First, thank you to the women involved with the FSF for starting this list and also holding your recent caucus. It looks like some really excellent goals and ideas were generated during your meeting.
I help out Robin Jeffries as the Assistant Systers-Keeper for the ABI sponsored mailing list for women in technology, Systers (in addition to running a technology consulting company that focuses on helping clients solve technical problems using Open Sourced Software). Inspired by our very successful Systers' Google Summer of Code -- our three students were women and our application pool was ~85% female - we are hosting a Systers Code Sprint at this years' Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with the hopes to start getting more women involved our development efforts and FOSS development as a whole.
Details about the Code Sprint are found here:
Read more about GHC here:
And finally information about Systers here:
I'd like to invite anyone attending GHC09 involved in the FSF and other FOSS projects/initiatives to drop-into the Systers Code Sprint and talk a little bit about your project or organization and maybe even do a little coding!
Systers uses a custom version of Mailman that includes items like dynamic sublists to allow end-user subscriptions to specific conversations and alternate email address functionality controlled by the end-user. We also have some custom templates and a approval process that includes an essay.
Eventually we are going to run out of Mailman 2.1.10 hacking projects and would like to begin exploring partnerships with other FOSS development projects to increase the participation of women in FOSS development through positive hands-on technical experiences. I'll post a little more about this after GHC09.
We recently had some private conversations with our GSoC students about IP and thinking about what it means to assign that IP to different organizations. In particular, there were questions (mine) surrounding the requirement to assign IP rights to the FSF to have code included in upstream MM -- particularly in light of RMS's public exclusionary comments regarding women involved in technology. The students received some excellent responses from women directly involved with the FSF and the MM project and I'm very encouraged by the new initiatives that seem to have come out of the RMS controversy (maybe we need a code name for the incident like "the Albatross".)
Hope to see a few of you at GHC09!
Thanks,
Jen