Danese Cooper talks about women in open source.  Why are only 2% of open source project people women?  She and her colleagues are looking for concrete information about what kinds of people self-select (and are happy) into open source projects.  She talks about the Debian women project, which affirmatively welcomes women without letting them lurk, and finds them mentors.  Someone quips:  "This is Women 2.0!"

Danese says there's a fear that bringing in women will make open source projects less fun.  There are lots of trolls on women-oriented development lists.  People discuss what to do with lists like these.  It takes leadership to change the list environment.  (Danese notes that she was the first woman interviewed by Slashdot and many of the questions were inappropriate.  Men don't seem to notice this.) 

Someone suggests that Apache could change its practices to be more acceptable to both men and women.  Someone says that these same issues will hold back developing country newbies.  Several people agree that mentoring is the real issue.

Someone talks about Maria Klawe, the dean of engineering at Princeton, who has done studies about getting women to stay longer in computer science.  Forced mentoring doesn't work, but when freshman curricula is all labs in programming pairs, both women and men stay on. There's a discussion about fathers teaching daughters.

Danese wants O'Reilly to do an entire track on this subject at some future conference.  She suggests that actually working on the issue, rather than just talking for an hour or two, could be helpful. She's interested in the summer of code, and what will happen there.  Danese is starting a women's effort connected with opensource.org, and urges people to subscribe.