{"id":912,"date":"2009-04-29T07:39:14","date_gmt":"2009-04-29T15:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/?p=912"},"modified":"2009-04-29T09:44:59","modified_gmt":"2009-04-29T17:44:59","slug":"whats-changed-portland-as-an-example-of-increasing-womens-participation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/2009\/04\/29\/whats-changed-portland-as-an-example-of-increasing-womens-participation\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s changed? Portland as an example of increasing women’s participation."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Code<\/a><\/p>\n

At Code-n-Splode last night<\/a>, we first heard Christie Koehler<\/a> give a great talk on CodeIgniter, the one PHP web framework endorsed by Rasmus Lerdorf, original author of PHP. She went over the pros\/cons, details of how you go about installing and then using CodeIgniter, and then showed a very detailed example from her recent work. I hope she posts the slides soon – they were great. (If you want to see our tweets – per Gabrielle’s suggestion, we’re tagging with #cns<\/a> now.)<\/p>\n

After the talk (nearly 9pm!) we all went over to the Green Dragon for our #afterhours chat. Audrey<\/a> led off by explaining the recent controversy she’d written about, and the Ruby\/Rails community response to her posts. <\/p>\n

Some of the things she shared I was shocked by – specifically some very personal attacks in comments that she’d decided to save (in Skitch), but remove from her posts. Her standard was: “is this something that would cause my mom to stop reading.” And, if the comment met that standard, she archived and removed it.<\/p>\n

I learned about threads in the local ruby community about the topic of women’s participation, and some very positive comments on Hacker News and Digg, and _why’s posts<\/a> that seem to be expanding perceptions and opening people’s minds to ways that may ultimately be more inclusive of women and minorities. <\/p>\n

All told, we had 15 people at the meeting, 13 of which were women. Our first Code-n-Splode meetings started with about five people. Our largest meeting (thanks to the clever, rocket-building Sarah Sharp<\/a>) had somewhere around 30 people.<\/p>\n

Among the many things that the Code-n-Splode crew discussed last night was “what made portland different”. And I thought I’d let you in on our secret.<\/p>\n

We ask women to participate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When we have code sprints<\/strong> for Calagator, Open Source Bridge or we have the Agile development meetups dedicated to coding – there are always women there. From what I understand, having women show up regularly to code sprints is unusual in other cities. <\/p>\n

When I am responsible for these meetups, I contact the people that I want to attend directly – and I ask them to come. This is a mix of women and men (I no longer have to explicitly think about inviting women, because so many are already in the community). But when I was first asking people, I *did* have to contact women who were just dipping a toe into the community — to convince them that yes, joining us would be fun, educational and sometimes good for their careers.<\/p>\n

When I first started attending user groups regularly about nine years ago, I often was the only woman. Now, it is extremely rare for me to be the only one. Particularly in groups that span multiple technologies (Web Innovators<\/a>, Open Source Bridge<\/a>, Extreme\/Agile developers<\/a>, Functional programming<\/a>, and BarCampPortland<\/a> come to mind) or are largely social opportunities for geeks to mix (Lunch 2.0<\/a>, Beer and Blog<\/a>). More geeky women (and women that I don’t already know) seem to attend these types of events.<\/p>\n

I don’t think there is a single magic formula for transforming your city’s geek scene. But I think it is worth asking questions of the Portland tech community leaders<\/a>, finding out how our groups work and trying out our techniques in your home town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Code-n-Splode last night, we first heard Christie Koehler give a great talk on CodeIgniter, the one PHP web framework endorsed by Rasmus Lerdorf, original author of PHP. She went over the pros\/cons, details of how you go about installing … Continue reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,4,133,23,20,11,36,13],"tags":[245,645,139,631,246,243,244,640,627],"class_list":["post-912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-gender","category-leadership","category-open-source","category-portland","category-user-groups","category-women","category-womenintech","tag-change","tag-community","tag-howto","tag-portland","tag-portlandrocks","tag-whaticando","tag-whatyoucando","tag-women","tag-womenintech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912","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=912"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/912\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chesnok.com\/daily\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}