Much as I'd like to buy the pitch that "women's participation would fix it," I can't. I've never participated in large scale open source. All of my participation has been small scale, those tiny teams that typically end in failure. They fail because (1) people don't have any idea what it takes to make a project sustainable over time. They think they've got lots of time to do things when really they don't. Milestones have to be hit or morale slides and real life intervenes. People find out they gotta eat, that they're paying for all of this. (2) People are jerks. (3) People diverge as to what they think is important to pursue. In small projects there isn't enough room for everyone to be a leader, so when it comes to competing ideas of leadership for a project, someone gets pushed out. (4) People don't do the work. (5) People have different strengths and weaknesses for their managerial chemistry. Not everyone can function well in all roles, and people often have poor understanding of people who function differently than they do. This leads to friction and if there's no understanding, explosions.
So, a woman could bring X set of technical and interpersonal skills to the dynamic. It's still a dynamic and having women on board doesn't automatically solve anything. Really, people in open source just have to tough it out for various personal reasons. I am inclined to believe that the root problem is the lack of supply of women in CS.
Oh, and if it wasn't implicitly clear: I think some of us, if we ever get good enough to manage all these issues in any kind of substantive way, start focusing on our own sustainable business models and less on "The Commons." To be that good with people, to get them to actually get a lot of work done, has economic value. Attempting to work with people who diminish one's ability to get things done is a drag.
Much as I'd like to buy the pitch that "women's participation would fix it," I can't. I've never participated in large scale open source. All of my participation has been small scale, those tiny teams that typically end in failure. They fail because (1) people don't have any idea what it takes to make a project sustainable over time. They think they've got lots of time to do things when really they don't. Milestones have to be hit or morale slides and real life intervenes. People find out they gotta eat, that they're paying for all of this. (2) People are jerks. (3) People diverge as to what they think is important to pursue. In small projects there isn't enough room for everyone to be a leader, so when it comes to competing ideas of leadership for a project, someone gets pushed out. (4) People don't do the work. (5) People have different strengths and weaknesses for their managerial chemistry. Not everyone can function well in all roles, and people often have poor understanding of people who function differently than they do. This leads to friction and if there's no understanding, explosions.
So, a woman could bring X set of technical and interpersonal skills to the dynamic. It's still a dynamic and having women on board doesn't automatically solve anything. Really, people in open source just have to tough it out for various personal reasons. I am inclined to believe that the root problem is the lack of supply of women in CS.
Oh, and if it wasn't implicitly clear: I think some of us, if we ever get good enough to manage all these issues in any kind of substantive way, start focusing on our own sustainable business models and less on "The Commons." To be that good with people, to get them to actually get a lot of work done, has economic value. Attempting to work with people who diminish one's ability to get things done is a drag.