Re: Just a single Question for the Candidates
* Amaya <amaya@debian.org> [2004-03-03 01:12]:
> As a female hacker/geek/DD I find myself more and more concerned
> about the gender ratio in the Debian Developer/User community. How
> can we say make a "Universal" OS when it's do scarcely related to
> half the population of the world... I think we all agree we want to
> see more women involved in or using Debian.
At the Open Source World Conference in Spain two weeks ago, someone
from the audience asked the same question. I said that it would
certainly be good to get more women involved in Debian and free
software, but I don't really have a good solution how this can be
achieved. Furthermore, I showed the map of Debian developers,
http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc, and pointed out that it's
not just women who are under-represented in Debian. There are, for
example, many parts of the world who don't have many Debian developers
(especially Asia and Africa).
As a matter of fact, I was surprised at the large number of women
attending the conference. The percentage of women at the conference
in Spain was much higher than what you'd see at a conference in
Germany or the UK. (I also pointed out that our most active female
developer is from Spain; they were quite happy to hear that ;).
Someone (I think it was Bdale) said that IT in India had a much larger
percentage of women than in western countries. I have heard similar
things about Malaysia. Also, someone claimed that the percentage of
women in free software is even lower than in computer science/IT in
general, but it was not clear why this is the case.
> I would be very interested in knowing what's is each candidate's
> plan or ideas on this subject, how to get more women involved, and
> what (in their opinion) would be the benefits.
I think it's good to get more women involved, just like I think it
would be good to get more people from other countries, etc, involved.
However, I also think we should make sure that we are not encouraging
a certain group to join Debian just because they are under-represented.
Joining Debian should be based on merit, and we should not forget that
ideal. So if there are technically excellent women who want to
contribute to Debian, great! (But the same goes for anyone else.) One
thing I can assure is that our New Maintainer process is blind to
gender/sex, nationality, religion, etc - only factors which make a
difference in whether or not somebody can be a successful contributor
to Debian are taken into account.
Back to your question on how to get women involved: I think it's a
fine line between promoting women to get involved and having more
diversity, and getting women involved in Debian simply for the sake of
them being women. I fear that it might be misperceived if I, as a
male, would actively search for women joining Debian. I think that
you (Amaya) can do a much better job at that, and I encourage your
recent efforts. For those who don't know, Amaya approached me
recently because she would like to organize a meeting between female
developers or prospective developers at DebConf. I gave her a listing
of the female (prospective) developers I know of. Amaya also looked
at the Debian communities on Orkut, and since then has sent one
prospective developer my way, and I had a discussion with her. I'm
happy to talk to prospective female developers and to give advice, but
then again, I'm happy to do the same for anyone else.
In summary, I think getting more women and more under-represented
folks involved is a good thing, but it should be done on technical
merit. Finally, to answer your question fully, I think that women
could help us with communication in the project.
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com
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