[Linux-aus] The Ada Initiative Q&A: some A this time

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

Thanks so much for taking the time! I think that really helps clarify
your goals. The work on the conference policies has already had a huge
impact FAICT and has really helped the general education on these
topics. Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Silvia.

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 7:40 PM, Mary Gardiner <mary at adainitiative.org> wrote:
> Sorry this has been a long time coming!
>
> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>> * what motivated you to create the AI?
>
> There wasn't one single thing. Valerie Aurora and I have been working together
> for years on women in open source and similar areas, in particular when we were
> both key LinuxChix volunteers in around 2006 and 2007 and later in the Geek
> Feminism community from 2009 onwards. And we've talked about paid activism and
> advocacy all that time, very occasionally.
>
> A few things have come together now:
>  - there was a lot of interest in women in open source and open technology
>   from 2009 onwards (Kirrily Robert gave something like 4 keynotes in a year
>   in the USA on the topic), especially on projects and communities that *do*
>   have a lot of women (eg Dreamwidth and an Archive of Our Own)
>  - Valerie and I both happen to be in a career place where we are able to
>   transition to running the Ada Initiative (she decided to move on from
>   kernel hacking, and I am about to finish a PhD)
>
>> * what concrete activities are you considering in your first year?
>
> This list isn't comprehensive, but a couple of things that are in planning
> phase now are:
>  - what we're calling First Patch Week, intensive mentoring periods for women
>   to learn the submission pathways into open source development. It's
>   modelled to a degree on the Patch Pilot process, which I think Martin Pool
>   first developed for Bazaar, the idea being to mentor women through a
>   complete code submission life cycle, from writing a patch to discussing it,
>   having it reviewed and it being merged
>
>  - producing a package of documentation and policies around conferences and
>   communities that events and communities can use and edit, particularly
>   around harassment and discrimination (I'm aware of course that our
>   anti-harassment work is controversial on this list, we still think it's
>   important). In general we intend to produce public Creative Commons
>   resources for communities to use.
>
> Throughout the Ada Initiative's lifetime we plan to offer free consulting to
> open tech and culture groups on gender diversity and women's participation
> issues too. If this becomes over-subscribed we will probably do some kind of
> impact assessment.
>
> See below about research too.
>
>> * what are you in particular trying to do in Australia?
>
> At this stage our plans aren't tied to specific locations except that with one
> directory in each of Australia and the USA, it will be easier to work,
> especially in our first year, in both of those venues.
>
> But we don't yet have partner organisations or projects in Australia.
>
>> * are you going to do statistics and questionnaires, too, or are you
>> relying on other people's analysis/research work to identify
>> opportunities to make a difference?
>
> Since you asked this, we've run one small questionnaire already, although it
> was more to identify "targets of opportunity" (that is, communities where
> there is a lot of interest in women's participation) than to gather data. That
> was at http://adainitiative.org/projects/census/
>
> We do intend to do more direct research: there is a lot of research on women
> in computing but not a lot on this space in particularly (it's not totally
> absent of course, see
> http://www.linuxchix.org/women-open-source-free-software-bibliography.html for
> the best biography I know of for open source, a bit out of date now). Some
> additional more involved research is in the planning stage now.
>
>> * what concretely are you intending to do for this community?
>
> For Linux Australia as opposed to Australia generally? Right now, primarily
> revise our conference policy package in response to the linux-aus and lca chat
> threads, which comprise most of the volume of feedback it has had so far. I'd
> be interested in additional input on what we can do for groups like Linux
> Australia; because it's a representative body rather than a creative community
> (ie, Linux Australia doesn't produce a project in the way that say, the
> Wikipedia project does, or the kernel community or etc) it has different
> needs.
>
> If people want to get in touch with us, please use the following contact
> details:
>  - general information, project proposals, partnership proposals
>   info at adainitiative.org
>  - donations and sponsorship: donors at adainitiative.org
>
> You can of course follow our announcements in various ways, see
> http://adainitiative.org/contact-us/ for RSS feeds, Twitter, etc.
>
> -Mary
>
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