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Build a sense of community

The first step in making LinuxChix work was to foster a sense of community. LinuxChix's goal of being a friendly and welcoming place helped considerably. People joining LinuxChix immediately felt like they had found a group of interesting friends, and wanted to be part of the community. Women were especially happy to find a place where they fit in and felt comfortable. Many women (including co-author Val Henson) expressed a profound sense of relief upon finding LinuxChix. Jenn receives a steady stream of email from women saying, ``I didn't know other women felt this way about Linux'' and ``It's such a relief to find this place, I really feel at home.'' We feel this is an important way in which we are different from the typical Linux community, which is usually dominated by flame wars and ego battles and an attitude of ``If you're not tough enough to take it, we don't need you.'' Often this attitude is justified as a way of filtering out incompetents, but our experience is that many competent, intelligent, hard-working people are more likely to contribute when they are treated respectfully. As far as we can tell, being friendly and polite has not resulted in a higher proportion of incompetent people getting involved in LinuxChix - the reverse, if anything.

LinuxChix has more than a friendly atmosphere: it has a specific goal, supporting women in Linux and computing in general. As a result, everyone working on LinuxChix knows they have something in common with everyone else: the desire to support women in Linux. This common goal defines the limits of our community; LinuxChix is not an inclusive organization and those who do not wish to support women in computing are invited to find another group, or start their own. This exclusivity is part of what generates our sense of community.

A wide variety of mailing lists is crucial to generating sense of community. A community needs at least one general-purpose, everything-is-on-topic mailing list where people feel comfortable posting anything they want to talk about with other members of the community. Linuxchix has separate mailing lists for people interested only in particular topics, e.g., technical discussions or major announcements. The proliferation of mailing lists allows people to participate in LinuxChix as much or as little as they desire. We very seldom have subscribers complaining about the volume of email on a particular mailing list.

Our mailing lists vary in their level of publicness as well. Many lists are unarchived, or their archives are available only to members. Along with explicitly off-topic lists, this gives members a safe zone to express thoughts and questions which they would not discuss on a publicly archived list. Being able to open up more to each other and have a safe place to make risky statements further builds our sense of community. However, we keep purely technical mailing lists publicly archived, so that answers to questions already asked are easy to find via web search.

A key element to the LinuxChix sense of community turned out to be our semi-private IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel. Hosted on a private server and advertised only by occasional posts to the smaller LinuxChix mailing lists, the IRC channel allowed LinuxChix members to form friendships and ``hang out'' with each other virtually. Occasionally the barbarians invade - usually teenage ``haxors'' offended by the idea of a women-focused group - and have to be driven off by IP filtering. For the most part, the LinuxChix IRC channel is one of the friendliest and most interesting IRC channels we've found.


next up previous
Next: Do nothing yourself Up: Running a volunteer community Previous: Running a volunteer community
2004-05-08