We, the Fedora Diversity Team, were thinking where else we could help organize a Fedora Women Day. Of course, that Fedora Kosovo Community came in my mind and I thought to contact Ardian and Renata to see when we could organize a FWD at Prishtina Hackerspace. Since Renata and I had some exams during September we thought to organize it in October. At the same time, Daniel Pocock, part of the Debian community, was thinking to organize a Mini DebConf, the first one in Prishtina. After talking with him we decided to combine both activities and organize something together. Personally, I was very happy to see two Linux distributions organize an event together in Prishtina and having so many people interested in it.
MiniDebConf and Fedora Women Day at Prishtina Hackerspace
On 7 October the event started at 10 am at Prishtina Hackerspace and a lot of people came, even though it was raining heavily and it was a bad weather in Prishtina. On the first day (Sunday) the event included a range of different talks for Debian, Fedora, Linux, Outreachy, D&I, privacy etc. The event was open to everyone, not only to those who were already familiar with FLOSS, but also to new people that were interested to have more information about it.
My first talk was about the Fedora project, giving the participants an overview of what Fedora is, the subprojects we have and the ways they can contribute. During my talk, I highlighted the Fedora Diversity Team and Fedora Women Day explaining why it’s so important for us to organize a FWD and what our team has done so far. Especially I was very happy to share with them the badge I did for Fedora Women Day participants :P, showing them that even when you have just a bit of knowledge related to design or something else (or even 0), in open source you will always find someone to help you with it, sharing is caring.
My other talk was related to Rails Girls Summer of Code, the award-winning scholarship program that aims to foster diversity in Open Source since 2013. I shared my experience with the participants on what I did for three months during summer working on Nextcloud: what were the challenges my teammate Xheni and I had, what we learned during the scholarship and what we enjoyed the most.
Renata and Kristi had talks about Outreachy Internship, sharing with all the girls their personal experience and supporting them to apply. Many other talks were from other girls too, sharing their experience and being very motivational for the other participants. On the second day, we mostly had workshops. I was amazed to see during this event that 50% of talks were held by women! Hope to see many other events having the same ratio.
Special thanks goes to FLOSSK and Prishtina Hackerspace, for being available to help us organize a great event, and Daniel Pocock for hosting FWD during Mini DebConf.
See you soon Prishtina. 🙂
