[kde-community] FOSDEM Organisation

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

John,

You couldn't be more wrong.

I have been organizing the Desktops DevRoom for the last 4-5 years (cannot
really remember), so I can speak from reality.

There is no discrimination against women in FOSDEM. It's just they do not
submit talk proposals. Simple as that. E. g. this year we have only had one
talk proposal from a woman and I had to chase her! In the very few cases
where they do submit talks, more often than not when you tell them "you've
got your slot" the answer will be "oh, I won't be attending, I need more
time to plan". Well, sorry but everybody is notified of
acceptance/rejection with exactly the same amount of time (4-6 weeks) due
to the timeframe FOSDEM manages. If men can come, why can't women? (we do
also have some rejections from men due to too-late notice but it's less
frequent).

People are overreacting with these CoC's (or lack of). For some reason, and
it's not discrimination of any kind, women are by far not interested in
technology and engineering. In the same way they are by far more interested
in Nursery, Medicine, Psychology, Marketing & Advertising, etc than men. Is
there a CoC about men for Nursery or Midwife conventions? I don't think so.



On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 2:21 AM, John Layt <jlayt at kde.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Just a heads-up that I will not be attending FOSDEM next year and will
> not be assisting in any way with preparations for FOSDEM or providing
> any hardware. This is the result of the FOSDEM organisers refusing to
> institute a proper Code of Conduct for attendees or to take any other
> steps in addressing the dreadful gender ratio of speakers on their
> program or attending the conference itself. I have attempted to
> discuss these issues with them and found their attitude and beliefs
> completely unacceptable to me. As such I cannot give them any form of
> support, and sadly that means not helping the KDE community at this
> event anymore.
>
> John.
> _______________________________________________
> kde-community mailing list
> kde-community at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
>



-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/attachments/20141206/166a5a42/attachment.htm>