OpenHelp

The idea behind OpenHelp is that it’s very difficult to take that first tentative step into the FLOSS community. You’ve picked up/been given a CD, you want to try it out, and something just doesn’t quite work. Where do you go for help?

Google? You’ll get loads of confusing information that may or may not be relevant, but you just can’t decipher enough to figure it out.

Forums? They’ll tell you to RTFM, or send you to the stuff you found and failed to understandwhen googling.

IRC? You’ll be lucky to find somewhere that isn’t either so quiet nobody answers anything or so busy you can’t follow what’s going on.

Mailing list? If you can find the right one, and if there’s enough subscribers to even notice your question, they’ll probably tell you to search the logs, and you’re back at square one.

Local LUG? Well, if there is one, and if it’s populated by friendly, helpful people who go out of their way to welcome new people, then you’re very lucky. You’re even more lucky if one of those people happens to be able to help with the problem you’re having.

And, of course, all this assumes you know what question you should be asking in the first place. All too often it’s tricky to figure out which bit isn’t working. If you can’t play an mp3, how do you work out if it’s codecs, the player, ALSA, the sound card, the speakers, some settings somewhere?

So here’s where OpenHelp comes in. If we can get it up and running, and if we can get some serious support, it will be a single place where people new to the community can ask any free software related question they like, and get a sensible, helpful answer, written in English rather than Geek. We’ve got loads of ideas going on about how to set it up and how to get it moving. I will be posting more about it and about how to get involved soon.

Women In Open Source

This blog came into being because of the Women In Open Source talk I did with Kat and Phated at LUGRadio Live the other week. So, I thought I should probably start it with something about that talk.

The main aims of the talk were to highlight the rather shocking statistic that, according to FLOSSPOLLS, only 1.5% of Open Source Contributors are women, and to get people to think about things. The fact that the gap isn’t nearly so broad in proprietary software (28% women) suggests that technology or ability that are not the (only?) problems, but it’s something fundamental in the difference between the two. What makes propreitary software and Free software different, in terms of getting involved in them, is the community surrounding them. The Free Software community is excluding women.

While it’s interesting to look at the situation objectively and try to figure out why it’s happening, I’ve no interest in pointing fingers or throwing around blame, because it won’t solve anything, and besides, I don’t believe there is anything deliberate or truely mysogynistic about what’s going on. I think it’s a general lack of regard for new members of the community coupled with and exacerbated by fundamental differences between men and women. All too often when someone goes looking for help, they get told RTFM, or that they’re asking the wrong question, or that they need to learn how to ask a question before anyone will deign to answer them. While it’s good for people to learn how to ask questions, if they’re not given a chance, they’ll never try. Besides, some people will never learn that particular skill, and I don’t think we should be excluding them from the community completely, unless we want to be known as elitist.

Women tend to be less confident and less capable of putting themselves forward than men, especially in an area which is male dominated. I’ll no doubt blog about the whys and wherefores of that another time, but it does seem to be true, and it explains part of why more women than men are put off by the poor response to requests for help. Add in that the poor response can be easily misinterpretted as the men being patronising and basically telling the women that they shouldn’t get involved with things they don’t understand. Then add in the common responses to a woman turning up at a LUG meet or similar – lewd comments, assumptions of low technical ability, a room full of quiet guys unable to speak to her. This kind of thing doesn’t have to come from everybody in the community, just a small number can ruin the good efforts of everybody else.

I’m still amazed by the response the talk got – I had people from all corners of the event wanting to talk to me about it, and so did Kat and Phated. Just about every conversation I had for the rest of the day related back to the talk, and all of them gave me something new to think about. There is only one part of my thinking that hasn’t changed significantly since agreeing to do the talk, but has been considerably reaffirmed: why the situation the descrepancy exists is fascinating, but the more important question is how can we improve things?