[Bf-committers] Women and Open Source (Fwd: Call for diversity)

Kent Mein mein at cs.umn.edu
Thu Jul 30 17:32:28 CEST 2009


In reply to Toni Alatalo (antont at kyperjokki.fi):

Since it was brought up, I just wanted to point out that
this was actually a topic brought up at the Google Summer of Code
Summit.  And was talked about a bit on the bus transfer from the
hotel to Google.

An interesting theory from one of the women talking about the issue was
that most women involved in open source latch on to a project in a
non developer roll and then expand their involvement.  She said
the tend to do multimedia content or documentation first and then if they
like the interaction go on to do more.

I think blender is one of those programs that is appealing to both
genders, and I'm pretty sure all of our developers first started out
as users.  I think most blender users try to show everyone
(not just men) how great blender is.  So I don't really see a benefit to
say "targeting the women" as new blender users....

One thing I have noticed is sometimes on #blendercoders every once and
awhile the "Guys" get to talking about guy things and that could put
off the next Andrea Weikert, or the next Sandra Gilbert.

Overall I think things are pretty good though, its just something to
keep in mind, on all of the blender channels/forums etc....

Kent


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