Mentoring of the Month for woman
Hi,
since three years I'm running the "Mentoring of the Month"[1] project in
Debian Med. The purpose is to get new people into the Debian Med team
and thus into Debian. The effort has lead to some new team members (not
all students remained) and some new packages. Both (the members and the
packages) would not exist without this effort.
At DebConf13 I reported about MoM[2] (video recording[3]) and I
explicitly considered reserving a month for woman. Until now I did not
added this constraint since there were always free sloths (monthes)
without any student.
My observation on our yearly sprints (five since 2011 with about 15
participants) was that we had one woman joining our first sprint and
another woman joining the second one. We did not managed to attract any
woman for the later sprints (despite the fact that I explicitly invited
the participating woman from second sprint via private e-mail).
I also tried to gather a woman for the Debian Med team at DebConf11 but
failed to get her actively involved.
My current conclusion is that it might help if I would focus more on the
"trying to attract woman" point rather than the Debian Med team point
since if we have only a small number of potential applicants chances are
even lower that these are obliged to the field of Biology and Medicine.
So if there is any woman who is interested in learning Debian packaging
and wants to become a member of some team inside Debian I leave her all
freedom to pick from any random package she wants to add to the pool and
join any team that might be interested in this package. I'll try my
best to guide her for one month into the (not so secret) secrets of
Debian packaging. Since I personally do not want to subscribe to any
additional team mailing lists I would suggest to mis-use debian-project
list for the mentoring communication if I'm not yet a member of the
target team and I really hope that the team will be inviting enough to
help in the integration effort. I personally see the positive side
effect that some [MoM] tagged mails on debian-project could attract some
interest of further candidates.
I'd be happy if
a) the MoM Wiki page[1] would now be flooded by student applicants
b) other DDs might share the burden of mentoring with me if a) might
become true
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed/MoM
[2] https://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/20130815_mom/
[3] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2013/debconf13/high/987_How_to_attract_new_developers_for_your_team.ogv
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http://fam-tille.de
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