在本次大会的主会场开始之前,还会有一个专门针对女性用户的小会场,主持人是www.javarach.com的创始人Kathy Sierra。她同时还是Sun公司的高级培训人员。
Linuxchix小型会议的组织者Mary Gardiner告诉Builder澳洲网站的记者说,以前,女性计算机从业人员总是认为自己没有参加过开源项目的建设,自己也就没有权利参加开源的线下交流活动。
Linuxchix小型会议的发言人都是女性,而且讨论的大部分话题都和女性有关,但是主题还是有关开源社区的建设问题。参加会议的人性别不限 :)
More than 50 women have signed up to the traditionally male dominated event, which represents approximately 10% of the overall number of registrations.
Helping to boost the female ranks is a mini-conference being staged before the main conference starts and the announcement of the first ever female keynote speaker, Kathy Sierra, book author, master trainer at Sun Microsystems and founder of www.javaranch.com.
Mary Gardiner, Linuxchix mini-conference organiser, told Builder AU most of the women at the mini-conference who haven't attended before "seem to have felt that they don't have a right to be part of a Free Software community event, usually because they are not heavily involved in Free Software development."
"Having a community event hosted by LinuxChix, which is a group for users as well as for developers, seems to have helped", Gardiner added.
Talks covered at next year's LinuxChix mini-conference event include "Closing the Gender Pay Gap One Salary at a Time", "Is Free Software a Macho thing? Women and FOSS", and "Social networking for fun and profit".
The Linuxchix mini-conference will have women-only speakers but is open to all delegates to attend.
BuilderAU will be covering LCA when it is held between 15th and 20th January 2007.