Re: Updating stats, thinking about what to do
On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 7:36 AM, Margarita Manterola
<margamanterola@gmail.com> wrote:
> Apart from that, is there
> something that we might do to get more women to contribute to Debian?
On a personal level my lack of involvement these past couple years has
been lack of time. A vast majority of the systems I work on from day
to day are Debian (all of them at work are) but in my free time I've
tended to be involved with non-packaging tasks with Ubuntu (and now I
frequently host the San Francisco Bay Area Debian dinners). However, I
have some packages in svn that I need to update and hope to get
uploaded to Wheezy in the coming months.
Also, how is the mentoring program doing? Letting people know that
there are mentors waiting to help out would be good, even I could
benefit from this, while I have done packaging in the past, tools and
things change, and I need to get back up to speed.
Now, in the direct email that was sent out (thanks for that!) there
was a line about the goals of the Debian Women project:
> Not only with packages, but with any aspect that helps
> improve the distribution.
This is also mentioned on the website but I think this is worth highlighting.
As an example of where numbers continue to grow: the majority of women
involved with Ubuntu who aren't employed by Canonical are
non-packaging contributors. Event coordination for local teams,
documentation, educational outreach (via online and real life
classes/training or otherwise), news and marketing and accessibility
are where many women really shine in the project, and by encouraging
participation in all these areas we got to 5% women in Ubuntu last
year. That said, there is great *interest* by many of these women in
eventually becoming developers, and with the connections made within
the project through all these other tasks a lot of women already feel
comfortable and can just ask someone they already work with if they
want to get more involved on the packaging side. I think getting women
comfortable within a project through tasks they are already
comfortable with is a worthy goal (plus all these things I mentioned
are hugely beneficial to the project!) and from that pool of
contributors you probably *could* work with them to bring them into
the more technically-demanding packaging world (this is not something
UW has actively done yet, but maybe we should).
I understand it's the culture of Debian itself which holds uploads and
DDship in such high regard in comparison to other contributions,
rather than something DW specifically does, but I think the recent GR
to accept non-packaging contributors is a major step to getting past
this and I think the DW project could do a good job of reaching out.
--
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com
Reply to: