Hello Sandra, thanks a lot for your personal account and well-argumented description of how you see the situation.
On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 05:22:03PM -0600, Sandra Loosemore wrote: > The absolute worst thing the public-facing representative > of *any* organization can do is bring negative publicity to the organization > about things that are irrelevant or contrary to the organization's mission. > As a result of RMS's comments, all of a sudden the public conversation about > the GNU project was not about how good our software is and how free software > is taking over the world and beneficial to everybody, it was about how we're > an organization with an ingrained culture of harassing and demeaning women, > (...) > It's been a public relations disaster for the GNU project. :-( > > IMO, to regain control of our public image, I think we have to take some > explicit and public steps to disassociate the GNU project from RMS's > comments. This was indeed my main motivation to sign the open letter at http://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/ so if people ask me about it I will direct them to your message :-) > It has bothered me for a long time that there are so few women participating > in the GNU community. I think I might be the only female maintainer on > either GCC/Binutils right now (I haven't gone through the lists, but the > others I used to know about have stepped down). The photos of the attendees > at recent Cauldrons show a group that is roughly 99% male. The steering > committee is 100% male. There is something wrong with our community that we > cannot attract more women, and we need to fix it, because a developer > community that consists almost exclusively of old white men is not > sustainable. Do you have ideas on how to change that, maybe on a per-package basis? For instance, did you experience things in GCC/Binutils or in other environments that you think might help to attract more women, or more generally to make diverse groups of potential contributors feel more welcome? Andreas
