This BOF featured Erinn Clark from the Debian Women Project

The Debian Women Project

• The original idea: Get more women involved in Debian, especially in technical parts of the project.
• Provide a starting point for women, who want to get involved in the Debian project
• Currently: 8 women involved in the Debian project, (~9 women have ever been Debian-Developers)
• Problems addressed:

  • It's hard to get into the Debian Project (even if you're a man) => might scare off women very likely

  • Women who were interested in development, were rejected for many different reason
• Motivation of the Project: Can we make a difference?

Women & Open Source Software in general

• Distinction between technical and non-technical work
• Most women are involved in non-technical parts of a project

• Example: OpenOffice.org-Marketing project - mainly driven by women

• Cultural problem: technology unfortunately is often considered a male thing

Women & Ubuntu

• Why are there no women involved in Ubuntu development? It's a case of scale of the project!
• Major Plus: Ubuntu is newer than Debian
• This means: We can do everything to not run into the problems other projects face(d)
• First Part of this philosophy: Code of Conduct
  • Whether it works, has still to be proved (so far, so good)
  • If there is something like Code of Conduct, "unsocialiced people" are more likely to not show up in the Ubuntu project
  • Adaption of behavoir:
    • Most people on mailing list and irc act according to the Code of Conduct
    • New users first watch and then act the same way
  • Meetings on IRC tend to be more like a true conversation

Possible actions to take

• Docs should be more precise, more documentating the "process" of doing something (esp. bug reporting, because it's an important task and the task with the most cryptic docs)
• Women shall be more "visible": encourage all female users you know to get involved!
• Encourage women to go to conferences (or sponsor them!)
• New project: a question day
• Learning together, mentoring on a local scale (local teams)
• More social events
• Adding something more specific about sexism into the Code of Conduct
• Use gender-neutral language in any language
• Encourage women to use female nicks on IRC
• There should be a doc on how people can help the project
• Go to schools, attract young people to Ubuntu
• Promoting Ubuntu in Cybercafés
• A ubuntu-love / ubuntu-family mailing list
• Something similiar to debian-jr
• Marketing targeted at female customers: Use it, even if you are a woman