Episode: 714
Title: HPR0714: Interview with Amber Graner
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0714/hpr0714.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:21:45

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The full circle podcast on Hacker Public Radio, this episode would want to news, women
in open source and goat festivals.
Hello world and welcome to our show on Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode we thought we'd give another airing to the interview we ran last summer
with Amber Grainer, lately of Ubuntu News and one of the women of open source.
The full circle podcast is the companion to full circle magazine, the independent magazine
for the Ubuntu community.
Find us at fullcirclemagazine.org forward slash podcast.
Full circle interview
So our guest this episode, blogger, journalist, mother of two,
mainstay of the Ubuntu women project and regular contributor to full circle magazine
and the Ubuntu weekly newsletter of which we'll talk more later.
It's Amber Grainer.
Hello.
Hey, how are you?
Ah, battling the technology as I seem to say every single episode, but we'll carry on.
That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
I'll remind you if you ever get hit by a bus.
Oh, yes.
I might buy the ticket for the bus and I didn't worry about getting hit.
What I'll try and do is not repeat the interview that you did with Leo and Jono back in
Floss Weekly in March.
And I'll even try not to repeat the interview that was in full circle magazine number 35.
And anybody hasn't read that can go search through the archives and go find 35
because we're going to step boldly into the future.
Although I am going to do the obvious first because nobody ever accuses us of being
original.
Mostly the Ubuntu women project.
Just give us a quick thumbnail sketch of what it was set up to achieve.
Basically it was set up to achieve to let more women come into the Ubuntu project and be a
springboard out into the greater community.
A lot of times when women come into a project, especially in IT, whether you agree,
disagree, like it, not like it, it is what it is.
And women are the minority in these groups.
And so when you walk into whether it's a physical meeting or an online meeting or anything
and you're like the sole female of the group, it's oftentimes a little overwhelming.
And so what we didn't want women doing is coming into the Ubuntu community and being overwhelmed.
We want to make sure that they had allies and they knew they could always come back to the
starting point and then find a new direction in the community if they wanted to.
Or to have an area where they could say, hey, does this sound right?
Is this a good thing? Is this not a good thing?
And to have a sounding board with other women too.
It's a camaraderie, a free decor for women within the Ubuntu community.
And it's been running for a while now.
What would you say is the current health of the project?
The current health is amazing.
We just had our first actual peer elected leaders.
And we went from one leader to three leaders.
And so we have three leaders elected by the team, not appointed by the community council,
and not sort of just like leader by default.
It was just that the team has now grown to where we needed some defined leadership.
And so now I'm Elizabeth Crombaugh, Melissa Draver, and Lee Honeywell are now the three leaders
of the Ubuntu women group.
And we're holding competitions regularly to get more young girls involved and women.
But especially young girls, because if they can get involved with preteens and teenagers,
chances are that's going to take them on into adulthood to be open-source advocates.
And so that's another thing that we're trying to do.
We're also revamping our website, we're revamping our wiki pages.
And so we're really banding together as a group and really making our mark
and footprint in the Ubuntu community.
I've been 20 years in IT, and I know there aren't enough women in the IT industry generally,
much less open-source.
And the proportion should be 50% of the population.
And we know it's not anywhere near that.
How do we get more women in technology and specifically into open-source?
Well, I don't know that I could speak for all women.
I don't even know that I can speak for me some of the times,
but I think one thing is to make sure that it's inclusive,
to make sure that, and not just what you do for women,
because what you do to include women or people in open-source, people in technology,
is what you would do for anybody.
But it's to make sure that it is inclusive.
And I'm sure we've all been places where it doesn't matter if you're a male or female,
you walk in and you just don't feel welcome.
There's like a thick, undercurrent of this is a click kind of environment.
And we don't want that to happen.
We want to make sure that it doesn't matter who you are, what age you are.
If you want to get involved in open-source, you want to be able to.
And it's just making sure that we understand the needs of people wanting to get involved.
And so if there's a woman who's maybe, they want to get,
they're working toward being a Debian developer.
And the Debian community is unique with, you know,
a unique aspect of open-source.
And so they're doing that, but Debian and Ubuntu have that relationship as well.
So they want to get involved in the Ubuntu community.
We want to make sure if she's a developer,
she gets introduced to all the places in the Ubuntu community
where her skills would be beneficial.
If people are like me, and I really self-identify as being a non-technical or a non-developer end user,
I don't like code, but if they're like me,
and we want to show them where their skills could be used in the community as well.
So it's making sure that the community is very inclusive to anybody's skillset
or lack thereof, and they're willing to mentor people to become involved in the project.
So it's just a matter of inclusion.
So where are the women in open-source at the moment?
Because with a few notable exceptions, such as yourself,
they seem to have quite a low profile.
Are they in development, or the creative side, or management?
Where are they currently?
Well, I think I can always speak to the women that I know about.
And that is, for example, well, look at story feeders.
I mean, she's, you know, the Gnome Project.
I mean, that's when I think of Gnome, I think of Stormy.
That's the first person I think of.
When I think of Linux Pro, or Linux New Media,
or even a bunch of user magazines,
the first person I think of is Ricky Kite.
When I think of Canonical now, I think of Jane Silver.
She's the new CEO of Canonical.
So they are there, and they are across the community.
I know that we just had the Southeast Linux Fest in Bloomberg South Carolina two weekends ago.
And we, we boast of a higher percentage of women,
both speakers and participants,
and it didn't start out that way.
It was sort of just like, we invited anybody who wanted to speak,
and we, and we got a higher number of women actually submitting talks,
and because they submitted them, and they were good, they were chosen.
So it wasn't like we went out of our way,
that's like, okay, we want this percentage of women, they submitted talks.
So there, there are women all throughout every area of open source.
But, and I say this, and a lot of people will get upset with me because I say this,
but women have sometimes a lot more on their plate.
And, and again, this is for my personal experience.
My husband had his job.
He said his job in open source since the early 90s,
and sure he contributes to the household and stuff like that,
but I wear the mom hat, and you know,
I'm the taxi that takes the kids to school and stuff like that.
And I recently started going back to school,
so I'm a student as well.
And then all my open source work.
So there's many, many hats that, that I think women alternate between,
and open source and technology is just one of those hats.
So they may not be as busy from the limelight telling people what they're doing,
but they are there.
Is it still the case that a lot of them are hiding behind androgenous usernames?
I think that used to be the case, but I don't think that's the case anymore
because most of the women that I know of, the men, you know,
they don't go out of their way to hide the fact that they're a woman.
Matter of fact, it's like, yeah, I am. So what?
I'm here.
You know, it's not a, it's not a, I think a bunch who is really in the last four or five years
has really made that possible for women to really get involved in a community and say,
this is a healthy community, and this is the way it should be.
Right now, like in 2006, it was sitting at about, I think the numbers were a little over 2%
of the women made up the Ubuntu community.
And that was sort of an unofficial survey.
However, now we've, thanks to Alan Bell and a couple other people,
they started tracking the number of women members, Ubuntu members,
because that's like the only hard numbers that he really had.
And the numbers are up to like 4.64%.
So we are growing, and we are showing that the efforts that we're doing in the Ubuntu Women project
is affecting the overall health of the entire community.
So it's on the rise, the diversity is growing, and that's what we want to see.
I'm going to be a little bit controversial, but in the British education system,
I don't think we do nearly enough to encourage the girls into the technical disciplines.
Is that the case in the states as well?
Well, I think in the states, and again, I've traveled, we've lived in the DC area,
in the Boston area, in North Carolina, and a couple different places throughout the state,
both private school and public school.
And I think technology as a whole is not being stressed enough.
Or if it is being stressed, it has been stressed in the proprietary operating systems.
It's not being stressed that open source is a viable option.
And so a lot of kids who would love to get their hands on and have their very own computer
have to share that time with family members or parents who need to be on there or siblings or whatever.
And because of that, they don't really get to take something apart or install what they want to install
or learn about all these different technologies.
So I don't think it is that, at least in the states, that technology in the elementary levels,
like the kindergarten through May 8th grade, before they start into high school here, isn't being stressed.
And by the time any child reaches high school, if they haven't already been introduced to it
and had a good experience with it, then it's less likely they'll go that route.
So I think overall, one, more emphasis on technology and open source alternatives need to be stressed.
And then second to that, more women and young girls need to know that, yeah, they can do this.
And that's where you've got to change the mindset of maybe parents or not just school officials,
because if a parent doesn't feel like it's important for their child to learn that stuff,
that's not going to be emphasized in their house either.
You've described yourself as a non-technical end user, which I do as well.
Nobody lets me develop code because my code is appalling.
I write and talk about this stuff instead.
Open source, I think, has this image of being a walled garden that belongs to the technical folks.
Do you think those walls are coming down yet?
I do. And here's why.
I know that 10 years ago, when I was trying to use anything open source and using those various operating systems,
any time my husband would leave and something would break, I'd pull my mask back out and I would start using it,
because I knew how to use that.
And I didn't need help with it.
I didn't need somebody to configure the printer setup so I could print.
And who wants to learn about somba and cups and all this kind of stuff?
And what do you got to do to make it work?
I could have cared less about that.
I just wanted my stuff to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it on any hassle.
And then finally, I get introduced to Ubuntu.
And I'm not saying that Ubuntu is the only option out there and I'm not saying that I'm stupid far from it.
What I'm saying is that it no longer where you don't need to know command lines.
You don't even have to look at the command line if you don't want to know.
Gone are those days.
And Ubuntu is really, I think, brought Linux to the forefront of those non-developer, non-technical end users.
They're probably super users on whatever system they're already used to.
But when they migrate over to Linux via Ubuntu, it's very easy for them now to become a super user with Ubuntu without ever touching a command line.
I can agree with that.
We've now got enough viable versions of operating systems that you shouldn't have to touch a command line at all.
I still get into discussions with the old school Linux people about the fastest way to do anything is a command line.
Most of the people that I know that I've been trying to convert wouldn't have the remote is the interest or clue how to do that.
Well, I think where you say that the command line, which is faster.
Well, you know, if somebody is used to GUIs and they can just click three or four clicks and it's done, versus the command line.
And you tell them the command line is faster, but they don't understand what they're typing.
And you have to walk them through what they're typing.
And it would have been faster for them just to click and do it.
Then for you to show them all the steps to do it versus the command line.
So I think it's very much like language.
If somebody knows words longer than mayonnaise and they're using those and they're trying to communicate with somebody
and nobody understands what they're talking about, are they really communicating?
Whereas if they just backed it up and didn't try to impress anybody with, you know, their vocabulary, they would communicate effectively
and the person they're talking to would understand what they're talking about.
So sometimes in our effort to show somebody how much we know, we end up proving the fact that, you know, their system was just as effective
as the one they're trying to switch them to.
So I think it's a trade-off sometimes.
Okay, I have to ask, follow up on your previous interview, the American Dairy Goat Association.
You were going to run a new Ubuntu booth at the Goat Festival.
And I can't believe I went trawling the internet for a goat festival.
But I did.
How did it go and what response did you get?
It absolutely amazing.
And people ask me, why did you go to a goat festival?
Well, in the small town that I'm in, agriculture is a big thing.
And they send these goats through humanitarian effort to various areas of the world,
regionally they sent goats to Africa.
And what they do is they send these goats there, and they teach people how to use these goats to make a living.
Be it cheese or milk or their fur or whatever it is, but they teach them to make a living with these goats.
And so when they found out that Ubuntu had its roots in South Africa, they're like,
we want you to come and tell people about this.
As I told people about it, I had businesses asking me, how do we migrate to that?
I had local government asking me, what would this save us if we switched to some open source initiatives?
Even if they didn't switch completely yet, but just use various applications that were open source versus the proprietary applications.
How would that help our community? How would that help businesses?
We were a very, in this area of North Carolina, it was very textile-based, and the textile industry left and went overseas.
So it left a very, very few jobs in this area.
So it's really the economy has been hurt in ways I can't even describe here because of that.
And so they were looking for ways to one thing differently, think out the box, to how could these initiatives help bring more money back into our county and our city here.
So that was one thing that was a great success, and some follow-up meetings that are happening later on in the year from those connections.
The coolest thing though, I'm sitting there and I'm setting the booth up, and I had people walk by and go, I used that.
And I had no idea that in my little corner of the world, there were other Ubuntu users.
But I found out throughout the day there was at least 10 people that walked by, and they knew about it.
They used it at home. They'd read Ubuntu user magazines.
So they're like, we didn't know you lived here, and so it was great to connect with those other Ubuntu users who didn't know about the rest of the Ubuntu community and how they could get involved in it.
So the great time talking about our local teams and what they are and how they can get involved with them.
It was the great time telling people we had no idea about open source to introduce them to open source and what that meant.
Through this initiative of a goat festival, there were over a thousand people that showed up to this thing, and everybody got to at least see the symbol of the circle of friends symbol, and at least get to say, I've seen that before.
So that was a good thing, and it was a lot of positive things that came out of having Ubuntu at a goat festival, and what can come out of thinking out of the box,
thinking past the typical geek and technical stuff.
That is such a cool story.
Speaking of events, you are one of the main caretakers, contributors to the Ubuntu weekly newsletter, and you originally asked us to promote a couple of events that are coming up, and maybe you can just mention those right now.
Yes, on Monday, the 12th, we have Ubuntu Developer Week, and that's where anybody wants to know how Ubuntu development works.
You get to sit down and classes on IRC and learn how to package and learn how an introduction to all the developing, and just learn like there's going to be a two hour session on the Django.
So if you want to learn more about that, just the technical side of things.
So not only do we in the community set our sights on those new users and those non-technical users, and people who want to learn to become super users, we also strive to teach people to become developers of Ubuntu as well.
And as for the Ubuntu weekly newsletter, you're happy to take contributions on Ubuntu related stories from anywhere?
Yes, I recently became the editor-in-chief for that, and so anything anybody can send makes my job a lot easier.
I would much rather have too much news than not enough, and people often say, well, how many RSS feed stories do you read a day?
And I go through about 300 feet a day, just looking for things, because I want to make sure that the stories that we put in there are really a snapshot of the most important things that happen surrounding Ubuntu for that week, because truly the Ubuntu Weekly newsletter is a snapshot in time of what's going on in the Ubuntu community.
Whether it's smooth sailing, whether it's controversial stuff, like moving the buttons to the left or whatever, anything like that that we can cover, we want to cover.
So anybody can send, and they can email me, they can pop in the IRC channel, which is Ubuntu Dash News on the free node.
They can go to, well, we have a Wiki page, so I don't have it in front of me, but if you just go to Google or whatever Ubuntu Weekly News Wiki,
it'll come up and you can drop ideas on the idea Wiki. So there's a gazillion ways you can get information to us.
We just request that it follows the timeline in the newsletter. So if we're going to report whatever Sunday through Saturday timeline that it falls within that timeline.
We'll put all of the relevant links in the show notes, so that anybody that's been catching you of that can go find the links and take a look.
Awesome, thank you.
Thank you very much, Amber. I won't tell you away from your 300-feeds any longer. I'm sure you've got plenty of things to keep trawling through.
I do, but it's always a pleasure to come on podcasting, and not only be part of any podcast that's related to Ubuntu, but also I always walk away learning something more than I knew when I started in.
And so I appreciate the opportunity to learn a little bit more, and I think you guys are great.
And I love the fact that you have a podcast now, and I love reading Full Circle Magazine. I tell people about it, because the other thing that I think people might know now is that there's a partnership between Ubuntu user and Full Circle.
So it's great to be part of that as well. You know, self-in cross-promotion, somebody you will also. There's a lot of good stuff that happens. You guys do a great job, so thank you for having me.
That's fine. You're very welcome. Thank you for coming on.
That interview was recorded before Amber's house fire. Fortunately, everyone was okay, and Amber is back as busy as ever in open source.
We'll be back with another episode of the Full Circle podcast on Hacker Public Radio very soon. I'm Robin Catling, goodbye for now.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over to C-A-R-O dot anything for all of us to meet.
Thank you.
