(2/3) Fwd: Re: Annual report - can I interview you?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi all,

Email 2 of 3 re Marina interview for annual report.

Cheers,
Dave.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Annual report - can I interview you?
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:18:46 -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,

Sorry about being a bit late with these. Let me know what time you would 
like to talk on IRC tomorrow (Tuesday) or any other day. Any time after 
11am EST tomorrow should work for me.

Thanks!
Marina

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 in 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.

We started out by doing a round of introductions on the gnome-women-list 
@gnome.org, putting together a page with mentors who can help women 
start contributing to GNOME, working with the FSF on creating resources 
and recommendations for encouraging women to get involved in free 
software, creating an issue of the GNOME Journal with articles by women, 
discussing the 2006 Women's Summer Outreach Program with its organizers 
Hanna Wallach and Chris Ball, following up with that program's 
participants, and encouraging women to apply for Google Summer of Code 
and connecting them with mentors. When we only ended up having one 
female participant in Google Summer of Code that year, we decided to 
create the dedicated internship opportunities for women.

There were 15 and 23 women respectively at the GNOME women's dinners at 
GUADEC in 2010 and the Desktop Summit in 2011. So the outreach effort 
has definitely worked.

[1] http://images49.fotki.com/v856/filevUZx/7142f/7/441267/7802004/081.jpg

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

People who were involved in organizing the program were the original 
mentors and provided the initial participants with a reasonable choice 
of projects to contribute to. We have been encouraging people in the 
GNOME community to sign up as mentors throughout, but seeing the work of 
the initial participants was likely the most effective encouragement 
that got people to add themselves to the list. Because pairing up 
participants with mentors is one of the key components of the program, I 
occasionally had to ask people about mentoring specific projects. They 
were usually happy to help.

For the first round, we started out with 8 projects and 9 mentors, out 
of these 3 were women. For the latest, third round, we had 18 project 
and 27 mentors, with 7 women among them. So about 70% of mentors are 
men, which is expected, since we need the help of everyone in the 
community in mentoring the participants. Two of the women who 
participated in the program as interns, Luciana Fujii Pontello and 
Ekaterina Gerasimova, have now become mentors.

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

We have a lot of resources for someone who wants to start contributing 
to GNOME and people are generally happy to help, but we need to have 
more people taking an active role in informally mentoring newcomers. 
It'd be great if there were more people hanging out on #gnome-love and 
answering questions there.

It'd also be great if people suggested a suitable first bug to fix to 
newcomers and mentored them through the process of getting the patch 
committed. We should not be afraid to direct newcomers in what bug to 
fix first, as this will actually help them get started and learn things 
that will inform their subsequent contributions. Every Detail Matters is 
a great initiative to point out bugs that are important to fix to 
contributors with any level of experience.

Recently, we used the list of mentors we already had for the Outreach 
Program for Women to start a more general list of GNOME mentors [1] who 
are willing to informally mentor any newcomer any time throughout the 
year. We encourage everyone to add their projects and themselves to that 
list!

This list is included on the page with links to mentors in different 
free software organizations [2], that is hosted on the Google Summer of 
Code wiki. I initiated creating this resource based on our experience in 
the GNOME Outreach Program for Women of connecting applicants with 
mentors and requiring that they complete a first patch with the help of 
the mentor during the application process. Making sure that applicants 
are connected with the project's mentor and make the first contribution 
before or as part of the application process is essential for a 
successful internship.

[1] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove/Mentors
[2] http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/Mentors

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?

We need to spread the word more about the mentorship and internship 
opportunities we have for women. Out of the 12 participants we have this 
round, 3 received this information because I contacted people or groups 
in the area. One of these women and 6 others were encouraged to apply by 
someone locally. One woman was regularly reading Planet GNOME and 2 
others were already involved in the GNOME community. If more people use 
the resources we provide for spreading the word at their university and 
local technical community for the next round, we would reach more women! 
The request to do so and the resources will be out sometime in February.

Beyond that, it would be great to organize events at universities and 
local technical communities that teach people the basics of how to 
contribute to free software, such as using a bug tracker, revision 
control system, and IRC. It's important to start with basics in order to 
attract a wider audience. The Open Source Workshop [1] at MIT organized 
by OpenHatch is one example of such event that many students found 
useful. It has excellent materials and interactive exercises available 
online. Also, it would be great to organize events where people can get 
help installing GNOME and starting to contribute to it. Being able to 
try things in a supportive environment where experienced contributors 
can help resolve any setback within minutes would help many people make 
the first step, which is the hardest. Emphasizing the  collaborative 
style and mentioning the Outreach Program for Women in advertising such 
events would help attract women to attend them.

[1] http://openhatch.org/wiki/Open_Source_Workshop

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

We have just started the third round of the program, which had even more 
strong applicants than the two previous rounds. We are planning to run 
another round of the program from May to August, with an application 
deadline in early April.

There are currently many people and organizations making an effort to 
get more women involved in free software, and I expect it to become a 
lot more common for women to be involved in free software projects in 
the next few years. However, even when people inside the project will 
take it as a matter of course that women are involved, it will still 
take even longer until this view is shared by society in general. We 
should try to continue the program as long as we see that there are 
women who have a potential to be strong contributors out there, who are 
not getting involved in the same ways as men who have this potential.

----- 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