Re: IRC Meetings
> Hi all! > > We haven't had an IRC meeting in a while, so I was wondering if there > is still interest in having them. I enjoyed them, as I think it's > nice to try and get everyone together at the same time every so often. I'd love to have one, haven't been to my first one yet as I missed the last two by accident. > Even if there's no big serious topic that needs discussed, I think it > could be helpful to use the meetings as a way to touch base and sketch > out the status of projects and set short-term goals. For example, it > seems like there's been a lot going on lately in the website and > mentoring areas. At a meeting the people heading up those efforts > could give a status update on what's been happening in their areas, as > well as what steps they plan to take next. This would be an > opportunity for them to solicit help on upcoming tasks, and for people > interested in helping to volunteer / ask questions about what skills > are needed / etc. > > What do you guys think? It'd be great to touch base on projects people are doing. It'd be a great way to both find people and find projects to do good stuff :) I brought up at some point the possibility of bringing on some of the Malaysian women I met at a forum a while ago, as they have a very different situation in ICT there, with something like 70% of the ICT workforce being women. And it isn't a big deal, or over the top, or at all wierd. It is very interesting, and probably worth the conversation. I'll touch base with them and see if they can make some time. Cheers, Pia -- Linux Australia http://linux.org.au/ Jeff: Whatchootalkin'boutwillis? Pia: What's Willis? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Website, logo, etc.
Hi all, On Sat, 2004-07-03 at 03:43, Erinn Clark wrote: > Pros: > - It gives it some credibility as an actual official Debian project > - Gforge makes translations / outsider contributions etc. much easier > - Central repository with arch/svn/cvs > > Cons: > - Something about the URL http://women.alioth.debian.org just seems.. >I'm not sure, but I don't think I like it > - I'm not sure how likely we'd be to get our project hosted there > > I've had some people mention they'd be willing to host the website and > I'm sure we could get anonymous arch/cvs/svn access so that others could > contribute. The problem with this is that it won't be an *.*.debian.org > URL, but most likely women.debian.net. I see no reason to have some > stuff on alioth and the rest of the website elsewhere; I'd prefer to > have it all in one place. Stupid question, what would the arch repository be for? Contributing what? debian.women.org is a point of contact right, it isn't going to start running its own stuff is it? Sorry, I'm a little confused :) Cheers, Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: Website, logo, etc.
On Sun, 2004-07-04 at 10:39, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote: > There are always specific stuff you may wish to maintain in a > revision control, like web pages, specific documents or images. K, that is sweet, I was thinking it was meant for contributing packages of other projects, therefore splitting up the community, which would be bad :) > Although I understand and agree with your worries here, I also > understand that use can be found for a revision control system, > too. Sweet. We should also consider allowing women to use the debian-women name to contribute packages to something, if they are nervous or whatever about contributing to a project personally, or submitting stuff for comment if they want some feedback and are new to the scene and not used to it. Perhaps? :) Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: The Linux Operator Guide to Women
On Mon, 2004-07-05 at 19:36, Fernanda Weiden wrote: > FYI and comments... > > The Linux Operator Guide to Women > > http://www.g4techtv.com/feature.aspx?article_key=431 Man, that is AWESOME! :D So so very funny. I'm posting this around my community right now ;) Hugs, Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: Supporters brief-up
On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 17:10, Helen Faulkner wrote: > I really would not like to see *anyone* who is trying to help us getting > the impression that we don't want them about. I think parts of the > discussion we've had about the supporters page idea will probably be > discouraging to men who were otherwise interested in helping us, and I > think that is a pity. It feels to me like this discussion is becoming > focussed on making a nearly-exclusive space for women in an isolated > corner of debian rather than encouraging women to be involved in debian > as a whole. They are very different things. I didn't originally have > the impression that we wanted a little ghetto for ourselves. Do we? I kind of see Debian-Women as a stepping stone to full community integration. As a contact point for women wanting to get involved who are shy/not sure of their options/concerned about these sexist rumours they've heard/etc etc. It is a place to promote women in Debian, as role models to up and coming hackers (male and female). I see it as a place that women can start from to get comfortable, and then be able to deal with the community on their own feet (although always with support where they need it). I don't think, as Helen mentioned, that Debian Women should be a place for women to hide away, and segment themselves from the community. We need now more than ever to be contributing postively, to be contributing our knowledge, our code, our documentation, FAQs, slides (from talks), and our minds. We can't allow Debian Women to become something fragmented from everything else. I've also been thinking, it might be an interesting conduit for up and coming developers to commit code to, if they are uncomfortable committing it personally. Imagine having Debian Women as a name in a package for contributions :) My 2c worth. Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: X Question
On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 12:13, Raquel Rice wrote: > I've been running 2 servers using Debian for about 6 months. > However, neither has had X installed. Today I'm setting up a > desktop, with X installed. X starts, but does not appear. How do I > go about bringing up Gnome? Have you run xf86config, or xf86cfg to ensure that the basics are set up ok? What actually happens when you try run X? Have you installed all the necessary packages for GNOME (sometimes it is less than obvious). Cheers, Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: editing Debian documentation
On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 07:23, Frank Lichtenheld wrote: > If you just want to help with > documentation you should probably subscribe to debian-doc@lists.debian.org > for all the documentation that is maintained within the DDP CVS. You > should be able to contribute to the DDP without being a Debian member > via the CVS (don't know for sure, though). This is true for the > Debian website btw. (list in this case is [EMAIL PROTECTED]). > For man pages or similar things you can file bugs with patches against > the corresponding packages. You could always clean up man pages, and then send them to the relevant package maintainers. That way you have direct interaction with the people behind the projects you are improving. This can be good and bad :) Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: Women in Open Source
On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 11:36, Amaya Rodrigo Sastre wrote: > 1. Why is the gender ratio in Free/Open Source Software even more >imbalanced than it is in the rest of computing? I don't believe it is any _more_ out of skew, in fact I have found more women get involved in the open source scene in some ways, because they specifically don't have to deal with the social norms at 'home' that may inhibit otherwise them. The researchers should look into Malaysia where they have a huge proportion of women in IT, across the board. This apparently didn't used to be the case, they used to be similar to Australia in that they only had a very small percentage of women. Now they are offering incentives for men to get into IT, because there are so many women. I was told about 70% women, and that includes the really high positions, no glass ceilings :D > 2. In what other ways are the causes of this imbalance affecting F/OSS? I think it mean people are drawn to FOSS that otherwise might not get involved in IT as they can contribute without as much crap put on them. I think that most people of the younger generations in FOSS are quite open minded, and quite accepting. You have to be to have a successful global project with people from many cultures, religions, both sexes and many ages. I think this therefore is a more supportive environment that the typical western corporate environment. I work in the corporate IT world, and it is completely different to the FOSS world. It is caught up in the social norms (women are technical! surely!), controlled by men of two generations ago who believe all women should be at home with the children, and young women are being brought up to believe they have choice and possibilities. These young women, including myself, inevitably butt heads with the older generations, and to be honest it has already driven away a secret generation of women hackers, who were extremely popular in the 60's and 70's (because they did so well on the entry tests) but didn't often last long due to the conditions they had to work under, and the complete lack of recognition they usually got. Here is a link to a paper by one of our (few) women politicians. Very smart woman: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=1178 Anyway, cheers, Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: Debian-women support?
On Sat, 2004-07-24 at 11:23, nicole wrote: > Perhaps this response from our "friend" Jonathan can be used as an example > of WHY debian-women exists. > I am not sure why he was solicited for a response on a "supporters" page > considering his fairly well-known point of view. Perhaps he received the > invitation by mistake. This event does bother me a little. I have to agree with JW that it shouldn't be an exclusive club. If everytime we get trolled we kick a person out with a lot of abuse and flames, then we are not actually progressing. Feeding the trolls makes them larger, but changing our course to the tune of their laughter is very sad. The man said some stupid things, but also had the point that he would support a woman as much as he would support a man (in the initial questions). I had to deal with a lot of crap on our mailing lists when I first got president of linux australia, not so much because I'm female, but because there was a lot of mistrust in the community about the group due to its past, and we had to build that up. We didn't ban anyone from having their say, certainly didn't kick people off lists, and now we have quite a civil and supportive mailing list. I guess I'm trying to say we'll come up across this time and time again until we earn some trust (and yes debian women has to earn trust, just like every other group), and we need a more constructive way of dealing with it without segmenting ourselves. Eventually silly comments like JWs simply won't be funny or troll-worthy, because they will be completely displaced. We should just get out there are be making a positive contribution to the project and community, and the actions will speak for themselves. You can't simply _tell_ someone to change their tune, you can however prove through action their tune is so irrelevant that it isn't worth singing. People like this only want a rise from us, and we give it to them. Cheers, Pia -- Pia Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Australia
Re: Article on Debian Women
Hi all, I've been wanting to jump into this thread since it started but I've been feverishly fighting fires. Ahh, Open Source politics > On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 07:48:43PM +0100, Karianne Grønningsæter wrote: > >> I was thinking about writing a short article about being a girl on >> Matarò Ubuntu conference, and some thoughts and ideas I got there. Now, >> as I wrote to my laptop-battery died on the plane, and then continued >> with another 4 pages by hand, it may seem to be a larger article, and >> will probably need some more time and work before it comes. >> I'll post it as soon as it's ready. Sounds awesome! At LCA2005 (http://linux.conf.au) there was talk of running a women in open source BOF. We are getting a better turn-out of women every year! It'd be great to have a BOF and try to come up with some actions to move forward with what we all care about. I have some ideas myself, and I believe that actions achieve results. To be honest it is the best way to get a message through to our community, where JFDI is everyones motto. Then we can all go out for a drink afterwards :) I have to say I have been quite impressed with some of the community response to discussions about women in this space. The DebConf responses to Erinns talk about the Women in Debian project in Brazil for instance were mostly mature and supportive. There are and always will be idiots out there, it is a matter of ensuring that attitude isn't the accepted norm :) Hugs to all, I'll post some more ideas when I've finished playing with fires ;) Pia
Re: Sexist Behaviour in Debian Women
Hi all, > Discussion: > 1) We need to create spaces, forums, cultures within Debian that are > welcoming to and supportive of women. > 2) We need to encourage women to be involved in Debian and to interact > with > Debian. Can I also suggest: 3) We need to be welcoming of men, of all people. There are many inequalities in the world, and I'm certainly not saying all people should be treated equally (all people are different right), but there is inequal access to opportunity globally. We should be trying to support a culture of creating equal opportunity for all. 4) We need to particularly take a look at our own personal surroundings, work, home and otherwise, and think how we can reverse some of the behaviours out there. Many negative behaviours towards women are propogated by womens acceptance of and playing up to such behaviours. For instance, if people around believe that as a women in ICT (let alone Debian) you should be quite butch, ensure you don't simply give up your femininity to fulfill that particular assumption. Try to not be negatively competitive towards other women in your personal space, another common behaviour that makes the issue harder to work through. Cheers, Pia
Re: Next #d-women forum; topics anyone?
> I've been volunteered (due to an apparently fortuitous position > timezone-wise) to moderate the next meeting on the debian-women IRC > channel. Thanks Matt :) > Please raise your ideas for discussion topics, and one of the ones that > gets > general support (and that I have some idea about, since I'll be leading > the > discussion) will be our Topic Of The Month. I'd really love to talk about how some of the problems of equal access to opportunity we encounter in most western countries that have already been solved in part by some of the eastern countries. I know that Malaysia has something like 70% women in ICT generally, and that they used to be similar to Australia and other 'western' countries in terms of very male dominated. I met some amazing Malaysian women at a forum a year ago and I'd be happy to email them to ask whether they would mind discussing their experience and how things have changed there. Perhaps we can learn some tactics that have been proven in this space? Perhaps this would shed some light? This isn't Debian specific but I think it would be quite interesting. I also believe that this isn't a problem specific to Debian or even ICT generally. I believe there is a general problem across the board in many of our countries, I mean just look at politics, corporates, and other high end roles and see the significant lack of women. Anyway, if this is interesting to people I'd be more than happy to contact some Malaysian ladies for the discussion. Cheers all, and happy new year :) Pia
