Re: Interesting and relevant article

[Michael Meeks]

On Fri, 2012-09-21 at 11:08 +0200, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
> The "Badges and ranks afford a better understanding of how 
> representative any poster is" does sound reasonable though, esp. to help 
> occasional or new participants.

There are merits in that; on the other hand - it appears to conflict
with the stated desire for flat / peer structures, and easy forms of
entry from the same article :-)

We have a two-level structure now of course: membership provides that
(I guess) - be good to get more people formally registered there too.

Regards,

Michael.

-- 
michael.me...@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot

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Re: Interesting and relevant article

[Tor Lillqvist]

> at least to me it doesn't look like we have any
> amount of confusion spread by clueless would-be experts in the ML anyway.

> That person apparently has a sense of humor, combining "high level" and
> "perl" in one sentence.

--tml
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Re: Interesting and relevant article

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 09/21/2012 10:41 AM, Michael Meeks wrote:

You're most welcome to build some. On the other hand of the top ten
recommendations a few look like non-starters to me:

* switch mailing lists to forums


The "Badges and ranks afford a better understanding of how 
representative any poster is" does sound reasonable though, esp. to help 
occasional or new participants.  Then again, at least to me it doesn't 
look like we have any amount of confusion spread by clueless would-be 
experts in the ML anyway.



* switch to a high level language: perl, python,ruby


That person apparently has a sense of humor, combining "high level" and 
"perl" in one sentence.


Stephan
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Re: Interesting and relevant article

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Joop,

On Fri, 2012-09-21 at 07:45 +0200, Joop Kiefte wrote:
> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ten_easy_ways_attract_women_your_free_software_project
> 
> Maybe this article can be a starting point for when/if we want to try
> to get even more and better contributions, and make the project more
> accessible? Does anyone know/have statistics about this for
> Libreoffice?

You're most welcome to build some. On the other hand of the top ten
recommendations a few look like non-starters to me:

* switch mailing lists to forums
* communicate for the sake of communication not to address
  specific issues
* use wikis instead of version control
* switch to a high level language: perl, python,ruby
* in-person / pair programming

On the other hand - I think we get a few things right: we tend not to
have massive flame wars, and (I hope) we have a friendly peer structure.

We have some excellent women developers and contributors around who are
respected members of the community: I'm thinking of Christina, Regina,
Tibbylickle, Sophie, Jaqueline, (and this is where I get duffed up for
forgetting some other female super-stars). So - gender shouldn't matter
to the welcome in the community. I'm aware of a couple of cases at
conferences where women have been actively helped by other attendees to
avoid specific unwanted attention; so we try to provide a safe
environment. I hope - we're not doing too terribly badly here.

Of course, if there are areas of contribution that are more attractive
to women that we are failing to provide a good on-ramp into the project
for we should fix that. The article suggests UI design, documentation,
marketing (though personally I think women hackers are every bit a match
for male ones) - then concrete suggestions to improve involvement in
these areas are appreciated: although, this is the wrong list to discuss
those topics :-)

HTH,

Michael.

-- 
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