First of all, can you present yourself to our readers? What is your background, your current job and the FLOSS projects you are involved with?
I’m 31, I’ve been living in Toulouse for a few years and I have two children. I am a trained historian, specializing in religious history from 18th to 19th century. However, I currently work in copy-writing, CRM and as a community manager for an e-commerce website. As for Open Source and Free Software, I’m working mainly on Wikimedia’s projects : Wikipedia firstly, Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons too. But I don’t partake in that many projects concerning Free Software: I simply read a lot about this subject, I’m an April member and I follow what Framasoft does – that’s really all for the moment.

How did you get involved in Wikimedia France? I assume that it didn’t happen overnight, right? How exactly did you make your way to become President of the organization?
I first contributed to Wikipedia in early 2006. In 2007, I discovered the existence of the “Wikimedia France” association, which supports Wikimedia projects in France. I started to pay attention to it and became a member at the end of the year. As I had some free time, I applied to become a board member in March 2009 and the board made me President. Everything went pretty fast once I understood what Wikipedia was about; free knowledge sharing, the necessity of openness to build this project. It felt completely natural to get fully involved.

How do you contribute to Wikimedia at the moment? Are there any specific projects that you work on which you happen to take more seriously than others?
Currently, my participation in Wikipedia is quite limited as I’m way too busy with the association’s operations! For Wikimedia France, I mainly take care of action coordination, which is not so easy to explain. I also take care of our employees. Besides, I really like following and giving fresh impetus to projects that we lead with cultural institutions. That’s mainly evangelism work with regards to museums, archives and libraries. It involves persuading them that opening their data can be beneficial for them, explaining Free licenses and creating beneficial partnerships. It’s very exciting. I really like getting beginners to discover Free Software and Wikipedia during informal meetings, mainstream conferences, etc.

Can you describe what daily life is like, as someone working in the IT sector and specifically in Free Software?
I work in e-business, it’s not exactly IT even though computer science is ubiquitous. The team I work with everyday – which includes marketing, graphic design and software development – includes almost as many women as men, all quite young (between 23 and 35, bosses included). Things are going very well. I’m no expert in software development but by working with developers, I’m gradually gaining a better understanding of their logic and their problems. We essentially work with free tools (Ubuntu, OpenOffice) or open source tools (like Magento, a heavy e-commerce platform). The Free Software philosophy is quite present in the firm – both for practical and economical reasons but also philosophical reasons as well.
It’s quite strange when you enter the Free Software world from outside computer technology. Regarding Libre / Free Software, it’s a bit strange to be there when you’re not already in the IT field. Sometimes I feel unqualified to talk about Free Software, even though I understand the issues very well. I never deal with the code, I like free software activists in general and our relationship is going well, but there’s a moment when I have to leave the conversation… That being said, I don’t despair and try to learn some tricks of the trade when I have the time.

Is female participation in Free Software limited ? Some statistics show no more than 2% of women in free software, whereas they are 25% in proprietary software. How do you feel about that as a member?
Once again, I don’t necessarily consider myself part of the IT world but rather part of the Free and Libre world.
For Wikipedia, there are few women; we estimate the number to be about 12% of contributors. I don’t know if this number reflects the reality or not, it’s hard to know for sure in a project where members are very “volatile” and where anonymity is the rule. In the French administration of Wikipedia, the proportion of women has stabilized over the last few years at roughly 7%. For Wikimedia France, about 10% of all contributors are women.
I’d say it’s not an issue. In reality, it can have an influence on the way articles are written and in the atmosphere of the community. I can’t say if we should lead a specific action for women, I think we should understand why they don’t contribute naturally in the first place. That being said, in the workplace I don’t find it uncomfortable to be female. In fact, on the contrary, I’ve almost never had any issue as a woman. I’ve often had the impression I’m more trusted for management tasks “because I’m a woman”. However, I don’t know if that’s related to the fact I’m a woman or to my personality. I think it was quite a challenge to give the leadership of the association to a literary woman, but I think it’s a good thing to show that the philosophy of FLOSS goes beyond just the software.

According to you, what should be done to add more stability in Free Software projects and communities? Is it really necessary/useful?
Stability is an important issue. In Wikimedia projects, we mainly work with volunteers. It’s very hard to ask someone to dedicate his free time to deadlines and to commit to long-term projects. It’s hard to ask for specific results, to give orders or to ask someone to work on a project he or she doesn’t necessarily like. So projects go ahead and grow but not always in the direction and at the pace they were intended initially. On one hand, it is sometimes difficult to manage when you are leading an organization because you are always busy with the short term. This limited scope can spoil projects done in partnership with institutions or external associations. But on the other hand, I feel it is a great advantage because it is such an incentive and stimulates even more creativity.
We should find ways of giving more value to each other’s work so that everyone feels recognized and rewarded for what he or she contributes to. And to help build momentum and incentives for more long term involvement. As for me, I try to take the time to keep an eye on every project, by asking for updates and of course sending thank you messages to individual contributors. It is not much but I know it is a sign of gratitude, which can help people feel more valued. We also try to gather task force teams to maintain projects – which is not easy.
So yes, let’s take care of our contributors to ensure long term stability of our projects. But we shouldn’t aim at excessive stability, which could in turn lead to bureaucratic management, since the strength and nerve of the FLOSS community is an individual initiative: inflexibility may kill creativity.

Extra question: I’m looking for the next person to interview for this chronicle and I already have a few names in mind. Is there a woman, in Free Software or not, from whom you’d like to listen about the story about diversity?
There is a woman that I really like and who lives at the other end of the world. Her name is Beatriz Busaniche, and she is from Argentina. She is really active in Argentinian Free Software and in Wikimedia too. She managed almost by herself to set free several dozen hours of archives from Argentine Radio-Television, a large part of which is now available for all on Wikimedia Commons, especially the highlights of the country’s history. She has a very catching energy and geniality. We happened to meet at a Wikimania event in Poland last summer, then in Wikimeetings in Paris last December. She has been very active in Free Software for many years, she really deserves to be interviewed I think

Thanks to Goofy, kaze, Roxanne and theocrite for the translation. You can find the original version here (French).
Photo by Tornad3

I joined Mozilla thanks to my boyfriend Santiago “nuno” Hollmann, who taught and explained to me all about Mozilla Foundation and their mission. And now, one year later, I’m a member of the Argentina Mozilla Community: spreading the word, giving talks and doing marketing campaigns about Mozilla.

Besides that, I am also a Mozilla Student Reps in my university where I am planning a big event and install fest for September 18th, and where we are also planning work together with the different Graphic Design, Marketing and English Translation students.

My biggest goal for this year is to create a Womoz Argentina, in order to integrate more and more women in the community, as it would be ideal have as many women as men.I think there are few women in the communities of the world (not only in Argentina) because they probably think that men are more associated with computers or they do not know what is Mozilla and what Mozilla does, or because they are not invited. One important step to incite many more women is letting them know that Mozilla communities aren’t just for “men”, and telling to all the women that they are very important for the project.

In order to integrate more women, we should present Womoz in all the events that we can and probably we should help feel identified with the project. Obviously, we should work on spreading the word that all the events about free software are open to women too, as well as making social campaigns on facebook, twitter, etc. All these things make me feel that we need Womoz Argentina, doing everything possible to integrate more and more women.

It is really difficult to feel yourself out of Mozilla when you always have this kind of integration and activities in order to make the Web – and of course life – more equal for all.

Atenas da Costa

Here are my impressions and point of view of the UDS: how it took place, what I was expecting, and what it brought me.

From May 10-14 2010 in Brussels (Belgium) was held the UDS, the Ubuntu Developer Summit. During an entire week, the Canonical employees as well as many developers from Ubuntu, Gnome, and other FLOSS projects from the entire world gathered in order to meet, work and prepare for the future version of Ubuntu.

So here is a small glimpse of what the event was like. A hotel filled with meeting rooms, 3-4,000 people, one more-than-full-agenda and one main and central theme: Maverick Meerkat. The topics were diverse and classified into 9 big families: server, desktop, design, kernel… In order to welcome all these people, 18 rooms and an auditorium. The possibility to follow the meetings thanks to streaming video and to participate via IRC and Gobby. And a calendar in perpetual movement in order to manage our schedules.

Might as well say that I felt a bit lost and out of place. I was mainly going to the UDS in order to witness how Ubuntu functions and understand how you “make” a new version.

I only had a vague idea of what would happen there and what I could do. As soon as the first day started, I felt like I was loosing ground: it’s too big, too many interesting projects, and too many people. My weak level in English did not help me to understand, however it got better by the end of the week. Thankfully, my French neighbors were present. As soon as I understood that I could record the meetings, I scrupulously did that in order to be able to work on them later. No excuse for this, as everything was also noted on the general wiki.

Concerning the meetings, I had a general idea of what would interest me: accessibility and Ubuntu-Women. Since that represented just a few meetings, I also added communities to my personal list. And I really didn’t regret my choice. I realized how big and important this was, and how I really lived in my small world with Ubuntu-fr. Because frankly, aside from documentation and the forum, Ubuntu-fr is really more like an “Ubuntu-France” and even more like an “Ubuntu-Paris”.

[…]

Concerning the Ubuntu-Women meeting, there were few women present. The goal was to find ways to incite more women to join communities via patronage, and to show that IT is not a “man’s-only” domain… David, a man from Quebec, had the idea to translate the existing documents of Ubuntu-women into French in order to make them more accessible to all French-speakers. I spoke a bit about WoMoz that has the same kind of goals. I hope we will be able to work on common projects, or at least that the ideas of some can help the others.

So what is my personal summary for this event? Tiring, intense, huge, too many things to integrate.

Do I want to go back? Sure. I had loads of fun, I met lot’s of really interesting people, and my head is filled with projects. The UDS makes me want to involve myself even more within Ubuntu and accessibility. I really felt like I was a drop in the ocean, but a drop that can have it’s own function and help things change in this immense sea.

My general impression? It is not being a woman that has held me back. Neither was it not being a developer nor having absolutely no technical skills. Many topics demand rather a relational or organizational skill. No, the hardest thing was my level of English.

[…]

So my conclusion is: if you want to participate, help, or simply integrate a community, the only brake to that is the one that you impose yourself. So I will now really start to learn English better and then, I’ll conquer the world.



To continue using Spotify from abroad, sign up for Spotify Premium  which gives you unlimited travel access.

It is not that I really have an access, it is just that I say I am living in France and on a very-long-trip in Germany and as I am a premium member actually it does the trick.


Have you heard about the Ken Loach story? Ken Loach decided last Month to stream for free all his movies on Youtube. Every week a new movie was due to be available on his channel. A really great idea for such a controversial artist. I don’t really know what happened. At the moment, only 2 movies are available and we can read this on his channel

We have been asked by distributors in France, Belgium and the Netherlands to block the films on this channel from these territories. We have also been asked by another party to remove ‘Riff Raff’, ‘Raining Stones’, ‘Hidden Agenda’ and block ‘The Navigators” from the UK. We sincerely apologize and hope to resolve this matter soon.

So I am not sure what to do and what to think about this situation. In some cases, I do believe that sadly the only solution is to download illegally those files or to install a VPN (or any other solution that makes a website believe you are in the same country). The person is the same, the only difference is where you are accessing from. I do not understand why it is making such a big difference. And I am not even talking about all the American websites like Vevo on Youtube, Hulu or the American TV Broadcast Channel Websites where you can watch the series’ episodes or even the Apple Store. No, I am just speaking about Europe. And how the contents are available legally but not from every distribution channel/website available.