Yet another male perspective on women in free software [LWN.net]

Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Posted Oct 16, 2007 17:50 UTC (Tue) by einhverfr (guest, #44407)
In reply to: Yet another male perspective on women in free software by yeti-dn
Parent article: Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Just as a quick point.  I think the issue of a lack of women is a symptom, not an illness.
The question is how we encourage contribution from the community.  If we encourage it well,
then we will have a wider demographic of contributors.  If not, then we are stuck with mostly
lonely males suffering from a form of OCD ;-)  (I am male, not entirely lonely, but probably
do suffer from the issue of obsessing about technical issues.)

The common basis is quite simple.  We all want to have software that does what we need it to
do.  This is the basis for the larger community.

You say:
"I don't care whether people are male, female, yellow, German, christian, aliens -- who can
tell it just from the name anyway."

My name (Greek for "Christ Bearer") aside, I am no longer Christian :-)

Something that would help, however, would be for a group to start interviewing women in open
source projects to ask how satisfied they are with various aspects of the project, get
specific feedback, and then rank projects based on how well the community supports their
contributions.  From there, it might be good to develop wider-range community management best
practices which help *everyone* contribute more.

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