[UbuntuWomen] "stop talking, start coding"

[स्वक्ष]

Borrowed Hilary Mason's very succinct title ,
http://www.hilarymason.com/blog/stop-talking-start-coding/ , as she
writes: "Many groups have popped up that support women in technology,
like Girls in Tech, She’s Geeky, and many others (enumerated in
Digiphile’s thoughtful post Why Including women matters for the future
of technology and society). More often than not, these groups are the
canned food drives of the women in technology movement. They make you
feel better, they might do a little good, but they offer no
fundamental change to the system that created the problem in the first
place". </quote>

And last week there was a GF article by Terri:
http://geekfeminism.org/2010/04/20/women-in-computing-groups-considered-harmful/
, which I found very interesting and thought-provoking because I have
always been interested in a stronger mentoring effort for UW --yes,
there is *-classroom and other newbie but they dont really know (OR
track) percentages of women contributors (different from Ubuntu
members) within different Ubuntu teams.

However, mentoring women within the ambit of UW makes it easier to
retain a strong focus and show results as we are focussing on women
exclusively. How can we improve and focus more on women who often come
to the list and introduce their skills "I know C/C++ but I dont know
where to start" and right now we re-direct them to foo-ubuntu team BUT
we have no clue if they actually go there and start out and if they do
how was their experience. Do they stick around, or leave or something
else entirely? There are so many unknown variables here.  So, do the
women reading this here, on the forums and irc want a stronger
mentoring program? On that note, given that UW is having a meetup(?)
at UDS does anyone have ideas on how UW should take this further. How
should we help Amber push this idea to the -devels and upstream
community so that we can get more focus on mentoring women for
technical tasks? What do you think we should do?

Thoughts/comments/critique/suggestions are all welcome.

</thinking out loud>

-- 
thanks and regards,
vid || http://svaksha.com