Christina Haralanova * Women's Participation to Free and Open Source Software Development (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:27:43 +0200
Hi all!
Below is the paraphrased slide set from Christina. The original PDF
will be on the conference website soon.
Grüße
Stefan
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Women's Participation to Free and Open Source Software Development Projects
===========================================================================
Christina Haralanova
Oekonux Conference, March 28, 2009
About the presentation
======================
Objective: to sensibilize researchers and activists about gender
imbalance in FOSS community, and to present a few research results
Three parts:
Women in IT and FOSS development principles
Women in FOSS - main challenges
The current research - some preliminary results
Gender gap in technology
========================
* Gender division in technology which imposes different roles to men
and women
* Factors: children's education, different socialization models,
gender division of labor and domestic work
* ICT redefine hierarchies, discriminations and disparities,
introducing 2 problems:
* Unequal access to technology
* Imbalanced participation in the innovation process between men and
women.
Women in Computer Science
=========================
25% of women in computer departments and 8 % of engineers (Quebec,
2003), and diminishes each year
Male presence in the machines exposed by social stereotypes
Male language, male logic of work, which results in lower women's
participation
===========
"We talk about machines invented, assembled, installed, configured
and repaired by men and used by women and men. But when someone
controls the process of production, they control the use. In the
computer use the gender divisions are still visible - men keep the
most powerful and better configured machines for themselves"
-- Isabelle Collet, 2006. L'informatique atelle un sexe?
Hackers, mythes et réalités.
Free Software Development
=========================
* FOSS - social and technical phenomenon
* Role of the community - sharing of values, norms, principles which
keep them together for a shared objective
* Principles of code development which allow fast evolution and
quality high result
* Collaborative principles between users and programmers
* Social and communication structure of FOSS projects
* Research made so far: based on small number of projects,
quantitative research, a community in its globality
A double context
================
1) Unequal participation of women in software development and
decision-making process of technology production.
2) Free and Open Source Software - a specific form of innovation, with
community based on principles of sharing and inclusion, but with
reputation of being masculine and homogeneous
What about women in FOSS?
=========================
1,1% of women in free software development (Flosspols, 2002) (*What do
we mean by software development?*)
Challenges:
* Education gap: steeper learning curve in FOSS
* Male norms in the hacker/geek culture
"If you don't focus on the machine, you don't really belong to
the computer science."
* Specificities in the FOSS community: volunteer job, computer
jargon, sexist behavior.
The forces that discourage women from CS, work much more powerfully in
FOSS
Misconception of the coding skill
=================================
* False concept that software development is equal to programming
* Nowadays, we don't need to program to use the computer
* Less than 30% of computer scientist profession is based on
programming. The rest includes: project coordination, testing, bug
fixing, documentation writing, translation.
* For a software to be successful, it does not be written, it needs to
be made user friendly, implemented in different contexts, maintained
overtime...
===========
"Documentation can be a means of quality insurance, and this power
is far too seldom used, not only in Open Source development. The
people who write the best code I know write documentation alongside
or even before coding: The code has to follow documentation,
otherwise it's a bug :), at least documentation and code are never
allowed to get out of sync. Which means documentation _is_
development, not just something subordinate."
-- Patricia Jung on Debian Lists, 2005.
In result...
============
* We need both social and technical activities in the innovation
process
* If we accept this, then this could be a way to value the work of
women in FOSS development
* Misconception of the coding skill leads to false impression that
FOSS is too technical and therefore difficult to use. => It
discourages people to join the movement.
* **Research question: where are women in the FOSS social structure?
What specific contributions do they make to the development
process?**
A field research
================
* A portrait of Free software in Quebec, Canada, 2[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]
* Objective: to make a collection FOSS projects in Quebec, to see
people's engagement in this project, to make a list of
recommendations for further research
* Diffused on 28 diffusion lists related to Free Software
* 90 participants in an online questionnaire
* More than 150 projects collected, and recommendations in the form of
a book contents for further research
A portrait of women
===================
* 14 participants (from 90) = 15,5% participation
* Half are coming from the most alienated regions of Quebec
* Types of activities (by women's priority):
* Training and promotion activities
* End users, migration, server administration
* Participation in social groups and FOSS communities
* Software development
Calculation game
================
End user (personal, professional activities) - 8 out of 14
Trainer (basic and specialized) - 7 out of 14
Participant in conference (presenter, listener) - 5
Technical adviser, analyst - 4
System administrator, technical support - 3
Document writer - 2
Conceptor (developer) - 1
Translator - 1
Conclusion
==========
* Women do valuable work in FOSS development, which is often informal,
therefore invisible
* Majority of women do the "boring job" in FOSS projects, such as
usability, training, documentation...
* Women have low confidence in their work, coming mainly from the fact
they are not developers by education
* Need for minimization of the importance of programming, in order to
value the work of "other contributors" and of users, for producing a
better and widely spread code.
===========
Thank you for your attention!
Christina Haralanova christina.haralanova AT gmail.com
University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM)
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de