Re: Code Of Conduct

[Tristan Van Berkom <tvb gnome org>]

Baris Cicek wrote:
> I wanted to put my 2 cents on this women involvement issue.
Me too :)

> Actually women in proprietary software market have a good motivation
> like earning money from what they do. But in free software world, they
> hardly have this motivation, and most of time it's volunteer work. 
>
> I doubt that female enthusiasm to IT is high in the world. Therefore
> they need some motivation to get involved. It's something to do with the
> loving what you do in Free Software world, and women mostly choose other
> things than staying by the computer for hours. If we go deep into this
> gender psychology and genetic closeness to particular activities should
> be considered. 
>
> From where I live (ie. Turkey) most women in the IT world are only there
> for earning money, and those I doubt they would ever touch computer at
> home or elsewhere from their office. Sure thing that there are some who
> loves to use computers. But that's really few, which won't exceed
> fingers of an hand. 
>
> It's not easy to increase women involvement in that sense. We need to
> find motivation, and proprietary world does it by giving money. But
> nothing comes to my mind for Free Software world. 

Well,
    there must be some form of motivation for us to continue hacking
on the various things we hack on, standing up to billion dollar
corperations that steal freedom from software users and writers for example.

it seems easy enough to convince people that they should protest and help
save rain forrests and dolphins, maybe we need to work on better explaining
the importance of volunteer free software hacking, and the real significance
of what it is we're doing here.

One very hard obstacle I can see about getting women involved in free software
development, is the difficulty in taking the first few steps. Since the
community is made up mostly of men; I can see why women would easily shy away
from lesurly chatting with a bunch of male hackers on irc... possibly mostly
talking "boy stuff". This would naturally change if there were at least a 20% female
representation of the community. On the other hand; it makes no sence to
say that talking "boy stuff" in gnome irc channels is "improper conduct"
(this is ofcourse just an example; point being that women and men alike dont
like to feel alone in their gender in any community/circle).

Cheers,
                           -Tristan