Autscape presentation: help wanted!

So, as i posted a while ago, i am going to Autscape 2008 at the end of July... and I am doing a "major presentation"!

(Yes, Biodiverse Resistance readers... I do have some readers, don't I? (*awaits response*)... you now get to know the crappy name that I was born with... and if anyone realises that they know me offline, please comment or email me, altho, apart from the couple of people who i know already read this, it's probably unlikely...)

The good thing about this is that I only had to pay £25 instead of £175, because Autscape got funding to pay attendance costs for presenters.

The bad thing about it is that... well, to be honest, i didn't think that my proposal for a presentation had much chance of being accepted, and i was quite surprised that it was... so, now, i have to think of a) the actual content of my presentation and b) how to structure it...

This is going to be the first time that i've ever given or led a presentation at any sort of conference, and also the first time i'm going to have been either a) at an organised event with autism as its primary focus or b) in a majority-autistic environment - which latter fact is, i strongly suspect, going to be a very emotionally "heavy", and possibly a bit overwhelming, experience in itself...

I believe my presentation's going to have an hour slot, with possibly some time afterwards for questions/discussion. (I'd probably quite like it to be mostly discussion, actually - i really don't like the very hierarchical, "lecture-like" sort of conference presentation...)

I'd like to have a handout with some references (most likely online articles) which are relevant to the subject. I'm very probably going to use writings by Amanda Baggs and Cal Montgomery (with their permission, if i can get it), and i'm probably going to use references from this debate, and this piece relating to prejudice against "invisibly" disabled people within the disability movement. But i would really like any other people's suggestions for articles that could be relevant...

Also, i'd just generally like to hear people's (especially autistic bloggers') views and thoughts on the topic. Do you think it's a valid one for discussion? Do you think that "autistic rights" is just naturally a subcategory of "disability rights", and therefore that the autistic rights movemnent is simply one part of a wider disability rights movement, or do you think that they are separate - and, if so, why?

What about the autistic rights advocates who express the view (for example, ABFH's post here) that autism "isn't a disability"?

Do you think that the paradigms of the social model of disability, as generally understood in the disability movement, accommodate autistic people and autistic spectrum impairments, or do you think that they need significant modification to do so? (Yes, i know that sounds like an MA dissertation question...)

For people who are actively involved in the disability rights movement, in the UK or abroad, do you think it's dominated by a particular impairment group, or that disabled people with all types of impairments get reasonably equal representation?

Any general tips on how to give presentations would also be welcome...

Autistics.org in urgent need of computer skills

OK, i don't know if anyone reads this blog, let alone anyone with the computer skills necessary, but i'm posting this as widely as possible just in case, because if autistics.org shuts down then the loss to the worldwide autistic community will be immense. Some of the writing hosted on that site has had such a profound impact on my life that it might even have saved my life, and it's not just the best, but possibly the only site that acts as a central "hub" for serious writing about autism (as well as a lot of non-serious, but still important, stuff) that challenges the medical model orthodoxy and actually tells it like it is...

Laura Tisoncik's statement, currently on the front page of autistics.org:

I give up (July 5th, 2007)

Ours is a community filled with computer geeks. I don't, properly, happen to be one. I'm a computer-literate political organizer. Yet somehow I've found myself having to decipher Bind9 (I can't), disentangle one mailsystem from another (something else I can't do), be the lead person on computer security (another subject way over my head) and lord knows what else.

That I can't do what I'm not trained to do and have little talent to do seems irrelevant to the rest of the community. The only problem they see is that I don't do what they want me to do -- that the scripts aren't running right, that they don't have feature X and feature Y, that they've been deprived of access to feature Z for a few hours while I go sleepless for days trying to figure out what is going wrong with Z, etc.

Well today I am declaring my independence from enslavement to this website. Either members of the community step up and do the necessary work so this website can go on without me killing myself trying to maintain it and so that I have a shred of energy left to do something I'm actually good at, or I will kill this server, this website, and everything else it hosts at the end of the July billing cycle (circa August 5th) and be done with autistics.org.

--Laura Tisoncik