Hi all, I presented last week about women in FOSS on a panel at OWSC II in Spain (opensourceworldconference.com). It was very interesting for me, because the panelists were very varied. One women spent 25 minutes (we only had 5 mins each) basically telling off the crowd for locking women out. This left a very negative reaction from the men and women in the room, and to be honest I felt quite sad to see her talk.
I basically took the stance that in the FLOSS world we have the opportunity to and often are changing social norms. I spoke about the difference between active and passive biases, and said that generally our community has a great attitude towards individuals achieving whatever they want, and thus many people who may be locked out in their normal environments by the social norms (as discriminated by gender, age, disability, or whatever) are actually pioneering a huge change of perspective and status quos. We have created an environment for great people to be great. Basically I said we are making the change in FLOSS and that the world is a better place for it. It may sound a bit fluffy, and I only had 5 minutes, but I had many young women and men come up to me afterwards so glad to be inspired. I think we can achieve much more positive change in gender equality through a very positive approach, and this panel "discussion" proved my point. The audience walked away with a positive association rather than the negative feeling that the woman harping on the bad stories invoked. I actually had one young person say that the negative stories made him feel hurt, as he tries to include women. My differentiation between active biases and passive biases helped him a lot. Anyway, thought I'd share with y'all :) Cheers, Pia -- Linux Australia http://linux.org.au/ "Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye." - Bill Hicks -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
