Women & Mozilla

These past months have been celebration-packed times… as always of course.

But they’ve also been a period filled with news and information concerning women in open source and computing. So it still seems as though the subject is gaining more and more importance as time goes by.

And this is fantastic news.

Here in WoMoz we constantly highlight how important it is that women be more visible in open source and how it is essential that they regularly present or talk about their work and accomplishments (just as everyone should do actually – we’re not “free” and “open” for nothing ).

We are very, *very* few women in open source, so it becomes extra important to make some noise around our accomplishments if we don’t want to become completely invisible (on top of being almost inexistent in FLOSS…). The fact that there are so many more articles addressing the subject is already really good news and a big step towards gaining more visibility.

There also seem to be more and more frequent “geek girl meet-ups” coming up: Microsoft sponsors some Girl Geek Dinners (like the one in Paris, France) and from what I understand Ubuntu apparently will soon be sponsoring their own kind as well.

So what about Mozilla in all this? Should we start promoting and sponsoring on a regular basis our own type of “geek girl” meet-ups too?

On a personal note, I must admit though that I’d rather not create yet another separate “Geek Girl Dinner Thing” (especially if Ubuntu are going to create their own): personally I’d rather get together with other FLOSS organizations / companies  / communities / whatever (like Ubuntu) that are already organizing these gatherings to see how we can work together on this, instead of dividing up our strengths. (remember: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” according to Linus’ Law ). Any ideas about this are welcome of course.

That said, and without further ado, here are some random links to articles and news that discuss the “women in open source and computing” topic, and that have appeared lately on our beloved Web:

• Open Source in 2010: Nine Predictions (Datamation.com, by Bruce Byfield. See especially point 5)
• Not Enough Women in Computing? (by Cameron Laird, itworld.com)
• Python institution promotes diversity (by Cameron Laird, itworld.com)
• Not Enough Women in Computing, or Too Many Men? (by timothy, Slashdot)
• Of Geeks and Girls (by Lisa Grossman, Science Notes 09)
• Issue 17 of the GNOME Journal, titled “Women In Open Source” (November issue): “This is their first issue with a unified theme, and with all articles written by women from the open source community. The idea and execution of this issue was created by the GNOME Women community. It comes packed with articles about GNOME and its underlying frameworks.” (excerpt from article in OSnews.com)
• Richard Stallman: For Avoidance of Misunderstandings (by Roy Schestowitz, boycottnovell.com)
• …

Stay tuned for more: we’ll be regularly adding new articles and links concerning the “women in FLOSS” subject on the WoMoz blog from now on.