[Fedora Women] Introduction

[Anne Wilson]

Hi.  I'm Anne, in England.  I dabbled with Red Hat 5, long ago,  but had to 
give up through hardware problems and lack of cash at that time to replace 
unsupported hardware.  It was 2000 before I discovered Mandrake 8, and 
dual-booted for about 6 months.  Linux has been my working environment ever 
since.

I'm retired, a home user with a fairly wide range of interests.  I look after 
all the computers for the 3-generation family, including the mixed 
architecture LAN.

I'm a member of two LUGs.  In the biggest one, I'm the only woman member.  
I've thought a lot about this, and about the reluctance of other women in my 
family to consider linux.  I think that the truth is that most women are 
task-oriented, when it comes to computing.  Writing a letter is much the same 
in any environment.  Photo editing, camcorder output editing, or creating a 
DVD just looks that bit harder than in Windows, and it's frightening to 
someone who has little tech understanding, and no interest in gaining it.  'I 
just want it to work', is the reply.  I suspect that there are lessons to be 
learned from relatively cut-down Windows programs.  For instance, Gimp is 
powerful, but many Windows-users will prefer to use a much simpler program 
such as iPhoto Express which leads through a wizard that says something like 
'move the two boxes until the eyes are covered, then click "Continue"' when 
they want to correct red-eye. 

I would love to get involved in projects aimed at winning these reluctant, 
frightened users.  I have no programming skills, but as an ex-teacher my 
communication skills are quite good.  If such a project was started I would 
like to be involved from the start, in the belief that you need to be very 
familiar with every aspect if you want to write good, non-geeky 
documentation.

Anne
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/women/attachments/20060725/a35cf9a4/attachment.bin