Opengender

A lot of small organisations have technology which is managed by ‘accidental techies’ (people who learn technical skills because they can’t afford to pay someone else to give technical support to projects). A lot of these ‘accidental techies’ in small organisations are women—because most administrators are women and it’s often administrators who end up administering IT setups in small orgs.

These women usually have very little access to technical communities and thus to community support or skills-sharing of the kind that men who are either professional or ‘accidental’ techies usually create/join.

In the early days of MS’ popularity, there were loads of free forums but these are becoming much rarer—it’s often hard to find good tutorials for MS systems and proprietary applications online.

FLOSS documentation and mutual-help communities are flourishing and expanding. It’s exactly this kind of mutual self-help communities which these female ‘accidental techies’ need.

So, the main problem is (1) that women have been led to believe that Linux is too hard for them and (2) that there’s often inappropriate male behaviour in many of these community spaces which puts women off—women often don’t feel comfortable entering these male-dominated spaces

So, there are 2 issues: (1) making tech support community spaces more appropriate for women and (2) clarifying why FLOSS is potentially more in line with a feminist approach to technology.

I think FLOSS offers better possibilities for feminist use because:

* it’s community owned
* mutual and self-help model
* collaborative
* empowers the user

Probably some other reasons but it’s getting late and I’m getting tired ;o)