This site was first published as www.adashboard.org. In 2013 I changed it to www.paramoulipist.be. Why?
The tool I use for this website WordPress, an open source blogging software grown out of a large community of users all over the world. It’s internal cuisine is called ‘adashboard’, hence the name. In 2006 I made my first practical steps into being an active IT-user. Until than I had been a common windows consumer, panicking when something would go wrong, feeling powerless, uneducated and insecure in my relationship with the machine.
By installing WordPress as a local database on my machine, I was forced to find solutions for all the problems that would occur, so I discovered the supporting community that is built around all open source projects. The idea there are thousands of people out there ready to give you a hand, ready to share their knowledge instead of showing it off, gave me not only a warm feeling, but more important, the courage to keep learning and become an active user instead of a passive consumer.
Open source came into my life thanks to the people of Constant. Open Source is not only a way to avoid spending large amounts of money, it is also a way to meet people, learn and share knowledge. There are still very little women involved in the open source movement. That is one more reason to be involved and report on it. Once you get used to a different approach to technology, it becomes a lot easier to start being creative and explore with all kind of tools.
Till 2012 I took part in one of Constants’ projects called ‘Women & free software’. 15 women of very different ages and different cultural and social background meet and share the love for Open Source IT. The idea was to create a learning and sharing space, physically and virtually, around the installation and the use of a server.
More information: Ateliers de samedi and a nice article on Women & free software (in Dutch/French):
At the end of 2012 I founded Algolit as a Constant workgroup around algorithm and literature. This could happen because of spending the previous years learning and experimenting with tools, code, text, performance. I had tried a series of buttons on the dashboard, learned about the deep structures that organise our digital society, had become intimate friends with my machine. It felt it was time to close a cycle in order to open a new one: Adashboard mutated into Paramoulipist.
