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On Friday, February 26th we will be hosting FACIL, an advocacy organisation that promotes software freedom and open formats, for our next 5@7. FACIL will be filling us in on the initiatives underway to promote the adoption of Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS): the status of FLOSS within the government of Quebec, ACTA, tou.tv. Please join us for a stimulating and fun
discussion about making inroads for free software in traditionally closed-source environments.

In the past 6 nights, I have done no more than 17 hours of sleep, including the power naps in some of the planes. This makes less than 3hrs per night. So what did this produce as negative effects? Well, bad concentration and paleness. Bad quality presentations. Forgetting personal belongings. Eating once a day. Drinking too much coffee. Moments of falling asleep while people demand my attention, and sleepless hours in bed, when emptiness is stronger than anything else and not allowing me to close my eyes.

As for the positive effects (yes, there's been some!), it resulted into: too much communication (sometimes till 4-5h in the morning). Pretty clear mind for almost 20hrs per day. A lot of work done on my masters thesis (mainly in the nights). Not that much work done on my presentations. I remembered names and faces easily this time (surprisingly). Memory worked also quite well (with several exceptions). No hunger felt all day long but no exhaustion or whatsoever either. No bad mood, and in fact too much laughing. I have been having great fun at FSCONS, with so many people! :)

So, what about my presentations? As for the first one, I have not much memory. The reason: a 1,5 hrs of sleep (went to bed at 6 am) and scheduled for the afternoon, when I was quite dead. Ah, and too much coffee to keep me awaken. As for the second one, at 9 am, it went a bit better, since I just woke up from 3hrs sleep. But this one started slower, since I did not dare to have any coffee beforehand. So, my brain was still deeply asleep, until a moment, where I remembered it was my passionate subject, so from then on - fiiiuuu!

Anyway, all that I can say is that no matter of the weird circumpstances (this has never happened before!), I still got a very and only positive feedback for my talks. Not only this, but also some really great questions and points of views. Actually, the audience was really positive and interested in the subject.

And one more thing for my note: the quantity of presentations (implications) lowers their quality. I have had 4 presentations to do from 6 to 15 of November, all of which on completely different subjects, and never done before. In addition, I have had severe deadlines with articles and thesis, and a new Drupal course to prepare for each week. This all have played rather exhausting.

My first presentation at FSCONS, taking place tomorrow from 15h15 has this crypted title "NGO Women". It is part of the Serengeti track on social movement examples on Free Software appropriation.

So, in brief, I am going to give several examples on how feminist movements around the world use free software as their approach to software and Internet technology: ways of appropriation, challenges, strategies. Some of the projects took place in Eastern Europe like the Women's Information Technologies Transfer, a network of ICT trainers for the women's movements, which bases its principles on open platform and freedom of technology. Others are taken from France, Canada and other parts of the world.

I will also like to discuss a statement, which I hear more and more often on feminist forums, that "There is nothing more feminist on the Internet than the Free Software". This is in similarity to another, more global view that Free Software movements and solidarity movements, in general, often have a common agenda.

As announced on the FSCONS schedule, I will be giving a keynote speech regarding women's contribution to free and open source software.

Here is the preliminary summary of the keynote:

Rethink Women's Contribution to Free Software Development
by Christina Haralanova

Free and Open Source Software development is seen by many as a technical, but also social phenomenon of the past several decades. The FOSS community bases itself on collaborative principles which lead to fast code evolution, a diminishing distance between users and developers, by allowing them to work together in order to produce a high quality code, available to all through a free licence.

Even if the FOSS community values inclusion and cooperation as basic principles, it persists as being rather homogeneous by its social structure. There are many challenges for women to join the FOSS community. Research shows a one per cent participation of women in the FOSS development projects. Even if we don't agree with this rather reductive number, we recognise women represent a minority in FOSS.

We will propose a critical point of view of the free software development processes, and its definition which limits software building to writing code, by excluding other processes such as usability, testing, documentation writing, bug finding and fixing, training end-users etc. Women's contributions relate a lot to these “side processes” related to software development. Therefore, by ignoring them, there is a strong possibility that women's work in FOSS remains invisible.

If software development can be assumed as a complexity of socio-technical processes, this could also be a way to value the work of non-programmers and non-experts in the field, including a large number of women. Such turn into the FOSS paradigm can also make a change in the overall perception that FOSS is too technical, and therefore difficult to use.

So, here are the main issues:

1. As a feminist activist, I am most often confronted to presenting the Free Software paradigm and use by women's rights activists. It is now turning the other way around that I have to present the gender imbalance in the FOSS community. Seems like a really different challenge.
2. Presenting a three years academic work on Women's Contribution to FOSS Development, in 30-35 minutes is another one.
3. Since similar debate is already raised by a number of FOSS conference participants, I think maybe I should present the same problem from a different point of view. In fact, I am tired of hearing the number 1.1% as of women participation in FOSS - I like to argue it is not completely true, and repeating it creates even more stereotypes...

Dear readers, your comments on the topic will be welcome. Dear FSCONS participants - please bring in your suggestions. I will try to take them in consideration.

The Free Society Conference and the Nordic Summit will be taking place this year in Göteborg, Sweden. I was invited by Serengeti community, who wished to make a link between the Free Software movement and the social communities and groups. So each example on how this relation is possible, will be helpful for their workshop. I will speak about how women's movements around the world appropriate Free Software.

I will be also doing a keynote speech on Free Software and Feminism.

The dates:

• November 14, 15h15 for the Free Software and Women Movements track
• November 15, 9h00 for the keynote speech

I am looking very much forward to this event!

If it would be just writing an thesis, it would be too easy. Just in a week time at the country, I managed to write a whole chapter, and read about 600 pages (with notes). And then, I will need about 3 weeks off in order to write a paper for the JoCI, and to make a presentation at a colleague, who is doing for the first time a course in "Computer science and society" at the Technical University. I will need to prepare for a 5 weeks missing from home, a wrap-up for my thesis for the end of August....

Dans le cadre du cours "Informatique et société", donnée par M.Robert Dupuis aux étudiants en informatique. Le cours cherche à insister sur la responsabilité professionnelle des finissants-finissantes en informatique. Ma présentation, d'une durée de 30-45 min, portera sur la place des femmes en TI actuellement.