[Promotion] Re: Women in FLOSS day?

[Thilo Pfennig]

2006/11/27, Anne Østergaard <anne at oestergaard.nu>:

> I am very sorry that I have not responded to your fine initiative and
> your mail before.

No problem. I hoped to get at least one answer by giving this status message.


> I can tell you about many conferences where there have been no female
> speakers at all to give presentations. Do you think the program will
> attract many women participants?

I think it would be a good start if we establish a habbit to try to
have a meeting point or workshop for women on every important open
source conference, so that women do not get lost. So if there would be
at least one day, one event where women could meet that would help
women interested in open source to find fellow women instead of having
to work themselves through crowds of men. So better have some KDE,
GNOME, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora -Women giving a hand and helping to get
to know how to start as to make bad experiences on one stand. (Well
sure the ultimate goal should be that NO ONE should make bad
experiences - and sure every stand should welcome women as it should
everybody else)

It would be a good question to ask every conference where women can
meet and if organizers did not think about it, remember them or
organize it. What I think this could also be good for is to help
cooperation between different kinds of organisations on other levels

> During the many conferences I have attended I keep coming back to the
> ones with a warm and welcoming atmosphere, and diversity.
>
> Whenever a female starts a debate on a mailing list she has to be
> prepared to defend herself and/or take a lot of "crab". Even have her
> intelligence, and motives questioned in a not "flattering" way. These
> ir-respectable remarks will remain on the internet and flaw your
> reputation.

I think this is difficult, because on the one hand it is important for
women to get respect, but as nobody is perfect it can even happen to a
woman to act stupid. I myself often do stupid things and sometimes I
like being told to if I do stupid things but sometimes I rather would
like people to look at my intentions and give me a hand. So I really
think the nature of problems that women have are not totally different
to those of men but the quality is VERY different. So my hope is also
that if men change their attitude against women they will also change
attitude their attitude against each other, play less macho games and
generally be more constructive. To be realistic also means that we
should all be aware that we are taking about changes that will be
slow.

Another thing we could do is having free software VIPs giving some
statements about women in open source. I mean people like Stallman,
CEOs of Linux distributions,... I remember at the world championship
some soccer players volunteered to make public statements against
illegal prostitution and as they had the publics attention that had  a
huge impact on the attention the topic got.

In future it would also be nice to have some polititians to make some
statement about women in Open Source. I think that politians would
have to be thankfull for both: Open Source itself and women in Open
Source and it is time to remind them to state their gratitude, as an
increasing number of government organisations are using open source
and also lack of qualification is mich bigger problem for women, than
for men and I think with Open Source many things are possible.



> I have thought about your idea about a price. I think it would work. I

Actually Quim came up with this idea.


> Were you aware that during the Libre Software Meeting in France this
> year over 200 French women attended the conference during the week. The
> majority were there to learn more about the use of Free Software in
> Education. This has not attracted so much attention as the Women's
> Summer Outreach Program 2006

Not heard of it. I think it would be good to have one place for
coordination and also public relation, gather material. Is this
something for freedesktop.org? Does this need an organisation? Or
maybe are there womens organisations that would like to help?

I think gathering ideas, making lists of what can be done, creating a
more general mailing list would also be a good idea.

> Thilo please don't leave us. We need you!

Okok ;-)

I think I would like to keep being the one that gives some ideas and
helping the ideas to get fulfilled in practice. I think it should be
the women to do the organisational stuff in their own hands.

To all other readers I suggest you talk about women in Open Source on
different occasions, try this and that, keep this topic alive. We also
should think about open source organisations and if not every
organisations should have at least one women in its board (depending
on how big the organisation is. But Fedora for instance:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board still does not have a women on
board, yet.

Thilo

-- 
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