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...[email protected]. Interested subscribers should send email to [email protected]
.We'd like use the list as an observation point between all the specific project-focused women's lists such as LinuxChix, Debian-Women, [email protected] 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 [email protected] 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.
my thoughts linked above..
Posted by: andy | August 21, 2005 at 07:29 AM
Maybe you find this interesting: Women in Libre Software - A first quantitative approach [1]; I've done it in a quick-and-dirty way, but it could be a form of tracking how the participation of women evolves in time in libre software. Gregorio
[1] http://libresoft.urjc.es:9080/libresoft/50
Posted by: grex | September 07, 2005 at 04:33 AM
Raising my hand
Good to see some movement and attention being paid to the topic. I've been involved with the PostNuke OS CMS for several years, and we've recently formed a non-profit foundation, PostNuke Software Foundation where I'm on the board of directors. I've signed up for the mailing list and would like to get involved so please let me know if there is anything I can do.
Regards,
Vanessa Haakenson
Another woman in open source. :)
Posted by: Vanessa | September 22, 2005 at 08:47 PM
Reporting in. :-)
http://chanweiyee.blogspot.com
Posted by: Wei-Yee Chan | August 31, 2007 at 06:03 PM
You don't really need or want that lifestyle, it might hurt y'all slowly more.......Just tell him you
don't wanna repeat something your not too proud of z7uas.
Posted by: speprovessy | October 30, 2007 at 03:27 PM