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Boston, Massachusetts USA
Máirín is a senior principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape (http://inkscape.org).
Authored Comments
Just wanted to put it out there that Dreamwidth is a wonderful open source project for women just starting out. I've personally had great experience with the upstream Mailman project community as well.
The suggested projects in the poll are very large, established projects with huge codebases. While each is a great community and welcoming to newcomers, I do feel like it's less overwhelming to get involved in a smaller project where you can understand the application in depth (because of its smaller scope) and you can get to know a majority of the contributors involved more closely (because there aren't as many since the projects aren't as massive.) You get a more personal touch from smaller projects, and you learn the basic ropes to move onto larger projects if you like later on.
They are much better in the latest builds - happy to do a YouTube demo, gimme a little bit... :)