SVW (SubVersive Women): contributing to Free Software development.
With software taking a more and more important place in the organisation of our daily lives, it is important that it's production somehow reflects the diversity of the userpopulation it is aiming at.Constants' involvement in Free Software vertrekt from the hope that once users and developers mix, other patterns of use and development might become possible.But unfortunately, reality seems to be different.While a small amount of women take part in the development of proprietary software (25%), their participation is unacceptably low (3%) when it comes to Free Software.
Over the years, Constant has developed several projects that dealt with this phenonema from different sides, both trying to understand why the term 'Free' in Free Software is not appealing to more women, and initiating pro-active contributions to possible solutions. Since 2000 Constant organised Digitales, a yearly event where developers, academics and students of the IT training centre for women, Interface3 would meet and discuss alternative approaches to digital technology. The Academies du Samedi (Women and Free Software) is a spin-off of this project and actively engages a group of ca. 25 women to learn at their own pace, and gain strength to be active in the Free Software community on their own terms.
The project we would like to develop with Interface3, takes these experiences a step further, making use of typical successful Free Software development tools and methods to explicitly include women instead of excluding them.
In a series of extracurricular sessions (starting with an intensive workshop, followed by physical meetings once every two weeks, with on-line sessions in-between for the period of half a year) a group of participants will concretely develop a functional plug-in to an open source project, using concurrent versioning systems and free software tools. The aim is to teach participants how to contribute to an existing project, how to collaborate on problem solving and to function in a decentralized, distributed project. Besides teaching the technical side of things, this means learning how to function in the particular social environment that is Free Software community. Concurrent versioning systems help organise larger software projects that are undertaken by people that are physically dispersed. Because as a result contributors do not need to be at the same place at the same time, it could help women to fit their professional work in off-hours, without being cut-off from the benefits of exchange and belonging to a community.
The first pilot that will be developed in 2010, will involve tutors that are active in the SPIP community, a multilingual content management system that has a strong user and developer base in Brussels. Later versions of this project could contribute to other Free Software projects too.
Employability: need for this type of developer. In EU rise of demand for Free and Open Source Software applications. Versatility of skills.
Mailinglist, cvs (commit etc.), IRC
Women only or priority for women?
Life long learning
Presence and distant learning; 'teachers' and guests.
Team of teachers; experienced in different free software projects
EU funding?
Workshop and than every two weeks a meeting
Role of Constant vs. Interface3 - development, financing, follow-up, evaluation - network: find teachers