On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 08:33:23PM +0200, Margarita Manterola wrote: > > - have specific travel grants / sponsoring for women speakers, possibly > > explicitly inviting them from other projects. Two remarks about this: > > > > - we have had multiple editions of the "DebConf Newbie" initiative in > > the past. This idea is very similar, but it will have a different > > target public (women DebConf participants instead of newbies) > > Yes, I suggested doing something like that this year, but it's hard to > market it in a way that doesn't trigger negative feelings for the > group that is not included in the special group, isn't it?
Yes, you're right, but to some extent that's likely inevitable. If, as a project, we decide that affirmative action / positive discrimination is the way to go to solve gender (and other kinds of) imbalances in the project, then IMHO we need to accept those consequences. It's "just" a matter of whether we consider the imbalances severe enough to take affirmative actions to solve them. Other Free Software projects seem to consider it worth to do so. FWIW, I don't remember any sort of complaints by non-newbies being discriminated for the DebConf newbies initiative. (There were other kind of issues, but mostly in the area of better coordination / organization.) That's not much as a data point, I know, but it might be better than nothing :) Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Former Debian Project Leader . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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