{"id":127,"date":"2007-08-30T00:05:54","date_gmt":"2007-08-30T07:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/2007\/08\/30\/a-women-focused-users-group-the-very-very-beginning\/"},"modified":"2009-09-03T08:00:23","modified_gmt":"2009-09-03T16:00:23","slug":"a-women-focused-users-group-the-very-very-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/2007\/08\/30\/a-women-focused-users-group-the-very-very-beginning\/","title":{"rendered":"a women-focused users group: the very, very beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned<\/a> nearly a month ago that we were starting a group whose goal is to get more women involved in open source. We had our first group meeting this evening.<\/p>\n

We decided on a “chaining” strategy for invitations – no broadcasts on mailing lists we aren’t subscribed to, and people should feel a bit responsible for the folks that they bring along. The accountability for group participation is one thing that I feel strongly about, and there was rough consensus, so looks like that will stand for now.<\/p>\n

There was some talk about maintaining at least 50% women in the group. Ultimately, I don’t think a percentage will matter if we have a strong group identity. But it got me thinking – what are the elements of this group that will keep me interested and will continue to draw women in? And then, what can I do to help maintain the group’s identity and goals?<\/p>\n

One idea I had was the socratic seminar<\/a>. Another was a goal of 100% participation in every meeting. During today’s meeting, three of us mentioned that we’d gone to a series of user group meetings without ever saying a word. What I like about the 100% participation goal is that combined with a socratic seminar, it would be radically different from other user group meetings I’ve been to.<\/p>\n

For structure, I thought we could have our show-and-tell, followed by an hour or so of group work, and then a post-group-work sharing. I think that the sharing piece is key. And if we keep ’em short – and timed – I think it could be a very interesting.<\/p>\n

We’ll see how things go. I offered to talk next month about the temporal database stuff I’ve been working on with Jeff. I asked for five minutes and thought it would be a nice jumping-off point for a smaller group to run off and work on database stuff for an hour. We’ll see if I can make a 5-minute presentation that is useful about temporal data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned nearly a month ago that we were starting a group whose goal is to get more women involved in open source. We had our first group meeting this evening. We decided on a “chaining” strategy for invitations – … Continue reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264,4,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-codensplode","category-gender","category-user-groups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1135,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/1135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}