Summary of the DW BOF session at DebConf11
Hi!
There was a BOF session at DebConf11 related to Debian Women, kindly
held by Meike, which I attended virtually thanks to the awesome work
of the Video Team, and the help of the participants when the video
link had gone down.
The minutes are available by using gobby-0.5 to connect to
gobby.debian.net (debconf11/dc11-dw-bof). I'll make a summary of what
was discussed so that we can discuss some further tasks as to how to
go on:
1) About mentoring
The mentoring process has been on-going for a long while, but
unfortunately has not had enough publicity, so much so that many of us
thought that it was stalled. We need to give it more publicity,
because without it, we can't reach potential mentees. We also need to
compose some sort of mentoring "curriculum" or templates, to help the
many people that don't know where to start. Also, it seems that many
mentees tend to just go away. Apparently more pinging is necessary to
know what's going on.
Tasks:
* Create a Mentoring "Curriculum" to help both mentors and mentees.
* Advertise the Mentoring project more.
* Have someone pinging mentors and mentees to know what's going on.
2) "How to help"
A lot of people want to help Debian, but don't really know where to
start. In order to encourage them and keep them collaborating, we
need to have a straightforward answer to the "Where do I start?"
question. A suggestion that was put forward was having
"Mini-projects" for people to join, that have simple tasks available.
Of course this means that someone has to lead these projects.
Tasks:
* Think of possible Mini-Projects where people can start contributing
to Debian without feeling too daunted by the size of it.
* Think of other ready made easy answers to the "How can I help?" question
3) Lack of new female DDs
One of the things noted was that even though there are always new
female maintainers and contributors, a very small number of them are
applying to become DDs. This probably has to do with the "Imposter
Syndrome", the women that are already involved in Debian tend to feel
that they have not done enough, are not good enough, etc. So, it
would be a good idea to have some clear guidelines so that someone can
be assured that they are ready to be a DD and stop procrastinating :)
Tasks:
* Create some guidelines that help people decide that they are ready
(or not) to apply to DD. (I've been thinking of this one, and I'm
hoping to create some diagrams with texts that help people easily
realize where they stand).
--
Besos,
Marga
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