Hm, actually, I haven't noticed a great deal of the negative behavior in
the article in the "open source community". Lately, I've realized that
this is probably because the only open source project I've considered
myself a part of is worldforge, which seems to be unique in that we can
answer most of the questions in the article with "Yes", "Almost", or "We
will when we actually have users". The only other "open source" stuff
I'm involved in these days is linuxchix and slashdot (which I thought
was just a few people trying to ruin it for everyone. it was actually
good 2 or 3 years ago.).
Worldforge is a project to create a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online
RolePlaying Game). We've taken a sort of do everything approach, so
there are multiple servers, clients, worlds, etc. under development.
There hasn't really been a public release of "worldforge", but we have
done a small demo client/server, and spun off several libraries,
including a game-oriented c++ gui lib and our client/server protocol.
We do a lot of "feminine" stuff such as management, communication,
keeping the web pages up to date etc. It's the only open source project
I know of with an orgchart
(http://www.worldforge.org/website/management/org_chart). Most of this
stuff is done by males, however, since our project leader and most of
the project are males (I'd better not show this to them; they might stop
doing it.).
So, the question is, why is Worldforge unique? At one point, I thought
it was because it was a big project, and a big project with dozens of
developers inherently needs more management and community than a small
one, where it's one person doing most of it and everyone else just
submits patches and bugs, etc.
Maybe it's because we've been mucking around for a year and haven't
released any code yet. Therefore, we've had to form a community around
the project rather than the code.
Maybe it's because we're in active development. We can use any help we
can get, including hanging around and arguing about design issues, so
we're inclined to be rather nice to newbies. We don't say "show me the
code", since we haven't released much anyway.
It could also be because we're a game project, so we need art, writing,
music etc., so not everyone is a coder, and not everyone is doing "hard"
stuff. Some of the most respected people in the project do "soft" stuff
like 3D modelling, web database stuff, client and editor coding, web
content, and adminning the servers.
I've also noticed that there are quite a few women in the project.
While hardly equal numbers, its more in the 15% range than the 1% range.
Though I'm the only female coder, there are some in the other parts of
the project. The producer of acorn, our first game proof of concept
release, is a woman, and she's not even a coder. I was actually quite
surprised at this, since the project is the intersection of two
traditionally heavily male communities, gamers and hackers. I'm
guessing this has something to do with crossover from the MU*
communities, in some of which 50% (say they) are female.
Actually, coding is a pretty small part, and really, is the easiest
part. Most of the software side of things is design right now, and
there's also all of the content.
So I guess the point of this whole thing is that women in a project
correlates with less emphasis on coding correlates with value placed on
non-coding productive[1] activities correlates with value placed on
non-productive activities correlates with community.
It's difficult to say what are the causes and what are the effects. The
presence of women in the project does not necessarily cause more
non-coding activity, since most of that is done by men. My guess is
that all of this is caused partly because of the unique requirements of
the project, ie, requiring both content and code; and partly because of
natural selection, ie. ny project of this size can't possibly last this
long without either a release or a community.
[1] I use productive here to mean producing something tangible directly.
So coding would be productive because it produces code, art would be
productive because it produces art, but management is not productive
because it does not produce anything directly.
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