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Today is Ada Lovelace Day: a fine idea, instigated by Suw Charman-Anderson and quickly picked up across the web, to honour the all-too-often overlooked women who’ve contributed to science, technology, and our interaction with them. The reasons for this are all too obvious: Suw lays out what triggered the idea here (casual, oblivious sexism in the technology sector); you could look at Kottke’s old post on gender diversity at web conferences; or, frankly, you could just imagine what kind of person you immediately picture in your mind if someone says to you “computer scientist” or “engineer” or “web developer”. I’ll bet that, if they have breasts, chances are they’re of the regrettable man-type.

The idea is that, today, over 1,500 bloggers will write about a woman they respect who works or worked, in some capacity, in the field of technology. I pondered for even longer than the standard prevarication time over who to write about: delve back into history to talk about a pioneering lady of tech (I’m always entranced by the double life of film star and communications technology innovator Hedy Lamarr)? Write about someone I know from the London social media community? Sort-of-cheat, and write about how I respect Suw for starting the pledge in the first place? (I’m sure I won’t be the only one to think of that last one…) In the end, I opted for someone I’ve never met, but whose work I see and value every day.

Jessamyn West is a librarian, a community moderator at MetaFilter, and awesome. I’m not a librarian, so I can’t speak to the exact importance of librarian.net, the website she’s run since 1999 – but I’m given to believe that it’s been an important voice as libraries embrace (or occasionally fail to embrace) the ways of accessing information that go beyond books on shelves. (Wikipedia notes that it’s a “widely read and cited” resource, and that’s good enough for me, because research is hard and that’s why we have librarians.) Jessamyn spends quite a lot of time travelling around teaching people about technology, be it “teaching email to old people” or making cute little videos showing you how to breathe new life into old library computers with Ubuntu. These are all good things.

But it’s Jessamyn’s other day job, helping to run the community over at MetaFilter, that’s the reason I know and admire her. MeFi is a superb example of how to run an online community – run with a gentle but firm touch, open communication and discussion between the moderators and the members, and a clear sense of what makes the site good. Jessamyn has been key to that – the first person Matt Haughey brought on board to help with moderation as the site grew. She was especially influential in establishing, maintaining and implementing the “only helpful answers allowed” rule at AskMetaFilter – a far stricter standard than on the other subsites – which has made it the wonderfully useful resource it is today (“Not Yahoo Answers”, in other words). It always amazes me how Jessamyn (and the other MeFi mods, to be fair) manage to cope with the constant flow of spammers, flameouts, dumb questions, gripes and general nonsense without descending into the shouty rage madness at regular intervals – but manage it they do. It’s a key lesson in how no amount of algorithmic, vote-me-up-vote-me-down community management can substitute for a steady human touch in helping not just individuals, but loosely bonded groups, navigate the complicated mesh of stuff that is the online community experience.

So, yes: Jessamyn, we salute you. In an entirely non-creepy way, though, because you probably get enough of that on MetaTalk.