Re: Interesting and relevant article

Hi Joop,

On Fri, 2012-09-21 at 07:45 +0200, Joop Kiefte wrote:
> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ten_easy_ways_attract_women_your_free_software_project
>
> Maybe this article can be a starting point for when/if we want to try
> to get even more and better contributions, and make the project more
> accessible? Does anyone know/have statistics about this for
> Libreoffice?

        You're most welcome to build some. On the other hand of the top ten
recommendations a few look like non-starters to me:

        * switch mailing lists to forums
        * communicate for the sake of communication not to address
          specific issues
        * use wikis instead of version control
        * switch to a high level language: perl, python,ruby
        * in-person / pair programming

        On the other hand - I think we get a few things right: we tend not to
have massive flame wars, and (I hope) we have a friendly peer structure.

        We have some excellent women developers and contributors around who are
respected members of the community: I'm thinking of Christina, Regina,
Tibbylickle, Sophie, Jaqueline, (and this is where I get duffed up for
forgetting some other female super-stars). So - gender shouldn't matter
to the welcome in the community. I'm aware of a couple of cases at
conferences where women have been actively helped by other attendees to
avoid specific unwanted attention; so we try to provide a safe
environment. I hope - we're not doing too terribly badly here.

        Of course, if there are areas of contribution that are more attractive
to women that we are failing to provide a good on-ramp into the project
for we should fix that. The article suggests UI design, documentation,
marketing (though personally I think women hackers are every bit a match
for male ones) - then concrete suggestions to improve involvement in
these areas are appreciated: although, this is the wrong list to discuss
those topics :-)

        HTH,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot