Fwd: Re: Annual report - can I interview you?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi all,

Email 1 of 3 re Marina interview for the annual report.

Thanks,
Dave.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Annual report - can I interview you?
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:06:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Marina Zhurakhinskaya <marinaz redhat com>
To: Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>
CC: Juanjo Marin <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>, Emily Gonyer 
<emilyyrose gmail com>,        karen gnome org

Hi Dave,

I wrote a few answers, but will need more time tomorrow. I really like 
to have a chance to think through these answers well. We can then 
shorten them and add in more things from the IRC conversation. How about 
we talk on IRC on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday instead of tomorrow?

Here are my responses to the first 2 questions.

Q. Marina, you've co-ordinated the GNOME Outreach Program for Women for
the past two years. Can you tell us how you got involved in GNOME yourself?

I joined Red Hat six years ago to work on a social networking product 
after seeing a posting from the team's manager on LinkedIn. I had used 
Linux through my college years and at my previous job, but I didn't have 
any experience contributing to free software. In fact, I remember 
puzzling over why there was a choice between two options - GNOME and KDE 
- at the login screen of my Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation at my 
previous job, and wondering how was I supposed to know which one to pick.

Four years ago my original team was merged into the desktop team and I 
started working on GNOME. With many great GNOME contributors out there, 
it's uncommon for the desktop team to hire someone who is not an 
established contributor, so the fact that I ended up working on GNOME is 
a happy coincidence.

Q. How did you end up co-ordinating the Outreach Program for Women?

In August 2009, I received an e-mail from Diego Escalante Urrelo, on 
behalf of the GNOME Board of Directors, asking me to organize the 
outreach effort. Having just come from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, 
it was very evident to me and others how few women there were in the 
GNOME community. There are just 4 women in this[1] GNOME group picture 
of about 160. Two other women are Stormy Peters and Rosanna Yuen, who 
worked for the GNOME Foundation. The third woman is Alia Merali, who 
joined her husband it attending several GUADECs and helped with 
organizing GUADEC in Barcelona in 2006. It was very exciting to me to 
have the mandate and the support of the GNOME Foundation to involve more 
women in the GNOME community.

[1]http://images49.fotki.com/v856/filevUZx/7142f/7/441267/7802004/081.jpg (we 
can probably find a better picture)

(To complete my answer for this question I'll talk about what we did to 
start out the outreach effort and that there were 15 and 23 women 
respectively at the GNOME women's dinners at GUADEC in the subsequent 
years.)

Thanks,
Marina

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Neary" <dneary gnome org>
To: "Marina Zhurakhinskaya" <marinaz redhat com>
Cc: "Juanjo Marin" <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>, "Emily Gonyer" 
<emilyyrose gmail com>, karen gnome org
Sent: Tuesday, December 6, 2011 3:52:11 AM
Subject: Re: Annual report - can I interview you?

Hi,

On 12/05/2011 07:14 PM, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:
> Thanks for making plans to cover mentorship in the annual report! I'll be happy to do an interview and help 
> with any materials about mentorship for the report.
>
> How about we start it out as a written Q&A, and then you can follow up with more questions via e-mail or on 
> IRC based on my answers if you'd like? That way I'll get a bit more time to think about the answers to the core 
> questions, but then we can incorporate questions based on the answers I provide and introduce an element of a 
> discussion into the interview. I'm generally around this week and next.

Sure! I was thinking that a half an hour IRC chat which we could edit
afterwards might come across more as a conversation than a Q&A - but I'd
be happy to send you a few questions to allow you to organise your
thoughts. We can either publish these, or do the conversation format
afterwards, whichever you prefer. Thanks!


Q. Marina, you've co-ordinated the GNOME Outreach Program for Women for
the past two years. Can you tell us how you got involved in GNOME yourself?

Q. How did you end up co-ordinating the Outreach Program for Women?

Q. Has it been easy to convince people to mentor projects? What
proportion of the mentors are male?

Q. Do you think we're doing a good job as mentors in the GNOME
community? What could we be doing better?

Q. What do you think are the main issues that we need to work on as a
community to see more women getting involved in GNOME?

Q. Given the success of the first two editions of the Outreach Program
for Women, do you anticipate the program continuing in future years?


Thanks for your help!

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org
Jabber: nearyd gmail com