[Womoz] womoz at fosdem

[Katarzyna Stawarz]

Hi everyone

First of all, it was really nice to meet some of you at FOSDEM!

Now, I missed the Sunday session (really sorry for that, I overslept and  
went straight to a Tor talk which turned out to be pretty boring anyway)  
so would really appreciate if someone add a summary of that workshop,  
pretty please?

And below I post my notes from the Saturday session. This is the original  
version and I haven't changed anything since Saturday; I was typing it as  
we were talking. It would be a good idea to add a summary of both  
workshops and Delphine & Alix's presentation on the Wiki, but as Julia is  
now working on the Wiki, we can't do that now (or can we?)

Oh, and by the way, can we make a list of all womoz contributors Twitter  
accounts?


Anyway, here's the summary. Feel free to comment and let me know if I got  
something wrong:


----possible tl;dr warning----


Overview of women and Mozilla

1. classification of the contributors
2. their experiences/feelings about Mozilla+FLOSS
3. How can we highlight/promote those who wish to be shown


Maybe we should start contacting community leaders to know how many  
contributors they have and what % are women.
Getting stats from official teams could help to find out:
- who are those women, what do they do, why they have joined

Time to set up some milestones

1. Contacting the community leaders, we can start with localization teams  
(starting point)
2. a short questionnaire to those women
3. we could list female contributors on our wiki (a showcase, profiles,  
interests)


Priority: identify problems and causes

to do:
- contact localization teams to get contacts to other teams
- blogging spree (blog posts on given topics to make us more visible)
- Twitter #follwofriday [that was my own idea which I forgot to mention  
out loud – KS.]
- we could set up a few different teams to avoid flooding the main mailing  
list
- (Delphine will talk with Pascal on what needs to be done, so there are  
projects new people could do)
- a list of projects (mainly easy, to have a nice start) for new volunteers
- to each task on the list add a person who could / is willing to help  
(but not one-on-one mentoring, more general help)


Goals
- highlighting presence of female contributors
- encouraging by example
- mentoring
- providing a support network
- being visible


How do we make recent female contributors more effective?

[below based on personal stories – KS.]
* What has drawn you to the community:
open source ideology and way of working
atmosphere
Mozilla community more used to work with non-geeks, seems to be more  
open-minded than other open-source projects


* What is not always good:
sometimes feel intimidated when there are too many man and not many enough  
women (although some feel that way when there are too many women – so a  
good mix could be good for everyone)
it's easy to get lost after joining the community
people want to help out but are not sure what they want to do or what they  
can do (especially when they don't have computer skills)

Nice experience: fixed some smaller bugs, felt good to help.


Maybe we should join other women events, present on Mozcamps or FLOSS  
events?

We could get involved with other women in tech groups but also we should  
have something specifically for us (i.e. Mozilla). Also, we should get  
involved with universities and general education (kids!) Different age  
groups require different approaches (the older women are, the less time  
they, but that changes at some point – bell curve).

We could identify sectors in which women are involved in Mozilla, and  
later on go to universities teaching compatible courses and give  
presentations and maybe organise some workshops. It would show that not  
only developers could do something within the community.

We need to learn how to talk about what we exactly do, what we want to  
achieve, and what we've achieved. We need to learn to showcase our  
advantages, what motivates us.

----end----

-- 
cheers,
Katarzyna Stawarz
@falkowata