[Womeninfreesoftware] Fedora QA recruiting

[Adam Williamson]

Hi, everyone. Hope it's OK to send this mail here!

So after I got involved in the latest sexism brouhaha (blog post:
http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/09/25/sexism-debate/ ), it occurred to
me it would be a good idea to make sure action matches words, so I had a
look at the projects I'm directly professionally involved in - Fedora QA
and BugZappers. And, well, they're pretty much your typical F/OSS
sausage fests, I'm afraid. We do actually have a few women involved, but
they're all Red Hat employees; on the volunteer side, it's all men so
far.

So I'm hoping to encourage people - women in particular - reading this
list to come and get involved with Fedora QA and BugZappers. We have
good (I hope!) Wiki pages explaining the purposes of these projects, and
how to get involved:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Join
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/Joining

to give the short version, QA is the project which covers all sorts of
testing of Fedora; from just running Fedora (stable releases or Rawhide)
and reporting bugs all the way through to getting deeply involved with
review meetings and writing automated testing tools and so on, it's all
QA. If you just want to dip a toe, it'd just be great to have more
people - as many as possible! - signing up for the fedora-test mailing
list, trying out Rawhide (we have nightly live builds available that
make it easy to test even if you can't run a permanent install), coming
out to Test Days and relatively easy things like that.

BugZappers is basically the triage project, and like all triage projects
everywhere is chronically in need of new members. It does require a
moderate level of experience to do a good triaging job, generally - it's
not an ideal choice of project for the absolute beginner. But we're
certainly happy to train up anyone who'd like to get involved but isn't
sure they have enough knowledge of any particular component to do
effective triage for it.

As the 'community guy' for these projects I do my best to encourage a
welcoming atmosphere for new members, and I really hope that'd apply no
matter what your gender, and I'm entirely prepared to use whatever
influence I have to oppose anything that goes against that - so please
let me know if you're aware of anything (or if you get involved and you
subsequently come up against anything like that). This seemed like a
good place to start to try and make a small start in improving the
gender balance in the projects I'm directly involved in - if anyone has
any ideas for ways I could take that further, or any gentle suggestions
that I'm doing it wrong so far, please do let me know =)

thanks!

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net