links for 2007-10-10

Getting girls (and Gen Y) into IT

I’ve spoken to thousands of school kids over the last few years trying to encourage young girls to consider IT as a career choice. Along the way it has become obvious that Gen Y doesn’t really care about IT as a valid career choice generally, not just girls. I’ve come to a few conclusions that I thought might be of interest.

I think there are two parts to the women in IT/FOSS debate specifically:

1) Women already in IT/FOSS
2) Getting more women into FOSS

The former ends up being a matter of support for those that need/like it, and for those that don’t it doesn’t matter. The second issue isn’t one that many women already in FOSS/IT can answer because most of us are not representative of the majority of women due to the interesting filtering mechanism of society and school that for various reasons turns many little girls off IT and therefore off FOSS (in some countries anyway, there are several countries where this isn’t the case).

I do a lot of stuff in category 2, as I’m trying to understand why young people generally are turned off IT and thus FOSS, and I’ve come to the following conclusions:

  • Job perception – IT is seen as being anti-social, boring, and something that only “nerdy” boys get into. I always stand in front of these kids and proudly declare I am a geek (which I define as a person who does cool stuff with tech) which blows their minds. A young, extrovert female who loves travelling and trying to help make a better world. I talk to them about the variety of jobs available and about how IT is always changing and fun to get into, which is information they simply aren’t getting from school at the moment. We could all take a little bit of time to talk to schools in our local areas to help the careers advisors, teacher and parents to know more about why IT is an important option for kids to consider
  • Role models – there aren’t many female IT role models actively influencing the choices of young women. This also gives young men that come into the industry incorrect assumptions about women in IT, so women being visible is really important for young people in general. Getting more young women and men working in IT out there as role models is important in getting more young people interested in IT across the board
  • Active turn-offs – teachers and parents actively tell kids to not go into IT, as they think there aren’t any jobs. I’m not kidding. I think this has even more of an impact on girls as they are more career focused earlier in their school life and thus make subject choices much earlier that takes them away from the possibility of discovering the fun and challenges of IT careers
  • Social awareness – kids today are more socially aware than ever before, and they see IT as not a very socially beneficial jobset. This is where I usually bring out the OLPC and talk to them about using technology to improve the world and the lives of millions of underpriveleged people which gets them interested in IT more, and is also a great segway to getting them interested in FOSS

Hopefully that is a useful insight to some of the issues we are facing getting kids and particularly girls in IT today.

7 principles for improving communities

I went to a conference a while ago to give a talk about FOSS for the NGO sector, mainly speaking to cooperatives and non-profits. Another speaker there gave an excellent talk that I wrote down to blog and am only now getting around to it 🙂 He basically spoke about how cooperatives can grow their communities and capacity when they are largely volunteer driven. The ideas below are largely around how to interact and encourage new participants, so it will likely be useful to every FOSS project out there. Everything he said made a huge amount of sense for the FOSS community, which is after all one big global cooperative 🙂

  • Openness – be open to input and differences of ideas
  • Inclusion – actively get people involved
  • Relevance – there needs to be meaning behind getting involved to give participants responsibility and pride
  • Respect – respect new members. Listen, ask questions, listen again
  • Opportunities – create a positive environment full of opportunities, eg – training, mentors, facilitators
  • Collaboration – help encourage groups of peers to collaborate. Don’t have “token” participants but rather everyone participating equally
  • Fairness – ensure there is fairness and justice in the organisation, and that people consider others in their actions (like a code of conduct)

I’m sure there are many FOSS projects that could draw from all of those in growing and improving their communities 🙂

You take the high road(show)

Jeff and I are now just over halfway through our national “Meet the Open Source Industry” roadshow.

It has been an excellent turn out in most cities, with great numbers in Brisbane, Darwin and Adelaide. Canberra wasn’t as well attended as we accidentally planned the event the morning after the long weekend, and Sydney was a little low on numbers due to over-busy Sydney people being slackers. 🙂

Tomorrow is the Perth event, and then next week is Melbourne and Hobart, all of which are looking great. Soon, we’ll publish slides from the roadshow including the Open Source companies we introduced all around the country!

Today is the Open Source Western Australia Symposium, a collaboration between the Department of Industry and Resources and the Western Australian Supercomputer Program. I helped them with some of their speakers and WASP have also created a good relationship with the Perth Linux User Group, which is cool. WASP even ran the Perth Software Freedom Day event.

Today they are also announcing the first major research project into the use of FOSS in the Western Australian Government and market, based on the national AGIMO survey into the use of FOSS in Federal Government earlier this year. Waugh Partners is running the survey and assisting with the analysis, which we are pretty excited about.

So the short of it is there is a lot happening, and we need to blog more regularly (hint, hint Jeff) 🙂