Slashdot Mirror
The Social Structure of Open Source Development
HulkProtector1 writes "NewsForge has published an interview Tom Chance conducted with Andreas Brand, a sociologist who is studying the free software world. Read the full interview to learn more about Andreas' views on KDE's development model, volunteer recruitment and retention, motivation, work distribution and more. "
Not intended to be flamebait, and from a quick readthrough, the article did not seem to address this inequality. We do hear a bevy of jokes about no females reading /....but what really is the reason?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Obviously, boys are smarter than girls. /. ... I know you're out there baby, and I love you!)
(This *is* meant to be flamebait -- and posted anonymously, so I don't ruin my chances with the girl who reads
But I'd personally like to see a reflection on more open source projects than just 1 or 2.
There are a million+1 projects now. Some with only 2 people, some with hundreds. I'd like to see what the research shows in a larger sampling.
I'm guessing some of the smaller projects (1-10 people) will have different motivational and organizational factors than a larger project. Simply because of the group dynamics.
Maybe it's safe to draw an analogy to Family Guy:
Lois: I guarantee you a man made that commercial.
Peter: Of course a man made it. It's a commercial Lois, not a delicious thanksgiving dinner.
Obviously you're just the president of Harvard.
No really, think about it. You have a core set of guys who are -really- in touch with the new movement (RMS and ESR come to mind), but who tend to upset a lot of "normal" people. Following in their footsteps, you have a slightly larger, more polished set of people; religions call these "disciples" but we tend to call them "maintainers." They decide where the needs of the real world intersect with the tenets of the ideology.
Then there's you and me. Honestly, most of us have no idea about the gory details of the whole thing. We gladly use free and libre and EULA'd software to get along in our daily lives. Some of us are more dedicated than others, and we only run Debian. Or Catholix. Or whatever. No matter which one we choose, it's "The Best One" and all others are inferior in some way.
LUG's as churches, LiveCD's as evangelism... the list goes on and on and on of why Libre and Open Source software are more like a social / religious organization, and less like a goods and services production group.
-theGreater Zealot.
The article touches on recruitment and how in open source developers come and go. So might as well ask /.
If you are working on an open source project, what has caused you to join an open source project?
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
OK, who broke slashdot? The comments are messed up big time for me: all AC and from random stories. It's even weirder than Slashdot normally, which is pretty scary.
I don't know, but when I was going through CS classes we started with about a 50:50 ratio of boys to girls. Okay, maybe 60:40. I only know of 3 girls out of maybe 30 that finished.
/. number is 760290, does that mean /. has 76,290 female users? Wow!
Just guessing, I would guess 30 boys finished. So 30:3? Seeing as how my
maybe attitudes like this are the reason there aren't that many women in programming.
my girlfriend spent four years at school and three years in the industry going from one software shop before she finally quit the whole biz because of attitudes like that. she works at a homeless shelter now and says that her mentally ill and drug addicted clients are easier to work with than the average alpha geek.
2 1337 4 u!
Did anyone here actually listen to or personally hear that speech or some of the followup interviews? The president of Harvard said something to the effect of, "There's different numbers of men and women in the sciences, and research should be done to see why: is it nature or nurture?"
Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds like a relatively innocent thing to say to me. I could see where you could misinterpret it... but it has sunk into the world's consciousness as a proven fact that the president of Harvard is a bigoted sexist jerk. This one incident simply doesn't seem to support that fact.
-theGreater Anti-PC.
Yale Daily News
If this is the way professors treat the freaking President of Harvard freaking University, is it a surprise that undergrads feel inhibited from speaking freely in class?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Determine the person at the center of the open source society, using a Erdos-style numbering scheme. e.g. Joe Blow worked on sendmail with Jane Smith who worked on zlib with RMS gives Joe Blow a RMS Number of 2.
Then just find the lowest average number, and that person is the center of the open source social structure.
I am officially gone from
Perhaps you should ask the project lead for Mozilla, who is I believe, female. At the 2004 OsCON they had a panel about FOSS volunteers. The Apache lead mentioned that there were two groups of people who tended to drop out early: women, and Japanese. In his opinion, they were driven away by the flame wars on the mailing lists. Women, and Japanese, were just not comfortable with the level of 'discussion'. The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
Obviously, they are not neurologists, but each has an interesting take.
religion - a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny;
open source - A method and philosophy for software licensing
philosophy - any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation
You seem to have religion and philosophy confused. Unfortunately this isnt unusual because for most people religion has hijacked their philosophy and ethics.
(source = hyperdictionary.com)
We do hear a bevy of jokes about no females reading /....but what really is the reason?
:P )
Women tend to be more social than men? Men have a greater enjoyment of technical problems than women? Boys play with dump trucks and military characters and Legos and Erector sets (more individual, technically-creative toys), while girls play with Barbies and lipstick and new clothes (more social, more fashionably-creative items)?
Some would say it's because men ostracize women in the workplace, but that ignores the fact that men go into Computer Science schools in a ratio of about 20:1, and engineering schools (what I've seen of them, anyway) in ratio of like 10:1 or 5:1. Perhaps this stems from earlier-childhood ostracization from letting girls play with dump trucks and BB guns and Legos and other activities which might turn them into a "tomboy"?
Or perhaps it's simply a product of genetic evolution which tells men to take technical problems in greater proportion than women (evolutionary history summed up as follows -- man: hunt for food and fend off predators and other men using innovative killing tools; woman: cook food, wash clothes, take care of kids)?
We may all be equal under the law (as we should be), but let's not kid ourselves - men and women *are* different, and that fact is as bluntly-obvious as the fact that we have different sex organs. And the difference, IMO, probably manifests itself in other factors of "manhood" or "womanhood" as well.
(Disclaimer: these are all vague sociological generalizations which will not apply in specific scenarios. But isn't that what sociology is about - vague over-generalization?
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
In my CS classes, it's more like a 10:1 ration of guys to gals, but that's a fairly small private university.
So, I'm female. I love computers, programming, linux, gentoo... hopefully in the future there will be more and more people like me.
I mean, there's got to be some females to help pass on geekiness to their kids. But I just don't think my mom would understand an e-mail that said something to the effect of "emerging package baby, nine month compilation time!"
By the way, geeky pick-up lines are the best. And I find all you guys very amusing.
PS, no you can't have my e-mail address. :)
It seems like everytime I read an article it's another social comentary on the structure of F/OSS, what's up with that?
;)
/. as the jibes about Will Wheaton in the story above.
It's strange how at one time the F/OSS community is a marginalized group under attack from every large company who thinks it's destroying their market share and now it's so important that everybody and their dog is writing about how wonderful the development structure is.
I'm not saying it's not wonderful, but I'm not saying it is either. Then again it seems that everybody and their dog is saying that too.
Oh, and on the comment: "I think that a democratic election is better than a dictatorship."
Is that a dig at Bush or a dig at Linus? Personally, and some research back me up on this, I think that dictatorships are sometimes needed to get the ball rolling. Then once the dictator gets too big for their boots and there's a revolt. In the case of Linus he elected deputies to help him with the leadership role.
Here's a quote I borrowed under the GFDL, from Wikipedia:
Edmund Burke:
"I cannot help concurring [e.g., with Aristotle, inter alios] that an absolute democracy, no more than an absolute monarchy, is not to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. They think it rather the corruption and degeneracy than the sound constitution of a republic."
See now I'm a F/OSS social commentary writer too...
BTW, the original confusion, see subject, came from the fact that I didn't see the obligatory OSTG warning in the message, it's almost as important and as much a part of
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
One fact that no liberal and no feminist seems to want to accept is that boys and girls are different
As a liberal (well actually NDP, but that's even further left) feminist I have to butt in.
I accept that men and women are different, not merely in their reproductive capabilities. Yes, males tend to dominate mathematical fields, Females language-based fields. I would argue that this is in part due to innate predispositions and in part due to societal reinforcement. Exactly how much of which is open for debate, but there do seem to be differences.
Yet even if we accept that men *tend* to be better at some skills and women at others it is pretty clear that individuals regularly rise above these tendancies. There are several very good male writers, although writing relies upon language skills, traditionally associated with women. (People always remark on the women who succeed in male-dominated fields, but what about the inverse? No one considers Tolstoy to have been overcoming the burden of his sex when he set pen to paper.)
Moreover, it is strange to assume that far more men are involved in open source developments because they are "better at math" given that the open source community is not just people sitting in cubicles doing math. It is, first, a *community* ergo a social network -- which is one of those things women are alleged to be so interested in. And does software not rely upon language? Should it not have a good user interface? If we accept that men and women tend to be interested in different intellectual challenges, why assume that there is only one kind of challenge in a given problem? Surely the strength open source is that different people are free to tackle the problems they see, the problems that interest them, and that by having a wide variety of people contributing the final product benefits from the variety of the people who worked on it. No?
Surely in open source development, variety and difference in the developers is a good thing, no? So it is worth asking why more women aren't involved, not because of a desire to be pc but because their involvement might produce a more robust product. And isn't that the whole point?
People get all tied up thinking that gender difference is oppressive and bad. I think gender difference is often exaggerated, but that any difference, gender or otherwise, is a survival trait for society. It's no good having everyone think the same way all the time. We need variety, in life as well as software development.
Just my 2 cents.
According to this Press Release from University of California Irvine (also covered by many news media), men's and women's brains are more different than almost anybody thought. The difference may explain why women are generally better at tasks requiring so-called "relational intelligence" and men are generally better at tasks requiring single topic focus (math, engineering, etc.) Computer programming in general falls into the topical domain.
From the press release:
"In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of - or connections between - these processing centers.
This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."
The press release also notes that these two processing models have similar intellectual performance. This is very interesting to me:
"These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
"PS, no you can't have my e-mail address. :)"
Street address would be fine.
In all seriousness though, while your parents don't understand your field of choice, they surely call you every time they need help. I hate getting calls that start with "Hi, you don't know me, but I am your moms friends hamsters former-owners uncles sons 2nd best friend, would you fix my computer? It doesn't work good."
The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
This is a complete copout. Here's a story.
I had two professors in college. One of them would lead class discussions, in which the sizable number of female students would tend to be quieter, and at some quiet point, he would kind of chuckle embarrasedly and say, "you know, it would be great if we heard some more from the women." And right afterwards, maybe a woman would say something out of obligation, but then things would pretty much go the way they were going before.
The other one led a discussion on the very first meeting of the class, and at the end of class, he stood in front of his desk and said this: "Okay, this public service message is for the women in the class. The message is: this was done to you. You were not born like this. When you were little babies in the nursery, you were blabbering and yelling just as much as the little boy babies were. But somewhere in between, something happened. What happened, or why, is not my department exactly. I'm just saying this because, the next time we talk over something in class, I want you to remember it. That's all." Then he gave us our reading assignments.
The moral of the story is: there is something you can do. The thing to do is: something. Something other than a shrug. Talk about the problem, from the beginning, and make it known how you feel and what you expect. Do not be rolled over by the freight train of social convention.
If you don't pretend to be anyone, are you?