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Christina Haralanova * Women's Participation to Free and Open Source Software Development (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation)



Hi all!

Below is the paraphrased slide set from Christina. The original PDF
will be on the conference website soon.


						Grüße

						Stefan

=== 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< === 8< ===

===========================================================================
Women's Participation to Free and Open Source Software Development Projects
===========================================================================

Christina Haralanova
Oekonux Conference, March 28, 2009

About the presentation
======================

Objective: to sensibilize researchers and activists about gender
  imbalance in FOSS community, and to present a few research results

Three parts:

Women in IT and FOSS development principles

Women in FOSS - main challenges

The current research - some preliminary results

Gender gap in technology
========================

* Gender division in technology which imposes different roles to men
  and women

* Factors: children's education, different socialization models,
  gender division of labor and domestic work

* ICT redefine hierarchies, discriminations and disparities,
  introducing 2 problems:

  * Unequal access to technology

  * Imbalanced participation in the innovation process between men and
    women.

Women in Computer Science
=========================

25% of women in computer departments and 8 % of engineers (Quebec,
 2003), and diminishes each year

Male presence in the machines exposed by social stereotypes

Male language, male logic of work, which results in lower women's
participation

===========

  "We talk about machines invented, assembled, installed, configured
  and repaired by men and used by women and men. But when someone
  controls the process of production, they control the use. In the
  computer use the gender divisions are still visible - men keep the
  most powerful and better configured machines for themselves"

  -- Isabelle Collet, 2006. L'informatique a­t­elle un sexe?
     Hackers, mythes et réalités.

Free Software Development
=========================

* FOSS - social and technical phenomenon

* Role of the community - sharing of values, norms, principles which
  keep them together for a shared objective

* Principles of code development which allow fast evolution and
  quality high result

* Collaborative principles between users and programmers

* Social and communication structure of FOSS projects

* Research made so far: based on small number of projects,
  quantitative research, a community in its globality

A double context
================

1) Unequal participation of women in software development and
   decision-making process of technology production.

2) Free and Open Source Software - a specific form of innovation, with
   community based on principles of sharing and inclusion, but with
   reputation of being masculine and homogeneous

What about women in FOSS?
=========================

1,1% of women in free software development (Flosspols, 2002) (*What do
we mean by software development?*)

Challenges:

  * Education gap: steeper learning curve in FOSS

  * Male norms in the hacker/geek culture

      "If you don't focus on the machine, you don't really belong to
      the computer science."

  * Specificities in the FOSS community: volunteer job, computer
    jargon, sexist behavior.

The forces that discourage women from CS, work much more powerfully in
FOSS

Misconception of the coding skill
=================================

* False concept that software development is equal to programming

* Nowadays, we don't need to program to use the computer

* Less than 30% of computer scientist profession is based on
  programming. The rest includes: project coordination, testing, bug
  fixing, documentation writing, translation.

* For a software to be successful, it does not be written, it needs to
  be made user friendly, implemented in different contexts, maintained
  overtime...

===========

  "Documentation can be a means of quality insurance, and this power
  is far too seldom used, not only in Open Source development. The
  people who write the best code I know write documentation alongside
  or even before coding: The code has to follow documentation,
  otherwise it's a bug :), at least documentation and code are never
  allowed to get out of sync. Which means documentation _is_
  development, not just something subordinate."

  -- Patricia Jung on Debian Lists, 2005.

In result...
============

* We need both social and technical activities in the innovation
  process

* If we accept this, then this could be a way to value the work of
  women in FOSS development

* Misconception of the coding skill leads to false impression that
  FOSS is too technical and therefore difficult to use. => It
  discourages people to join the movement.

* **Research question: where are women in the FOSS social structure?
  What specific contributions do they make to the development
  process?**

A field research
================

* A portrait of Free software in Quebec, Canada, 2[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]

* Objective: to make a collection FOSS projects in Quebec, to see
  people's engagement in this project, to make a list of
  recommendations for further research

* Diffused on 28 diffusion lists related to Free Software

* 90 participants in an online questionnaire

* More than 150 projects collected, and recommendations in the form of
  a book contents for further research

A portrait of women
===================

* 14 participants (from 90) = 15,5% participation

* Half are coming from the most alienated regions of Quebec

* Types of activities (by women's priority):

  * Training and promotion activities

  * End users, migration, server administration

  * Participation in social groups and FOSS communities

  * Software development

Calculation game
================

End user (personal, professional activities) - 8 out of 14

Trainer (basic and specialized) - 7 out of 14

Participant in conference (presenter, listener) - 5

Technical adviser, analyst - 4

System administrator, technical support - 3

Document writer - 2

Conceptor (developer) - 1

Translator - 1

Conclusion
==========

* Women do valuable work in FOSS development, which is often informal,
  therefore invisible

* Majority of women do the "boring job" in FOSS projects, such as
  usability, training, documentation...

* Women have low confidence in their work, coming mainly from the fact
  they are not developers by education

* Need for minimization of the importance of programming, in order to
  value the work of "other contributors" and of users, for producing a
  better and widely spread code.

===========

Thank you for your attention!

Christina Haralanova christina.haralanova AT gmail.com

University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM)
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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