The dark side of open source conferences

Posted Dec 2, 2010 14:02 UTC (Thu) by bjacob (guest, #58566)
Parent article: The dark side of open source conferences

As someone who runs a smaller open source project, I wonder if there is anything that we can do to attract more women to contribute? Our project's members are very civil and we never had any heated/incivil argument, yet almost all of the new contributors who spontaneously pop up seem to be male. I wonder if putting a message prominently on our website would help. I would say something about there being no difference between men and women when it comes to programming, and about us being a civil bunch and being ready to kick out anyone who'd be incivil. I wonder if that'd do anything to help, or if we should more proactively reach out to where women actually are (e.g. universities) or if there's just nothing we can do on our part.

The dark side of open source conferences

Posted Dec 2, 2010 18:11 UTC (Thu) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]

You'd have to watch for it, but occasionally the geekfeminism.org blog has threads requesting that women-friendly companies who are hiring, women-friendly FOSS projects who are looking for contributors, etc. pop up in the comments and say something.

Recruiting for a friendly FOSS project

Posted Dec 3, 2010 20:12 UTC (Fri) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link]

I remember an organization called "society of women engineers" at my alma mater -- I had two friends who were members, one girl and one guy. If I were a project leader who wanted to recruit girl developers, might look for mailing lists of such college organizations.