A division of labor: Attempting to measure free software
Molly de Blanc studies bioethics at New York University. She applies framework traditionally seen in medicine and public health to understanding the ethics of technology and the role it plays in our lives as individuals and societies. She is a student fellow in the Privacy Research Group at the Information Law Institute at the NYU School of Law and a research assistant at AI Now. Prior to her time at NYU, she worked at the GNOME Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Open edX, and MIT OpenCourseWare. She is a member of the Debian Project. She lives with a cat named Bash who swears he has never been fed before.
We like to think that diversity has increased over time--contributors have stuck around as they age, students are excited to get started, initiatives are making space for people of color, trans* individuals, women, and other groups underrepresented in free software. We like to think we are doing better at recognizing the wide range of contributions and that more people are getting involved from all spheres of skill type, level, and experience.
But is this true? Molly de Blanc, a free software activist with a fondness for numbers and data, analyzed the results from four community surveys from 2003, 2013, 2016, and 2017 (as well as other bits of data around the internet). With fourteen (incomplete) years of community data, she'll attempt to quantify the ways the make up of free software has changed, where we're not doing as well as we'd like, and how we can do better.
We'll be asking (and answering) questions like:
- Is more non-coding work being done by women?
- Are people coding and also doing other things?
- Who is not coding? Who is doing nothing "technical?"
- Are we doing a good job trying to understand our community?
- Date:
- 2017 October 6 - 10:45
- Duration:
- 50 min
- Room:
- Room 5104
- Conference:
- Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2017
- Language:
- Track:
- People
- Difficulty:
- Passing the Baton: Succession planning for FOSS leadership
- Start Time:
- 2017 October 6 10:45
- Room:
- Room 3187
- Keepassing your credentials synced and under control
- Start Time:
- 2017 October 6 10:45
- Room:
- Room 5102
- SSH and the shell: go forth securely
- Start Time:
- 2017 October 6 10:45
- Room:
- Room 1113
- Clojure for Unix Hackers
- Start Time:
- 2017 October 6 10:45
- Room:
- Room 3199