Re: Some thoughts regarding DW
Hi there!
As all of you should perceive, I usually am at the irc channel, which I
much prefer, but I decided to post some points in this thread about
some comments. Let's start from the first message.
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 18:58:04 -0400 "Hanna M. Wallach" <hmw26@cam.ac.uk>
wrote:
> Furthermore, Debian Women is not an
> affirmative action project; I (and many others) believe that making
> things easier for women, in the sense of lowering standards is
> entirely unconstructive and detrimental.
I may be completly wrong about my concepts and views about d-w, but
doing things like creating new manuals, encouraging women to enter the
project by showing some models (women already doing some contribution),
organizing talks about d-w and gender questions on debian, creating
menthoring process with focus on women IS an afirmative action and makes
Debian Women an afirmative action project. Simply by putting women in
the name of the project already make it an afirmative action. To not
give that impression, we should change the name and also the target of
the project. One thing that I would completly disagree.
The difference between a project like debian women is the fact of
having a clear target. We don't want to be the Disney World inside
Debian Project, we want to get women to contribute to Debian. Starting
being users firstly or making the users becoming developers.
If we were only a user group willing to create a "Barbie World" without
put women face to face with the reality in the project, I think d-w
would be a big bullshit.
But now, saying that d-w is not a feminist project nor an afirmative
action project is like ignoring the main reason for creating d-w.
Sometimes creating groups and actions dealing unequally with women is
the best way to get equality in the long term. It IS an afirmative
action. And it IS the reason of creating this group, IMHO.
I was thinking about answer the Juttaw's e-mail separately, but i think
I can point some of the things she did point here:
1) I agree about having clear targets, actions and also knowing how to
deal with situations in which there's a sexist behavior coming from a
men to ANY women (member or not of d-w), and also sexist documents,
softwares, etc, that could be propose to be added on Debian.
2) I don't think choosing our own tools to maintain our website is a
problem. As we are who will maintain the system, nothing more natural
than choosing tools that people around here uses preferred tools.
3) I feel very unconfortable about the view some developers has
about d-w: the group of few ones, who would complain with then whether
they says something sexist against any women of the group. I read twice
in the d-d channel "don't tell that to erinn (or helen, or whoever)",
refering to some sexist subject brought in the channel, when I started
to complain about. I think we should give more talks about that and
produce articles about what the d-w is with focus on dds. Maybe we can
use our blogs on planet debian.
4) Maybe we could start to work in a document on the "self conception
of d-w", with the opinion of everybody who wants to give suggestions
and share a view about the project, then we'd start to have a kind of
identity. It would be important for then, people like JuttaW decide
whether she want or not to keep involved in the project or not, and not
feel out of the place.
And I'm sure that we don't need any formal leaders. They will appear
from the daily work to our project.
[]'s
Fernanda
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