gnome women
Concerned about the lack of female GNOME developers and inspired by the success of the Debian Women Project, Máirín Duffy and I have founded GNOME Women, a project to encourage more women to participate in GNOME development. At present, we’re starting small—just an IRC channel and a forthcoming mailing list—but I’m hopeful that the project will be as enourmously needed and successful as Debian Women. If you’re interested in getting involved, do drop by the IRC channel (#gnome-women on irc.gnome.org) or send me an email.
June 7th, 2005 at 3:05 am
Just want to wish you luck with GNOME women. I’m not sure if I can help you out in any way. If you need/would appreciate some help setting up a site or anything else Web related, send me an email. Cheers.
June 7th, 2005 at 9:09 am
Great. I have always wondered why arent any women working on free software out there. And not because its “cool” to have women on it but because you, women have that thing we men lack. This thing that doesn’t have a name but we all feel and know. Just like in a family were the father cannot replace a mother, i feel the same when we talk about any activity like software development. We, men, lack the ability and creativity you women always have.
June 7th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Don’t forget to also link to KDE Women another similar project from around 2001. I am sure the projects can share experiences of engaging women in OSS.
June 7th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
You know this kind of seems a little quixotic. When I tell you that there is a disturbing lack of women helping on the development of any number of open source progamming languages, do you plan to create projects to rectify this situation too?
June 7th, 2005 at 4:33 pm
Geoff, I’d like to hear why you think this kind of thing is quixotic.
As for your question about the lack of women developing open source programming languages, the answer is no. I’m not in any way involved in open source programming langauge development myself, so I’m really not in a position to create a project to rectify that situation.
June 7th, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Because creating dozens of “foo Women” projects is attempting to solve the wrong problem?
June 7th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
What do you believe is the “right” problem?
June 7th, 2005 at 5:07 pm
“but I’m hopeful that the project will be as enourmously *needed* and successful as Debian Women”
You are hoping that the Gnome project suffers from lots of aggressive and sexist behaviour so your project will be needed? :-p
June 7th, 2005 at 5:45 pm
Okay, fair point. Perhaps not needed in quite the same way… ;-)
June 9th, 2005 at 3:06 am
Perhaps in a perfect world “foo Women” is not strictly needed. Women should be able to integrate to FOSS development and culture like any man would do.
But that’s not the true. For women there are a lot of taboos when it’s about science and computers and that’s a shame.
Showing other women that they are not crazy if they want to help to FOSS, because there are other women that does it, it’s lovely and needed today.
It is needed in the same way that in countries like mine we need a local GNOME group to show that contributing to the project is not imposible. It is needed because for third world countries there are a lot of barriers to get involved, specially inside our minds.
Kudos Hannah and I hope we can send you a couple of girls from Chile to cooperate with GNOME Women.
June 9th, 2005 at 11:10 pm
Hanna, for some reason I never knew you did participate in GNOME development. Yay :-)
June 14th, 2005 at 7:39 pm
Hi
I own the domain gnomegirl.org and i wanted to create a place for every female gnome user/developer .. sadly i was alone in organizing and gave up….
What do you think of the domain? I already got a logo and a basic page layout and a simple php based backend..
Greetings
Geraldine
June 15th, 2005 at 12:01 am
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think a “GNOME Teenagers” or “GNOME Scots”, for instance, would help me hack GNOME in any way. In fact I’d find such a project rather distasteful. I wouldn’t want to be associated with it. Perhaps GNOME Women is similar. Perhaps it’s not.
June 15th, 2005 at 4:00 pm
I can’t see how they are similar at all. Are there social obstacles making it more difficult for Scots or teenagers to contribute to GNOME? Beyond that, I’m having troubles seeing how any group like this would be distasteful.
June 21st, 2005 at 4:55 am
I support you both, MáirÃn and Hanna and wish you success. I partnered with one of the few women in my department while pursuing my computer science degree. She trusted me enough to confide in me the many problems that she experienced while pursuing her own degree in an overwhelmingly male department: insensitivity to inappropriate media in the lab in the company of women (for example, porn, violent music towards women), aggressiveness, intolerance, and so forth.
April 6th, 2006 at 9:20 am
There ARE obstacles to Scots (language) and teenagers (respect) but scottish learn english and teens earn respect with good hacks.
Ironicaly I don’t see any obstacle to female hackers wanting to contribute to gnome (desktop applications are fairly asexual) what are you complaining about? Honestly, you are simply complaining that they are (mostly) guys.
The problem is with (some) women that simply don’t want to hang around guys, no matter what.
I mean, what is the difference between “Foo” And “Foo Women”? Well, the difference is that Foo is free-for-all and Foo Women is a no-guys club, that’s not very cooperative, constructive or… well… nice at all.
For women it creates the idea that men are things you shouldn’t bare the burden of talking to. For men it creates the idea that women simply don’t cooperate. The worst thing is that, separating men and women actually generates sexism, from but parts, since coexistence is the root of understandig and understandig is the root of empathy.
but then again this is only some guy’s opinion…