I know of a few women PD users but I've never met a female developer of PD externals. Actually there is a place in Montreal called studioXX (http://www.studioxx.org/) whose mandate is to increase the exposure of female artists to technology. I heard they are about to start a pure-data workshop there. (oh and look its own own MiS teaching it!)
I think the problem is the old problem of privilege as much as anything. It's not a problem specific to women, but all "minorities". Actually I was thinking that open-source should/could be a very interesting thing in context of first peoples communities. I think communities like these would be very ideologically connected to the open-source concept. (from my white western "priviliged" perspective anyhow) Imagine if there was an open source OS (and there may be) that was centered around the ideology of a non-western community, a true fusion of spirituality and creative computing.
Interaccess was involved in something called the "Container Project" (http://www.container.access-it.org.uk/) that basically got funding to plunk a shipping container / computer lab into rural areas, in our case Jamaica, and taught workshops and so on there. Strangely there was little exposure to open-source software. People learned how to do HTML on old os9 macs and on windows98. I wonder if there is such a thing in the western world for first peoples communities.
I think it is in all of our benefit that the diversity of contributers to open-source (and PD & Linux in particular) increase and reflect the diversity of our (global) community.
I've always felt a little strange about starting these things, since in most cases those with the knowledge (white men) end up teaching the "minorities" (maybe marginalized groups is a better term). I hope one day a woman will teach PD at studioXX !
Sorry for the blabbing, the topic just captured my imagination.
B.
PS: out of 1000 potential users, how many visual artists are there among us? maybe 50?
Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Its good to see more women getting involved. But it remains a sad fact that out 40+ Pd devs, almost all are white males. I was just discussing this with my girlfriend ideas, it seems to be a pretty amorphic issue. I read an interesting article about this problem regarding free software development in general. It seems many women don't want to be openly female in such forums because it often leads to obnoxious and/or harassing emails. So many women choose gender-neutral online identities to avoid this. Then there was another interesting point about how free software development tends to be kind of a macho realm, with people trying to one-up each other. Many women (and men as well) find this quite annoying.
Just my two bits...
.hc
On Mar 14, 2005, at 12:23 PM, B. Bogart wrote:
The last PD class I taught at Interaccess (Toronto, Canada) was 50% female. This class was the first in a series on pd, gem, audio, electronics and microcontrollers.
On top of that of all the workshops I've taught there have always been about 30% women and more.
I don't know how many of my students keep up with PD...
b.
Ian Smith-Heisters wrote:
That's the thing. I have personally met one other person that uses PD. Otherwise, I know of you guys only via the list.
Another interesting demographic question would be what are the national/gender makeups. Is there a single female that, say, has a developer's account on the CVS?
There was a discussion on Ars Technica a while back about the prevalence of men in programming. Somewhere in there came up the fact that during the internet boom autism rates in Silicon Valley went up 200%. Autism effects men more than women for some reason that no one can figure out. Also, the profile of asperger's syndrome (high-functioning autism) is the same profile of a geek: anti-social, amazing ability to focus on details no one else can see.
Anyway. I count 2 Pd users and a bunch of emails that may be generated by bots.
-Ian
Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
My impression is that when I started lurking on the Pd list, which was in mid-2002, the Pd crowd was already many times bigger than the jMax crowd -- say twenty times, and possibly a lot more.
Which reminds of something related: How many Pd users do you all think there are? Ciao
Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish. -William Carlos Williams