On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 05:01:50PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: > I had a small group, some of them not feeling confident about posting > on the main list, and we had a lot of specialized stuff to discuss. > It made sense to me to combine the specialized aspect with mentoring > the less-confident people. It beats me why it _was_ a contentious > issue. It never seemed to me that the people who responded, and I, > were talking about the same things. :( > I have encouraged new people to post here, and I've been disappointed > with the response to those posts. Does anyone say, "Welcome to Debian- > Women, X! Great to see you here. I can see that Y is important to > you, and I'm sure there will be someone here with the expertise you > need, or who can refer you to it. ;)" So, hmm, you may be right that this is a strategy that debian-women needs to adopt in order to scale up much beyond its current size; for my part, though, that seems to demand a greater mental commitment than I'm able to give for tracking of who is or isn't a newcomer. I guess there may be a culture gap as well; the sort of reception you describe is certainly one I would expect to see (and be inclined to offer) in response to a "first-time poster" post introducing oneself to the list, but if I posted to a new list with a technical comment (which is what I remember seeing from new posters, as I try to reach back in my memory to recall those posts that prompted vague reactions of "hmm, I don't recognize that name"), I would expect a technical response. A lack of pleasantries wouldn't phase me in the least. And I'm sorry if this comes across as being overly clinical, but I also have to wonder whether something like this is scalable and sustainable. I'm all in favor of people being friendly to one another, and I think debian-women has been a shining example of how Debian *could* be in this regard; but I also think that a "welcoming committee", as it were, is very hard to scale to a list like debian-devel, so if the desired outcome is that debian-women is a gateway for getting women involved in the larger Debian community, then I think it's important that we focus on strategies that *don't* lead to making debian-women a much more warm-and-fuzzy place than we can ever hope to see happen on (e.g.) -devel. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I will move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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