open source females

My paper has qualified for judging in the National Collegiate Conference! I will now be judged in the top 10 and will officially be presenting on Saturday, April 4th!

Time to begin making my presentation. Wish me luck!

I just submitted my final paper. It took about 20 minutes to actually click the send button. AITP is supposed to let us know on or before March 20th if we are finalists.

So, here it is in .pdf format if you'd like to read it.

I'll post here when I find out whether or not I am a finalist. If I'm a finalist, I will be presenting at the conference in OKC.

Finally. The results speak for themselves.

My paper is coming to its final stages. I just wanted to share this tidbit of information.

I received 41 surveys last week! This is incredible.

I'm currently in the process of turning those results into charts that I can incorporate into my paper. It's looking great.

When writing up my findings, I realized I left a few things out that I wanted to elaborate on a little more in my paper. I created a new survey to address these issues.

The new survey is only 10 questions long. Here is the link for the new survey.

I'm e-mailing it to everyone who filled out the first one, but I'm putting the link here just in case.

First of all, thank you to the 25 (and counting!) of you who responded to my e-mail and filled out the survey. Also, thank you for everyone who passed on the link to this website. I really appreciate your help. :) I was pleasantly surprised.

I have become disappointed with Survey Monkey and have switched my survey over to another website - www.survs.com. I'm more than happy with their services simply because they actually give me statistics on each question and allow me to export them into a nicely laid out spreadsheet.

NEW SURVEY LINK!!!

Somehow, they can do it for free but Survey Monkey can't. Anywho, it's very customizeable, user-friendly, and does everything I need it to do. Thank you, Survs.

The new survey has the SAME QUESTIONS. It just looks nicer and is all on one page.

No one has to re-take it because I spent about 2 hours today filling it out 25 times transferring everyone's answers because I am a broke college student and couldn't throw $20 out just to make it quick and painless.

I'm almost finished responding to everyone's e-mails. Again, thank you, everyone. :)

Dru Lavigne wrote a short blog for my research! I feel honored.

I sent out an e-mail this morning to the Systers mailing list not knowing what to expect. What I got was an overwhelming number of responses offering to help me out.

Thank you to everyone who has participated so far. I really appreciate it. :)

I am now on revision 2 of my paper so far. I have the abstract, introduction, background, research questions, and methodology complete. The surveys have been tweaked ever so slightly, and I think I'm finally ready to administer my surveys to the public.

Now I need to find people to take them. That will be the hard part. Since I narrowed the focus of my paper, I can no longer give my paper to at least half of the people I had previously requested to take it.

I need 20-30 participants. Starting now.

I have been working on new surveys this morning.

So far I have a Part 1 and a Part 2, both of which are required. There are 2 parts only because SurveyMonkey makes you pay if you want more than 10 questions on a survey.

Females in Open Source - Part 1
Females in Open Source - Part 2

I added a section on the right titled "Links & Resources". Over the past few months, I have been scouring the internet for useful websites and previous research papers to assist me with my paper. These are just some of them. A lot of them are pretty entertaining reads.

The "HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux" actually had me laughing the entire way through. It reminded me of my first time walking into an ALUG (Appalachian Linux Users Group) meeting, even though I knew about 25% of the guys there. I was a freshman in college and had never been to a meeting like this and was not sure what to expect. I don't think they were expecting me, either.

It's funny because I went to an OSUM (Open Source University Meet-up, formerly ALUG) meeting last week and the same thing happened. Since 99% of the old ALUG guys are graduated, there is a whole new crowd of members. I only knew about 2 of them this time around, one of which is no longer a student and is actually the club's faculty advisor.

I heard that when I left, someone mentioned that they thought I was lost when I entered the meeting. I also heard, "THERE'S A GIRL HERE!," when another guy came in late.

I admit it was funny and situations like those are the ones that make this field that much more entertaining for [some] girls, but I also wanted to shove that wiki down his throat and yell at him.

My professor for my independent study has suggested (or rather required) that I set up a blog for my research to promote my findings, so here it is.

I am not finished by any means of the word and still have to create surveys to hand out. I've decided Appalachian's CIS department is not the best place to do research that involves women seeing as how there are about 6 of us. I'll probably have to get results from online friends as well. I'll keep updating this and I'll put links up to all my resources when I get everything fixed the way I want it.