(Picture by Giovanni, some rights reserved)

Here is the 1st part of a series of posts concerning my participation at MozCamp Europe (Berlin) last weekend, and in which I will also share feedback concerning the WoMoz talk we gave there with Clarista.

So to start out, here are the slides from the WoMoz presentation. They can be consulted and are available for download on my SlideShare:

An .odp version is also available for download here (CC-by-sa).

The audio part should be coming soon, and we’ll make sure to post that as well once it’s possible. Stay tuned for the next series of posts about MozCamp Europe!

This is a wonderful occasion to teach women how to program in Python, and will lead to many more future meet-ups. Whether you are beginner or more experienced in Python programming, come and join us for an evening of fun and learning!

Here is some more info about the event:

The PyStar program is a workshop designed to teach all women (including trans women) and their friends who are looking to learn how to program in a friendly non-alpha-geek environment. The material is aimed at learners who have never programmed before though there is also material for those with some programming experience in other languages who are interested in learning a new language. This free event relies on volunteer teachers so we’re looking for people who already know Python, and have an interest in teaching to come guide the attendees as they work on small scripts that teach the power of this very accessible language.

So if you’re in the area and wish to participate, you can sign up here. Feel free to tell your Parisian friends about the event!

We’re also looking for volunteers to teach Python during this workshop (both women and men). If you’re interested, you can sign up on the same page. If you know anyone around you who’d be interested, again feel free to spread the word.

See you all there!

(on a side note, I’ll be participating as well. Can’t wait to learn new things! )

Address : 25 Quai Grands Augustins, 75006 Paris
Website : http://www.tgcparis.com
Google Maps : link

Registration for this event is free and open to all (yes, men and women)! For organizational reasons, we ask you to RSVP on this site to help us estimate the number of participants. But not to worry, nobody will be kicked out of the room by our bouncers or experts in krav maga, so if you see that the event is full, feel free to come anyway.

We will follow-up shortly once we have confirmed the the location! Oh, and no need to start collecting funds to offer me drawing lessons, I’ll just end it here…:)

This event is still by far my favorite free and open source event. All the things you can learn, do, and see just in 2 days is amazing. I still haven’t got over it. And that’s probably the reason why I’ll keep on going in the years to come.

Anyways, this is not the point. This year in the “Mozilla Devroom” were held many interesting talks. We were less Mozillians than during previous years (as Tristan already explained, Mozilla only sponsored speakers this year), but this permitted more interaction with the other free software projects present, which was really a big positive point.

As I had announced before the event, we held a quick-but-efficient Women & Mozilla meet-up on Saturday afternoon, which was really interesting and fruitful. There were 3 main ideas that we discussed there, and that we will progressively put into action:

1. We need to develop and maintain more our communication tools. Our blog and video website need more regular content and more authors
2. We should create a twitter account, in order to reach out to as many people as possible
3. We should consider dropping our mailing list for a forum

(more info about all this on the WoMoz mailing list. Archives are public)

I gave my talk on Sunday afternoon, presenting the Women & Mozilla project, explaining what we had done during 2010 and what was to come in 2011. You can find the slides here. Everything went well (in spite of the outer-space experience of Saturday night and the inevitable not-so-great-feeling the next day we all had to experience ) and the comments and feedback I received were really interesting and useful. A big thanks to all of you present!

So this sums up pretty much my experience of this year’s FOSDEM. And as always, I can’t wait for next year’s.

(Picture by Vivien Nicolas, featured on Bonjour Mozilla during FOSDEM)

Yes, that’s right. Let me explain: Mozilla will participate in the Dare 2B Digital Conference next Saturday, February 12th. The intent of this event is to introduce girls (7th to 10th grade) to the wonders of computer science and electrical engineering. Mary has written an awesome report concerning our upcoming participation there, which I highly recommend you read. In the meantime, here’s a summary of what all this is about.

With the idea to empower women at an early stage and bridge the existing gap in the workforce of technology efforts, Dare 2B Digital Conference will host an event in Mountain View (California) composed of various workshops and activities in order to interest young girls in STEM fields. Their mission, as they put it, is to
ensure that women are fully represented in the wide spectrum of exciting, creative and lucrative careers that leverage an education in Computer Science. Dare 2B Digital reaches out to girls – middle school and high school students – including those in underserved communities, who use familiar technology everyday (cell phones, video games, the Internet), but who usually do not consider careers that envision, develop, market, sell, apply, or rely on these and other technologies.

Lukas Blakk is going to showcase a video workshop there, in order to demonstrate all the great things you can do using HTML5 and Universal Subtitles. Will be present as well from Mozilla: Marcia Knous, William Reynolds and Rainer Cvillink. The idea is to show these girls how cool and fun it can be to work in a STEM field. And we need your help to do so!

Yep, you can get involved in the fun too, and here’s how: we currently need localizers’ participation to help translate subtitles online during the event. You can sign up here on the Mozilla Wiki to give us a hand.

There are 3 workshops where you can help out on Saturday:

10:15am – 11:30am PST

12:30pm – 1:45pm PST

1:45pm – 3:00pm PST

As the wiki sign-up page explains, the key components of this tutorial will be demonstrating the Miro Converter, Universal Subtitles, and a little bit of Popcorn.js where the girls work on doing subtitles for clips of footage shot during the day to share online and adding some dynamic content to the media.

Interested? I’m sure you are! So don’t be shy, come and sign up here to help out.

Thanks!

Women & Mozilla will be present once again at FOSDEM in Brussels this year, from February 5th – 6th 2011. This will be the occasion to reach out to women developers present at the event, as well as to present the WoMoz project, our 2010  work and our plans for 2011, during a talk on Sunday: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fosdem:2011/Schedule

We would also like to invite people interested to join us for a WoMoz meet-up on Saturday afternoon on the FOSDEM campus, around 17:00 CET. We will meet at the Mozilla booth and head on over to a free room (still TBD). Our idea is to gather during one hour and discuss our plans and ideas for the future, and to get as much feedback and opinions as possible. Don’t hesitate to contact me for any questions about this meet-up here: delphine at mozilla dot com

Can’t wait to see you there!

It is of course impossible during only 2 hours to create an entire Diversity Charter, so we decided that we’d start by establishing the bases for it and draw out the main lines. You can find Rayna’s notes from the session here: http://wiki.april.org/w/OWF_GED_workshop

In the end, it was decided that we would create a work-group that would continue to work on this Charter after the workshop. If you are interested in participating, please feel free to join us on the dedicated mailing list here: http://www.april.org/wws/info/owf-ged (the ml is in English, as well as the wiki)

We hope that this Charter will be adopted by many companies and communities. We intend on working on a “hackable” charter, in order that a maximum of interested companies / communities will be able to adapt it to their particular needs.

As it is also one of WoMoz’ 2010 Roadmap items, we hope that this Charter can be something that we can adopt and, once it is clearly established and ratified, that Mozilla will eventually want to use as well.

So women, men, and basically everyone… join us in the creation of this Diversity Charter, so it can reflect all our beliefs and needs! We would love to have your help and ideas, so that this Charter can be representative of us all, and be as open and participatory as possible.

And a special “Thank You” to April and to Frédéric Couchet for letting us continue to use the mailing list and wiki for this work

nb. This post is almost the same as I previously published on my personal blog. However since we have really started working on this charter since, I thought it was important to make another call for participation.

The Open World Forum in Paris (September 30th – October 1st) will host in this year’s 2010 edition a think tank called “Open Diversity Summit: Why women matter?“:

Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) is fundamentally changing
the IT industry. It is undoubtedly a tremendous success, both in
economic and social terms. However FLOSS still faces gender
inequality, to an even greater extent than the wider IT industry which
itself is seen as an area where discrimination is widespread. This
summit will showcase approaches to tackling gender diversity from
across the Open Source world.

The Gender Equality and Diversity Team (OWF-GED), of which some WoMoz members have taken part in, are proud to present these panels this year.

The entrance is free, however registration is necessary: http://www.openworldforum.org/attend/agenda/diversity-summit-why-women-matter

So if you are in the area and this topic interests you, please don’t hesitate to hop by!

I am very glad to have been present in the Software Freedom Day in Colombia.  Many cities celebrated this day, and Mozilla Colombia was invited to Manizales, a small city in the “coffee area”.  Although I live in Bogotá – the Capital and most important and biggest city in Colombia -  we decided to travel to Manizales (my friend Jefferson from Mozilla Colombia and I)  for two reasons:

• Mozilla should be present in all cities and towns – and we don’t care if they are big or small.

• People must understand that Mozilla is not only about Firefox and that Firefox is more than a web browser.

In our conference,  we spoke about the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corporation, some legal items (not much, but enough I hope),  technical aspects and Mozilla philosophy. We used several supports:  slides, videos about Html5 and demos, but the most important point in our conference was an interview made with Guillermo Movia from Argentina about what he thinks of Mozilla.  We showed this video and discussed it.  In the video, Guillermo spoke of important aspects about the Open Web and  how important is to keep it open.  He mentioned a lot of examples of monopoly and how Mozilla is confronting them and the importance of standards.

We discussed all this. We showed the importance to use products such as Firefox. And people asked us technical questions of course (and we answered of course) but a guy asked me an important question,  in my opinion the most important of all:

“What is the difference between Firefox and other web browsers technically and philosophically speaking? Why must I use Firefox and not another one?”

Technical aspects were easy to answer. We supported our answers with some demos, speaking about the importance standards, Open Web, Open Source etc, but when we explained the philosophical aspects and how important Communities are to Mozilla, the way we (communities) work with them,  and the coherence between philosophy and community, they were all convinced and superficial things like “My web browser is faster and cleaner than Firefox” became less important.

We finished our conference talking about the different ways to contribute, showing projects and mentioning an important number: 16.8%. That number is the percentage of women who work in Mozilla. It is a high number compared to other open source projects, especially when you consider that women contribution is around 1% to 2%. In fact, in our conference room there was just one woman: me. Men in Colombia often wish that there were more women involved in open source or technical events, so when I mentioned this number, their eyes became wide open with amazement!

Our conference assistants,  Jefferson and I listened to the next conference about Open Suse. The speaker (a man) hadn’t attended our conference about Mozilla… He spoke and spoke and… suddenly, he looked at me and said:

“I don’t like Firefox,  I hate it because it uses a lot of memory. I use Opera, it’s not open source but I like it.”

People laughed of loud for a long time and when they finished their laugh, I said: Memory? Memory is to use it! And the people (who attended our conference) said:  Hey brother you are wrong!

After our conference and SFD, we concluded that people understood the importance of projects like Mozilla. We have 4 new members in our community and more people who understood the importance to have an Open Web.