[Actionchix] Magazine

[turtle]

>
>
> When I first asked about the possibility of a women owned Linux magazine
> where the majority of articles would be written by women, I wasn't
> thinking about publicizing the women owned aspect.


I agree that we should avoid sounding like a misandrous clique.  I don' t
think Women-owned is really relevant since this is a labour of love, not
property, and since ownership isn't that important in the open source
community.

I was thinking how nice it would be to subscribe to and read a
> technically oriented Linux magazine where the writers and contributors
> were women instead of the status quo, men.


And this is why I think openly announcing ourselves as women-friendly,
gender neutral or some other identification of the openness to women
*should* be done.  If someone doesn't know that we are going to be including
female viewpoints, then they aren't going to know how we're different from
every other technical publication out there.

That women own it, write for it, determine hiring and editorial policy,
> yes, but don't advertise the fact, since it would, from a business sense
> at least, be unwise in my opinion.


I don't think we actually have any mission statements or other whatnot
indicating that we won't have men part-owning, doing hiring, editorial work
or other stuff.  I certainly hope not.  I think there are a lot of men who
would be excellent people to help us out with this project.  Excluding them
based purely upon their gender would be pretty counter to the spirit of what
we're doing.

Let the magazine exist and prosper on its own merit.  Again, LJ doesn't
> advertise its male dominated stance.  I see no reason for Tech Linux (or
> whatever title is chosen) to advertise a female dominated stance, even
> if it is in fact female dominated.


I wouldn't want to be part of anything that had a spirit of domination of
one gender over the other.  However, I do think we need to let people know
we are open to all genders simply for the fact that if we don't advertise
the fact, then people glancing over a list of technical publications will
have no idea how we are different from the others.

The following is not related to the email I was just quoting, but is a
general statement:

Personally, I think that comments fueled by hate, whether it's righteous
rage at being mistreated, or blatant bigotry, aren't useful.  I have seen a
lot of them here.  Sometimes they are blatant misandry, just striking out at
men in general, totally unfairly (and in my opinion worse than the reverse
since most men don't have the eye-opening experience of being on the other
side of gender discrimination, so we really should know better).  Other
times they are puritan (sex is bad, so anything to do with sex and women
together is degrading to women solely because sex is bad with no other
logical reasons).  What I feel is different about linuxchix isn't the lack
of hate-fueled comments, but how they are handled.

The thing that linuxchix does for me that other communities don't do,
actually has nothing to do with the "chix" part of the community.  What I
really find to be awesome about linuxchix, and what I hope will translate
into the magazine, is our tolerance and open-mindedness.  On the linuxchix
forums we can have someone talking about their comfort level with sexualized
talk in the workplace without them being attacked for whatever they might
say - for or against it.  We can have someone rant about men without getting
lynched.  We can find support for each other when we stand up to unfair
treatment without having a peanut gallery either belittling us for standing
up for ourselves, or belittling what we are standing up against.  Linuxchix
is a forum where people's shouting is heard, but where, even if we disagree,
they aren't shouted down, where their opinion is considered valid, as an
opinion, but not as gospel, and most importantly, where bullying - verbal,
social, or otherwise, is not acceptable.

I sincerely hope that our new magazine will find a nice gentle middle road
between the male-dominated tech world, and the female sense of identity,
where we are tolerant of all genders and all viewpoints, male, female,
sexually liberal, sexually conservative, polite, outrageous, traditional and
weird.  I would love to see articles celebrating men in tech side by side
with those celebrating women, provided they are fairly written and neither
one outshouts the other.  I'd also love to see articles celebrating gender
differences in the tech world side by side with those detailing how gender
in IT is irrelevant and a non-issue.

Maybe what we need to do right now is not define the magazine by what it is,
because that might end up being quite amorphous.  (We're a very diverse
group, and that's not something I think we should consider a problem, but an
excellent opportunity to be diverse and multifaceted.)  Maybe we need to
instead define the magazine by what it is *not.*  For example, we don't
discriminate against any gender.  We are not going to run shoddy articles
based on bigotry and ignorance.  We do not promote hatred.  etc.

This definition would never even need to be officially published, but it
might help us, as a team, focus and agree on what we are doing without
feeling like we are pigeonholing ourselves.

Just a thought.

~Daria