"I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women do speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively - they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

That's what I want - to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don't know the power in you - I want to hear you. I want to listen to you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgement or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations, I want to hear you. Speak with a woman's tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don't let us sink back into silence. If we don't tell our truth, who will? Who'll speak for my children, and yours?"

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from her 1986 commencement address at Bryn Mawr College (published in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places).

#IWD #InternationalWomensDay #WomensDay #Feminism #UrsulaKLeguin #Quote #Quotes

I'm starting a new series on Conway's Law 🙈
Published: Beyond the Shades of Conway's Law

What started as merely note-taking in the form of "Shades of Conway's Law" evolved into a talk, with additional reading, research, and more connections.

This series represents an expansion of those ideas and a reflection on the journey.

This is work in progress 😅

https://thinkinglabs.io/articles/2026/04/24/beyond-the-shades-of-conways-law.html

I'm speaking on the 26th of April (tomorrow!!) at https://www.oggcamp.org/ in Manchester speaking about my much loved Open Source Design Diary studies project! which you can read here:

https://github.com/sprblm/Diary-Studies-Designers-in-OSS/

This study is now a few years old and i'd be great to get another one of these done. Please reach out if you'd like to see more data and insights from design, usability, user research etc. being done in OSS!

#oggcamp #oggcamp26 #oss #opensource #opensourcedesign

A #team anti-pattern that I frequently observe and always try to root out whenever possible: treating trust as a wall rather than a bridge; an individual expectation rather than a relationship.

“You should trust me; I shouldn’t have to communicate.”

“I thought you trusted my expertise.”

“We all trust each other to do our jobs.”

There’s a truth to it, because yes, of course we need autonomy and focus to do our jobs.

But the place this type of thinking leads is not a cohesive team that genuinely trusts each other in a relational way. It leads the opposite direction toward individuality and isolation and prevents team cohesion.

Endemic to very senior teams especially; it’s one of the reasons I love working with less experienced folks, the expectation is much less individual and they know they need each other to succeed.

Tough one.