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Where are all the Women in Open Source?

Another thing that happened at OSCON was the previously promised "Women in Open Source" panel. It has already been blogged here, here and here amongst others.

This topic is getting more and more interesting, as people have started to come out to tell their gender-bias related technology stories to me.

We purposefully tried to steer the discussion at the OSCON panel away from "story telling", because we only had an hour and the stories can easily eat up such a short amount of time. What we wanted was to interest the audience in starting to think about the issue, so that over time we can work on strategies to collectively address it. I've heard from several people that this approach was frustrating because they wanted to dive into solution brainstorming. That's such a great problem to have!

So, starting today (and I'd imagine it will start small until the word gets out), the Open Source Initiative will be starting an open list for further discussion of this topic...women@opensource.org. Interested subscribers should send email to women-subscribe@opensource.org

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We'd like use the list as an observation point between all the specific project-focused women's lists such as LinuxChix, Debian-Women, women@apache.org and hopefully someday a women's list at Mozilla, and there has been some discussion of also using the list to collect stories from women who have successfully found a way in to some aspect of the open source movement.

For my part, I plan to spend the next year actively evangelizing women@opensource.org as often as I can, including hosting a face-to-face conversation BOF on the topic at every conference where I speak in the next year...I'm hoping I can convince my friends at O'Reilly to host a mini-track at the next OSCON on the subject of attracting and retaining more women contributors into Open Source. I'll keep you posted.

Mozilla, the Reorganization

For the last several weeks I've been participating in a series of Advisory Committee meetings to help the Mozilla.org Foundation start a wholly-owned subsidiary called The Mozilla Corporation, or Mozilla.Corp. Today there is a press release about the change and a FAQ on the new website.

This work is a great example of how effective the Mozilla Community (both .org and .corp) are at building consensus and making everyone feel included and useful. I'm not sure how useful my participation was, but I tried to add value to the conversation. When the time came I also briefed some of my blogging friends.

Interesting how hard it is to get "Big Media" to understand the subtle FOSS message on something like launch of a new Mozilla Corporation. They assume the story can be boiled down to formulae they know. So, as my friend Joi Ito first mentioned in this morning's blog, Markoff of the New York Times got the message slightly wrong. The Washington Post did slightly better.

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