ROSE Blog: Rikki's Open Source Exchange

Laura Scott wrote a great report about DrupalCon Boston 2008. She includes a bunch of photos of some of the women who attended and discusses the issue of their "visibility" in the open source community. Participation by women in Drupal is higher than average in the open source universe, but hasn't grown in the past year, either.

Laura makes an interesting point about our education system, too:

"Despite the fact that nearly every student will be working with computers in whatever field they enter, they likely will never have even one class where they study any sort of computer science or algorithm theory."

She says that the leading women contributing to Drupal came into it from other educational backgrounds and vocations.

Laura says that more than 1000 people contributed to the latest Drupal release. The higher percentage of women participating in Drupal is no coincidence – the project does a fabulous job of encouraging participation and helping women who participate become more visible.