On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 10:41:21AM -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> > starting this fall, but I wanted you to know that I'll be very happy
> > to poor some money into a d-w meeting, no matter that program. If you
>
> So, I've been thinking about this, and it's not like we don't have
> enough women: we have between 20 and 30 active women, maybe more, and
> that's a big enough number to have a small meeting. However, we are
> all over the world, flying to an in-person meeting takes time and (a
> lot of) money. And also, doing a women-only meeting sounds weird to
> me. We don't want to isolate that much from the whole Debian
> community.
Oh, I didn't have in mind a "women-only meeting" either :) I wrote "d-w
meeting" meaning an in-person meeting of the people working on d-w, no
matter their sex. This is pretty common (and I hope it will be even
more common in the future): there's a team which usually works together
over the net that, from time to time, meet in person to enjoy the
benefits of in person meeting (higher bandwidth, fun, enthusiasm, etc.).
As for not isolating the rest of the Debian community, I totally agree,
and that's the reason of the existence of the sponsoring guidelines
[1]. Hopefully, following that, we can have in person meetings without
alienating the rest of the community.
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/SponsoringGuidelines
I clearly understand the problem of a world-wide meeting, but I guess
that if you start plan for one, not all of you will be able to attend
(e.g. work/family reasons) so the costs can be lower than
expected. Alternatively, we can think of trade-offs (e.g. EU-d-w
meeting), but this is really up to you. Finally, if/when we have a
budget, we can consider asking for specific sponsoring for it; for
instance, I'm sure that if we try to have a d-w meeting joint with
similar initiatives from other (commercial) distros, we can find
sponsoring from who has more money than us. Anyhow, I really don't want
to force the hand on this, it was just a (wacky) idea.
> I've been thinking that something else that could be done along this
> line would be to encourage (and sponsor) more local/pseudo-local women
> to go to mini-debconfs. I've heard that there are a few mini-debconfs
> coming up in Europe (.fr, .it) and it might be a good idea to choose
> one of them and encourage the women in Europe to go there.
Absolutely, that totally makes sense as well. It turns out I'm partly
involved in both .fr and .it forthcoming events. For what concerns .it,
it will be a joint Debian/Ubuntu community event and there seems to be
already a d-w/u-w round table organized (Francesca knows probably more
about it than me).
For what concerns .fr, I'm not aware of any d-w activity planned. If
you're interested in proposing one, a good contact for inquiries is Carl
Chenet <chaica@ohmytux.com>.
> Yet another possibility would be to do a bigger event, with all the
> rest of women in Free Software groups (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mozilla, GNOME,
> KDE, linuxchix?, etc). This would mean a lot of work in organization
> and the like, but it might be worth it, I'm not sure.
That's a really intriguing idea too. I'm sure that I personally won't
have the time/energy to organize that, but if d-w wants to do that it
would be great and I'll be happy to give any support Debian can offer.
Keep up the good work,
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Caposella .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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