AdaCamp
Saturday was the very first AdaCamp, an unconference set up by the Ada Initiative to talk about issues facing women in open stuff, here in Melbourne.
The event was well attended by awesome feminists from a breadth of fields and some geographic diversity within Australia (including a surprising number of people from Perth). There were open source people, Wikimedia people, librarians and academics.
There were 21 sessions in total, in 3 streams, so I don’t know everything awesome that was discussed. I think the most important session I attended was the first one of the morning on Imposter syndrome. Also the session on getting women involved with open source, where I talked about the GNOME Outreach Programme for Women.
[Unfortunately I forgot to bring a notebook with me, and tiredness has caused my memory to let me down.]
Brianna and I supplied the morning and afternoon tea, which was various combinations of vegan, gluten-free and fructose-free. Some people asked for the recipes used, which I blogged here.
Haecksen
I drove to Ballarat yesterday to give my panel at the Haecksen miniconf at linux.conf.au ((Many thanks to my employer Collabora for letting me be there.)) on gender-focused outreach in open source.
It was, in my opinion, an extremely good panel. I was originally daunted by appearing on a panel with Pia Waugh, Leslie Hawthorn and Selena Deckmann (all of whom are amazingly talented), but I think I did okay. We covered a breadth of mentoring from school age girls, to open source mentoring with Summer of Code and specific programmes like GOPW with a little bit about mentoring in organisations. Unfortunately I feel like the panel ran out of time just when it was getting interesting, and I didn’t get to talk about optimising your mentoring and the differences I’ve found in mentoring people from high-context culture vs low-context cultures [1, 2].
We also talked a bit about improving your diversity (which was a bit off-topic, more of a carry-on from the talk preceding the panel). Key point for me was: people from minorities tend not to ask (or apply), if you want diversity, you have to seek it out. Furthermore, people tend to know people who are like them, to seek out diversity, ask for recommendations from people who are least like the people you already have.
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Unfortunately, I’m not at linux.conf.au itself, so if you’re looking for me, I’m not there. If you want to talk to a Collaboran about what we can do for you or how awesome it is to work for us, you can find Daniel Stone or Dario Freddi at the conference.
