OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 17:30 UTC (Tue) by MisterIO (guest, #36192)
Parent article: OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

This may be considered rude, but IMO something like the beautiful articles by Valerie Aurora can do much more for the women cause than this whining crap.

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OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 28, 2009 18:45 UTC (Tue) by Skud (guest, #59840) [Link] (1 responses)

MisterIO, I agree that Valerie Aurora's articles are fantastic, but I disagree that my keynote was "whining crap". You are welcome to think so if you wish, but I won't let it go unchallenged.

I presented some facts, showed a couple of examples of open source projects bucking the trend, and offered some tips that might help projects and individuals interested in doing likewise, with, I think, good will and humour.

If anyone would like to judge for themselves, they may read the linked article and slides, or watch the video at http://oscon.blip.tv/

Rude?

Posted Jul 29, 2009 19:02 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

This may be considered rude, but [...] whining crap.

Why on earth would that be considered rude?

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 29, 2009 19:42 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

This would be the Valerie Aurora who's written about just this kind of thing? Having role models for women in Linux is an excellent thing, but doesn't solve the fundamental problem that many parts of the Linux community are (generally justifiably) perceived as hostile to women. I'm not clear on how proposing solutions for that counts as whining.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 30, 2009 0:21 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree on this position. I love Val's articles because of their technical attention, good writing and fascinating subject matter.

On to the wider topic. There are a number of topics that you should not discuss in the course of a profitable evening: politics, religion, free software licenses, and perhaps one has to add "women in open source software" into that set. We can't talk unemotionally about politics and religion, and we aren't lawyers and don't understand licenses, and I can't contribute to a discussion about women without saying something people here would gladly kill(file) me for.

Lately I have been lamenting the emphasis on the "community" part of the open source community, as I'm more of a "source" sort of person. I love code and coding, and I keep on stubbornly believing that if we could just ignore our personalities and get back to coding we could do great things.

OSCON keynote: Standing out in the crowd

Posted Jul 30, 2009 0:38 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It would be nice if that could happen, but unfortunately humans are human
and have emotions. The only way you can avoid politics in a human
community is to restrict its size to one person, and I'm not entirely sure
that even that would work.