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1. Comments from Chris Ball about the program

1.1. How was it advertised?

1.2. What did you learn from running the program?

I think the poster-in-CS-depts was probably key, because the largest group of women in CS who haven't joined GNOME is the group of female CS students who haven't found their way into free software yet, and don't read Slashdot.

Plenty of our applicants were already in free software communities, but the ones most qualified (ridiculously qualified, in some cases) tended to be in university -- for example, someone with a masters in machine learning analysis on music asked if she "might possibly be qualified enough" to add automatic playlist creation support to Rhythmbox; we tried to explain that it was hard to imagine how someone could possibly have been more qualified than her.

The lesson we took from that was that women are undervaluing how useful their skills are, and their aptitude compared to their male peers, and the SoC-style "prove that you're the best at coding, apply for SoC" adverts were acting as a turn-off.


2024-10-23 11:10