Joe Terranova blgged about the PACS meeting Saturday and included some photos (I was caught in a couple, they aren’t terrible).
Melissa Draper posted “An Open Letter to the Open Source Community”. It’s a good letter, the sort that I don’t think gets posted enough and even I neglect to raise often enough because the issue is so obvious to me now and while plowing along with Ubuntu-Women and LinuxChix things I sometimes get detatched. Go Melissa! It’s great to have active women in the Ubuntu community like her to work with.
In the same vein, Jono Bacon wrote a blog entry Say NO to discrimination in our community. After a few incidents within Ubuntu about 2 months ago Jono, in his capacity as community manager, began having meetings with the Ubuntu-Women group to discuss equality issues. We’ve had a couple meetings, a few women have continued conversatiosn with him about the issues facing women and even though the release of feisty and a few big ubuntu events have put us off-track a bit, we’re getting there. There are some really great ideas floating around.
Which brings me to a post by Richard Johnson, which is really just a quick response to Melissa and Jono, but I had to post a link because he’s been amazingly supportive – he’s a guy who “gets it” like I wish more men would.
Sadly all this goodness and support comes during a wave of trolls flooding through the Ubuntu-Women channel, one of which was a “known troll” in Ubuntu circles and has gotten a bit out of hand (followed me into my loco channel after I banned him from U-W). Luckily these past few days I’ve had the help of Miriam Ruiz who I’ve encountered before via LinuxChix and Debian-Women, but haven’t really sat down and spoken with until she joined the Ubuntu-Women channel last week. She uses Debian, and does extensive work with Debian (she’s an admin and founder of the Debian Games Team!), but she’s learning about Ubuntu and joined the channel. She is very cool :) Actually, there are a lot of really awesome women in the Ubuntu-Women channel right now, as well as a few key (and clueful!) men in Ubuntu there to support and work with us.
Oh and there is an unofficial #ubuntu-men channel now, which the founder claims was created with innocent intentions, but which appears to be growing in protest to the Ubuntu-Women project. I don’t have any problem with such a channel existing (and actually defended it in #ubuntu-ops), this is something -Women groups and LinuxChix have always maintained – if you want a -Men group or a LinuxChaps, MAKE ONE. I must have gotten a dozen private messages over the past week about #Ubuntu-Men, and theories about their evil intentions. I honestly don’t have time to spend on caring about it, the Ubuntu Women Project is very secure and doing well, we have nothing to fear from a protest group, and if they do have innocent intentions – more power to them! Perhaps the most amusing thing about all this is that I’m the channel Contact for the Ubuntu Women channel… and the channel Contact for the Ubuntu Men lives in Pennsylvania too. We’re in the same LoCo team. Lucky me, eh? Actually we can talk like normal human beings, he seems like a decent guy.
Geez, Ubuntu stuff is keeping me busy lately.