More on your points

More on your points

Posted Oct 17, 2007 3:57 UTC (Wed) by einhverfr (guest, #44407)
In reply to: Yet another male perspective on women in free software by paulmfoster
Parent article: Yet another male perspective on women in free software

Points 1, 2, 8, 9, and 10 often also come down to: 

Slow down.  It is really easy to communicate unintended thing in email, so take your time,
calm yourself, and communicate exactly what was intended.

Furthermore don't be afraid to appologize when someone takes soemthing the wrong way or you
are factually wrong.

Point 3:

I agree here with a major caveat.  Project leaders should have thick skins and should demand
often brutal honesty from community members.  They should not, however, demand that community
members have thick skins.

Point 4:

True to some extent or another.  At the same time, the key is sympathy and compassion, not who
is at fault.  Somone could just blow up because he/she is having a bad day.  People have to
share responsibility for a conversation's outcome.

On your last point, let me share my experience with LedgerSMB.

We have never gone out of our way to recruit women.  Yet, we have done what we can to promote
an open community where people feel comfortable contributing.  As a result, 1/3 of those with
commit privelege are women (I am guessing that this may be more than most projects).  How did
this happen?  Simple.  We accepted contributions from them and they found they enjoyed working
with us.  No great mysteries here.

I will say this though-- every one of our committers is a demanding, exacting individual with
a strong emphasis in developing quality software.  THere is no difference here between the men
and women that I can attribute to gender (more of it seems to do with expertise than gender).
We have had fights on private lists that are very intense, but are always generally respectful.
I have watched this start to push away contributors from time to time but I am not sure if
this is good or bad.  On the positive side, the big issue tends to be whether people are
willing to put in the effort to make their patches committable in a codebase that is both
rapidly being developed and where it hasn;t changed yet, it is very brittle.

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