Report on Women In Open Source - FOO Camp meeting

[Danese Cooper <da...@gmail.com>]

All,

Some of us were at O'Reilly FOO Camp last weekend (Greg Stein, Sam  
Ruby, Geir Magnussen, me, Brian Behlendorf) and also there were  
others thinking about women in open source (Mitchell Baker, Allison  
Randall, Alolita Sharma, others).

So we did a FOO session on the topic of Women in Open Source that was  
well attended and lively.

Some of what I learned...

-There was research done on the topic of getting more women to stick  
around in engineering settings (in schools) which is encapsulated in  
the book "Why So Slow" by Virginia Valian...see http:// 
mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=5581.
There is an real audio file available of the author speaking in  
addition to the book.  She sounds like an interesting lady.  Here's a  
link to her bio http://maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/psych/faculty/valian/ 
valian.htm.  The person who told us about her work said she  
completely changed the way computer science is taught (both men and  
women) at her school in response to her research...for instance  
freshman classes were changed to 100% labs and all extreme and agile  
team topologies.

I'd love to listen to her talk about this topic.  Maybe she would  
come to a meetup if we asked her.

Danese