On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Margarita Manterola <margamanter...@gmail.com> wrote: > Apart from that, is there > something that we might do to get more women to contribute to Debian?
On a personal level my lack of involvement these past couple years has been lack of time. A vast majority of the systems I work on from day to day are Debian (all of them at work are) but in my free time I've tended to be involved with non-packaging tasks with Ubuntu (and now I frequently host the San Francisco Bay Area Debian dinners). However, I have some packages in svn that I need to update and hope to get uploaded to Wheezy in the coming months. Also, how is the mentoring program doing? Letting people know that there are mentors waiting to help out would be good, even I could benefit from this, while I have done packaging in the past, tools and things change, and I need to get back up to speed. Now, in the direct email that was sent out (thanks for that!) there was a line about the goals of the Debian Women project: > Not only with packages, but with any aspect that helps > improve the distribution. This is also mentioned on the website but I think this is worth highlighting. As an example of where numbers continue to grow: the majority of women involved with Ubuntu who aren't employed by Canonical are non-packaging contributors. Event coordination for local teams, documentation, educational outreach (via online and real life classes/training or otherwise), news and marketing and accessibility are where many women really shine in the project, and by encouraging participation in all these areas we got to 5% women in Ubuntu last year. That said, there is great *interest* by many of these women in eventually becoming developers, and with the connections made within the project through all these other tasks a lot of women already feel comfortable and can just ask someone they already work with if they want to get more involved on the packaging side. I think getting women comfortable within a project through tasks they are already comfortable with is a worthy goal (plus all these things I mentioned are hugely beneficial to the project!) and from that pool of contributors you probably *could* work with them to bring them into the more technically-demanding packaging world (this is not something UW has actively done yet, but maybe we should). I understand it's the culture of Debian itself which holds uploads and DDship in such high regard in comparison to other contributions, rather than something DW specifically does, but I think the recent GR to accept non-packaging contributors is a major step to getting past this and I think the DW project could do a good job of reaching out. -- Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2 http://www.princessleia.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-women-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/BANLkTik8hnEsPb6G7oS9oQ6tr3LaZW-=d...@mail.gmail.com
