OWF GED workshop

On September 30, 2010, the Gender Equality and Diversity sessions took place as a satellite event of the Open World Forum 2010. Please find below a short summary of the workshop held in the afternoon dedicated to a Charter to be realized in the near future. Here are the slides introducing this workshop (pdf).

DISCLAIMER: Given that I was also participating, it is very possible that I forgot to mention details here. Please feel free to edit the page and add everything which seems important to you.

Introduction

The first question to be asked was: why do we need a charter?

This kind of frame is to be used as an ensemble of guidelines for communitites and companies to help promoting diversity. Furthermore, it can be a good way of making people aware of the diversity issue.

Why do we need more women?

This year's Diversity session being focused on women participation in FLOSS, this question was the logical one. Indeed, it is quite difficult to give a clearcut answer without defining women as a particular group (which may direclty lead to positive discrimination, and other undesired side effects). Therefore, it is important to have a precise and inambiguous answer to this question.

One direction suggested by participants was: women are a part of the user base. Thus, if one wants to create better and richer software, including in the production chain people from this user base is the best way of obtaining better products.

Another (non exclusive and complementary) direction was also highlighted: bringing more women will increase the number of contributors. Software being a complex thing, having more contributors with various backgrounds and competences is better for the conception process to be successful. Having more contributors is helpful to get things done, if I summarize it in a very straightforward and pragmatic way.

An additional comment was done here mentionning the productivity. The latter is a quite delicate word beacuse people have diverse definitions of it and it is safer to avoid it if no common definition is set up prior to utilization. What was ment with this increase in productivity is a globality: more people working on a project make it go faster, various backgrounds make various ideas come and more people giving feedback and reporting bugs allow for great improvement.