OTW Featured In OSCON Keynote
A belated congratulations to all of the OTW's technical women--coders, tag-wranglers, sysadmins, webmasters, etc.--and a belated thank you to Kirrily Robert for her terrific keynote presentation at last week's OSCON, i.e. the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Kirrily's presentation, "Standing Out in the Crowd," about women in the open source community, focuses on the positive by taking OTW's all female open source Archive project and Dreamwidth's female dominance and focus on diversity as models for future action.
Kirrily's entire filmed keynote is now available on OSCON's blip.tv channel; its well worth watching in its entirety.
Kommentit
"You can teach programming;
"You can teach programming; you can’t teach passion or diversity." I have been reading the discussion over at Kirrilly's blog since she posted her presentation and every time, I scroll back up to read that, and it always makes me a little teary-eyed. Seriously, Francesca, how many times have I been in an OTW meeting, and we realize we need to do something that we don't have the skillset to put together, and every time -- every time -- someone will pipe up, "I'll learn!" It's so much a part of our culture, now, the education effort, from the Ruby coders who started out knowing how to style an LJ entry to the DevMem staff and Charlottes who are working with the Drupal community to make our donor database behave the way we want it to, and everyone else.
Amazing courage
I can't imagine the courage it took Kirrily to stand up there before a club of men and say what is hard for them to hear. The presentation is so clear, straightforward and--dare I say it?--gentle that it makes me want to stand up and cheer. I was glad to hear at least a few chuckles from what must have been a very uncomfortable audience.
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