[CREATE] "Reclaim your tools". A film by Jakub Szypulka

[Femke Snelting]

Hello all, hello Jakub!

Thanks for making the film Jakub, it is very nice and the tiny scene with yourself in the hotel mirror clearly marks it as a personal film, not the one-and-only report. The questions it sparked off about representation are a bit larger than your work alone, and I am glad they came up now we are starting to prepare the sixth edition of LGM.

>> e) We're still way ahead of a lot of other F/LOSS events in terms of
>> straight-up, ratio-based representation (never mind the subjective
>> value of different kinds of participation and representation, which is
>> a whole other, very long discussion).

With only 1 woman on stage in 2006, 4 in 2007, 3 in 2008 and 2 in 2009 LGM has not been doing much better than FOSDEM, OSCON and GUADEC in those same years. In the mean time, many F/LOSS related projects have realised this is a problem and decided to develop activities to track and change the numbers -- see links below.

I am convinced that the quality of Libre Graphics software has everything to gain from actively diversifying participation. Through it's generally friendly character and amazing collection of very different projects, involving many nationalities, gathering experience with open standards, localization; negotiating technical and cultural questions ... LGM should actually be leading the list!

Addressing participation and representation becomes more relevant now the community starts to grow and clearly will continue to do so. Bringing up the uneven male/female ratio is only scratching the surface of what the actual conditions for an inclusive community might be and it is boring to have to do a headcount. But sometimes brute force creates awareness and than opens up the possibility to acknowledge that *all of us* bring gender to the meeting, not only if you wear a hat to mark it ;-)

>> f) Every year, we do better. <anecdote> From my first LGM (Montreal,
>> 2007) to now, there have been huge changes in terms of the number of
>> women attending, participating and talking. The event feels more and
>> more inclusive every time, which is great. It's a far cry from what I
>> perceived when I walked into the lecture hall at the Polytechnique andg
>> saw what appeared to be a hundred or so men and maybe two women.
>> </anecdote>

This change did not happen automatically. For Brussels 2010 we worked with gnome-women, debian-women, LinuxChix and other activist groups to locate and invite women involved in Libre Graphics. We wrote e-mails to women we knew were active in LG, but never had considered participating. We specifically targeted support to women speakers through funding and lodging. Also the grant from the OIF helped widen the scope of participants. We made sure that volunteer-teams were mixed and replacing T-shirts by aprons was not an accident either.

>> g) +1 on Prokoudine's point. Maybe looking at the ratio is a bit of a
>> brute force type of tactic which really doesn't necessarily take into
>> account the actual impact of women in the event and the community.

This might be true, but than the question is: How do we make sure that their impact is equally visible?

Femke


- Free Software Foundation, recommendations from the womens caucus: http://www.fsf.org/news/recommendations-from-the-womens-caucus
- Kirrily Robbins, Standing Out in the Crowd: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/10173
- Python foundation diversity statement: http://www.python.org/community/diversity
- Gnome Outreach Program for Women: http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/women
- Debian Women Mentoring Program: http://women.debian.org/mentoring
- FLOSSPOLS (EU study about the societal impact of F/LOSS. A few years old, but still relevant) D17 - Gender: Policy Recommendations http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-Gender_Policy_Recommendations.pdf