Re: Fwd: (Debian's Two Choices) The influx of women and the outflux of men. The end of debian as a distro and it's emergance as a women's rights pulpit.
Hi everyone,
Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 08:16:14AM +0200, annabelle tully wrote:
>> I'm not against Debian Women at all. I am against the image it can
>> give. The basic points of Debian Women you wrote are great, but I fear
>> DW might not reflect those points enough.
>
> Did you actually read my email? Especially:
>
>>> But more importantly, it's an impression that's *false*. Many of the
>>> participants in d-w are active in technical aspects of the project.
>>> Several are in the new maintainer queue. We have more women involved in
>>> Debian than we've ever had before. So it's a problem if d-w gives the
>>> impression of being a bunch of people uninterested in doing anything
>>> technical. Certainly, getting rid of the project would be one way of
>>> solving that. Alternatively, we could fix the impression that people get
>>> in order to ensure that it reflects reality.
>>>
>>> So, as someone who's observed this impression, it would be really
>>> helpful if you could tell us what gave you that impression and what
>>> could be done to rectify it. Lists of maintained packages? Interviews?
>>> Daily emails with bugs closed by women? Seriously, communicating the
>>> goals of d-w with the rest of the project is important and I'm sure that
>>> nobody is happy with people getting the wrong idea.
>
Hmm, I think I can imagine how people might get the wrong idea about the success
of the Debian Women project in terms of getting women involved in technical
aspects of Debian.
Firstly, people may not realise that it can commonly take several years before a
person who is involved in Debian becomes a DD, if, indeed that is their aim. I
personally started using Debian 6 or 7 years ago. I started contributing, in
the form of bug reports, about 5 or 6 years ago. I got involved in Debian Women
about 2 years ago and I became a DD 1 year ago (and I actually progressed
through NM in the relatively fast time of about a year). I don't think this
type of progression is uncommon. That means that we may not see large numbers
of women becoming DDs for a few years yet. That doesn't worry me at all. I
think that it is impressive enough that the number of female DDs has roughly
doubled since the Debian Women project started and that we have about double
that number of women in NM at the present time.
Secondly, people may not realise that women are making technical contributions
to Debian that won't be obvious unless the mailing lists and IRC channels are
watched closely. Translators, bug-squashers and package maintainers don't have
to be DDs, and we have many people involved in those activities whose
involvement might be a little hard to spot.
Maybe we really should start making lists of our collective achievements? (It
would take people who are willing to compile and maintain such lists - such
things get out of date very fast.)
Helen
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