Female Focus

At the 2008 Southern California Linux Expo, female attendees received a ladies' t-shirt in their attendee bags – a small gesture, but also a first in my experience. On Friday, February 8th, I attended the Women in Open Source conference (Figure 1), a loosely organized event with eight speakers. Allison Randall's first talk, "The Art of Conference Presentations," proved to be a hard act to follow because she suggested some best practices for speaking and slide show preparation.

Figure 1: Pictured from left to right, Rikki Kite, Cat Allman, Emma McGratten, Allison Randall, and Danese Cooper at the SCALE 6x Women in Open Source panel discussion.

In the afternoon, Stormy Peters spoke to a full room of men and women in her talk "What Does a Community Manager Do?" Later, Drupal's Angela Byron talked about building websites with Drupal and suggested that creating clear project documentation provides the best way to "skyrocket your karma points" in an open source community.

The final talk, Danese Cooper's "Why Whinging It Doesn't Work," covered accenting the positives about women in open source rather than focusing on the problems. Danese then moderated our WOIS panel discussion at the end of the day (Figure 1). If you don't want to miss out on SCALE 7x, sign up for email updates [1].