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!

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.



Mainly, we have been very busy with accomplishing the tasks from our 2010 WoMoz Roadmap, just as we had planned and announced. Here are some more details concerning this long-term task, as well as our other activities:

• 2010 Roadmap
  • What has been done

  We have successfully accomplished the first steps of our Roadmap and followed our predetermined milestones accordingly. Only the survey is taking us longer to create than we expected (especially concerning the elaboration of the survey questions), while some future tasks have been started in advance, such as working on creating a Newcomers Team and mentorship program.
  So what does this mean concretely?
  We have mainly worked internally, contacting leaders throughout the various – and numerous – Mozilla communities in order to find out who and where the Mozilla women contributors are. This first phase permits us now to have a general and more accurate idea of who these women are, what they work in, how long they have been contributing, as well as the proportion of women and men in these teams (list to be published soon).
  We know of course that it is difficult to find *all* the contributors, however this will help us gain a much better overview and perspective than we had before.
  Concerning the Newcomers Team and mentorship program, we are currently brainstorming on ways to integrate this idea within the general Mozilla project. You may find notes concerning these ideas and this projects on our Meeting Notes page here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WoMoz/StatusMeetings

  • What still needs to be done

  As mentioned above, we still need to finish elaborating the internal survey questions. This survey will be distributed amongst the women contributors in Mozilla that we have contacted and that have contacted us as well. We will also elaborate a specific survey for the Mozilla women employees.
  The main goal of this survey is to have an overview of the profile of the women working and contributing in Mozilla, as well as their activities and perceptions in the institution.
  The purpose of the survey will be to detect areas of improvement related to gender issues in Mozilla and FLOSS communities for further actions and to give more visibility to women’s work.
  More info and notes about the survey can be found here.

• WoMoz side-tasks
  

As you can notice, our blog has a new theme now. It still has some minor issues and bugs to fix, however the theme is practically ready to rock & roll! A big and special thanks to Béatrice Kreng and Julia Buchner for having dedicated so much of their time on this.
Also, we are currently working on a fun Fortune package that we would like to integrate into Linux distributions. It will basically be like the Wanda Fortune Fish that already exists on Ubuntu for example, with quotations from famous women.
A more detailed list of our side-tasks can be found here.

• What we still need help with

The two main areas were we still need help and volunteers with are: writing articles on the blog and making videos. If you are interested in helping out, please don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment below.

• Update on the number of community members & contributors
  • Mailing List -> 80 people
  • Wiki Members -> 28 registered users
  • IRC -> around 15 online (during European Time Zone)
  • Facebook WoMoz Fan Page -> 140 fans

• More info and details about the WoMoz Project:
  • Our Meeting Notes
  • Directly on our Website

As always, feel free to join us for our meetings if you’re interested! They’re open to *all* and any suggestions for the project are welcome.

The main goal of these workshops will be to establish a 2010 Roadmap for the WoMoz project.

A daily agenda has been established for both workshops. The various items contained in the two daily agendas will be subject to discussion. By the end of the week-end, we should have defined our roadmap for the year and determined how to achieve these 2010 goals – our main and number 1 goal being to increase the number of women contributors in Mozilla, and by extension in FLOSS.

Discussions will be held in a more informal way and we encourage attendees to participate actively during the brainstorming.  The workshops will be open to all (men are welcome to participate, as in all WoMoz activities).

On Sunday at 1:00pm Alix Cazenave and Delphine Lebédel will be holding a 10min talk in the Mozilla DevRoom in order to present WoMoz to the communities and sum up our week-end workshops.

During the Fosdem event, WoMoz will also have a section at the main Mozilla booth (with brand new badges, flyers and stickers), so don’t hesitate to drop by! 

WoMoz Monthly Meetings are held every 3rd Thursday, on the #womoz IRC channel here:

irc://irc.mozilla.org/womoz

They are open to all.

• Goals of the WoMoz Gathering at FOSDEM
  • interact with women developers present at FOSDEM and encourage them to participate in the FOSDEM WoMoz sessions
  • try to draw more European developer profiles into participating and contributing in WoMoz and Mozilla
  • establish some kind of 2010 Roadmap for the WoMoz project: open a dedicated wiki page for this and start it during fosdem, in order to leave fosdem with something concrete to continue after the event

• Proposed Topics
  • schedule still TBD exactly, so feel free to suggest any ideas for talks / discussions by sending me an email here: delphine at mozilla  dot com. We’ll have a dedicated room for the sessions at least 2 hours on both Saturday and Sunday mornings to discuss these topics
  • establish a WoMoz Roadmap for 2010 and finish tying up “loose ends”
  • finish the discussion on how to get organized: who wants to do what?
  • the importance of being visible
  • ongoing projects
  • how to collaborate efficiently with other existing women’s groups?

• Propose a Topic to Discuss during the WoMoz Sessions

As the exact WoMoz schedule has not been determined yet, feel free to suggest topics you’d like to discuss then!

You can do so by either:

-  leaving a comment under this post

-  sending me an email: delphine at mozilla dot com

Thank you

Here is  a quick update concerning the WoMoz project:

• Still working on improving the wiki: structure, content, menus, etc.
• Integrating our video site into the wiki
• 2 surveys are now under construction
• Update on education with Mozilla Education: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/StatusMeetings/2009-12-14
• Video interview of a woman Mozilla contributor planned to appear next week!
• Watch out for cool Add-Ons to show up…
• Still working on visibility issue: participating more and more in FLOSS events, organizing dedicated events, etc.
• More on our Actions and TODO list wiki pages

Note on next week’s planned WoMoz IRC monthly meeting (12/24/2009):

Thursday session will most surely be adjourned and postponed until January, as it will be the 24th of December and many are away.

Have a great holiday all!

We created a dedicated section for WoMoz meetings in the Mozilla Wiki Community Calendar, as well as the WoMoz Meetings wiki page.

From now on, we will be holding Women & Mozilla meetings on the 3rd Thursday of every month. The meetings will take place on IRC channel #mozillawomen, at 18:00 UTC / 10:00a Pacific.

We’ll be focusing more on IRC meetings as many prefer using this way of communication for the moment. Since this has worked out fine last time, we’ll continue until we see it becomes better or necessary to hold calls as well.

Quick update on project:

• Improving the wiki: structure, content, menus, integration of different websites

• Creating a survey: Why are there so few women in Open Source? Is it that they leave or don’t join in the first place? (feel free to leave your opinion about this in the comments below if you wish!)

• Finding ways to work more on an educational level

• Creating a section that emphasizes how important it is that women already implicated in open source be more visible

• Making a video interview

• More on our Actions and TODO list wiki pages

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