[Actionchix] Welcome to actionchix

[Mary]

Hey folks,

Welcome to the actionchix list.

The idea of actionchix is to get the LinuxChix community together to
build things. We've already built an excellent community for women Linux
users who want technical support, political discussion or social
contact, so actionchix is the place for projects.

Some policy notes:

 - All LinuxChix lists ask participants to 'be polite' and 'be helpful'.
   Remind people of this gently off-list or on-list if you think it's
   necessary. Contact the moderators at actionchix-owner at linuxchix.org
   if you think things are getting out of hand.
 
 - actionchix is for projects. If you have a discussion, political,
   social or technical, that isn't really to do with something people
   are building here, or with a project idea, take it to another
   LinuxChix list. This applies especially to trolls: if you must
   respond, please do so elsewhere.

 - This list is open to anyone who wants to subscribe: it's open to all
   genders, all ages, and to people who aren't members of any other
   LinuxChix list.

 - This list is open archive: this means your posts will be available to
   non-subscribers via http://linuxchix.org/pipermail/actionchix/ and
   will show up on Google searches (just like posts to courses and
   techtalk).  There are pros and cons to this: I thought that the
   benefits of potential contributors to and users of our projects
   stumbling across us out-weighed the negatives. This seems to be the
   view most Open projects take anyway.

   People concerned about Googlability are welcome to subscribe or post
   using any kind of pseudonym they want. And you won't show up on
   Google unless you actually post to the list; being subscribed is
   hidden.

People have already brought up a lot of ideas for projects LinuxChix
could do, here's the list I put in the announcement mail:

 - educational materials for use with school-age girls
 - educational materials about Free Software and its philosophies, for
   women who want to get involved
 - media resources for dealing with tech and mainstream press on women
   and computing
 - political resources for dealing with political bodies about things
   like intellectual property, freedom of expression and other political
   issues relevant to Free Software/computing
 - joint projects with other computing/women in computing groups
 - translation of materials developed
 - resources for women in different cultures
 - helping seed the foundation of new Free Software (and related Open
   Knowledge and the like) projects by women
 - contributing resources developed by LinuxChicks to existing Free
   Software (etc) projects

But really of course, the things we do are up to you. I'd like to open
this thread up for ideas both big and small.

I peeked at the subscriber list and I know we've got subscribers who've
been major contributors to Free Software, women's communities, and a
bunch of other projects, so I'll keep this short, but here's some
guidelines (open to discussion too):

 - ultimately, projects happen when people do things. Everyone who's
   been part of a volunteer project knows how frustrating it is to have
   lots of voices saying "it would be great if someone would..." and
   noone actually volunteering. Unless someone is actually asking for
   general ideas (like this thread!) specific offers of help can be more
   useful.

 - the open source/free software community is built on a lot of material
   that is free for anyone to use and modify. Please consider one of the
   free licences for whatever you work on here. (See
   http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ and http://creativecommons.org/).

 - there are a lot of existing projects out there that are doing
   potentially similar things. Sometimes it might be useful to develop
   stuff to contribute to them, or building more permanent links.
   Someone off-list talked to me about the potential value of, say,
   documenting a piece of software and submitting the documentation
   upstream as "by LinuxChix" as a good way for LinuxChix to reach out
   to the community.

I'm travelling at the moment, and my 'net access is going to be
intermittant until at least December. So please take actionchix and run
with it :)

If we get a number of projects germinating on the list, we'll probably
set up topics for them (like courses has) so that you can subscribe to
and unsubscribe from particular topics as well as to and from the list
itself. If people start to want this, raise it on this list and poke the
moderators.

-Mary