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Our Blogs Open Sauce Mini-summit on women in free software | Mini-summit on women in free software |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 25 August 2009 | |
  
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A small group of women activists, thinkers and scholars will join the FSF's Deborah Nicholson, the GNOME Foundation's Robin "Stormy" Peters, and free software activist Hillary Rettig to talk about the issues involved. A substantial amount of discussion about sexism in the FOSS space was kicked off recently following a keynote given by FSF founder Richard Stallman at the annual conference of the GNOME Foundation. Some of Stallman's comments were interpreted as sexist by self-styled defenders of women's rights who then launched savage attacks on him. The FSF's move to host the mini-summit appears to be a reaction to this. A presentation on women in open source projects by Perl consultant Kirrily Robert at last month's OSCON also resulted in plenty of talk about the lack of women in FOSS projects. The last time a survey was done, in the EU in 2006, it was found that less than 2 percent of the participants were women. No figures exist of the number of women in FOSS in the US. In the FSF media release , Nicholson said, "At the summit, we will discuss existing entry points, why women don't always feel invited, and when they do, why they don't always stay. "Individual projects have found ways to make women welcome and we will look at some of these examples and discuss how to build on those successes. We will also identify new strategies and tactics to help create a balanced community." |
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