That Software Ain't Gonna Free Itself
For Ada Lovelace Day, I'd like to express my thanks to and for my friend and colleague, Deb Nicholson. Deb is the membership coordinator for the Free Software Foundation. She has also spent the last several months making the track on increasing women's participation in Free Software at Libre Planet a reality.
Deb initially brought a group of women together to discuss the topic last September, which brings me to my first reason why Deb is awesome: she gets stuff done. She got an initial discussion going, then reached out to get more people involved, and held regular IRC meetings to collaboratively plan the conference program with the community. She actually got all of us together in Boston. She even made sure all the women who attended got together for dinner. Best part - a few of the women who came to Thai were invited by a friend so they could geek out and learn more about Free Software.
Did I mention that in addition to making all of this happen, she also gave an awesome talk? I'm really looking forward to putting up a pointer to the video from Deb's talk; she did an excellent job dismissing myths around women in Free Software and laying out the ground rules for effective communication in our discussion. She dealt well with ineffective audience participation; she stood up and asked an individual whose communication was rude and derailing to leave the room. Her response took real courage and I was incredibly proud of her strong and respectful stance in what was a tense situation.
She also helped the volunteers whenever she could, helped hand out lunches, wrangled speakers, made sure we always had directions and acted as an awesome emissary for the FSF.
And did I mention that when not working on creating things happen in real life, Deb also hacks on GNU Social?
As a wise man once said, "software ain't gonna free itself." Deb is one of those amazing people that helps make FOSS possible. She's one of my heroes.
I will be posting more notes from Libre Planet later this week. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
Deb initially brought a group of women together to discuss the topic last September, which brings me to my first reason why Deb is awesome: she gets stuff done. She got an initial discussion going, then reached out to get more people involved, and held regular IRC meetings to collaboratively plan the conference program with the community. She actually got all of us together in Boston. She even made sure all the women who attended got together for dinner. Best part - a few of the women who came to Thai were invited by a friend so they could geek out and learn more about Free Software.
Did I mention that in addition to making all of this happen, she also gave an awesome talk? I'm really looking forward to putting up a pointer to the video from Deb's talk; she did an excellent job dismissing myths around women in Free Software and laying out the ground rules for effective communication in our discussion. She dealt well with ineffective audience participation; she stood up and asked an individual whose communication was rude and derailing to leave the room. Her response took real courage and I was incredibly proud of her strong and respectful stance in what was a tense situation.
She also helped the volunteers whenever she could, helped hand out lunches, wrangled speakers, made sure we always had directions and acted as an awesome emissary for the FSF.
And did I mention that when not working on creating things happen in real life, Deb also hacks on GNU Social?
As a wise man once said, "software ain't gonna free itself." Deb is one of those amazing people that helps make FOSS possible. She's one of my heroes.
I will be posting more notes from Libre Planet later this week. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
Labels: ada lovelace, libre planet, lp
posted by Leslie Hawthorn at 8:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home