The Ada Initiative activities reports and new fundraising campaign

You may have already heard about the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open technology and culture. It was launched in February 2011 by former kernel hacker Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner. I personally got to know it through Val Aurora herself while I was translating into French the 'FLOSS events anti-harassment policy' and trying to make it accepted by the organizing committee of the Libre Software Meeting 2011. The latter eventually failed, but in the recently released 'Activities Update', the Ada Initiative reports 30 FLOSS events that have already adopted it (and still counting).

Among the noticeable activities, there was a survey the Ada Initiative ran in March 2011. It dealt with women participation in FLOSS and open culture in general as well as with something more delicate to analyze: the perception people from these communities have about female contributors. It came out that half of the respondents were women and the major part of them is mainly involved into FLOSS. Despite all limitations of this survey, it showed again that respondents were unhappy with the current proportion of female members. It looks to me that it is not possible to clearly state whether respondents find the FLOSS/open culture communities they know welcoming enough, even though the authors observe that “[w]omen view open technology and culture as a whole to be less welcoming to women than men do”. If you are interested to find more about the other activities of the Ada Initiative, you can do so by visiting their website or reading this summary.

Last but not least, they launched a donation campaign so that their projects can be funded for the next year. You can visit the dedicated website if you would like to help.

SourceForge launches a survey on “Women In FLOSS”

It uses in fact the questions that were asked for the 2006 FLOSSpolls survey. I spotted a few interesting critical comments on the Ubuntu-women mailing list. Thus, the controversial question to know whether a FLOSS participant has already been asked on a date by another member was addressed again, through a (to me at least) justified argument: “[the survey] didn't ask if *I* had asked anyone on a date”.

Beyond this consideration that always harbour vast amounts of debate (and often, vitriolic disagreement), I found another criticism quite relevant: indeed, there is a question aiming at defining the age at which a FLOSS member had his/her own computer. The small problem here is that no question in the survey addresses the age of the participant... which may be very misleading.

The Wikimedia Foundation 2012 Fellowships: applications still opened

“The Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellowships Program offers an opportunity for members of the Wikimedia community, academic researchers, and industry professionals to partner with the Wikimedia Foundation in order to move mission-critical projects forward. Fellowship projects are intended to help scale and increase sustainability of the work of volunteers in the Wikimedia movement by providing intensive, time-limited support focused on key areas of risk and opportunity.” (from the dedicated website)

The Wikimedia Foundation’s paid 12-month Community Fellowship positions and, if you are interested, you still have time until January 15, 2012 to apply. This time the proposals are encouraged to focus on improving editor retention and increasing participation across Wikimedia Projects. Indeed, with only 9% of the editors being women, this fellowship program seems like a perfect focus for people interested in increasing the proportion of female contributors.