friendlier debian?
About a month ago, in a discussion about the Debian Women project, I noted that the project had not only resulted in more women getting involved in Debian, but also men who had been previously put off by Debian’s often aggessive developer culture. This prompted the question of why not just have a project to make Debian friendlier, instead of having a project focused on women. I wrote a long response to this, which I’ve posted here in case others are interested too.
The Debian Women project was started because there have only ever been around 4-8 female Debian developers, yet there are currently around 950 developers in total—less than 1% of developers are women. Why aren’t there more female developers? The honest answer is that we don’t know. What we do know though is that there were an increasing number of women peripherally involved in Debian who felt for a variety of reasons (the major one being the lack of visibility of other women involved in the project) that they couldn’t get more involved. Debian Women was started with the aims of encouraging more women to participate in Debian development, having more visible women within Debian (role models), as well as providing a support structure. All of which are very women-centric goals.
The benefits for men have actually been an interesting (but unintentional) side-effect of the project. When we started the project, we never expected that so many interested (no, not in that way!) men would get involved. The IRC channel is currently around 60-70% men, many of whom are already Debian developers. When asked about their reasons for participating, many express general interest in feminism and “women in computing” but as the project continues to grow, another reason cited is that the community that has built up around the Debian Women project is much more positive, welcoming and friendly atmosphere than other Debian fora. This is certainly not something that any of us anticipated. Other developers, particularly ones who have been active in the project for many years, are surprised by the Debian Women IRC channel and mailing list too. They didn’t think that this kind of atmosphere could/would happen within Debian. And, now that it does exist, many people are much more keenly aware of he possibility of aiming for a similar atmosphere in other areas of Debian.
So, why not just have a project concentrating on making Debian a friendlier place? Well, aside from the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, which were (and still are) the primary aims of the project, it’s often very hard to change an the atmosphere of an existing structure, particularly one where the majority of the participants haven’t ever taken a step back and thought about it. I think it would have been very hard to start up a successful project with the primary goal being to make Debian less aggressive. On the other hand, the Debian Women project, although it didn’t set out to do so, has demonstrated to the Debian community as a whole that it is possible to have a friendlier Debian community and furthermore that this is something that may indeed be desirable. So I think it’s not that we’re trying to remedy problems with a women-based environment, but rather that a project with women-related goals has ended up starting to remedy (or at least starting to get people thinking about and questioning) some more inherent problems within the community. Perhaps another way of thinking about it is, “what’s good for women is good for everyone.”
March 31st, 2005 at 12:03 am
Maybe if 99% of Debian developers were women instead of the other way around, the project would be able to complete a release in less than three years.
March 31st, 2005 at 7:52 am
I would strongly agree that, to end users, Debian Developers are very hostile creatures. Take #debian as a classic example..
March 31st, 2005 at 8:51 am
I’m one of these males on #debian-woman and mailling list. I found your “debian-friendly” project idea extremely interesting. I’d like a more collaborative and less competitive Debian world and I think that’s exactly why DW has been so successful.
March 31st, 2005 at 6:09 pm
Hi Hannah,
Right after your FOSDEM speech, we chittery chatted for a minute about a female touch giving #debian a friendlier face.
I’m really pleased to see you thinking about ways to make Debian friendlier. Keep up the good work!
Mark
Debian user
March 31st, 2005 at 10:38 pm
Huh. The only real Debian “people” contact I have had is through the Debian Planet news feed, but I haven’t really seen many signs of hostility among them.
I’d like to get involved eventually, but I don’t quite believe that my skills and current free time are up to par to be helpful yet. Working on that. :)
I just checked out the Debian Women site today - definitely looks like a good resource. Friendly is good.
April 1st, 2005 at 4:20 am
I just switched to Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org/), which is Debian-based. They do releases every six months and they seem to care more about user-friendliness.
April 2nd, 2005 at 6:19 pm
#debian-women: teenage ch1×0r approved
I’d just like to point out that that phrase (i.e. “teenage ch1×0r) is not mine. It’s Erinn’s, actually. So no, I’m not doing some strange sort of self promotion. <grin>
Two days ago, I was browsing Debian Planet in my RSS aggregator, and …
April 6th, 2005 at 8:22 am
Appart from some ubiquituous “google it” answers, I have not that aggressive attitude you say channels like #debian are example of.
Anyway, may be if we create a Debian Men project, all the macho men will then have a proper fora where to express their aggresiveness or unfriendliness and that will by itself turn channels like #debian and Debian in general more friendly and gender neutral.
April 6th, 2005 at 4:07 pm
The DW project got my attention because it promoted a “positive, welcoming and friendly atmosphere” still I did not try to participate because I’m, well… male.
I would very much like to see a “positive, welcoming and friendly atmosphere” Debian project for all people.
I will be using Ubuntu for the time being as it has this “much love” way about it. :)
(And it “just works” most of the time)
April 9th, 2005 at 2:19 am
thanks for your article!! Sometimes I get worry about the idea of the “invasion” by men in women-groups… but is interesting to see this places like “friendly places” where everybody can have access to (without gender specific).
April 10th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
I’m not a developer and have never been on debian-women or any other developer site/group/list but I use debian-user a lot and do think there’s something gettting very struck about the culture: a focus on programming and fixing compatibility problems but in a rather macho way. The result is that we don’t have a good hardware compatibility list for Debian, we don’t have good documentation, we don’t have good ways the expertise on, say, the user list, creates FAQs etc. I’m not sure what the answer is but I think it is linked with a stereotypically Western male gendered component to the problem. If there’s a way I can help I’ll try but time is very limited sadly.
Chris (male, end user of Debian for years now)