Here are some links to articles, blog posts and websites about women in computing and FLOSS. We will be publishing these kinds of links for time to time concerning these topics, in order to have an overview of what’s new and what is currently going on.

• IT Jobs Offer Growth, But Women Are Bailing Out
• Women in IT: The Facts: A summary of recent research on women in the IT workforce that makes  the business case for increased participation from women and provides  recommendations for action
• Women in Free Software: Recommendations from the Women’s Caucus
• Why Including Women Matters for the Future of Technology
• Le Rôle des Femmes dans les NTIC en Déclin (fr)
• TEDWomen
• Kathleen, a FAQ

That’s it for this time! Please let us know of any interesting links in comments of this blog, or on our mailing list. Thanks!

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

So if you are in the area of Paris next Tuesday, we hope to see you there!

More info concerning this event:

• Program of La Cantine
• The dedicated Facebook event page
• Map to the event

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.



We think that the free/open source world is based on strong values, such as liberty, altruism and collaboration. And yet, it seems that the free/open source world does not equally address both men and women. In order to better
understand the place of women in the free/open source world, we have developed a survey for the communities, companies and players of the free/open source world.

As a member of the Free/open source world, your opinion is very important to us. We would be truly thankful if you could take no more than 10 minutes to complete the following questionnaire:
http://owf-ged-poll.limequery.com/71557

The results will be analyzed by researchers in Education Sciences at Paris Descartes University and released at the Open World Forum on September 30th in Paris: www.openworldforum.org.

Should you have any questions, comments or wish to contact us, please send an email to owf-ged@april.org

We thank you for your contribution!

On behalf of the Diversity Summit Team,
Delphine

WoMoz is proud to present Flore Allemandou and her contributions and hard work through a quick video (approx. 5min). The quality is not perfect but others will follow and we’ll get better as time goes on

So here we go: http://womoz.mirocommunity.org/video/220/interview-with-flore-mozilla-w

Thanks Flore for this interview!

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.

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.

According to the director of Barbie marketing for Mattel, a lot of female engineers and other women in the tech industry voted for this Computer Engineer career for Barbie.

Mattel explains that “To create an authentic look, Barbie® designers worked closely with the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering to develop the wardrobe and accessories for Computer Engineer Barbie®. Wearing a binary code patterned tee and equipped with all the latest gadgets including a smart phone, Bluetooth headset, and laptop travel bag, Computer Engineer Barbie® is geek chic.”

Barbie’s new career is not just an answer to the demand of the popular vote, it’s also a way to encourage young girls to aspire to engineering or technology careers.

Sources:

http://www.zdnet.fr/blogs/l-esprit-libre/la-poupee-barbie-sera-informaticienne-et-utilise-linux-39713313.htm

http://www.chipchick.com/2010/02/computer-engineer-barbie.html

Indian girls are massively interested in computer sciences and engineering jobs¹. The number of girl teenagers following theses studies has increased by 125% in 2008. They are attracted by information and communication technologies related to environment or electric resources, but not so much by nuclear or aerospace industries. 71% women are careerist, and the same percentage have chosen this stream because of the attractive salaries.

And what about parity? It’s interesting to notice that there are different perceptions of the situation between male and female workers: 55% men think that women and men are equal in the company. But what do women think about that? Only 26% share the same opinion. So, who tells the truth? We can see that in fact only 30% women are involved in management activities in their companies.