"I am currently in the process of organising the half-day Gentoo mini-conf at the next linux.conf.au, Australia's annual technical conference about Free Software..."

Archana Raghupathy of Chennai started LinuxChix-India in 2005. It is the Indian chapter of the global women techies' network Linuxchix.org, and "tries to empower Indian women to use, develop and contribute to the world of free and open source software (FOSS)."

If you think that Linux is only "for the boys", then think again. Did you know that there are women-oriented Linux communities that are created to provide both technical and social support for women Linux users? The most well known among them is called LinuxChix, and I’m not kidding. To know more about LinuxChix, I have collected some interesting facts about them so read on.

Nearly a year ago the FSF held a mini-summit for women in free software to investigate practical ways to increase the number of women involved in the free software community. Those that attended the summit formed the Women's Caucus, and have been working to develop practical policy to recommend to the FSF and the wider free software community.

The Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software to discuss how the free software community can cultivate and increase participation by women in free software's development and activism communities.

The Software Development Times has published an in-depth look the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) attempts at breaking down barriers for women in open source. It highlights the recently released report by the FSF's Women's Caucus, a mini-summit held last year to address issues in the FOSS community that some say prevent more females from participating.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNOME Foundation are targeting higher women's participation in the community. The first step is a "mini-summit" on "Women in Free Software."

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.

The organisers of linux.conf.au have done a fantastic job in making all presentations and tutorials available to watch online - in Ogg Theora format naturally. If you were disappointed to miss out on linux.conf.au, this is the next best thing to being there.