way back, on april 9^th 2005, i attended one of peter yu’s many excellent conferences: “w(h)ither the middleman?” 

it was a fun event, packed with many of cyberlaw’s rockstars.

i was on the last panel of day two, looking at ‘the future of intermediaries’ along with a great line-up that included ann bartow, rob heverly, dan hunter and david post.

for me, the most inspiring of the talks during the two day event was the one given by ann. she took the question posed in the conference title seriously, choosing to remove the bracketed-h and explaining why gender equality requires us to wither the ‘man’ in the middle.  the publication deriving from this talk is available here, and i highly recommend it as an important diagnostic and prescription for the way we use (and don’t use) the web.  

in her talk, ann provided some possible explanations for why there is not very much legal scholarship devoted to gender issues on the internet and suggested that there is a powerful need for cyberprofs and activists to pay substantially more attention to the gender-based differences in communicative style and substance that have been imported from real space to cyberspace.

ann also shared a number of examples of gender discrimination online and off, including experiences of her own upon her arrival to usc, including her first meeting with a senior male colleague who greeted her with a question: ‘why should the faculty have hired a woman instead of a man to teach ip?’  

she told us that it has since gotten a bit easier, that over time she was able to ‘flip’ this guy (i.e., he came to recognize her contribution to the faculty and her field and he eased-up a little once she was able to ‘prove herself’). 

during the discussion period on our panel – when asked what could be done about all this – ann replied by saying it-would-be-a-great-start if male colleagues would simply add a gender component within the fields of research that they are already conducting. 

i remember dan hunter and others promising that they would. i made a similar promise to myself. while it has taken a lot longer than i had hoped to ramp up my research and although it is still very early in my project, i am happy to finally report to ann and the others in attendance that i have met the challenge.

in furtherance of my own recent work on the relationship between ‘identifiers’ and ‘identity’ (part of my idtrail project), last wednesday, i gave a presentation at uOttawa’s shirley greenberg feminist lunch time workshop series titled “new identifiers for victims of abuse”. 

unfortunately, my talk was more of a description of the project than a finished research product.

if you are interested, the podcast is available here and the powerpoint deck is here. 

this post is really just to offer my sincere thanks to ann for ‘flipping’ me, and also to challenge dan hunter, greg latowska, and other men who promised they would meet ann’s challenge — as well as all of the other men on this list who didn’t know about ann’s challenge — to  flip-it-forward!

many people have written to tell me that they recognize the presence of elements of gaudi’s park guell as one of the motifs that runs through my site and some have asked why.
 

in addition to the fact that it is one of my favorite places and a reminder of one of the best years of my life, the main reason is because gaudi inspires me.
 

taking cues from nature, gaudi’s work is perhaps unsurpassed in its seamless combination of beauty and function. every single scrap of trencadis is a disassembled assembly of meaning, purpose and aesthetic.
 

the undulating benches on the banner by my website (etched into my memory thanks to the stunning photography of my wife erin) twist-n-shout around the perimeter of the esplanade.  the public square is a rather grand space about 160 feet by 120 feet and a great place to digest a sandwich and watch an impromptu soccer match or yoga session .  half of it is supported by solid ground, the other half is supported on the doric columns of the hypostyle chamber below. some say that these vibrant and colorful benches take the form of a snake basking in the mediterranean sun, but the greek theater, as the area it circumscribes is sometimes called, is also designed so that people can sit around in groups and kibitz.
 

another reason for choosing this setting as the backdrop for this site are the two delicious ironies of park guell. 

first, although it bears the english name for a “public space,” which it certainly is now, this “park” was in fact commissioned by  a rich industrialist named guell, with the vision of building a walled-off neighborhood (not unlike the gated communities popping up left and right across north america).  gaudí's original plan was supposed to include 60 private houses in an exclusive garden setting but only two were built: one of which now houses a small Gaudí museum. ironically, this private space was subsequently purchased by the city of Barcelona and can be enjoyed by the public.  [a metaphor for the future of DRM?!]

outside the small museum, a plaque indicates that gaudí lived there for the last 20 years of his life but this wasn’t really so. in fact, he spent the last 10 years of his life camped out at la sagrada familia, conceptualizing the mosaic spires for what already is and will upon completion surely be one of the world’s most amazing structures (it is still being built and is not likely to be completed for another 20 years)

la sagrada familia had by this time become gaudi’s single-minded obsession. so possessed by its every detail was he that gaudi allowed his personal lifestyle to suffer extreme neglect. his clothing, it is said, was in the end held together only by pins. he continued his fund rasing efforts by panhandling in the streets.  by this time he considered himself one among the poor. he no longer sought exclusivity or fortune.

though he was celebrated for several decades as Catalunia’s most renowned architect, not a single person recognized him in 1926 when, at the age of 74, he was run over by a tram and died three days later. the second bit of irony here is that gaudi made the mistake of supporting guell’s bid to ensure the exclusivity of park guell by making sure that the public tram did not come anywhere near the park.  it is said that after years of trying to keep it away, the tram struck back. [thus proving that the answer to "the answer to the machine" is *also* in the machine]

if you visit barcelona, another story that you will hear the locals tell is about a well known interaction that gaudi had with one of the bishops of the church who, after seeing gaudi obsess in painful detail about execution in the designs of one of his spires, asked him: 

“why do you lavish so much care on the top part of these spires, which, tens of stories above the tallest structures  no one will ever be able to see from up close?”