I am giving a talk for women in a while (the venue has not yet been announced) entitled Starting Your Free Software Adventure
. This is the current abstract:
Free Software development opportunities range from code and documentation through to community management. There are a huge number and variety of projects to get involved in and even more waiting to be started. But finding a place to begin can be difficult.
This talk will show where the entry to Free Software contributions lie from all kinds of directions: coding, bug triaging, documentation, packaging and more, using women already involved to illustrate pathways to involvement.
If you are a woman involved in Free Software or Free Culture volunteering or paid work, I’d like to invite you to be used as an example in this talk. There are two main things I want to know:
- what are you doing now?
- what were your first few steps into Free Software/Culture?
I will want to use either your name or a usual handle in the presentation, and a (CC BY-SA or compatible) photo if possible, but neither is absolutely essential.
I’d prefer to talk to women who have made the results of their work public at some stage (ie you’re active in a freely joinable community with web archives, or your code goes in a Free project, etc). That is not essential though. Please identify the country or countries you would say you come from — I am hoping to have a good mix of Australian and international women, for an Australian audience.
Feel free to send a link to this to other places before November 28 2008. Please do not forward after that. I would like expressions of interest by December 5 2008 to mary@puzzling.org and we will take it from there in email.