I have been given the opportunity to meet and get to know so many amazingly talented and skilled women who are in Open Source and more specifically the Ubuntu Community. The women I am writing about make the work and contributions they provide to Ubuntu, Open Source Projects, and initiatives to increase the visibility of women in open source, seem effortlessly awesome!

The Ada Initiative is a new non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media.

The premier annual Linux and Open Source conference in Australia, linux.conf.au, is once again hosting a LinuxChix mini-conf. We are now calling for presentations by women on both Free Software technical topics and other topics of general interest to women involved in Free Software or working in IT.

When attending conferences, working with various open source teams, and generally interacting with people in the open source world, we see women as a small representative minority. The disparity leaves us wondering: "How do we better activate 50% of the population?".

This Tuesday (October 16th) there is an opportunity to attract more women contributors to technology in general and KDE in particular. Tuesday is Ada Lovelace Day; we are using the occasion to invite women to discover KDE. We want to help another generation of women be part of KDE. During the day, we will offer tutorials on different topics to give you a running start.

I am tired of seemingly only ever reading about the topic of women in Open Source within the context of a conflict scenario... I am more interested in talking about the awesome, positive and inspiring stories of women in Open Source...

We here at Pingdom have been talking about why we don’t see that many women in Open Source, and were actually about to investigate it further and possibly write a blog post about it.

Want to encourage more women to get involved -- including yourself? These links might help.

We can talk to women who come to user group meetings and invite them to speak. By being friendly and asking women directly to speak up, we open the door for participation. If we insist on equal participation, the structure of our organizations will change. The first time I spoke up in a user group was terrifying, but I did so because a peer politely, but repeatedly, asked me to speak.