Getting More Women Coders Into Open Source

Nerval's Lobster writes: Diversity remains an issue in tech firms across the nation, with executives and project managers publicly upset over a lack of women in engineering and programming roles. While all that's happening on the corporate side, a handful of people and groups are trying to get more women involved in the open source community, like Women of OpenStack, Outreachy (which is geared toward people from underrepresented groups in free software), and others. How much effort should be expended to facilitate diversity among programmers? Can anything be done to shift the demographics, considering the issues that even large, coordinated companies have with altering the collective mix of their employees?

Comments

How about more offensive public mailing lists?

[Balial]

Fill all the forums with macho bravado. I hear that works every time.

Re:How about more offensive public mailing lists?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, it's 2015 and mailing lists are often still too triggering. Take for instance the mailing list for a large open-source project, Wayland. Just recently someone dared to post this:

Weston does not allow popup menus initiated by keyboard. Remove the broken keyboard shorcut for a popup from the stacking demo.

Obviously 'popup menus' is slang for 'lynching blacks'; and what to think of 'broken keyboard shorcut'? I think you mean 'differently abled keyboard-identifying human interface device control key combinatory' you shitlord! I just can't even right now. This is outright cyber violence.

And let me tell you that was one of the LEAST offensive comments I could find.