by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

This weekend was the LibrePlanet conference here in Cambridge — the Free Software Foundation‘s yearly gathering. (For those new to the idea of free software, here’s a little background — some people use the terms “free software” and “open-source software” interchangeably, but they have different connotations.)

Women are underrepresented in STEM in general; they tend to be even more underrepresented in computing (women make up about 20% of programmers); but in FOSS (free and open-source software) women are only 2% of contributors. There are lots of potential reasons for this: free software is mostly driven by volunteer work, and women are more likely to be responsible for childcare and “second shift” household duties and thus have little time available for volunteer code work; the free software community has a lot of participants who are, well, less than respectful of diversity; and there’s a perceived barrier to entry when potential new contributors worry that their code won’t be up to the project’s standards or that they’ll be criticized for not being up-to-speed with the project’s practices (revision control, packaging, etc.).

So, this year FSF membership coordinator Deb Nicholson organized a Women’s Caucus as a conference track including panels and talks about what women are doing in FOSS and techniques that some FOSS projects have successfully used to attract and retain women. (Notes from the caucus available on the wiki).

On Friday night, Deb organized a dinner for women attending the event and other local technical women — it was great to meet all these ladies, including people I’d only heard of online, and see what women in the area and at the conference are up to in the tech world.

The conference featured a panel on attracting and retaining women; Denise Paolucci, Chris Ball, Erinn Clark, and Hanna Wallach, from the Dreamwidth project (which is 70% women) and the Debian Women initiative (which quickly grew the community of women involved in the Debian project from 2 out of 900 to many more), talked about specific techniques which worked for their projects. Most of the techniques that work to attract and retain women will also work to attract and retain more people in general — those who are new to coding, or to free software, or who are underconfident in their skills or nervous about joining a new community. The Debian project learned that emailing people individually was much more effective than general calls to action; they also discovered that the more women joined their project, the more welcoming the project seemed to new women. And by getting men who were already active in the Debian project involved with Debian Women, they ensured that the new women who joined already had a connection to experienced participants in the bigger project, which helped them integrate into becoming fully participating members more quickly. Dreamwidth learned that naming specific groups or types of people in their now-famous diversity statement helped people see themselves as a potential part of the community. They also worked hard at mentoring newcomers and congratulating them on their contributions (even if the code didn’t work) — they found that highlighting contributors’ first code commits or other contributions in their weekly newsletter provided a form of recognition and a way to get a psychological boost from a “level-up” without encouraging the competitive culture that many women find intimidating.

Leslie Hawthorn gave a talk about mentoring (some takeaways: share your own mistakes and how you felt when you were new, don’t expect your mentee to be just like you, and don’t expect perfection from your mentee; and some links: the Google Summer of Code Mentoring Guide and an article on mentoring in open-source communities). Leslie works with the Google Summer of Code project, which gives stipends to students to work on open source projects over the summer — so she’s helped a lot of new contributors get involved in the FOSS world. And Selena Decklemann gave a talk about 50 ways to contribute to or help a FOSS project besides coding. Hopefully her slides will be up on her blog soon, since they were pretty awesome but unfortunately I wasn’t able to take notes on this one.

I also met some of the people from the OpenHatch project, which seems like a really cool way to help newbies get involved in FOSS projects — they’ve set up a website where project maintainers can post bugs or tasks that they need help with, and would-be contributors can browse for something that interests them or click the “I want to help!” button to add themselves to a list of people who are available and interested (so a project maintainer can contact them later).

Overall LibrePlanet was a great time! I loved meeting such a wide variety of people and learning about all the neat things people are doing in the free software community. If you aren’t already going to technical conferences — you should start! If you’re not up for the commitment of a registration fee or travel, you could see if there’s something like the BarCamp unconference in your area.