Young people and computers
There's been some discussion elsewhere about how young people's
experience of computers has changed over the years, and how this might
interact with our success in recruiting young people into Debian. I
would estimate that the conversation focused on 16-20 year-olds, as it
started after someone pointed to the graph of developers' claimed ages
at
http://people.debian.org/~spaillard/developers-age-histogramm/devs-age-histo.2013-01-01.png
A few points from that discussion (not trying to be an exhaustive
summary):
- The conversation wondered how much the number of younger people
coming to Debian might have reduced due to changes in wider computer
use/culture. Certainly, programming languages used to be an advertised
part of the system, where now they are typically an optional add-on,
hidden, or effectively unavailable to the users of certain types of
device.
- It was also pointed out that we have several groups of Debian
contributors who came from successful local projects, e.g. university
computer groups. It seems that many such university groups themselves
recruit fewer new members than they used to, so the change may not only
be that Debian gets fewer of the people trained in them. (One factor
mentioned for their own recruitment trouble was that many students have
less reason than a few years ago to spend time around computer labs.)
- Another factor that makes a difference to how young people spend
their time on computers may be the availability of always-on internet
access. I know that, once I had a computer at home, but before I had
any kind of internet connection there, I started to do programming
projects to fill in my school holidays; perhaps nowadays I would have
spent the time chatting online, or using the computer to collaborate on
something productive other than programming.
- A change mentioned that might be more positive is that it's now much
easier to get programs distributed to people who will find them useful.
While we might not like app stores etc. and the typical lack of source
code, this still gives people a greater motivation to create software
(including a greater chance that it will reach others who need something
to solve the same problem) than existed for most amateur programmers
before.
If you agree, as I would, that it's useful for Debian to recruit more
young people -- they often have a lot of spare time, and a lot of
enthusiasm, and good connections to influence and recruit others who
might be interested in helping -- then what do you think Debian could do
differently to encourage this? How much do you think is due to general
factors like those above, and how much due to changes in Debian and in
how it's perceived?
--
Moray
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