I started writing an email to Clancy Ratliff in reply to her Gender and Open Source essay. I started going off in kind of a rant and tangent though, so I decided to post here as a response instead.

I currently work as an interaction designer in Red Hat's engineering department, and have had varying amounts (not very extensive) of involvement in the open source community. Most recently I co-founded the GNOME Women group to encourage women contributors to the GNOME project.

LinuxChix gets a lot of mention in the essay is referred to as being an "open source development community," but I feel quite strongly that it is not. Some of the motivation behind my pushing for GNOME Women was borne out of frustration with LinuxChix. LinuxChix is really more of a Linux User's Group (LUG) than an actual development community. I tried to participate in their IRC channel - it is really a tight-knit community of regulars who use it as a social forum and don't discuss Linux that much at all. It's like.... a quilting circle or something where making a quilt isn't quite the point at all, if that makes sense. If you join the channel (irc.linuxchix.org, #linuxchix) and lurk for a while I think you'll see what I mean. I think Linux is such a huge topic that it's not clear what LinuxChix would develop, anyway.

Now, I do believe it's useful for women to have a place to go for support and camaraderie when they are just starting out with Linux, and it is a good thing to have more women using Linux. LinuxChix appears to be succeeding on these fronts. However, as large as the group seems to be, I'm somewhat skeptical that it's produced many open source *developers*. Think of it this way, only men write books and women and men read books. It's good that there are literate women, but if the books are created only by men, then a male perspective will dominate. I use this analogy because I have thought for a long time that programming is a new literarcy, and that as computers become more and more pervasive in everyday life, those who fail to gain some ability in programming will be left behind.

I think more focused projects such as Debian Women, KDE Women, <mailto:women-subscribe@apache.org>women@apache.org</a>, and (of course ;-) ) GNOME Women are/will be more successful in encouraging women contributors (developers and others) than broad organizations like LinuxChix. (Of course, now the Open Source Initiative is creating a women@opensource.org mailing list, so we'll see how that fares.) Whether the group is focused on a distro or a software project, the point is that there is a focus, and there are specific things (action items) that need to be done, and a structure within each distro/project with which to do them. The structure of Debian is defined such that there is a specific process to follow if you want to call yourself an "official" Debian developer.

I have seen some pretty scary things directed towards women in open source; namely, the "Death to Women's Rights" guy, who repeatedly wrote offensive messages to a number of FOSS women's group such as Debian Women and LinuxChix, saying stuff like "it's MEN who wrote open source software, stay away from our hobby." Apparently he targeted women from the list privately as well. But, that's just one nut. I haven't really experienced anything offensive trying to get involved in open source. Awkward, yes. Funny in a "omg is this guy *that* socially inept??!!" way, yes. But deeply offensive to women, along the same lines as the Bugtraq Security Systems recruitment letter to Starla Pureheart? Hell no. I mention this because I think with all of the recent discussions about women in open source (I'm guessing as a result of the recent Women in Open Source session at OSCon), there seems to be a fear that crazy shit is going down where it isn't. For example, Mitchell Baker, the president of the Mozilla Foundation and one of the panel members in the Women in Open Source session at OSCon posted the following in her blog:

In the meantime, if you've thought about getting involved in the Mozilla project but found that something in our approach or attitude or style prevents you from doing so, I would be very interested in hearing your story.

The GNOME & Red Hat guys I've worked with have been *extremely* polite and respectful and I've never felt disparaged or been subject to offensive, hurtful comments. J5 is actually the one who first suggested starting GNOME Women to me. This was after he came back from this year's GUADEC, where some of the GNOME devels discussed solutions to the problem of few female contributors. GNOME Women was *not* started in response to any offensive incident or string of incidents.

GNOME Women thus far is two months (two *slow* months) old. I have no great stories to share yet; I guess the story thus far is that we've had an extremely warm reception by the GNOME community, but not a lot of "recruits" yet. Hannah, jdub, and I have contemplated holding a design competition for International Usability Day (IIRC, in late November?). Which reminds me I should send an email out about that soon. :)

So. In summary, my opinions on the subject:

• More FOSS women users are great, but let's get women contributors as well!


• Focusing on a specific distro/project may be a better strategy for getting women involved in FOSS rather than just focusing on "Linux."


• There has been some offensive stuff said towards women in development communities, but the formation of women-focused groups for a particular project does *not* mean that the members of said project have ever been offensive to women.

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