A nonprofit I volunteer with has, years ago, held our Christmas bash at the nearby Fairlawns Hotel. We haven’t been in several years and – even though we missed Christmas itself by a full month! – decided to return here this year.
I’m often an early riser, especially when away from home, and enjoy making the most of the first light with a walk. Last time I was here there wasn’t a geocache in sight, so imagine my delight to find that now there’s one right on the doorstep! Armed with a torch to fight off the renaming pre-dawn darkness, I braved the cold and came out to explore.
Found the obvious hiding spot quickly, but my sore back (Fairlawns’ mattress was somewhat softer than I enjoy!) made retrieval challenging! Still, a success once I was on my hands and knees! TFTC, and Merry Christmas I guess!
Your product, service, or organisation almost certainly has a priority of constituencies, even if it’s not written down or otherwise formally-encoded. A famous example would be that expressed in the Web Platform Design Principles. It dictates how you decide between two competing needs, all other things being equal.
At Three Rings, for example, our priority of constituencies might1 look like this:
The needs of volunteers are more important than
The needs of voluntary organisations, which are more important than
Continuation of the Three Rings service, which is more important than
Adherance to technical standards and best practice, which is more important than
Development of new features
These are all things we care about, but we’re talking about where we might choose to rank them, relative to one another.
The priorities and constituencies portrayed in this illustration are ficticious. Any resemblence to real priorities and constituencies, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The priorities of an organisation you’re involved with won’t be the same: perhaps it includes shareholders, regulatory compliance, different kinds of end-users, employees, profits, different measures of social good, or various measurable outputs. That’s fine: every system is different.
But what I’d challenge you to do is find ways to bisect your priorities. Invent scenarios that pit each constituency against itself another and discuss how they should be prioritised, all other things being equal.
Using the example above, I might ask “which is more important?” in each category:
The needs of the volunteers developing Three Rings, or the needs of the volunteers who use it?
The needs of organisations that currently use the system, or the needs of organisations that are considering using it?
Achieving a high level of uptime, or promptly installing system updates?
Compliance with standards as-written, or maximum compatibility with devices as-used?
Implementation of new features that are the most popular user requests, or those which provide the biggest impact-to-effort payoff?
These might not be your answers to the same questions. They’re not even necessarily mine, and they’re even less-likely to be representative of Three Rings CIC. It’s just illustrative.
The aim of the exercise isn’t to come up with a set of commandments for your company. If you come up with something you can codify, that’s great, but if you and your stakeholders just use it as an exercise in understanding the relative importance of different goals, that’s great too. Finding where people disagree is more-important than having a unifying creed2.
And of course this exercise applicable to more than just organisational priorities. Use it for projects or standards. Use it for systems where you’re the only participant, as a thought exercise. A priority of constituencies can be a beautiful thing, but you can understand it better if you’re willing to take it apart once in a while. Bisect your priorities, and see what you find.
Footnotes
1 Three Rings doesn’t have an explicit priority of constituencies: the example I give is based on my own interpretation, but I’m only a small part of the organisation.
Ruth wrote an excellent post this month entitled Wonder Syndrome. It attempts to reframe imposter syndrome (which is strongly, perhaps disproportionately, present in tech fields) as a positive indicator that there’s still more to learn:
Being aware of the boundaries of our knowledge doesn’t make us imposters, it makes us explorers. I’m going to start calling mine “Wonder Syndrome”, and allowing myself to be awed by how much I still have to learn, and then focusing in and carrying on with what I’m doing because although I may not reach the stars, I’ve come a long way up the mountain. I can learn these things, I can solve these problems, and I will.
I don’t recall exactly what I’m advising a fellow Three Rings developer to do, here, but I don’t think he’s happy about it.
I just spent a week at a Three Rings DCamp (a “hackathon”, kinda), and for the umpteenth time had the experience of feeling like everybody thinks I know everything, while on the inside I still feel like I’m still guessing a third of the time (and on StackOverflow for another third!).
The same’s true at work: people ask me questions about things that I suppose, objectively, are my “specialist subjects” – web standards, application security, progressive enhancement, VAT for some reason – and even where I’m able to help, I often get that nagging feeling like there must be somebody better than me they could have gone to?
You’ve probably seen diagrams like this before. After all: I’m not smart or talented enough to invent anything like this and I don’t know why you’d listen to anything I have to say on the subject anyway. 😂
You might assume that I love Ruth’s post principally because it plays to my vanity. The post describes two kinds of knowledgeable developers, who are differentiated primarily by their attitude to learning. One is satisfied with the niche they’ve carved out for themselves and the status that comes with it and are content to rest on their laurels; the other is driven to keep pushing and learning more and always hungry for the next opportunity to grow. And the latter category… Ruth’s named after me.
Wait, what if I’m not‽ Have I been faking it this entire blog post?
Bnd while I love the post, my gut feeling to being named after such an ideal actually makes me slightly uncomfortable. The specific sentence that gets me is (emphasis mine):
Dans have no interest in being better than other people, they just want to know more than they did yesterday.
I wish that was me, but I’m actually moderately-strongly motivated by a desire to feel like I’m the smartest person in the room! I’m getting this urge under control (I’m pretty sure I was intolerable as a child and have been improving by instalments since then!). Firstly, because it’s an antisocial pattern to foster, but also because it limits my ability to learn new things to have to go through the awkward, mistake-filled “I’m a complete amateur at this!” phase. But even as I work on this I still get that niggling urge, more often than I’d like, to “show off”.
Of course, it could well be that what I’m doing right now is catastrophising. I’m taking a nice thing somebody’s said about me, picking the one part of it that I find hardest to feel represents me, and deciding that I must be a fraud. Soo… imposter syndrome, I guess. Damn.
Or to put it a better way: Wonder Syndrome. I guess this is another area for self-improvement.
(I’m definitely adopting Wonder Syndrome into my vocabulary, as an exercise in mitigating imposter syndrome. If you’ve not read Ruth’s post in full, you should go and do that next.)
This cache is closest to where we’re staying, and was the third (and final, because our littlest party member had had enough for now) of our expedition. Nice container and a lovely spot. TFTC.
Continuing our reverse-order explore of some of these caches closest to our accommodation for the week. Little 5-year-old John found this one and came proudly out from its hiding place with it in hand. TFTC.
Some fellow volunteers from a nonprofit I help run and I are staying at nearby Myddelton Lodge and came out to find a couple of local caches on our lunch break. This was the first, and my new-to-geocaching colleague Paul was first to put his hands on the cache. Nice one. TFTC.
I’m staying not far outside Ilkley this week doing voluntary work, and needed to come down into town to pick up a teammate from the station (and charge the batteries on the car!). Took the opportunity while waiting for the latter to come find this cache. SL, TFTC!
Geosense sent me straight to this one during a short visit to Stratford. Some fellow volunteers and I stayed at the hotel last night for our AGM and Christmas party and I couldn’t resist coming out to find this before heading back to Oxfordshire. TFTC.
Prior to 2018, Three Rings had a relatively simple approach to how it would use pronouns when referring to volunteers.
If the volunteer’s gender was specified as a “masculine” gender (which particular options are available depends on the volunteer’s organisation, but might include “male”, “man”, “cis man”, and “trans man”), the system would use traditional masculine pronouns like “he”, “his”, “him” etc.
If the gender was specified as a “feminine” gender (e.g .”female”, “woman”, “cis women”, “trans woman”) the system would use traditional feminine pronouns like “she”, “hers”, “her” etc.
For any other answer, no specified answer, or an organisation that doesn’t track gender, we’d use singular “they” pronouns. Simple!
This selection was reflected throughout the system. Three Rings might say:
They have done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was hers.
Would you like to sign him up to this shift?
Unfortunately, this approach didn’t reflect the diversity of personal pronouns nor how they’re applied. It didn’t support volunteer whose gender and pronouns are not conventionally-connected (“I am a woman and I use ‘them/they’ pronouns”), nor did it respect volunteers whose pronouns are not in one of these three sets (“I use ze/zir pronouns”)… a position it took me an embarrassingly long time to fully comprehend.
So we took a new approach:
The New Way
From 2018 we allowed organisations to add a “Pronouns” property, allowing volunteers to select from 13 different pronoun sets. If they did so, we’d use it; failing that we’d continue to assume based on gender if it was available, or else use the singular “they”.
The process has some further complexities to cover the fact that we say “they are” but “he is“, but this broadly covers it.
Let’s take a quick linguistics break
Three Rings‘ pronoun field always shows five personal pronouns, separated by slashes, because you can’t necessarily derive one from another. That’s one for each of five types:
the subject, used when the person you’re talking about is primary argument to a verb (“he called”),
object, for when the person you’re talking about is the secondary argument to a transitive verb (“he called her“),
dependent possessive, for talking about a noun that belongs to a person (“this is their shift”),
independent possessive, for talking about something that belongs to a person potentially would an explicit noun (“this is theirs“), and the
reflexive (and intensive), two types which are generally the same in English, used mostly in Three Rings when a person is both the subject and indeirect of a verb (“she signed herself up to a shift”).
Let’s see what those look like – here are the 13 pronoun sets supported by Three Rings at the time of writing:
Subject
Object
Possessive
Reflexive/intensive
Dependent
Independent
he
him
his
himself
she
her
hers
herself
they
them
their
theirs
themselves
e
em
eir
eirs
emself
ey
eirself
hou
hee
hy
hine
hyself
hu
hum
hus
humself
ne
nem
nir
nirs
nemself
per
pers
perself
thon
thons
thonself
ve
ver
vis
verself
xe
xem
xyr
xyrs
xemself
ze
zir
zirs
zemself
That’s all data-driven rather than hard-coded, by the way, so adding additional pronoun sets is very easy for our developers. In fact, it’s even possible for us to apply an additional “override” on an individual, case-by-case basis: all we need to do is specify the five requisite personal pronouns, separated by slashes, and Three Rings understands how to use them.
Writing code that respects pronouns
Behind the scenes, the developers use a (binary-gendered, for simplicity) convenience function to produce output, and the system corrects for the pronouns appropriate to the volunteer in question:
<%=@volunteer.his_her.capitalize %>
account has been created for
<%=@volunteer.him_her %>
so
<%=@volunteer.he_she %>
can now log in.
The code above will, dependent on the pronouns specified for the volunteer @volunteer, output something like:
His account has been created for him so he can now log in.
Her account has been created for her so she can now log in.
Their account has been created for them so they can now log in.
Eir account has been created for em so ey can now log in.
Etc.
We’ve got extended functions to automatically detect cases where the use of second person pronouns might be required (“Your account has been created for you so you can now log in.”) as well as to help us handle the fact that we say “they are” but “he/she/ey/ze/etc. is“.
It’s all pretty magical and “just works” from a developer’s perspective. I’m sure most of our volunteer developers don’t think about the impact of pronouns at all when they code; they just get on with it.
Is that a complete solution?
Does this go far enough? Possibly not. This week, one of our customers contacted us to ask:
Is there any way to give the option to input your own pronouns? I ask as some people go by she/them or he/them and this option is not included…
You can probably see what’s happened here: some organisations have taken our pronouns property – which exists primarily to teach the system itself how to talk about volunteers – and are using it to facilitate their volunteers telling one another what their pronouns are.
What’s the difference? Well:
When a human discloses that their pronouns are “she/they” to another human, they’re saying “You can refer to me using either traditional feminine pronouns (she/her/hers etc.) or the epicene singular ‘they’ (they/their/theirs etc.)”.
But if you told Three Rings your pronouns were “she/her/their/theirs/themselves”, it would end up using a mixture of the two, even in the same sentence! Consider:
She has done 7 shifts by themselves.
She verified her email address was theirs.
That’s some pretty clunky English right there! Mixing pronoun sets for the same person within a sentence is especially ugly, but even mixing them within the same page can cause confusion. We can’t trivially meet this customer’s request simply by adding new pronoun sets which mix things up a bit! We need to get smarter.
A Newer Way?
Ultimately, we’re probably going to need to differentiate between a more-rigid “what pronouns should Three Rings use when talking about you” and a more-flexible, perhaps optional “what pronouns should other humans use for you”? Alternatively, maybe we could allow people to select multiple pronoun sets to display but Three Rings would only use one of them (at least, one of them at a time!): “which of the following sets of pronouns do you use: select as many as apply”?
Even after this, there’ll always be more work to do.
For instance: I’ve met at least one person who uses no pronouns! By this, they actually mean they use no third-person personal pronouns (if they actually used nopronouns they wouldn’t say “I”, “me”, “my”, “mine” or “myself” and wouldn’t want others to say “you”, “your”, “yours” and “yourself” to them)! Semantics aside… for these people Three Ringsshould use the person’s name rather than a pronoun.
Maybe we can get there one day.
Three Rings is already capable of supporting people who use no pronouns, but we don’t yet have a user interface to help them specify this! Maybe it’d look like this?
But so long as Three Rings continues to remain ahead of the curve in its respect for and understanding of pronoun use then I’ll be happy.
Our mission is to focus on volunteers and make volunteering easier. At the heart of that mission is treating volunteers with respect. Making sure our system embraces the diversity of the 65,000+ volunteers who use it by using pronouns correctly might be a small part of that, but it’s a part of it, and I for one am glad we make the effort.
This weekend, while investigating a bug in some code that generates iCalendar (ICS) feeds, I learned about a weird quirk in the Republic of Ireland’s timezone. It’s such a strange thing (and has so little impact on everyday life) that I imagine that even most Irish people don’t even know about it, but it’s important enough that it can easily introduce bugs into the way that computer calendars communicate:
Most of Europe put their clocks forward in Summer, but the Republic of Ireland instead put their clocks backward in Winter.
If that sounds to you like the same thing said two different ways – or the set-up to a joke! – read on:
The timezones of Europe look pretty simple compared to some parts of the world, but the illustration of the British Isles hides an interesting eccentricity.
A Brief History of Time (in Ireland)
Spring forward, fall back… just a little bit back, though. Not too much.
After high-speed (rail) travel made mean solar timekeeping problematic, Great Britain in 1880 standardised on Greenwich Mean Time (UTC+0) as the time throughout the island, and Ireland standardised on Dublin Mean Time (UTC-00:25:21). If you took a ferry from Liverpool to Dublin towards the end of the 19th century you’d have to put your watch back by about 25 minutes. With air travel not yet being a thing, countries didn’t yet feel the need to fixate on nice round offsets in the region of one-hour (today, only a handful of regions retain UTC-offsets of half or quarter hours).
That’s all fine in peacetime, but by the First World War and especially following the Easter Rising, the British government decided that it was getting too tricky for their telegraph operators (many of whom operated out of Ireland, which provided an important junction for transatlantic traffic) to be on a different time to London.
It’s widely believed that the world’s first “U UP? [STOP]” message never got a response as a direct result of Anglo-Irish timezone confusion.So the Time (Ireland) Act 1916 was passed, putting Ireland on Greenwich Mean Time. Ireland put her clocks back by 35 minutes and synched-up with the rest of the British Isles. And from then on, everything was simple and because nothing ever went wrong in Ireland as a result of the way it was governed by by Britain, nobody ever had to think about the question of timezones on the island again.
Ah. Hmm.
“Those Irish people want to govern their own country, do they? After we so kindly shared our king with them? Right-ho: let’s set fire to their cities and see how they feel then.”
Following Irish independence, the keeping of time carried on in much the same way for a long while, which will doubtless have been convenient for families spread across the Northern Irish border. But then came the Second World War.
Summers in the 1940s saw Churchill introduce Double Summer Time which he believed would give the UK more daylight, saving energy that might otherwise be used for lighting and increasing production of war materiel.
Ireland considered using the emergency powers they’d put in place to do the same, as a fuel saving measure… but ultimately didn’t. This was possibly because aligning her time with Britain might be seen as undermining her neutrality, but was more likely because the government saw that such a measure wouldn’t actually have much impact on fuel use (it certainly didn’t in Britain). Whatever the reason, though, Britain and Northern Ireland were again out-of-sync with one another until the war ended.
I like to imagine that the development of powerful computers by the folks at Bletchley Park was a result of needing to keep track of timezones across the British Isles.
From 1968 to 1971 Britain experimented with “British Standard Time” – putting the clocks forward in Summer once, to UTC+1, and then leaving them there for three years. This worked pretty well except if you were Scottish in which case you’ll have found winter mornings to be even gloomier than you were used to, which was already pretty gloomy. Conveniently: during much of this period Ireland was also on UTC+1, but in their case it was part of a different experiment. Ireland were working on joining the European Economic Community, and aligning themselves with “Paris time” year-round was an unnecessary concession but an interesting idea.
But here’s where the quirk appears: the Standard Time Act 1968, which made UTC+1 the “standard” timezone for the Republic of Ireland, was not repealed and is still in effect. Ireland could have started over in 1971 with a new rule that made UTC+0 the standard and added a “Summer Time” alternative during which the clocks are put forward… but instead the Standard Time (Amendment) Act 1971 left UTC+1 as Ireland’s standard timezone and added a “Winter Time” alternative during which the clocks are put back.
It all seems so simple until you actually think about it.
(For a deeper look at the legal history of time in the UK and Ireland, see this timeline. Certainly don’t get all your history lessons from me.)
So what?
You might rightly be thinking: so what! Having a standard time of UTC+0 and going forward for the Summer (like the UK), is functionally-equivalent to having a standard time of UTC+1 and going backwards in the Winter, like Ireland, right? It’s certainly true that, at any given moment, a clock in London and a clock in Dublin should show the same time. So why would anybody care?
This code for Europe/Dublin, from the Perl module Data::ICal::TimeZone, is technically-incorrect because it states that the winter time is the standard and daylight savings of +1 hour apply in the summer, rather than the opposite.
But declaring which is “standard” is important when you’re dealing with computers. If, for example, you run a volunteer rota management system that supports a helpline charity that has branches in both the UK and Ireland, then it might really matter that the computer systems involved know what each other mean when they talk about specific times.
The author of an iCalendar file can choose to embed timezone information to explain what, in that file, a particular timezone means. That timezone information might say, for example, “When I say ‘Europe/Dublin’, I mean UTC+1, or UTC+0 in the winter.” Or it might say – like the code above! – “When I say ‘Europe/Dublin’, I mean UTC+0, or UTC+1 in the summer.” Both of these declarations would be technically-valid and could be made to work, although only the first one would be strictly correct in accordance with the law.
But if you don’t include timezone information in your iCalendar file, you’re relying on the feed subscriber’s computer (e.g. their calendar software) to make a sensible interpretation.. And that’s where you run into trouble. Because in cases like Ireland, for which the standard is one thing but is commonly-understood to be something different, there’s a real risk that the way your system interprets and encodes time won’t necessarily be the same as the way somebody else’s does.
If I say I’ll meet you at 12:00 on 1 January, in Ireland, you rightly need to know whether I’m talking about 12:00 in Irish “standard” time (i.e. 11:00, because daylight savings are in effect) or 12:00 in local-time-at-the-time-of-the-meeting (i.e. 12:00). Humans usually mean the latter because we think in terms of local time, but when your international computer system needs to make sure that people are on a shift at the same time, but in different timezones, it needs to be very clear what exactly it means!
And when your daylight savings works “backwards” compared to everybody else’s… that’s sure to make a developer somewhere cry. And, possibly, blog about your weird legislation.
I first came to this series in 2014 – seems like a lifetime ago! – but got called away by something (a problem with the beta of Three Rings‘ Milestone: Promethium) before I could find more than the first one. Today, under our recently reduced lockdown and in an effort to save the kids from crawling to the walls, we came out for a walk along this side of the woods and quickly found this cache. TFTC!
After a quick pre-breakfast expedition to the (very good, but under-visited) nearby cache GC18GJB, I decided to take a minor diversion on my way back to Alexandra House via this little cache. An easy find, although I did for a moment think I might have been being watched… only to discover that the creature watching me was a deer. Does a deer count as a muggle? TFTC.
An abundance of leaf mulch made it more–challenging than I’d anticipated both to reach the GZ, on account of slipperiness, and to find the container, on account of camouflage. My geosense took me directly to the right spot but after an initially fruitless search I expanded my radius. Then, still having had no luck, I checked the hint and returned to the site of my initial hunch for a more-thorough search. Soon, the cache was in my hand. SL, TNLN.
Like many previous finders I’m staying in the nearby Alexandra House. My fellow volunteers and I at a nonprofit we run were getting together for our AGM and a Christmas meal (I know it’s early in the year for such things, but among our activities was signing Christmas cards to the hundreds of charities we support, and we have to catch the last international posting dates!).
As has become my tradition at our get-togethers, I got up for a quick hike/geocaching expedition before breakfast. I’m glad I did! This under-hunted cache represents much of what’s best about the activity: a decent sized container, maintained for many years, in a location that justifies a nice walk. FP awarded.
Side note: there’s a bus stop (pictured) at the North end of this footpath. Who’s it for??? In the middle of nowhere with a two-hourly bus five days a week, it doesn’t seem to be serving anybody! Maybe a geocacher will disembark there, someday.
