Changing The Conversation, MO

I like the new meme that Jono has started at his blog. It’s basically that we should be promoting all the fantastic women we’ve had personal dealings with and not focus too much on fighting for the remote control.

We do have a fantastic community, I’m adding only some of those people who I’ve worked with to jono’s list:

Elizabeth DeMarco. I’ll start with lizzie, she’s fairly new to our LoCo group in MA, but already she’s been driving hard at learning python and picking up systems administration. Attending my sys-admin classes at first and now learning as much about python and Django in order to further help develop our LoCo website. A wonderful student to work with.

Belinda Lopez of Canonical Education Team. Also known as dinda on IRC is a Canonical employee who comes from outside the community culture and by having her in the Ubuntu Learning group discussions has given us an outside educators and course creators view. And she does have awesome experience in that field.

Elizabeth Krumbach of the PA LoCo. pleia2 is so dedicated in the community, I’ll be surprised if there are many Ubuntu people who have not worked with or know of her yet. I’ve had to privilege with working both in the LoCo community and on the Ubuntu Learning project where we are both board members and I always really enjoy the discussions and debates and I’m always impressed by her intelligence and dedication with which she applies to everything.

Sara Abbott. The partner of leftyfb, she’s been our LoCo’s cake and sweet things maker for a while. helping out our group with minutes and other jobs. Sara has been a rock of solid down to earth views, if you think your getting high and mighty and away from the real practicalities of the common user, she’ll put you right. A much needed balance to meetings where principled views can sometimes detach from reality.

Deborah Nicholson of the FSF. I’ve only had the opportunity to work with Deborah a couple of times locally. But I’ve always been impressed by how quickly she moved from a standard charity organiser to an impassioned Free Software supporter. I also appreciate that she takes time for people, like personally inviting my team (Ubuntu MA LoCo) to attend FSF events such as the Software Freedom Day.