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Report on Women In Open Source - FOO Camp meeting



All,

Some of us were at O'Reilly FOO Camp last weekend (Greg Stein, Sam Ruby, Geir Magnussen, me, Brian Behlendorf) and also there were others thinking about women in open source (Mitchell Baker, Allison Randall, Alolita Sharma, others).

So we did a FOO session on the topic of Women in Open Source that was well attended and lively.

Some of what I learned...

-There was research done on the topic of getting more women to stick around in engineering settings (in schools) which is encapsulated in the book "Why So Slow" by Virginia Valian...see http:// mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=5581. There is an real audio file available of the author speaking in addition to the book. She sounds like an interesting lady. Here's a link to her bio http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/psych/faculty/valian/ valian.htm. The person who told us about her work said she completely changed the way computer science is taught (both men and women) at her school in response to her research...for instance freshman classes were changed to 100% labs and all extreme and agile team topologies.

I'd love to listen to her talk about this topic. Maybe she would come to a meetup if we asked her.

Danese



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