[clug] Open Source Software's Dirty Little Secret

[Jack Kelly]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Daniel Pittman <daniel at rimspace.net> wrote:
> A specific example would be someone claiming that the low participation of
> women in IT or FOSS is a result of inherent gender differences, rather than of
> IT and FOSS being an environment that excludes women and, so, deliberately
> keeps their participation low.
>
> (...or, y'know, "she wore a short skirt, so she had it coming")

Huh? Is there some sort of Godwin's law about gender discussion that
means someone will sooner or later reference rape? This point would've
worked better without the snark.

You're making good, solid points. You don't need to do stuff like that.

As to hostile environments and their effect on participation:
http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/

Choice quote:
"""
One of the first things I asked them was whether they had previously
been involved in open source projects. They gave answers like:

    I’d never contributed to an open source project before, or even
considered that I could.

    I didn’t feel like I was wanted.

    I never got the impression that outsiders were welcome.

    I considered getting involved in Debian, but the barriers to entry
seemed high.
"""

Sound familiar to anyone? I've considered becoming a dev for a couple
of distros and the barriers looked pretty high, as the fourth quote
says. I've had some good experiences - I fixed a couple of ebuilds in
Gentoo Sunrise and contributed a couple of bug reports (and fixes) to
Gentoo. (The emacs team in particular were great, reviewing a patch
for an ebuild I was trying to improve.) I've had some bad experiences,
where I'd spent ages reading policies and documentation to do
something correctly, only to have my contribution ignored.

Taking the first step in contributing is pretty intimidating. I assume
it'd be worse for minority groups. It needs to be easier for people in
general to (a) skill up, and (b) get involved.

-- Jack