>From the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia:

Linux grrls break free 
By Adam Turner 
April 2 2002 

A locker-room mentality inherent in many user groups and mailing lists
was the catalyst for an online
sexual revolution - resulting in an Linux user group targeted
specifically for women.

LinuxChix was founded three years ago in the United States by Deb
Richardson, who handed over global
coordination and hosting to Melbourne programmer and writer Jenn
Vesperman in August 2001. Linux is
a free, open-source operating system, meaning its use and development
is not restricted by copyright laws.

LinuxChix is not exclusively for women but is actively welcoming to
women rather than just passively
neutral, says Vesperman.

"Deb started it partly because she was sick of the teenage boy,
locker-room mentality of a lot of Linux
groups. She knew that it was chasing her away from Linux groups,
particularly online, and felt that she
couldn't possibly be the only one," says Vesperman.

"She also felt that, particularly for women who aren't inherently
geeky, there wasn't enough motivation to
get past the locker-room mentality and actually find the core of
really good people that she knew was
there."

Along with Melbourne and Sydney there are 18 LinuxChix regional
chapters in the United States, six in Europe and five in Canada,
supporting Richardson's original belief that women were in need of a
low-testosterone environment in which to share ideas.

"I think there are an awful lot of women who are interested in Linux
and in Unix and I think there are more of them than there appears at
first glance, simply because a lot of them have been scared off for
various reasons," says Vesperman.

"On a couple of the open-source mailing lists, the official lists for
various projects, including some reasonably big-name ones, several of
the women feel that they have been treated rudely
specifically because they are female. They're not working on those
projects any more."

The LinuxChix community primarily revolves around eight general
mailing lists. They include "techtalk"
for technical questions and answers from beginner to expert level,
"issues" relating to Linux, open source,
technology and women and "grrls-only" - a combination of the LinuxChix
mailing-lists topics but for
women only. Grrls-only is deliberately not archived, to encourage
people to speak openly.

"We get quite a few people talking about whatever's going on in their
lives at the time. It's very social.
Since the inception of grrls-only, several women have felt freer to
rant about things," says Vesperman.

LinuxChix has a key focus on education and empowerment, offering
online courses covering such areas as
programming in C, security and Linux kernel hacking. A new BSDChix
chapter of LinuxChix has formed
for people interested in the BSD Unix variants.

LinuxChix's Melbourne chapter next meets on Saturday, April 6. 

For details contact Claudine Chionh at [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Sydney
chapter is inactive.

www.linuxchix.org

This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/29/1017206149200.html 

-- 
Ron. [au]

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