[Kde-women] Women's outreach BoF at Akademy 2012

[Claudia Rauch]

Hi all,

Here are my notes from the women's outreach BoF at Akademy 2012 -
thanks to everyone who participated! Please add anything that I forgot
to mention and give feedback if you have additional ideas or comments.
Do we want to publish something on women.kde.org? Or does someone feel
like blogging about this? Do we have a wiki to collect more ideas?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* We were approx. 10-12 people, mostly women, 2-3 men were also present.
*  Quick introduction round
* The group agreed that KDE is already quite diverse and doing well at
being welcoming to women and men alike. The question is: how do we
make this more visible to people outside of the community so that we
get even more women involved?
* Carl mentioned the outreach program of the University of Bellingham,
that got a big grant from the Association of Women in Computing [1].
Could we work with the uni or this association?
* In order to get more people, especially women, involved in KDE and
Free Software in general, you need to show role models, and lower the
barrier to get involved
* Lydia mentioned the IRC tutorials that she and others organised for
Ada Lovelace-Day 2011 [2].
* We discussed if IRC tutorials are helpful/successful - agreement
that they are good but only attract women that are already familiar
with IRC and not necessarily newbies
*  We briefly touched on the question if there is a difference in why
women get involved in FLOSS and why men get involved. The women
present shared their stories and motivations and the conclusion was
that there are probably no differences. Reasons for joining that were
mentioned:
  ** good company / "my people"
  ** career possibilities
  ** learning new, valuable things
  ** doing something valuable for society
  ** KDE as a whole more welcoming than other FLOSS projects
  ** KDE is such a large, mature project that everyone can find their niche
  ** KDE is well documented so it is easy to find information on how
to get involved
  ** if you commit a change or write an article, your work is visible
to you and others
* A question from Clemens showed that there are women in all kinds of
roles in KDE but just two female maintainers
* Valorie made the point that KDE is welcoming as such, but not
welcoming to women in particular. There seems to be a lacking
awareness that there are not enough women involved.
* Runa commented saying that a special women's outreach program might
give men the impression they are not being valued or that they might
get censored
* A short discussion about which message we want to send with women's
outreach activities: we want this to be a positive message, showing
that we would like even more women to get involved. We do not want to
focus on problems.
* Ada Lovelace Day 2012 is on October 16th [3]
* Suggestions from a brainstorming on what actions we could take:
  ** Organise IRC or Google hangout tutorials again for Ada Lovelace Day
  ** Organise an in person coding workshop similar to Railsgirls workshops [4]
  ** blog posts/ "Behind KDE " interviews with women involved with KDE
(not necessarily as a "Women in KDE series" but just to show that
there are women involved, too).
  ** create a new "Women in KDE" video, see [5]
  ** coordinate with http://adainitiative.org/
  ** pre-Akademy (Friday afternoon) Women's get-together (bring male friends?)
  ** Women's track/ conference day during Akademy or some other
conference. Example was: the women's miniconf during linuxconf.au [6]
  ** Get inspiration from http://openhatch.org/
  ** Women mentoring program, not paid, but organise a women in KDE
sprint or a showcase of the contributions at Akademy and
invite/sponsor those who were successful (similar to GSOC students)
  ** share ideas and experiences with the women from the GNOME women's
outreach program
  ** use the "Team Health Check" tool created by CWG to see how well
your team does in terms of diversity
  ** Talk to Linuxchix or Ubuntu Women
  ** make use of women.kde.org
  ** get guys involved: it is great if guys also speak up on this
topic and show their support

Now it's up to us to take the next steps :)-

Claudia


[1] http://www.awc-hq.org/home.html
[2] http://linuxgrandma.blogspot.de/2011/10/teaching-next-adas-join-kde-for-ada.html
[3] http://findingada.com/
[4] http://railsgirls.com/
[5] http://dot.kde.org/2010/03/24/kde-celebrates-ada-lovelace-day
[6] http://haecksen.net/haecksen-schedule-2012


-- 

Claudia Rauch
Business Manager
KDE e.V.
Linienstr. 141
10115 Berlin
Germany
Phone: +49 (0) 30 2023 7305 0
Fax: +49 (0) 30 2023 7305 9
Mobile: +49 178 522 3086

KDE e.V. is a German Verein registered at the Amtsgericht Tübingen
(VR1301). Its president is Cornelius Schumacher. For more information
please see http://ev.kde.org, and http://kde.org/