Women in Open Source

Posted on February 8, 2008 - by jono

Currently over at SCALE in Los Angeles and the Women In Open Source track has just kicked off today – looks like it is going to be an excellent day, with some facinating tracks. It is being kicked off by my friend Allison Randell, who is also speaking at LugRadio Live USE 2008. Speaking of which, we have worked hard to try and get the demographic of women up at LugRadio Live – although we have a number of women who attend as visitors, the speaking rosta has been somewhat devoid of women, for no other reason than the lack of papers being submitted. This year I am pleased to see that we have a number of women confirmed – Danese Cooper, Val Henson, Allison Randal, Belinda Lopez and Kristen Accardi, and we hope to see more women participating as we finish off confirming speakers.

One person who has been inspiring me in much of this is my good friend, Emma Jane Hogbin, who I think really gets the issues involved, and will hopefully be presenting at LugRadio Live UK 2008. We have talked quite a bit on the phone about how to encourage more women in Open Source, and she is spending some of her efforts with the Ubuntu Women project. She sent her slides over and they look excellent, and particularly amusing too.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Comments

We'd love to hear yours!

Visit My Website

February 8, 2008

Permalink

Kevin Mark said:

Emma used to be a regular in debian-user many, many moons ago. I wondered where she went to…
Reply
Visit My Website

February 9, 2008

Permalink

Sankarshan said:

There is a significant number of women contributors to FOSS from Asia as well (and this doesn’t often get recorded any place) – do you have a pointers as to how to go about getting their voices and thoughts as well ? Would podcasts help ?
Reply
Visit My Website

February 9, 2008

Permalink

emmajane said:

Ohnoes! I’ve been outed.

I am absolutely delighted with the LugRadio USA line-up! (Actually I think it was more of a, “HOLYCRAP!F’REAL?OMGTHAT’SAWESOME!” response, but we’ll call it “delight” as that sounds so much more civilized.) Massive congrats to the LugRadio guys for their efforts in showcasing female role models within the FOSS community and for being a role model to other conferences too. You guys rock!
Reply
Visit My Website

February 11, 2008

Permalink

Steve Lee said:

That’s great Jono. You could contact Jo (AKA Linux Girlie) of the Karoshi project and a fellow board member over at schoolforge.org.uk. Jo has made Karoshi into a great project that simplifies school Linux admin and perhaps she would do a talk in the UK?
Reply