Starting a women-focused group [LWN.net]

Starting a women-focused group

Posted Sep 30, 2007 23:19 UTC (Sun) by SelenaDeckelmann (guest, #47907)
In reply to: Now we are back to square one by khim
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

At the risk of opening up a thread that was winding down...

I am the author of the Women in Technology article quoted at the top of the page.

Free software was not created when RMS convinced proprietary software developers that "software is like sex: it's better when it's free" - it was created when he left MIT and started coding. Why can not "women-friendly" FOSS communities be created this way ???

While much of this discussion has ranged outside of what I set out to talk about, I wanted to mention that I am part of a group of people (men and women) who started a software users group whose goal is to get more women involved in F/LOSS. This is a group specifically about programming. We meet in-person, in Portland, OR.

We are in our infancy, but are fortunate enough to have experienced programmers, and enthusiastic volunteers driving the effort. Over the next few months, I hope to have more to report.

Those of you here who have not read my article, I am very interested in what you think about the specific points I made in it. (here it is)

My perspective, in a nutshell, is that I have had an exceptionally positive experience both as a user and a developer of open source software. My goal in writing the article was simply to encourage more women to join us and share in that fantastic experience and community. I see F/LOSS as an important social movement, not just about the code.

It is self-evident that we cannot have F/LOSS without code. But we also cannot have code without people. I think that we all benefit from actively inviting into our communities people who are different from us - different genders, different ethnicities, different cultures or political beliefs. The discussion that occurred here is remarkable because of the willingness of people of polar-opposite opinion to (mostly) rationally discuss a very difficult problem. If there is one advantage the open source community has relative to the rest of the world, it is an abundance of people willing to listen to other points of view and be persuaded.

And with that, thanks for listening. Feel free to contact me directly. I am fairly easily found through google at this point.

to post comments

Starting a women-focused group

Posted Oct 1, 2007 0:39 UTC (Mon) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link] (1 responses)

> While much of this discussion has ranged outside of what I set out to talk about

Indeed.

> I am part of a group of people (men and women) who started a software users group whose goal is to get more women involved in F/LOSS. This is a group specifically about programming.

I wish you good luck (though somewhat skeptical about groups formed to follow more than one agenda, and mostly orthogonal ones at that).

> Those of you here who have not read my article, I am very interested in what you think about the specific points I made in it.

OK, I did re-read it, and I guess the only point which I disagree with is ...

> I think that we all benefit from actively inviting into our communities

... that word "actively". Perhaps we mean it differently, but to me, it associates with "forcibly". I hate it when _I_ am "actively" being involved into something, so expect others might find it rather unpleasant, too. I believe the internal barriers (== discrimination, doesn't matter against women or any other subset of the mankind), in cases when they exist, should, if possible, be dealt with instead.

PS. Oh, and the title. Perhaps you believed that "To Sir, with Love" would ring the bell and make the connotation obvious. It didn't for me - not until I googled for it (and that happened only after I had read the article, confused by an apparent lack of connection between the title and the body).

What I mean by active

Posted Oct 1, 2007 1:21 UTC (Mon) by SelenaDeckelmann (guest, #47907) [Link]

Thanks for having another look.

... that word "actively". Perhaps we mean it differently, but to me, it associates with "forcibly". I hate it when _I_ am "actively" being involved into something, so expect others might find it rather unpleasant, too. I believe the internal barriers (== discrimination, doesn't matter against women or any other subset of the mankind), in cases when they exist, should, if possible, be dealt with instead.

Fair enough. I meant active as the opposite of passive. Speaking for myself, I did not think anyone would want to hear my opinions on technical subjects in a user group - until a friend asked me to speak up. My point in the article was that asking someone directly for their opinion, or letting them know that their participation is wanted, can encourage a person to participate. That's very different from forcing people.

Honestly, I don't think that it would be possible to force women into IT. It is certainly possible to invite them. I've "recruited" a few women from other disciplines to get CS degrees myself.

PS. Oh, and the title. Perhaps you believed that "To Sir, with Love" would ring the bell and make the connotation obvious. It didn't for me - not until I googled for it (and that happened only after I had read the article, confused by an apparent lack of connection between the title and the body).

I'll try to pick a better title next time :)

Good luck

Posted Oct 1, 2007 5:16 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Wish you success - if you'll succeed it'll be sample which can be pointed out as "you don't need to tolerate jerks and misogynists to achieve success". Just don't forget that for most men "creation of place where both women and men can participate equally and where women do not feel ostracized" is not a success by itself (you successfully created yet another way to waste time? congratulations! we sooo don't need this). Something used by all major distributions or something touted as "major new feature" in one of them - this will be a success...

P.S. May be "just" 200% increase in number of Linux desktops in area can be considered success (but here I'm not sure: since it does not have global impact it's easy to say that such increase was a reason why your group survived, not a consequence of it's existence).