Thanks to everyone who contributed to our survey in August! We had a total of 110 responses, almost a quarter of whom had never heard of the project before filling out the survey.
We have split up these results into 2 posts. In the first we shared the raw statistics, you can visit that post here: Ubuntu Women Survey 2013 Results: Part 1. In this post we’re sharing a representative sampling of the key findings from the write-in responses.
If there is something you wish we were doing or doing more of, what would it be?
For this question the overwhelming response was that we need to do better, less passive outreach, a sampling of those responses:
- Target potential users in a better way.
- [I am a developer and] I’d like if there was more information on whom to contact to get more actively involved.
- I want to see/hear “Ubuntu wants you to contribute, and we [Ubuntu Women Project] will help you figure out how to do that!”
- More outreach and education to women with little/no programming experience
- Offer mentoring for contributing code to Ubuntu. I want to contribute code and want help.
- It’s often really hard to see where relative beginners would be able to jump in and contribute to the community
It was also great to see some concrete ideas come out of this:
- Create online projects for women they could work on maybe in teams online … These projects could include parts of Ubuntu (from easier like promoting Ubuntu to heavy like how to create first patch for Ubuntu – it could be kernel, it could be some package)
- Offer internships, ie participate in the GNOME Outreach Program for Women or Google Summer of Code
- Get some of the interviews published in a more widely read Linux magazine or popular website so a wider audience could read them
- Find more stories about kids and specifically girls who like playing with Raspberry Pi, Scratch or similar. It is easier to engage kids
- More marketing in localized regions and work to bring up a program for potential female leaders
- Making sure images of women were included (and not excluded) in any relevant media. e.g. http://community.ubuntu.com as having visuals of female role models can spur female involvement
We don’t currently have the resources to tackle all of this, but I’m really excited to see the feedback and have these ideas so we have something to discuss moving forward so we know the kind of talent we need to attract to our project.
Any other comments or feedback for the project
Many of the responses were very kind – thank you everyone!
Aside from that, the comments centered around us needing to be more visible, as 25% of respondents hadn’t heard of us before this survey, and having more a more succinct project description that makes it easy for new contributors to find our resources.
We’ll be referring back to these responses regularly as we move forward and craft our goals for the next cycle, which begins later this month. We’re also planning on doing more in-depth surveys about specific programs to get feedback from the community about how we’re doing.
