Mathemagenic

Seb's Open Research points me to the article at kuro5hin.org:

HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux. A recent addition to the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTO collection sets out to tackle a seldom-acknowledged problem in the Linux community: women who use or are interested in Linux are often discouraged from getting involved in the community and/or learning more, by the attitudes they encounter. More generally, the same problem also applies in computing generally, the author argues.

This article makes me thinking about several things. First one is about not "beginners-friendly" attitude of a community as a barrier to join, or "you don't grow an inclusive community by calling beginners idiots". I experienced it myself and heard stories about corporate communities: for success in being open you need easy learning curve for beginners to catch up with others' language, norms and knowledge.

Second is about remembering my experiences of working with problems of social integration of kids with disabilities: if you want success you have to start from "others are different from me" attitude and acceptance of those differences.

The last one is funny: a couple of days back my husband noticed that there are only guys in my RSS subscription list :)