World Wide Web-Women

ROSE Blog: Rikki's Open Source Exchange

I'm a firm believer in giving credit where credit is due, and as a journalist, I have a fear/paranoia of accidentally lifting someone else's content without giving proper attribution. Of course, in the news business, we're all sharing a lot of the same actual news, adding our own spin for our particular readership or angle. And when you work for an international publishing company like we do, things can get particularly interesting.

One of the many women in our field who tends to fly below the radar is our news editor, Britta Wuelfing. If you were at LISA last year, you might have seen her running around conducting interviews or (wo)manning our camera for our live streams. Back in Germany, Britta does an excellent job of keeping track of international news of interest to our English-speaking readers. Here's where I'm reminded that it's a small world after all. Earlier this week, Britta noticed a story that one of our German editors, Anika Kehrer (another fabulous woman in open source), wrote called First Driver for USB 3.0. Britta ran Anika's translated news story on our site. In her news story, Anika discussed an announcement another amazing woman in open source, Sarah Sharp, made on her blog.

In any case, Anika's story got Slashdotted (sort of) this week, but I'm not sure that she got credit she deserved, which inspired me to give a proper shout out here. But more importantly, I think it's exciting to see how the women in open source connected, starting with Sarah writing a blog post from the comfort of Portland, Anika picking up her news in Munich and drawing attention to Sarah, and Britta noticing that the news would be interesting to our English-speaking readers, too.

Don't you just love the World Wide Web?