Debian Women BoF, Thursday 14.00 Introduction from marga Debian Women has existed for a long time, but has rather stalled. We need new ideas of things to do, to be more friendly/interesting/inviting. Sharing experiences / obstacles that make it harder for women to participate in Debian - Debian is now more welcoming than in the past. For example, DebConf is now more welcoming to people learning new technical skills. This year we had a DebConf welcome session for newcomers, packaging workshops etc. - Debian Women previously had a mentoring program for a long time, but it didn't get much use. Perhaps we need to reinvent it? Perhaps it hasn't been very visible to the target audience? (E.g. we could contact people in university departments, and student groups.) Calling it "Mentoring of the month" might be scary as some people will fear that one month might not be enough. - The Debian Wiki has useful information on contributing, but the documentation could be improved more. For example, we could benefit from clearer information on people to contact to get involved in specific areas of Debian, IRC channels and so on. The Debian Women part of the wiki is out of date -- for example, the members section lists people who haven't contributed in years, but doesn't list current active people. This could be a nice task for someone that wants to help. - It's hard for e.g. designers to know how to start contributing to Debian. You need to start with a specific idea of what you want to do, which can be hard for newcomers. - Many people may want to join a Debian team, not just start working independently. We may need to propose this to people in a more straightforward way. - Many people lurk for a long time to find an appropriate way to start contributing, perhaps when they finally have a specific need to get something done in Debian. - There's a need of finding a space where to do things, learn how things work, and how to start contributing to different things depending on the skill. So, for example, have a landing page where people can find tasks that they can do depending on their skills, have a list of teams or people that they can contact, etc. - Many of these problems also apply to men! So perhaps some of them can be addressed through the Welcoming team. Debian Women should ask why the problems are stronger for women, but often this is only an issue of time. Also, women typically get involved with computers later than men. - Debian can have a high barrier to entry in terms of technical knowledge. Even for people who have been using Debian for a long time, it's hard to start contributing. Though once you join IRC channels and start speaking to people, it can become less scary. - You don't need technical knowledge to contribute to Debian, even for example in triaging bugs (which might seem technical). - Debian teams should put more energy into keeping their web page up-to-date, and making it more welcoming. The Welcoming team could write to teams and ask them to do this... - Stories from current contibutors would help encourage newcomers, especially for people wanting to contribute in non-technical ways. - 'Calls for help' are useful in giving people precise ideas. When this is in a formal programme like Outreachy, the disadvantage is that people can be discouraged if they are not selected. - Asking someone for their time might be hard/scary. Specific mentoring might help with that. - A Request Tracker queue might be better than just a mailing list to make sure we don't lose people who are trying to find a way to contribute. This would also be private and therefore less scary for newcomers than posting to a mailing list. - Newcomers may want a friendly person just for initial discussions to check if their ideas on contributing will work. Some newcomers may have no idea on the best concrete way that they can help; others may have specific skills they want to use; others may want to learn new things. It would be good to have public documentation as well as a visible contact group. Again, this fits into the ideas for the Welcoming team. - As there are many people wanting to help that are not programmer, there is a need of a page that says "if you don't program, here's how you can help" - Close down Debian women? Some people would prefer a general 'minorities' programme, other people will not like that... - Perhaps at minimum it is useful to highlight that there are women involved in Debian, and give an opportunity for women who want to get in touch with other women. It is easier for people to get involved in something if they see that other people like them are also involved! - Debian Women *has* been active recently, just in different ways. There were MiniDebConfs organised in Barcelona then more recently in Bucharest. We now have lots of videos that we should use to make women's activity in Debian more visible. - We should make more use of the mailing list for the things that are happening (e.g. the Bucharest MiniDebConf's organisation was not visible there). - We can also create more groups alongside Debian Women, if other groups have similar needs. The Welcoming team may do a part of this for many groups. - The general consensus seems to be that it's ok to tweak the goals of the Debian Women group, to make it clear that everyone that identifies as non-cis-male (transgender people, gender queer people, etc) are also welcome. - There seems to be a need of having a "Front Desk" for newcomers, where they can join and figure out how they can help. This is basically the role of the welcoming team, but we need to make sure that interested women know that they can go there. - The previous mentoring programme was 1-on-1. We also had IRC sessions. Perhaps more long-term group courses would be useful? When training is public, others can also benefit. - For mentoring/training, we just need more volunteers. - The Ada Initiative is shutting down. They had good material on Imposter Syndrome and other topics, which they are now open-sourcing. They also organised Ada Camps, which were a women-only space, which could be empowering. They also had useful information on organising events. - If we need money for something, the DPL will approve it.