[UbuntuWomen] Making Ubuntu-for-all _work_

[Melissa Draper]

Jacinta Richardson wrote:
> <snip>
>
> G'day Melissa,
>
> I understand that you have a whole lot more experience with the Ubuntu community
> and its setup than I do, and I appreciate your explanations here.  Would it be
> possible for you to suggest some things that we can do, rather than telling me
> what will be too hard or impossible?  For example, perhaps looking at the CoC is
> too ambitious right now.  Perhaps instead, a list of etiquette guidelines could
> be part of the UFA charter?  As someone who has this experience with the Ubuntu
> community, I'm sure you could come up with some great ideas.

G'day Jacinta,

You asked where I would start. Well to begin with, I would not recommend
waiting for a Jono to guide us. While I respect him and what he does,
his word is not the be-all nor the end-all. We each have our own ideas
of what UFA should be, we need to take the next step and make something
of our ideas. There is no right nor wrong way to do this, as it is a
common goal and as it is with every challenge, there's multiple ways to
achieving it.

What I personally believe we need to do for UFA is to have a flagship
project to build it around. In this case, I envisage UW, as it was the
basis for the overall concept that was mentioned, and we now refer to as
Ubuntu For All. Keep in mind that we are not the only discriminated
faction, but we do currently we have a head start. The project needs to
be strong enough and visible enough to demonstrate what the a umbrella
project, UFA, could offer, and also to mentor future projects. At this
point we may have the womanpower, but we do not have the visibility.

Meanwhile, people may note that all those who people seem to be waiting
to be the catalyst, are male -- are we to rely on males start our
revolution for us? Is that not what we in UW are working _against_?
While yes, it would be delightfully pleasant if guys did vocally support
us and given something to lend their support to, they will. However we
cannot expect them to lead our revolution for us. We must be the ones
that take the first step, or we have failed before we've started.

As such, I've spent the past hour and a half writing an Open Letter to
the Open Source Community. The aim is to infiltrate the blogosphere,
Digg.com and so forth regarding gender discrimination. This gives
everyone something to point at, and as I speak Rich Johnson has just
done so (Thanks Rich!).

Changing a document isn't going to win people over, nor is creating yet
another document, or even adding to the Community Council meeting
agenda. Creating visibility is what I believe we need to strive for and
none of the previous actually do that to a satisfactory degree. I can
only hope that what I have just done will be a step in the right direction.

See the blog post at http://www.geekosophical.net/?p=119 and Digg the
post at
http://digg.com/linux_unix/An_Open_Letter_to_the_Open_Source_Community

>
> <snip>
> All the best,
>
> 	Jacinta
>
>   


-- 
Sincerely
Melissa Draper

http://www.meldraweb.com

Phone: 0404 595 395
(intl): +61 404 595 395

P.O Box 1412
Lavington, NSW 2641