FSF is raising funds in order to be able to fund a few more women's travel to the upcoming Women's Caucus at the Libre Planet meeting next month.

As we've been talking about increasing women's participation in free software one of the things we've realized is that women typically have less access to funding for travel to conferences.

Support the Women's Caucus Travel Fund.

On my way back from Sweden in November, the border agent told me I should change my Permanent Resident Card (PRC) because it is expiring in December. This coincied with the fact I was already a resident in Canada for the past five years.

So, instead of celebrating an anniversary, I realise the procedure takes for ever, and I risk having papers problems for months and months before I get legal again. So, what's it all about? One of the things is that the renovation procedure takes... 4 months! Yes, you heard well. A simple card, which at other institutions takes 10 minutes to check, photograph you, and print, it takes 4 months to Canadian Government. And yet, the procedure is way too complcated that it has to be.

The LibrePlanet Conference will be held March 19th-21st in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Harvard University Science Center.

Why you should attend:

• Learn about the latest developments with the GNU operating system
• Workshops, presentations and lightning talks from key free software projects
• Participate in group hacking projects or campaign discussions -- bring your laptop
• Learn about practical steps in free software advocacy.

This year Libre Planet will also be hosting a GNU Hackers Meeting and a track focused on finding ways to increase women's participation in free software.

Une rencontre motivante and impressionante parmi les chercheuses féministes et les groupes des pratiques au Québec a été tenu à l'Université du Québec à Montréal le 28 janvier 2010. Une quarantaine des chercheures et de féministes se sont rassemblées afin de discuter des pistes possibles de collaborations, ainsi que d'échanger de l'information à propos des questions et des actualités de la vie militante et académique.

Un modèle de transfère des connaissances

Une des questions les plus actuelles de cette rencontre représentaient les façons de faire de l'échange entre les milieux. Voici quelques éléments surlignés:

• Encourager le transfère social qui vise la modification des rapports sociaux des sexes
• Augmenter la capacité d'agir des groupes pour éviter de développement des individus qui partent.
• Tenir une pratique réflexive sur les autres
• Organiser des activités diverses et adaptées
• Tenir compte du contexte des utilisateurs et de leurs besoins
• Orienter les efforts de transférer vers la pratique
• Avoir des contacts personnels soutenus

Les mouvements des femmes

Le milieux féministe se distingue par son dinamisme, diversité, vivacité du mouvement des femmes au Québec. C'est un milieu particulier qui encourage le transfère des savoirs et promeuve la démocracie. Il existe beaucoup des contraintes, mais ce qui est important est de toujours garder "un côté réfléxive". Aliances avec les chercheures pour aller plus loin.

Dans le cas du Relais Femmes, les défis sont plusieurs. Par example: d'accompagner les groupes dans leurs expériences, de réflechir comment les nouvelles connaissances sont prises dans le milieu/groupe; de combiner la recherche avec la formation et la mobilisation.

She's Geeky: A Technology Conference for Women will be taking place between 29 and 31 January, 2010 in Mountain View, California (US). Held in the Computer History Museum, She's Geeky promises to be an awsome event.

Among the proposed sessions can be found many interesting ideas: from technical skills, to management and transfer of knowledge, networking and philosophy around women and technology, children and computers, and the future.

Here are my favourites mixes:

• Linux, command-line, GIMP, programming, public speaking
• Ruby programming, Rails, ways to get more women into programming, teaching programming to kids
• Arduino!

DrupalCamp Montreal 2009 is on now. More than 100 people, presentations in 2 tracks and also some informal ones. This is my third DrupalCamp Montreal (even if on the website is written it is the second one).

The first one was in 2006, and this was my first meet-up with Drupal, and with the community. I must admit, at this time, I did not get much impressed by the software, since I was proud user and contributor to Spip (another cms). But I liked the community though. I met some great women (Myriam, Angie "webchick" and others).. some great people and an easy-going space, where you can join sessions, ask questions and fool around with the software.

DrupalCamp Montreal 2009 is different. It is much more big, more institutionalised (in McGill University), more organised (coffee, lunch, wifi, schedule, registration, t-shirts, book store, video streaming...). I like it because it has somehow kept its informality, and warm welcome for newcomers. I even attended the first day without registering, and it was not problematic. No fierce control, no stopping unregistered participants, things are voluntary and grass-root raisen, and since this does not stop the community to participate, to pay its fees, to organise in a good way, to have great and high quality participations. Even if companies participated, there was not big visibility of the corporate participants, no logos, no intrusion.

The most interesting for me was : Angie's Keynote about Drupal 7 from the first day and the training and support experience of Caroline and Deb.

I was also at the Gmap-ing and Views by Lis and Jake, but they took about 30 min to start, and then my concentration went away, the site kept crashing, the presentations was slow, full of tech probs.. and I got nothing in the end. People starting laughing and participating in troubleshooting, but not really into contents...

Since I will be teaching Drupal soon, it is a good warming-up excercise for me to get the new software directions and features.

Great work #drupalcampmtl !

Media@McGill Beaverbrook guest lecturer Angela Davis is an American political activist and university professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Today, Davis continues to work for racial and gender equality, gay rights, and prison abolition and is a popular public speaker, nationally and internationally.

More information to come closer to the event.

Thursday, October 1, 2009 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Room 132, Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal.

The Graduate students of the Department of communication at the Université de Montréal are pleased to invite you to a conference by Andrew Pickering. Andrew Pickering is internationally known as a leader in the field of science and technology studies. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, and The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science.

He will present his coming book: Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain 1940-2000. Sketches analyses cybernetics as a distinctive form of life-spanning brain science, psychiatry, robotics, the theory of complex systems, management, politics, the arts, education and spirituality- and offers a promising alternative to currently hegemonic cultural formations.

The talk with take place in Room 3110, Pavillon de l'aménagement, Université de Montréal 2940, ch. de la Côte Ste-Catherine. September 10th 2009, 7:30 PM. A cocktail will follow the talk. Métro Université de Montréal, Bus 129 Côte Ste-Catherine.

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!

The Fourth Oekonux Conference has just passed (27-29 March). My lecture was my first actual academic presentation of findings, which I have made in public. There were two feelings at the beginning: enthusiasm and disappointment.

Enthusiasm, because I really wanted to share my work and ideas, and I felt I had moved far from previous popular presentations done at Open Source conferences. I did not like to stick to the "one million dollar question" on WHY there are so few women in Open Source, I actually bypass this issue, and go deeper to see actually WHERE are the women in the FOSS movement, and what specific contributions they provide. Some answers to these questions might actually better motivate FOSS community groups to make efforts and encourage women's participation.

Disappointment, because all the male participants had left for another session (I heard a bit later that I have had a fierce competition with a famous lecturer), and all the female ones have stayed. Few minutes later, it was not so bad, when some late comers joined the conference, and we were actually almost as many women as men in the room.

So, in brief, my 1,5 hours lecture was not recorded, except on my small voice recorder, therefore with very bad quality. I listened to it again, in order to note the questions and the comments made by the participants (the worst part of the recording). So, here they are, in a summarized form, with some of the answers, also in résumé.

Conclusions.

• Women do valuable work in FOSS development, which is often informal, therefore invisible
• Majority of women do the “boring job” in FOSS projects, such as usability, training, documentation...
• Women have low confidence in their work, coming mainly from the fact they are not developers by education
• Need for minimization of the importance of programming, in order to value the work of “other contributors” and of users, for producing a better and widely spread code.

Le Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la
tech­nologie tiendra le mercredi 19 mai 2009 son 13e Colloque des
cycles supérieurs. Ce colloque donne l’occasion aux étudiants membres du Centre, qu'ils soient inscrits à la maîtrise ou au doctorat, de présenter leurs résultats d’analyse de leur mémoire ou de leur thèse.

Date : Mercredi, 19 mai 2009 - 9h00 à 16h
Lieu : CIRST, Université du Québec à Montréal, Pavillon Thérèse-Casgrain, 5e étage, salle W-5215, 455 boul. René-Lévesque E. (entre Berri et St-Denis)

Colloque LabCMO et CIRST
20 mars 2009
Salle des Boiseries (J-2810), UQAM

Programme

9 h 00 : Accueil des participants

9 h 30 : Serge Proulx – Les contributions numériques : entre l’empowerment de l’utilisateur et la captation commerciale des données par les entreprises de l’Internet

During the past decade the phenomenon of Free Software has become successful and well-known. It is still amazing how in the realm of software the creativity of so many volunteers leads to products which are useful for the whole mankind. In 1999 the Oekonux Project started with analyzing this phenomenon and trying to understand the special features of Free Software as a social and political enterprise.