Sun, 14 Sep 2008
How to know ...
In response to Lior:
How to know you're dating a free software guy?
You can recognize you're dating a free software guy by:
- You've finally found someone who shares your interests.
- He knows it is called GNU/Linux.
- He understands why you refuse to talk via gTalk, MSN or icq.
- His browser of choice is called Iceweasel, as is yours.
- He likes to attend your talks at Open Source conferences.
- You've finally found a guy who stands above stereotyping women as technically and technologically ignorant.
Posted at: 22:54 in /english/women
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Sat, 13 Sep 2008
More Blatant Advertising: Eleonore Digital
Here's one more post for my own little "advertising section", where I introduce gender-related projects that I think are a good idea but deserve some more publicity. So, last time we had geekspeakr.com, this time I'd like to introduce to you the Eleonore Digital Project.
In a nutshell they are organising a project where groups of students all over Europe work together in creating an educational 3D computer game that deals with the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Each team is assigned an episode or a certain aspect of Eleonore's life and they will research this, draft a concept and finally create their respective part or episode of the game. Doing this they will only work with free software, namely Debian as the Operating System, OOo, Blender etc. A longer (and better) description of what they want to do and the motivation behind all of this can be found in their project description or on the Eleonore Project site itself.
In my opinion the project seems to be a really good idea and I wish them the best of luck! What I like most about it is that it is not exclusively for girls, so that it does not create a kind of "artificial biotope" for girls to work in. Instead it aims to rise the girls ratio by means of a project topic that (so I assume) mostly appeals to girls. And I am especially happy that when looking for a topic that appeals to girls they came up with something better than fan homepages, foto love stories, and what else you find in "girls IT projects" these days. I am pretty sure that reading and researching on the life of one of the most influential women in European history is going to do them much more good that creating princess-themes webpages! I am also quite happy that they picked Debian as their operating system. I think Debian being used in a school project is a nice example that it is in fact not as "user-unfriendly" as it is often claimed to be! I've also introduced the project to the Debian Women Project and Miriam had the very good idea to also forward it to the Debian Games Team, so I hope we'll get some good cooperation here.
Posted at: 12:37 in /english/women
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Tue, 15 Apr 2008
Blatant Advertising: Geekspeakr
No news in this post, just a little advertising. I just came across geekspeakr.com and think it's a really great idea. From the site:
Many organisers of technical conferences, meetups, and dinners want to have more gender-balance in their lineups, but they don't know where to find technical women speakers.
Enter geekspeakr.com, a simple directory and connections system to help technical women speakers and event organisers to find each other.
I guess this could also be interesting for a some of my fellow Debian Women.
Posted at: 22:04 in /english/women
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Fri, 03 Feb 2006
Some work on gender and FLOSS
This also coincides nicely with a mail I got at about the same time from the FLOSSPOLS Project. They are organising a workshop on gender and FLOSS in Cambridge next weekend and invited me to participate. I am very much looking forward to this! Not only because it's an interesting topic, but also because I am finally going to personally meet some very interesting women, who I've only virtually "talked" to or only read about until now.
Also, this happens at just the right time, since I have recently begun to grow a bit bored by the whole Women and FLOSS Issue and it's ever-repreating discussions. I feel that these events give me back some of the momentum I've lost over the last months. Raising the number of women in FLOSS is a complex, longsome and sometimes even tedious business and it's good to get a little push from time to time.
PS: Congrats, honey! ;-)
Posted at: 14:08 in /english/women
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