debating whether i should have weighed in.. but then did it anyway.
http://lwn.net/Articles/349210/
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Hi!
I started using Linux in 1994, installing Slackware from floppies on a home-built machine some friends of mine from the dorms helped me pick out parts with. I screwed the motherboard into a case myself and tried not to bend pins when I put the cpu in for the first time. I was terrified I was going to break something, but my friends wouldn't do it for me.
More recently, I was the co-chair of Open Source Bridge (a conference for open source developers and "citizens" in Portland, OR), and am very involved in PostgreSQL.
Anyway, I have written a lot about the topic of women and open source -- primarily from angle that mentorship and social circles really impact women's participation.
I think your comment could be an example of this effect. :)
When more of the men who lead and code the core open source projects start to know and are friends with the women who participate, I think we will see a huge shift in perception and reality around recruitment and participation of women.
My approach is to just do stuff - start user groups, write code, tell people what I think - rather than argue about whether there are or are not enough women.
When people ask me how to get more women involved in their software projects, I tell them to look around, start talking to the women around them and ask the women they find who show interest to participate directly. This, oddly enough, tends to work. I live in Portland, OR -- which some people think is some kind of techno-communal utopia. But we're just like everyone else.. We just have a bit more energy around bringing social activity and tech together right now.
I'm not very interested in discussing the barriers to participation at this point. They are there, *shrug*.
I think it is far more productive to just take action, measure the results and adjust accordingly.
If you're interested in some of what we've done, I've got a blog post about a specific group that's was successful in the last couple years: http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/04/29/whats-changed-portland-as-an-example-of-increasing-womens-participation/
And here's something I wrote for O'reilly a while ago:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/womenintech/2007/09/28/to-sir-with-love-how-to-get-more-women-involved-in-open-source.html
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Hi!
I started using Linux in 1994, installing Slackware from floppies on a home-built machine some friends of mine from the dorms helped me pick out parts with. I screwed the motherboard into a case myself and tried not to bend pins when I put the cpu in for the first time. I was terrified I was going to break something, but my friends wouldn't do it for me.
More recently, I was the co-chair of Open Source Bridge (a conference for open source developers and "citizens" in Portland, OR), and am very involved in PostgreSQL.
Anyway, I have written a lot about the topic of women and open source -- primarily from angle that mentorship and social circles really impact women's participation.
I think your comment could be an example of this effect. :)
When more of the men who lead and code the core open source projects start to know and are friends with the women who participate, I think we will see a huge shift in perception and reality around recruitment and participation of women.
My approach is to just do stuff - start user groups, write code, tell people what I think - rather than argue about whether there are or are not enough women.
When people ask me how to get more women involved in their software projects, I tell them to look around, start talking to the women around them and ask the women they find who show interest to participate directly. This, oddly enough, tends to work. I live in Portland, OR -- which some people think is some kind of techno-communal utopia. But we're just like everyone else.. We just have a bit more energy around bringing social activity and tech together right now.
I'm not very interested in discussing the barriers to participation at this point. They are there, *shrug*.
I think it is far more productive to just take action, measure the results and adjust accordingly.
If you're interested in some of what we've done, I've got a blog post about a specific group that's was successful in the last couple years: http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2009/04/29/whats-changed-portland-as-an-example-of-increasing-womens-participation/
And here's something I wrote for O'reilly a while ago:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/womenintech/2007/09/28/to-sir-with-love-how-to-get-more-women-involved-in-open-source.html