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Re: Statistics about the IRC channel



Hi All,

Christian Perrier wrote:
Today, I did a few possibly interesting statistics about the IRC
channel.

Interesting indeed.

I have logs since June 2005 and I extracted all unique nicknames from
there. To these, I applied the knowledge I have of people and about
who is actually a man, who is a woman and who I have no idea about (ie
I don't know the people and whois is silent about them).

There have been 319 unique nickname. Out of these 137 are men, 73 are
women and 109 are unknown (to me at least)

From these, I extracted the number of contributions, month by month:

A contribution is of line by an individual

%	M	W	U
2005-06	61,88	36,78	1,34
2005-07	56,01	40,72	3,27
2005-08	60,02	37,49	2,49
2005-09	52,66	42,66	4,68
2005-10	50,3	42,37	7,33
2005-11	58,05	36,57	5,38
2005-12	65,14	30,58	4,28
2006-01	59,69	37,89	2,42
2006-02	70,8	26,96	2,24
2006-03	70,72	28,4	0,88
2006-04	73,54	25,58	0,88

As one can see, even if I can't "identify" one third of the people, I
have identified the most contributing people.

I see an interesting tendency for men participation to increase while
women participation decreases. I already have this feeling for quite a
long time but it seems that numbers are proving me correct. Is it good
or bad: I leave this up to you, people...:)

I am curious to know how the total amount of conversation by men and women has varied with time. Specifically, are women contributing more or less total conversation, even as their relative contribution has dropped.

I am inclined to think that it is neither good nor bad that the participation of women has decreased, as long as the IRC channel is meeting the needs of the women who do participate in it and helping to meet the goals of the DW project, ie to get more women more involved in contributing to Debian. (Note that I am not saying that the channel should not also meet the needs of the men who use it, not at all. However that has a less direct effect on the overall project goals.)

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has tried the IRC channel and found that it did not meet their needs and why. Should we be aiming to change it and, if so, how? Is it working as it is and requiring little or no changes?

What do you think?

Helen



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