[Promotion] Women in FLOSS day?

[Thilo Pfennig]

2006/11/2, Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net>:

> Some awards? Some examples of recent contributions? Along similar lines, some
> interviews with key people from a number of projects? Not great ideas, anyone
> got any?

Generally whe should not try to prepare too many ideas for the women.
I think that more importantly they should take over the idea soon and
discuss themselves what they think is best. I am sure that they will
do no harm to FLOSS :-) .

I think it would be bad if this would end just in a "best female
programmer selected 2006". My random ideas:

 * Maybe a BarCamp/hackfest/unconference that is also present online on that day
 * There could/should be one site/wiki that allows people to
contribute before and after that day
 *  it would be cool if projects like Debian, KDE, GNOME, Fedora,
Ubuntu, ... would link on their front pages to the site on that day.
Maybe we could get Google and others to link on that day, too.
 *  it would be good to have different acivities around the globe that
are not organized centralised.

I think there might also be support from women awareness
organisations. We might even get surprised about the support. Although
women in FLOSS are a minority I think it is a very good chance for
women because:

A good female developer can just contribute essentials to a project
and if the code is good this would lead to immediate respect and
influence. This is because there is no real stableinfrastructure of
male oppression like in some companies. There might be men that do
want to block influence of a woman, but I see FLOSS as a system where
nothing but good ideas, freedom and quality of code count. All other
factors do exist but can not be real blockers.

I also think that women could really program software they like. Women
do have different receptions about what is important - in free
software they have the chance to make the software like they want it
to be without anybody having the power to cut out the female touch.
Not to be misunderstood - I do not mean the software that some men
might think of from their preconceptions. I really do not know what
this will look like, but the industry more and more tries to make
products that are also liked by women. But what could be more
emancipation to build yourself, what you dream of and not having some
well-paid men in the top of Fortune 100 companies thing of what they
can sell women. So this would be "Software from women for women" ;-) I
really think our software will be better the more influence women will
have.

The question is: How do we move on from here? Or better: How can we
give this idea of some knowledgeable women that work this out. I am
eager to see where this is going ;-)


Thilo
-- 
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