On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 9:08 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
Laura Hale, 20/12/2011 23:55:
We want everything related to women's involvement with Wikimedia projects in the region. :) This includes, but is not limited to: [...]
Whoa, that's a lot. But, sorry for the silly question, what's exactly the purpose of collecting such info (so that I can prioritize, choose correctly and expose better): prove that Wikimedia is not for males only, show that initiatives to fill the gender gap are possible, just collect some statistics for further (internal) consideration, ...?
At the moment, this is to both inform the community the state of female participation on a leadership level, the state of women's participation on WMF projects (the 9% number is meaningless unless properly contextualised) and the state of women's related content by region. Women are not a homogenous group and a solution that works for some women ( like http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Teahouse ) will not work for other women (like Australians, where the concept is alien). It is important to understand these sub populations, where they exist and what they are up to.
Beyond that, the purpose of the list is to create benchmarks for chapters and communities with in the movement to see how they can improve. If we get this information, six months, a year, two years down the line, we can say: Look! We've improved the participation levels of women at New Zealand based meet ups (and at the same time increased male participation levels!). We have more women involved in editing articles about popular Australian women's sports, about Australian literature and about female Australian politicians. In this country, there was not a single woman on the board but now they have one. In Bangladesh, they sent their first woman to attend an international conference and she came back and helped organise events in the country.
This information can also be used by participants to help justify external grants from outside WMF to help address these issues. There are many grants out there related to women, female leadership, etc. This can help that. (It was in fact one of the major reasons discussed on our planning list. We need these perspectives in order to help current and future female leaders, so they can apply for grants to do things. There are some women in some chapters who do a great job at grants, including in Hungary and South Africa.)
I don't know how interesting this information is the WMF. We haven't had a sit down with the WMF about our conference. If they find this helpful for their own mission, fantastic. Awesome. It would be great to hear more about women in the Movement from an international perspective. :) We have some truly fantastic women and they don't always get the credit they deserve.