Minutes from the meeting held at DebConf15 today
Hi all,
We held a Debian Women meeting today. It was only an hour although we
probably could have kept talking as there were a lot of interested
people there that wanted to share their ideas, but we had to stop due
to other concurrent events. For those that were and for those that
were not there, feel free to share any additional ideas.
Notes were taken on gobby. For your convenience, I'm pasting the whole
thing here (take this as almost a full backlog of the discussion).
Thanks to Moray for taking some awesome notes:
****
Debian Women BoF, Thursday 14.00
Introduction from marga
Debian Women has existed for a long time, but has rather stalled. We
need new ideas of things to do, to be more
friendly/interesting/inviting.
Sharing experiences / obstacles that make it harder for women to
participate in Debian
- Debian is now more welcoming than in the past. For example, DebConf
is now more welcoming to people learning new technical skills. This
year we had a DebConf welcome session for newcomers, packaging
workshops etc.
- Debian Women previously had a mentoring program for a long time, but
it didn't get much use. Perhaps we need to reinvent it? Perhaps it
hasn't been very visible to the target audience? (E.g. we could
contact people in university departments, and student groups.) Calling
it "Mentoring of the month" might be scary as some people will fear
that one month might not be enough.
- The Debian Wiki has useful information on contributing, but the
documentation could be improved more. For example, we could benefit
from clearer information on people to contact to get involved in
specific areas of Debian, IRC channels and so on. The Debian Women
part of the wiki is out of date -- for example, the members section
lists people who haven't contributed in years, but doesn't list
current active people. This could be a nice task for someone that
wants to help.
- It's hard for e.g. designers to know how to start contributing to
Debian. You need to start with a specific idea of what you want to do,
which can be hard for newcomers.
- Many people may want to join a Debian team, not just start working
independently. We may need to propose this to people in a more
straightforward way.
- Many people lurk for a long time to find an appropriate way to start
contributing, perhaps when they finally have a specific need to get
something done in Debian.
- There's a need of finding a space where to do things, learn how
things work, and how to start contributing to different things
depending on the skill. So, for example, have a landing page where
people can find tasks that they can do depending on their skills, have
a list of teams or people that they can contact, etc.
- Many of these problems also apply to men! So perhaps some of them
can be addressed through the Welcoming team. Debian Women should ask
why the problems are stronger for women, but often this is only an
issue of time. Also, women typically get involved with computers later
than men.
- Debian can have a high barrier to entry in terms of technical
knowledge. Even for people who have been using Debian for a long time,
it's hard to start contributing. Though once you join IRC channels and
start speaking to people, it can become less scary.
- You don't need technical knowledge to contribute to Debian, even for
example in triaging bugs (which might seem technical).
- Debian teams should put more energy into keeping their web page
up-to-date, and making it more welcoming. The Welcoming team could
write to teams and ask them to do this...
- Stories from current contibutors would help encourage newcomers,
especially for people wanting to contribute in non-technical ways.
- 'Calls for help' are useful in giving people precise ideas. When
this is in a formal programme like Outreachy, the disadvantage is that
people can be discouraged if they are not selected.
- Asking someone for their time might be hard/scary. Specific
mentoring might help with that.
- A Request Tracker queue might be better than just a mailing list to
make sure we don't lose people who are trying to find a way to
contribute. This would also be private and therefore less scary for
newcomers than posting to a mailing list.
- Newcomers may want a friendly person just for initial discussions to
check if their ideas on contributing will work. Some newcomers may
have no idea on the best concrete way that they can help; others may
have specific skills they want to use; others may want to learn new
things. It would be good to have public documentation as well as a
visible contact group. Again, this fits into the ideas for the
Welcoming team.
- As there are many people wanting to help that are not programmer,
there is a need of a page that says "if you don't program, here's how
you can help"
- Close down Debian women? Some people would prefer a general
'minorities' programme, other people will not like that...
- Perhaps at minimum it is useful to highlight that there are women
involved in Debian, and give an opportunity for women who want to get
in touch with other women. It is easier for people to get involved in
something if they see that other people like them are also involved!
- Debian Women *has* been active recently, just in different ways.
There were MiniDebConfs organised in Barcelona then more recently in
Bucharest. We now have lots of videos that we should use to make
women's activity in Debian more visible.
- We should make more use of the mailing list for the things that are
happening (e.g. the Bucharest MiniDebConf's organisation was not
visible there).
- We can also create more groups alongside Debian Women, if other
groups have similar needs. The Welcoming team may do a part of this
for many groups.
- The general consensus seems to be that it's ok to tweak the goals of
the Debian Women group, to make it clear that everyone that identifies
as non-cis-male (transgender people, gender queer people, etc) are
also welcome.
- There seems to be a need of having a "Front Desk" for newcomers,
where they can join and figure out how they can help. This is
basically the role of the welcoming team, but we need to make sure
that interested women know that they can go there.
- The previous mentoring programme was 1-on-1. We also had IRC
sessions. Perhaps more long-term group courses would be useful? When
training is public, others can also benefit.
- For mentoring/training, we just need more volunteers.
- The Ada Initiative is shutting down. They had good material on
Imposter Syndrome and other topics, which they are now open-sourcing.
They also organised Ada Camps, which were a women-only space, which
could be empowering. They also had useful information on organising
events.
- If we need money for some interesting outreach project, the DPL will
approve it.
****
--
Besos,
Marga
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