A Series of Fortunate Events

On Wednesday, I found time to sneak over to the first formal Open Source / LibTech Chicas meetup coordinated by Sandra of OpenITP and some other ladies. I was really glad that they got this together since last year on the heels of AdaCamp, I’d tried to get a women in open source meetup going with sorta mixed success (full disclosure: I was in the first trimester of my pregnancy and battling nausea and fatigue!). So anyway, Wednesday’s gathering was well-attended with an interesting mix of women who’ve been in FLOSS for a while and a bunch who had relatively no experience and had no clue where to start. One woman asked me point blank, “How did you get involved in this; is it some sort of subculture?!” And in answering this question, I realized my involvement in FLOSS has been the result of a series of fortunate events, including but not limited to:

After a few of us at the gathering answered the question, the next thing that new people wanted to know was “Where do *I* start?”So I told people I’d send them some links and figured I may as well post them here so everyone could access them and any of the smart people out there who read this blog could chime in with even more suggestions. That post is here.