diversity

I would really love for someone to do a true systematic study of motivations and barriers for both male and female contributors. I know that Wikisym this year is talking about having a meeting about researching Wikipedia; maybe I can find an ethnographer or something that I can really push towards this.  :-)

Yeah, I would love that too. (And I am always in favour of research.) But honestly, there is a lot that's already well known and documented -- this is in no way a unique problem, and our circumstances WRT gender aren't that unusual. For example, there's lots of overlap with open source communities challenges, and lots of overlap with females-in-technology challenges generally.

Kirrily Robert's done lots of good writing, as have other LinuxChix and WikiChix people.

Some semi-random interesting reading.....

• http://infotrope.net/blog/tag/women/
• http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Geek_Feminism_Wiki
• http://wikichix.org/wiki/FAQ
• http://www.metamute.org/en/node/5596
• http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf
• http://flosspols.org/deliverables/FLOSSPOLS-D17-Gender_Policy_Recommendations.pdf
• http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3106738.0

I think we need to begin acting on what we know, and expanding some of the experiments that have already begun. Lots of it is obvious work, it just needs some focused attention :-)

Aye I agree, more research (especially wiki oriented) would be great. All I basically have it my own uninformed mind ramblings :)

Thank you for the links, starting to work through them now but very interesting it really is an interesting issue but I think it is the time to look at it and I feel there have to be ways to help it along in a more diverse direction and that is by far the biggest thing since there is definitely economies of scale making it easier as we go.