The future of KDE Women - a personal view of things

Hi all,

today I want to say some or some more words about the current situation and 
the future of KDE Women. As I started to port the website to the KDE style 
some months ago, I hoped that it would help to see some more women actively 
involved in KDE. After my long free time period in the summer Uni started for 
me and I couldn't go on working so much on KDE Women as I've done all the 
summer. I worked together with Anne-Marie, who is involved in KDE Women since 
it was founded. We both planned a lot and collected our ideas for KDE Women. 
I will explain our ideas in the next few sentences.

First of all the idea of translating the website. As I started to port the 
website I asked Chris how to start and he told me to read his tutorial about 
programming KDE websites. There I found some notes about i18n tags for the 
translation with the help of .pot files. I questioned Chris a lot about it 
and learned that for the first time it is possible to translate the websites 
in the way the KDE applications are translated. So Anne-Marie and I started 
to include this i18n tags in the code of women.kde.org. Our website is the 
first one of the KDE websites that uses this new method for translation. 
So the question that appears in your mind possibly is:
Why isn't there any translated stuff online?
A very good question with a simple answer:
the translating couldn't start yet, because we haven't got a translation file 
(.pot file) yet. We, as the first people implementing this translation stuff, 
only can wait until this file is ready.
Then I hope that a lot of women will start with the translation of our 
website. And maybe other websites will be transalted too.

A second idea was to create a database to handle a collection of tasks that 
need to be done. Currently I am working on this database and hopefully I will 
soon be able to write the webinterface for it.
The database will work in two ways. You can search through the tasks and 
assign to a task, that you find interesting. And the other way round you can 
add tasks that need to be done. 
Anne-Marie is currently busy with listing missing What's This help. The task 
of writing What's This will be found for example in the database. I would 
like to stress this task because missing What's This help is a leck of 
usability. One of our male supporters wrote a tutorial about how to write 
What's This help, that is linked on our website. I hope that we can improve 
usability by adding this little help texts.
You'll find other tasks as well in the database like little coding tasks, 
artwork, translation, writing or everything else that is needed. The tasks 
will be categorised from easy to difficult, so you can find the right level 
for yourself. This database will also hopefully improve the work between all 
people, who are involved in KDE.

At last I would like to say some words about the big idea of having a KDE 
Women meeting. I asked on this mailinglist if there is interest in meeting 
each other. Everyone who is interested should wrote a personal mail to me. I 
counted the answers I got yet and at the moment there are about ten women, 
who would like to have a meeting. If there are other women, who maybe just 
subscribed to the list or didn't answer yet, but would like to have a 
meeting, please don't be shy and send a mail directly to me with your name 
and the country you come from. We plan to have a meeting in the next summer. 
An idea of a program for the meeting you'll find in the CVS module 
kdepromo/women. More about a meeting will be soon to say.

That are the biggest ideas we want to realise at the moment, our future plans. 
I think that there will be more ideas for KDE Women and I hope that all ideas 
be named.

The last few weeks showed that there are lot of women, who would like to 
translate the website or would like to contribute in other ways. There were 
some subscribtions to the mailinglist and I am glad to see that Anne-Marie 
and I aren't the only women, who are interested in KDE Women.

Now I would like to ask you all to become an active member of the community! 
We need every helpful hand, because we have big and complex tasks for the 
future that we want to realise.

The main reason why I write this mail is that I want to prevent that KDE Women 
get asleep again. I think that the KDE Women project is very important for 
every woman, who is searching for a starting point in KDE. But it isn't only 
important for the whole KDE community. For over two years nothing happend in 
the KDE Women project. As I became involved in KDE there wasn't any activity 
on the mailinglist, the irc channel was completly deserted and silent and the 
website hasn't seen an update for a long time. I made the experience that it 
can be very hard to become involved in the KDE project without having company 
from other women. That is the reason why  I want to help women to find a 
starting point and company. This is also the reason, why I don't want to see 
the project asleep again. So I want to ask every women to start contributing 
in KDE Women to find your starting point and to help others to find theirs.

Two months ago Uni started for me and I have to work hard for my courses. I 
learn a lot of interesting and useful stuff that helps me to improve my 
coding skills and a lot of connected subjects. The subject Computer Science 
that I chose to study is one of the hardest and most laborious subjects on my 
uni. That shorts my time substancial  so that I rarely find time to work on 
KDE Women. I already know that in the next two semesters I won't have any 
time at all, so that I won't be able to work on KDE Women at all. But I would 
like to be sure that things are going on, so I just can ask everyone of you 
to become active and help that KDE Women keeps alove.

Cheers,
Frauke

-- 
Frauke Oster
KDE/Kivio developer
A KDE Woman
[email protected]