GNOME Women

There is no point in this at all... GNOME could be putting it's resources to much better things

There is a point...it's just that it flew 35,000 feet over your head. There are far more aspects to making GNOME (or any other Free software project/movement) successful than just specs and coding. Chief among those non-technical aspects is "evangalism". There DOES seem to be a "negative feedback loop" that keeps female participation in computing from achieving some critical mass--especially when it comes to Linux and other Free software projects. If the Free software community continues to alienate half of the population (unintentionally or otherwise) then it will NEVER achieve parity--let alone surpass--Microsoft and other closed software competitors.

What is missing from/challenging for GNOME and other Free software projects becasue of lack of women's perspective? To name a few ("positive stereotypes" I suppose, from my personal observations):

* Women are more skilled at communicating. They are better organised when it comes to social networking and cooperation. These skills are vital to the success of an open source collaberative project

* Women are superior to men in terms of visual design. The Mac's UI made everything else look like crap (even XEROX PARC didn't look as nice) in large part because of women's contribution to the design (all the original Mac fonts and icons were done by a woman for example). Because of the vision of the original Mac team the Mac still makes Microsoft stuff look ugly in comparison today.

* Male developers naturally think more like computers operate, so although the underlying programming might be better for it, the user interface tends to be structured around stuff like C++ objects, structures and function calls. It seems to me that women are more in tune with the end tasks to be accomplished, so that the end result is software that us more usable by non-programmers.

It is those last points that make GNOME and KDE suffer due to the lack of female involvement.

As far as I know it, whether your a guy or a girl, using a computer is the same thing.

Then you do not know a lot. There is a lot of evidence suggesting that using a computer is NOT the same thing if you are a guy or a girl. Girls do more online shopping, email and chatting than guys. Guys play more on-line games and view more porn than girls. If you look at software sales by gender you'd get very different results, just as you would if you were to do that comparison based on geography, age, income level, educational background, political leanings and so on. Using a computer is a DIFFERENT THING for different people. To be successful in computing you have to keep that in mind. True, you can't be all things to all people, but given women account for a whole lotta people you can't dismiss their views.

Honestly, it's a cute idea, but let's actually work on making GNOME kick ass

Calling such an undertaking a "cute idea" underscored the problam that continues to exist in the Free software community. Off-handed remarks like that instead of real discussion is an attidude that is decades out of date. I sincerely believe that to make GNOME "kick ass" it NEED the active particiaption of more female developers. After reading up on the history of the Mac I firmly believe that it was the participation of a couple of key female team memebers that greatly contributed to its reputation for elegant and useful design.

Although I believe men and women should be treated equally in all ways, it would be naive to suggest that there are not differences in the way men and women think and perceive. Without the adequate participation of BOTH genders there will always be something missing from the results. That is why I find it extremely valuable to get a woman's input when I develop an application. What makes sense to me (a typical techno-type male) might seem quite odd to a woman (or even non technical men), so that input from a different perspective really boosts the quality of my results.

That point was really driven home when my sister (at the time VP of marketing and training for her company) was reviewing a beta release of a web-based application developed by a team of in-house IT people and IBM consultants. The site did not fare well with test users (sales associates for her company) in terms of usability/navigation--a lot of "bugs" were actually not runtime errors but mistakes made because of non-intuitive UI design. After these men spent a few weeks plowing through the issues from user feedback my sister came in to see why progress had slowed. After 8 hours of review with the team, my swister and another woman they accomplished more than they had since the first test rollout weeks ago. By the end of that week the site was production ready and soon after had won accolates for its design.

instead we decide to make a site targeting the percert-of-a-percent of GNOME users?

Firstly, I think that although female participation in GNOME is quite low that 0.01 percent is a gross underestimation. Secondly, that attitude is a prime example of the "negative feedback" I mention. If you ran a business it would go bankrupt. If you cater to your current users you are 100% guaranteed to fail--NO exceptions. To succees you must address the needs of your POTENTIAL audience. That includes existing AND future users. Perhaps you spend too much time at your computer or local LUG meetings or LAN parties to notice, but women do in fact make up half the population.

not to flame, but alot of the girls who are apart of these sites are really attention-seekers

Again, there is that outdated attitude that annoys ME to no end. "Attention seekers" do indeed rub people the wrong way at times, often those people bring attention to the projects they work on too (at least half the time it is POSITIVE attention anyways--after all, creating great software as a means of seeking attention can be a very constructive process). I also disagree with your suggestion that attention-seeking behaviour is more prevalent amonst women. I would have to say that is a trait shared equally with men at the very least. I might even say that it is MEN who are the attention-seekers as we tend to have more fragile egos. Witness the occasional outbursts of brilliant-but-eccentric "heros" like Richard Stallman or Theo de Raat. They but heads with a LOT of people with their attention-seeking behaviour, but without their contributions to Free software we would not be anywhere NEAR where we are now.

So why is the Open source community especially prone to sexism? I'd say it is mostly because the community is just following the same curve Microsofties had to, but just a few years behind. When MS got big and visible enough (particularly when it became a publically traded company) it had to deal with having a spotlight on it. Having women leave the company over sexist behaviour is not good PR--it makes it harder to find quality employees and alienates half your potential customers. That hurts the bottom line and your share price, and regardless of what the "old boys club" in the boardroom thinks of women, that would make them take notice. Linux has not had that kind of visibility--not yet anyways. It might never face those kind of pressures because Linux is a diverse, distributed community, not a highly visible corporate behemoth. Since there is no one corporation or PR firm in charge of "Free Software Marketing" it makes sense for people to address their specific needs with grassroots special-interest groups.

Perhaps you were trying to be funny with your post, but such "humour" doesn't fly well with many people. If you were NOT joking, keep these points in mind:

* It was a WOMAN--Ada Byron--that first recognised the value in Babbage's ideas: She is considered to be the "first computer programmer" and was the first person to think of using computers to do more than solve numerical problems (for example, she correctly predicted that computers would be used to create pictures and music)

* MacOS is beautiful in large part due to the contributions of pioneering women

* Microsoft's early marketing successes we in large part due to a woman hired to do the task. Things that seem commonsense today (naming apps based simple words and/or on what they do like "Word" for the word processor) were not always common practise when software was sold by the same people who wrote it (if you nenver saw the products, what would you think "Lotus" and "Ami Pro" did?).

* A Woman (co-founder of Sierra On-line) wrote the first published GRAPHICAL adventure game for personal computers

Still think it is a waste of time to try to make a special effort to include women in the community now?