Jutta Wrage wrote:
let us look from people, who are visiting the page: If they acct like me , the will sometimes look: 1. Who is responsible (and doin the actual work)? 2. maybe: Who else contributes to the project (f/m) Given those I know, what they have done or will do: Erinn is in 1Others may review content, give support for those active in the project, Make a translation, deliver content to one out of 1 are in 2.
I think we need to discuss what we mean by people who are contributing to the project. I am getting the impression that people are thinking of "the debian-women project" = "the debian-women website". Now, I think that having a website is an important part of this project, because it will provide information to people who are interested in being involved in our work, or to women who are interested in being involved in debian. I think it's excellent that people are already writing draft pages for it.
But I think the website is going to end up being only a small part of the ways in which we achieve the aim of getting more women involved in debian. We need people to be about on the irc channel to answer newcomers' questions in an encouraging way. We need people to stand up and give talks at their local LUG and linux conferences. We need people to pick up on sexist behaviour in other debian spaces and communicate in an assertive way that this is unacceptable. More than anything, we need people to give potential debian-women technical help, ranging from helping them install debian and get their systems working to sponsoring them through the new maintainer process and beyond.
I would say that people doing any of these things are contributing in no small way to the debian-women project. I would like to see the website making it really clear that there are many ways for people to contribute to our efforts, and that we would welcome everyone, men and women, to assist us in this project.
I really would not like to see *anyone* who is trying to help us getting the impression that we don't want them about. I think parts of the discussion we've had about the supporters page idea will probably be discouraging to men who were otherwise interested in helping us, and I think that is a pity. It feels to me like this discussion is becoming focussed on making a nearly-exclusive space for women in an isolated corner of debian rather than encouraging women to be involved in debian as a whole. They are very different things. I didn't originally have the impression that we wanted a little ghetto for ourselves. Do we?
Just my thoughts on the matter. Helen