An information-support-network is what it is!

I've been mulling over my first post on here- why have a separate blog just for women? My answer has evolved in a rather round-about way.

Earlier this year I read Jason Kottke's blog post about the lack of gender diversity at tech conferences. There were different percentages, but by doing a quick scan, it seemed that the average amount of women speakers at tech conferences came out close to 17%.

Intrigued and disgruntled (although not very surprised), I went in search of more information.

According to Computer World in 2005:

"Only about 2% of the thousands of developers working on open-source software projects are women, a number that women already involved in the open-source movement want to see increased. That issue was the topic of a panel discussion here on Friday, the last day of the seventh annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention, as the panel discussed ways to reverse that pattern. The 2% figure was gleaned from several university and private studies, according to panel members, and is much smaller than in the proprietary software industry, where some 25% of all developers are women.


Then, I decided to explore the realm of "women's tech groups" on the internet when I came across groups such as Linuxchix.org (they also have a wiki group), Fedora Women, and others that you can find at the bottom of the Fedora Women wiki page. I quickly began to sign up for every list-serve that I could find- there were not as many as one might hope- but there were some.

The list-serves for the Linuxchix group are great (there are a couple of different list-serves for different purposes). By the second day, I had not only found out a lot of really interesting information but the conversations taking place within the list-serve were interesting, as well. One such example was finding out about an unConference taking place in San Francisco called Supernova 2007.

Thus, my conclusion evolved: a women's blogging group can allow for an aggregation of information that can create an 'information-support-network' (think of it as its own women's tag, if you will). It's not that I need emotional support- I can yell at my computer for that- what I need is practical, efficient, and applicable information as quickly as possible. Obviously, this doesn't just have to be tech information- it can be anything that provides knowledge or better understanding. Perhaps that's something that we can provide- better understanding of issues that might otherwise go unseen or unnoticed until brought to the light of a monitor. When I started talking to people about the 17% figure, they were shocked. The knowledge had passed on and suddenly it was not just my viewpoint alone- other people could see something that I see almost everyday. This dissemination of information had created a small information-support-network that now included both men and women.


Peace.
-Agent Ska-