Re: Grant proposal around women in college and open source

[Barton C Massey <bart@cs.pdx.edu>]

In message <[🔎] 42A7C3B8.4020705@yahoo.co.uk> you wrote:
> Hi Bart,
> 
> Your proposal sounds interesting to me.  I think that if you succeed in
> implementing this project it could be of value to Debian Women (I can't speak
> for LinuxChix).  However I have a couple of initial questions.
> 
> 1) What would an "organization leader's signature on a
> memorandum of understanding" imply in terms of the
> commitment being made by Debian Women, if we were to do
> this?  Would it imply a greater level of commitment to
> activities than we are already making by running the
> project as we are doing, and if so, can you describe what
> sort of things you have in mind.

Specifically, I'm thinking we would like Debian Women to
  * Cross-link our portal sites a bit.
  * Help us find qualified, caring folks to mentor
    women on open source issues, to the extent that
    they are willing to do so.
  * Advise us and help us to guide our interactions with the
    community of women in open source.  In particular, help
    us to spend grant monies wisely.
  * Anything else you can think of that we should have
    thought of :-).  We want the proposal to be as useful
    as possible, so ideas are highly welcome.

> 2) Debian Women is not run in a particularly hierarchial
> way and we don't have someone who can "officially" speak
> for all of us, let alone commit all of us to any
> particular thing, though there are a small group of
> people, myself included, who have been involved in making
> most of the major decisions and are thus defacto "leaders"
> of the project, as far as we have them.  Would this be a
> problem for your aims?  (I'm not trying to imply a general
> lack of commitment among the Debian Women community -
> collectively we are a dedicated and enthusiastic bunch -
> but this is a pretty fundamental aspect of a volunteer
> project being run as ours is.)

I don't see this as a major problem. As long as a few
representatives could step forward and indicate that they
support the proposal, I think that's all NSF could
reasonably ask for in any case.

Thanks much for your quick and insightful response!

    Bart Massey
    bart@cs.pdx.edu