On 30/11/2004, at 1:07 AM, Helen Faulkner wrote:
At the last meeting we covered the "who we are and what do we like
about the Debian Women project" topics quite well, I thought. Next
time, we are planning to skip the formal intros (which took quite a
long time) in favour of an informal "meet and greet" period for the
hour before the actual meeting. Everyone, especially new people, will
be very welcome to join IRC and introduce themselves in that period
With a couple of posts immediately beforehand to remind the slow among
us that the meeting is on =)
1) What would you personally most like to get out of the Debian Women
project?
a) more knowledge about how to use Debian
b) more interaction with or contribution to Debian
c) social benefits from meeting the people involved in Debian Women
d) benefits (to yourself or to Debian) from you helping other people
who are involved in Debian Women
e) other? Please elaborate.
I'd like to know more about running a secure debian system - especially
public web serving. I have http://www.danamania.com/ on an old mac
performa. More than that, it's rather rewarding being a bit of an
inspiration to other people - not so much what I do specifically, but
the social side - so just being Another Visible Geekgal is worth quite
a lot to me, because seeing others doing Cool Stuff has helped me in
the past. Anything from talking in #debian-women and being generally
geeky there, to having a little slashdot article about me ( *preen* )
attempting to boot Mac OSX on a 25mhz debian machine from 1993... it's
visibility, it's good.
2) How can the Debian Women project best help you gain more knowledge
about using Debian?
a) holding "tutorial" discussions on the mailing list or on the wiki
b) enabling you to ask people directly on IRC
c) informing you about where to access relevant documentation
d) other? Please elaborate
Oh the tutorial thing can work REALLY well in a mailing list. Linuxchix
has had a few of these, and while they take effort to keep up & going,
the mailing list format allows any of us to jump in & add a few
cents/pence worth. It's archived, it's publicly available and it's
googleable. Half the buzz there is seeing what others are getting out
of the project, which seems to be where the irc channel also does its
best work.
3) How can the Debian Women project best help you to contribute more
to Debian?
A confidence boost! For me so far it's only been bug reports, but
that's still something :). I'd never submitted one before, but a little
pressure to go & do so in the irc channel had me submitting a bug
before I realised what I was doing. Ace!. And suddenly... I've
contributed, a bug was fixed and the world inched a little closer to
seeing a Stable Sarge.
5) How can the Debian Women project best help you to help others (and
hopefully benefit yourself and/or Debian in the process)?
a) encouraging people to ask questions on IRC
b) encouraging people to ask questions on the mailing list
c) allowing you to post helpful information to the wiki or webpage
d) increasing the amount of cooperation or collaboration between
Debian Women and other groups in Debian (eg debian-mentors)
d) other? Please elaborate.
I think this comes back to the Being Visible thing I mentioned above.
I'll be the first to admit that I quite like talking about the Cool
Stuff I occasionally get to do. I hope some of this rubs off on others.
Apart from this, none of us know debian so intimately that we're good
with answers for all deb questions - so having an arena where we all
feel free to jump in & help when we can is gold. As for what makes me
personally comfortable to do that - just a little politeness and the
mailinglist/channel being sociably friendly is most of what I need. (I
know that's different for others though).
6) Are problems with language preventing you from becoming more
involved with Debian Women?
As a pure english speaker, so far none - apart from an empathy with the
non english speakers when the irc channel shifts into spanish or
portuguese :).
7) Anything else you would like to say that I have missed.
*squeak*
dana
