Hey Amita!! Thank you for sharing.
I have a couple of suggestions.
I would change completely the first paragraph. It seems when I read it that
"we live oppressed by men" and we definitely don't want to send that
message. I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that we need to stand up
because numbers or because reasons that somehow might give the sense that
we are being oppressed. It's like saying that we need to polish the world
to be part of it, and that's far from true. I wouldn't also use the term
"poor" since we do have girls that don't have any contact with technology
in regular environments. And last (and I know it won't like many) I won't
like to use the term feminist, we are here to help people (in this case
Women) to join us, not to create a movement to defend women's rights, there
are other places to do so; our task should be merely informative and
educative. We are helping people to learn about Fedora and use it for good.
Instead, I would start the abstract saying something like: (using mostly of
what Amita wrote)
"It's wonderful to be a women.
Women have been participating in social, political, economic, cultural and
technological fields for many decades and it's time to push it farther.
Even if Fedora has a raising number of females participating actively in
our community, we aim to increase this statistics by creating and
encouraging programs where Women interested in IT can develop their
personal and technical skills and make a path for themselves in the IT
field.
Every tiny step counts, like provide workshops for schoolgirls in areas
with difficulties, reaching out to college girls to spread knowledge and
opportunities about open source, educating them about Ada Initiative, the
GNOME Project’s Outreach Program for Women, OpenHatch and Women in Drupal,
pyladies, GSOC. There are so many nice outreach programs for women in open
source, we just need to spread the knowledge and motivate every women out
there to join the movement. There are lots of things to do, it is not just
coding in fact, you can do many different plus exciting things in open
source i.e. writing, documentation, designing, translation, testing etc.
Our idea is to make a helping-pyramid where each Fedora Woman can be the
mentor of 2 more Women, once these new feel comfortable enough, each one
will take 2 more Females, and continue the work to make our numbers grow."
Let me know what you think and if the input was helpful at all :)
Keep the great work Amita!
2016-03-31 1:57 GMT-04:30 Amita Sharma <amsharma(a)redhat.com>:
Hello Everyone,
As promised, below is my submission for flock. Feel free to pitch in to
add more value.
women in open source
=========================
My paper will highlight different aspect of diversity and how fedora is
supporting diversity in all terms, but my paper is focused more on women.
It is wonderful to be a women. A powerful gender that supports the rights
and equality of women.
Be it social, political, economic, cultural or open source - women should
have equal rights.
But, If we look at the percentage of women participation in any filed, be
it open source or any other field, ratio is damn poor. We, being in the
eligible category to guide other women for open source culture, should take
steps forward to make this ratio better. I know, taking initiative in this
man dominant world, is not easy. But together, we can and we will make the
difference. Every tiny little step counts, like educating poor female
children, reaching out to college girls to spread knowledge and
opportunities about open source, educating them about Ada Initiative, the
GNOME Project’s Outreach Program for Women, OpenHatch and Women in Drupal,
pyladies, GSOC. There are so many nice outreach programs for women in open
source, we just need to spread the knowledge and motivate every women out
there to join the movement. There are lots of things to do, it is not just
coding in fact, you can do many different plus exciting things in open
source i.e. writing, documentation, designing, translation, testing etc.
It is duty of every established women in open source to take a pledge that
she will educate/help/motivate atleast 2 other women in her life span to
join open source community and make this open source culture more lovable
and beautiful and little more feminist.
Thanks & Regards,
Amita(Ami)
_______________________________________________
diversity mailing list
diversity(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/diversity@lists.fedoraproject.org
--
tatica
Maria Gracia Leandro
http://www.tatica.org
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:tatica
LinuxUser= 440285 GPG Public Key: E1CDCC56