[gnome-women] What's the plan?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

I sent this to gnome-women gnome org instead of gnome-women-list gnome org  
Trying again with some updates.

On Tue, 2006-05-16 at 22:56 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> So, following up on useful discussion arsing from my blog entry
> http://www.murrayc.com/blog/permalink/2006/05/12/women-in-open-source/
> what do we do to get more and better female involvement in GNOME? It
> feels like an emergency to me, yet GNOME should be the solution to this
> kind of problem. I'd like to help if someone could lead the effort.
> 
> My thoughts at the moment are:
> 
> 1. Track the numbers:
>   We need to know the gender percentages in the GNOME Foundation every
> year, so we can roughly measure our progress. 

It looks like this will happen:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/found

> We could do a one-off
> survey now.
> 
> 2. Special treatment:
>   - Persuade existing GNOME developers to give extra time and patience
> to potential female contributors? I have very little time, but I'd be
> prepared to dedicate some time and be unusually (for me) patient for
> this good cause.
>   - Create a wiki page with lists of potential mentors (and their areas
> of expertise), and potential people to be mentored? This would be good
> for the male contributors too, of course.
>   - How do we avoid this looking like a place for men to find women?
> Would a code of conduct help?

I created a general mentoring page. Hopefully it will fill up:
http://live.gnome.org/MentoredProjects
But the above questions remain.

> 3. Code of Conduct? 
> GNOME should probably have a code of conduct like Ubuntu's. It would be
> a quick way to stop a lot of noise (which is offputting for all), we
> could specifically discourage some obvious anti-female behaviour. As
> well as outlawing the worst examples, it could advertise us as a place
> where women might be able to avoid some of the behaviour they
> anticipate. 
>  
> 4. Role Models:
>   Publicise existing female contributors and new female members once
> they are established.
>   - Make sure they are on Planet GNOME?
>   - Make sure they are speaking at GUADEC?
>   - Articles in GNOME Journal / gnomedesktop.org?
> 
> 
> I've read in an FAQ somewhere that some women are put-off by some of
> these things - treating women differently from the start, and pointing
> out the few women who are involved. But we can't please all the people
> all the time, and I don't see how to take action that isn't in
> contradiction to something, and I don't see how we can make things
> worse.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com