Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

One of the things I really like about the nonprofit technology community is that there are so many women involved. There are lots of women on the varied lists I read, there are nonprofit technology organizations that have lots of women leaders, and all of that is great. But then, there is the little secret (well, it’s not so secret). When you look at systems administrators, or coders, or net-heads … the women kinda vanish. When it comes to conversations about things like the innards of APIs (REST or SOAP?), why Ruby on Rails rocks (or doesn’t), what’s a good alternative port to run SSH, when we’re going to implement IPv6 or … there’s a whole lot of testosterone, and not a lot of estrogen hanging about. So where did the women go?

As someone who was a real rarity in my early years (how many African American women neuroscientists have you heard of?) I didn’t ask this question too often (it would just depress me.) But as I re-enter this field I love, I can’t help but think about this question again.

This is why, by the way, I love hanging out with Linuxchix. This community has been around for a while, and its full of women who know their way around a linux kernel (some of them even get paid to hack it,) and can answer just about any question on Apache mod_rewrite I can come up with. There are some really great men who hang out too, who don’t mind being around a bunch of geeky women.

So maybe, we can get some Linuxchix to get involved in the nptech community, and we can get some nptech women who might be a little shy getting their toes wet with technology installing linux and writing code, with Linuxchix support, and have some nice synergy.

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