Re: How do women become involved in free / open source projects?
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Am Dienstag, 22.02.05 um 19:51 Uhr schrieb Bruce Byfield:
Helen's Faulkner's comment that "women follow a different route to
being interested in things like Debian and FOSS compared to the
average man"
Would anyone be willing to comment or share their experience?
The first project I really was involved in was WINE. I tried to use it
as replacement for my old Dos/W3.1 machine for a couple of apps not
available for Linux.
Wine did not have a lot of useful documentation that time. And I
decided, to make something like a HOWTO, maybe a book later.
The problem was: I did not find many people helping writing the
documentation, and I really do not understand much about W32. The men
where mostly interested in programming. Often Wine went unusable and
the example apps did not run any longer. I have not enough C knowledge
to repair things, by the way. So what I found as a difference to most
of the men: I was more interested in less features but bug free running
apps - functionality and more user orientated. They have been
interested in adding more and more functions even if breaking things.
When Wine went more and more commercial and it was not useful for my
old apps any longer (I could not run my apps with current versions for
more than a half year) I lost my interest.
Debian is a special thing for me. I am using Debian since 0.9x. My
friend told me that time, there was an interesting project making a new
distribution, more user orientated and free. Since the first time, I
installed it, it was in my focus. There was quite good documentation on
installing it and every year, it got better. Seldom something was
broken, when updating.
The first years my only contribution was making bug reports and trying
to spread Debian. But I noticed things changing while the project was
growing: setting bugs from serious to wish, even if the apps break
other things, arrogance by maintainers.
There is much more documentation on using debian, but the documentation
is spread, not developed as a team... Seems everyone begins to write
his own documentation instead of contributing to existing.
My last contribution to the Debian project was (and still is) making
the Debian web pages more accessible using CSS and "look" the way, they
should for people with handicap. I still feel no need to be a DD for
that. And that may be the difference to many of the men: Being DD and
technical things are more in the center than the project itself for
many of them. Seems to be very important to be able to say "I am a
Debian Developer", more important than to contribute useful things or
trying to keep Debian useful and running without problems for
_everyone_. Not that all Developers think that way, but many. For me I
feel no need to have my name everywhere and being in the list of DDs. I
feel happy, if I can help making things better and I like team work as
our (together with Denis and Frank) is. Fro most of the debian people
and others my work is invisible as I tried not to "make new everything
leave my mark on it". But the accessibility, if I can help increase it,
makes me much more satisfied.
I would be able to express my thoughts and experiences much better in
my mother tongue. But I hope you get the essential.
Jutta
- --
http://www.witch.westfalen.de
http://witch.muensterland.org
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