LibrePlanet2010/Schedule/Sunday/Recruiting women in free software projects

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Please remember that this event is focused on free software, not open source. We have a set of guidelines for speakers, but we ask everyone to be mindful of the power of words and the importance of framing the issues being discussed and worked on in the best possible terms.

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Everyone who attends gets a free t-shirt too

Please replace {{LP2010-stub}} with information about the talk, including the name of presenters, a link to the slides (if any), room details, time, etc.


This is a panel. Deborah Nicholson is moderating.

  • Denise Paolucci

Denise Paolucci is co-owner of Dreamwidth Studios (www.dreamwidth.org), a code fork of the LiveJournal.com free software blogging platform with a project team that is 75% women. She is the project and business manager, and has been one of the successful guinea pigs for Dreamwidth's programming tutorial and mentorship system -- although she still can't always figure out where the quote marks are supposed to go.

  • Chris Ball

Chris Ball is the Lead Software Engineer at One Laptop Per Child and a member of the Oversight Board at Sugar Labs. He proposed and ran the GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program with Hanna Wallach in 2006, and hopes to use that experience to continue to encourage more participation by women in Free Software projects and communities.

  • Erinn Clark
  • Hanna Wallach

Hanna Wallach is a senior postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she develops machine learning techniques for identifying and answering social science questions. In her not-so-spare time, Hanna has run several projects that encourage and promote women's involvement in free software development -- most notably Debian Women, with Erinn Clark and Helen Faulkner, and GNOME's 2006 Women's Summer Outreach Program, with Chris Ball. In case that wasn't enough to distract her from her research, Hanna co-founded an annual workshop for women in machine learning, now in its fifth year. She is also a fantastic cook (citation needed).