Group: Women's Caucus/Documentation/Original summit planning

Ideas

I. Building on the work of others

A. Initiatives within the free software community that have already been successful

• LinuxChix, Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, GNOME WSOP, phpwomen, Drupalchix, OTW, Dreamwidth, Systers

B. What other freedom movements have experienced similar issues? What worked for them? What didn't?

• WikiChix
• Inclusion in Open Education
• Three papers on strategies to increase women's participation in the labor movement

C. What solutions can we adapt from other freedom movements to increase women's participation in the free software movement?

II. Our own derivative plan for success

A. What we'd like to see in our communities -- a bit of visioning

• places/ways for women to have increased visibility to each other and talk w each other
• promote the visibility and importance of the women already in the field using wiki pages which would be especially useful for conferences and awards
• decentralize communities, ie have local meetups easier and cheaper to get to
• education and mentoring and peer mentoring

B. What we believe we can implement almost immediately to increase women's participation

C. What we believe is reasonable in the next year (esp. making this a larger conversation)

D. Some of the things we'd like to see in three years (this section should be an evolving document)

Participants in the September 19th Caucus

• Deborah Nicholson-- FSF Membership Coordinator, "freedeb" in #glofs on freenode.net.
• Stormy Peters -- GNOME Foundation
• Hillary Rettig -- author of The Lifelong Activist
• Adelaida McIntire -- FSF Intern
• Leslie Hawthorn -- Google, @lh on identi.ca, lh on freenode.net
• Mairin Duffy -- Red Hat, Fedora Project
• Hanna Wallach -- Debian Women, GNOME WSOP
• Christine Spang -- at MIT, Debian
• Marina Zhurakhinskaya -- GNOME

Older notes

1. framing our goals as a group
2. how to broaden this discussion and bring in more voices as we move forward
3. concrete actions to achieve balanced participation in the free software community

Myself, Hillary and Adelaida met for lunch on August 19th to start sharing some ideas. Two things that came up were:

1. Linkages with other freedom movements and activist communities
2. Our web presence does not provide good entry points for those new to our issues