The development of this site so far has, from the multiple perspectives I can access through the miracle of conversation, been uneven with respect to listening to, understanding, and meeting the needs of anyone other than the principal developer. Fortunately, the skills that need to be developed can be learned by a person internally motivated to do so.

I have used dreamwidth in the past and continue to do so from time to time because it is a thoughtfully designed, professionally managed, user supported site that genuinely listens and responds to the needs of its user community. I recommend it as a social blogging platform with a strong, rich set of access controls.

On September 24 I wrote a post locked to a group of authenticated people on this site.

Shortly after I wrote that post, Tom Boutell commented on it with the concern that the information in the post was available to Google and would be cached.

• Tom may have overlooked the visual indicators of access on the post and erred in his statement
• The site may have failed to honour my request to limit access to the post
• Tom may have tested access, found it was effectively public, and warned me
• Tom's software or privilege model may be buggy
• Tom's understanding of access rights may be deeply flawed (this certainly matches discussions you can find elsewhere on this site: it takes a lot of hammers to convince the guy to not dismiss out of hand requests and explanations from people who want to give him a chance and use his stuff)
• There may be a different explanation

The result when I went to bed was that I do not trust this site, nor anything else authored by Boutell, to honour access controls I place on my data. When I continued writing this, having received an email in the interim that started "Oh lord, Dawn. I am so sorry," nothing has substantially changed. I don't want to use this platform and I certainly don't want to encourage people I like and trust to use it.

It will take more than an apology to build my trust of Tom -- and more importantly, of a system he designs, writes, or maintains -- to a level where I will be comfortable placing anything other than "for public consumption" materials on this site or any other authored or co-authored by Boutell.

REDACTED PENDING CONFIRMATION ABOUT SECURITY.

DO NOT TRUST LOCKS ON THIS SITE TO KEEP INFORMATION PRIVATE.

While I wouldn't say I go out of my way to pick fights, I do tend to get involved in discussions and situations that provoke feminist, queer-positive, privilege-examining, mental health destigmatizing, and similar responses in me. I try to encourage similar responses in others where it seems useful for moving some part of the general social discourse and awareness further towards equity.

At times it creates a bit of a hard-to-scratch itch that I don't seem to be getting very far except with The Usual Suspects, a collection of people who would fall in the "mutual respect and trust" and "many similar values" rings of friendship. And it feels like I'm repeating the same stories to the same handful of people with minor variations and not much changes.

Then they tell two friends, just like Heather Locklear in the 80s with her wheat germ oil and honey shampoo. And I may or may not see any second order effects. My experiences, analysis, and encouragements do make a difference.

Chief among The Usual Suspects is S, partner in thoughtcrime. As a tall, white, apparently on the high end of the middle class, midlife-ish guy with a record of community engagement, he has Audience Power. It turns out to be much more noticeably useful when he tells my stories, not only for the additional reach but for his astounding ability to get people to listen to him, engage with him, and treat him as a human being on equal footing rather than some uppity piece of property with teats. People responding to S are much less dismissive and generally not at all outright abusive, which some are to me on the same subjects with the same messages.

Still, it seems weird that for all my agency, I don't have a fulcrum on which to place my lever. And it does at times stick in my craw that the intersection of culture and biology gives a disproportionate amount of power and capacity to create change to someone whose overall politics, philosophies, and goals are aligned with mine. He's a go-getter; she's an abrasive bitch.

For next term's MBA courses (he said a fortnight after Spring term ended, three full weeks before first Fall lecture) one of my two electives is a strategy-area course on sustainability. I've settled on strategy as my area of concentration because I have developed a kink for pushing the big levers that will Get Stuff Done and sustainability addresses my grar at the short-termism endemic in business that has leaked through to society at large.

Naturally I bought the course textbooks already. They arrived today and in the less than an hour I've been home since work ended I've read through the beginning material of both and the afterword of one. It's clear these books will give me specific problems to think about and, with the prof's guidance and classroom participation, tools to address them meaningfully. One can expect me to blurt out somewhat well-formed thoughts and ideas about social, economic, and environmental stewardship with greater frequency from now through mid-December.

The books themselves are Reconstructing Value by Kurucz, Colbert, and Wheeler (structured as a business textbook) and Capitalism at the Crossroads by Hart (appears to be built as a general business book, with an Al Gore preface and a Fisk Johnson foreword). I am glad to have the structure imposed on me to read both these books deeply and consider the contents thoroughly.

Although business books tend to overpromise, I'm intrigued that these two promise to change the way the reader thinks. I believe I have fewer and healthier assumptions than the average businessman, while continuing to run periodically into the brick wall of my societal programming.