haeksen miniconf @ linuxconf au

i'm at the haeksen miniconf at the australian linux conference, being conveniently held this year in wellington, where i conveniently happen to be at the moment. everyone has rushed outside at lunchtime, because there's the first sunshine in about a week of appallingly bad weather. but in the foyer there are quite a few people lurking around, either chatting in groups or hunched over laptops attached to the powerboards that have been generously placed around. there's an open wireless network which doesn't seem to need any log-in, despite signs displaying the password, and a cafenet token in the conference bag. but an open network is what there should be, at an open source conference.

the haeksen miniconf is organised by linuxchix, & features a line-up of women speakers on a variety of topics. first up this morning was emmajane hogbin, talking about version control, which was of interest to me in relation to UpStage - we have student programmers, the original developer, & occasional volunteer programmers around the world. our version control system at the moment is what's offered by the sourceforge site, but it's not perfect - to be honest, i don't completely understand it but i know it has shortcomings. emmajane was particularly enthusiastic about bazaar, which i notice is a hosted app on sourceforge, so i intend to have a closer look at that afterwards.

then sara falamaki rewarded the audience with sweets for sharing what makes them happy as programmers. not being a programmer, i wasn't able to contribute anything or get a sweet, but it was an entertaining talk. after sara came elizabeth garbee, a 71-year-old from ohio who talked about open source for teenagers - how not many teens are into it, but they should be, & the typical stereotypes of teen geeks that she comes up against.

none of the talks so far have been specifically discussing women's perspective within the open source movement, even though all the presenters are women; elizabeth touched on it when she was talking about teenager's misconceptions about what geeks are like, saying "and a girl!" to emphasise how her peers' attitudes were challenged by her approach to computing. i'd like to think that this is a good sign - that there isn't such a need to talk about a women's perspective in the open source movement anymore - yet i know that the figures don't add up, that there are still women programmers who use male psuedonyms on IRC because it's not worth the hassle of being "out" as female, that the numbers of women studying programming at universities is tiny, and so on. (there are articles & resources about gender & IT here if you want the details.)

but this afternoon's talks include nancy mauro-flude speaking about genderchangers and the eclectic tech carnival, which i can perhaps contribute too. & there are lots of interesting women here - i don't know what the percentage is, from what i've seen i'd guess maybe 20% women (altho that could be being generous ... )

speaking of which, it's all about to begin again so i'd better leave the sunshine & take my seat ...