[IndiChix] Notes from LCIN talk at FOSSkriti

[Gayathri Swaminathan]

Hey Ankita/Vidya:

Both these question blocks seem relevant to future activities and raise the
following important questions,

1. How to encourage new comers to FOSS activities - newbies just entering
FOSS world. How to step them into it?

2. How to encourage common-interest/ community members - how can for
example, two IndiChix members working on a same FOSS project(s) collaborate/
peer program/ bug squash. This partially answers a newbies question of "why
should I join LinuxChix-India?"

3. Who are the mentors - Should they be identified IndiChix advisors or
should be based on international active participation per FOSS project?

We do have this block
http://linuxchix.org.in/wiki/index.php/Main_Page#Volunteering in our site.
Think it is time to start identifying point of contacts for each type of
activity.

Think if we addressed these, a partial answer for the wider concern of
men-women participation will develop.

Yup, the iteration of "be polite, be helpful" and this mantra from
linuxchix.org
"LinuxChix is a community for women who like
Linux<http://www.getgnulinux.org/>and Free
Software <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>, and for women and men
who want to support women in computing" is going to be necessary.




> > - There was a question on how do we plan to encourage women to
> > participate in various FOSS projects? If we agree with the fact that
> some
> > mailing lists are not sensitive towards women, do we have a plan in
> place
> > to
> > help women manage this? Have we gathered the do's and dont's of
> > participation ? Do we have the support infrastructure in place?
>
> If we are talking about international FLOSS projects, from the Ubuntu
> community viewpoint, we take the CoC very seriously and implement it
> too, even at the local community levels. If you have seen any
> behaviour that is contra to the CoC simply bring it to the attention
> of an Ubuntu member or take it directly to the CC (community council).
>

> > - There was some confusion regarding male participation in the group.
> > If we say that men are welcome, what is expected of them? What would be
> > their role on the mailing list or the group in general? Behavior wise as
> > well.
>
> The reason the main 'chix didnt have an elaborate list of do's/donts
> is to avoid confusion about what action to take when there is no
> precedent and 'be polite, be helpful' works well in most cases. If you
> see someone going against that simply point that motto and state what
> you find inappropriate and ask them to stop the harassment. If they
> insist on repeating the obnoxious behaviour, ask the admins to remove
> them. This is also true if you feel someone is harassing you (a woman)
> off-list. Partly why we keep it 'reply-to-list' even if its not the
> best option.
>
> > - Some felt the need to not restrict the group activities to only big
> > cities and not ignore the small ones. They suggested on establishing
> > networks in small cities, having a contact point for it and closely
> > co-ordinating the activities.
>
> I'd suggested this earlier .... any woman in any local city has the
> freedom to start a group and work on it. It should be important that
> there should be women taking the initiative because we dont want a
> situation where its used by men as a place to find women. That would
> be detrimental and counter-productive imho.
>
>
-- 
Gayathri Swaminathan
gpgkey: 3EFB3D39
Volunteer, FDP
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