Re: How do women become involved in free / open source projects?
On 2005-02-26 19:32:56 +0100, Jutta Wrage said:
[ Heavy snipping. ]
> 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 was discussing this (well, not exactly, it was more of a general
discussion about how men and women are different) with a friend the other
day. I am almost opposite of you - to me it IS very important to have
all the "formal" things sorted out, so I _want_ to be a DD if I am going
to be contributing to Debian. My contributions will be equally useful
and valuable if I am not a DD, but on the other hand I can as well go
through the complete NM process and vbecome a "real" DD since I'll be
doing the same things as "them" anyway. Maybe this is a slightly male
approach to things, I don't quite know.
My friend differs from me. She agreed with that formal status is
important, but she thinks women are more likely to believe they can't
be as good as the men anyway - they are less likely to spent that much
time on digging into projects etc, so why bother trying? This is a
variation of "twice the work to be evaluated as half as good", I guess.
I don't say any of these three views are wrong or right, but it's
interesting to see how different people are and how that can shape what
we do.
Magni :)
--
sash is very good for you.
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