On Mon 18 Apr 2011 11:36:01, Margarita Manterola wrote: >Last year, we did the IRC training sessions which worked fine, and I >hope that they can happen again this year.
Yes, I hope it too. But so far, I've not received many replies to my proposal of a new round of IRC sessions [1], so I let it go. >Apart from that, is there >something that we might do to get more women to contribute to Debian? I remember that we already talked about it almost one year ago: we ended up with some proposals and ideas [2] [3] which were only partly realized. We could start from there. :) Now, my personal opinion. I think that we need to work a lot on the - sorry for the rudeness - communication fail of DW. I'm not accusing anyone, only a matter of fact. So, Debian became a more kind and welcoming place, and people both in Debian and DW are very supportive (to me Ana and Rhonda was/are super-supportive even if they have not work as DW mentors) but we *fail* in communicating this change. We even fail in communicating our existence/presence! Let's think at it: an outdated and oldfashioned website, no conversations on the IRC chan, no initiatives, no presence at conference, no news about us. We're invisible. This invisibility of DW could be not the main cause of the lack of new female contributors but IMO it helps in not achieving our goals. So, my proposals. In the last months we have finished the migration of the old DW-wiki in wiki.d.o and we have some well organized contents there [4], but women.debian.org is still very outdated and oldfashioned (both in contents and graphics): thanks to Ana is now again up-and-running (well, at least we could again commit in it) but IMVHO it needs a lot of love. As I'm quite comfortable with wml I can work on it, and switch the current theme to - if you agree - the new one of www.d.o. Another one is a better use of communication tools: such as our identi.ca group [5]. I'm not a very microblogging (or blogging at all) person, but using it is simple and quite fun, and it's important to reach people who doesn't really like ML as we do ;). Btw, we have 62 members in debianwomen identi.ca's group. \o/ Last september Marga sent a "Bits from Debian Women" mail/news/whatever: definitely a great idea, and as me and Meike work on -publicity team it couldn't be too difficult to write and sent another and publish it on DPN. And btw, when someone needs to communicate something to a wider public (wrt to DW project: i.e. progress or call for help of DW mentoring project, interviews of DW members, talks about DW, irc sessions, and so on) please contact -publicity team. :) Enough for now ;). Cheers, Francesca [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2011/03/msg00001.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2010/08/msg00017.html [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-women/2010/09/msg00029.html [4] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWomen [5] http://identi.ca/group/debianwomen -- <taffit> eof: when I want something | "Convince people with results, done quickly, I don't wait for | rather than words" others ;) | Enrico Zini
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