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Report on Poster Competition on Womens and LGBT Issues This will be one competition that provoked plenty of debate and in my opinion, exposed the lack of awareness of a wide spectrum of FOSS contributors and others. The idea was definitely supported by large sections of the FOSS and many other communities, but some had reservations. We did not have too many submissions though, the number of submissions were less than the available prizes. So all eligible submissions were awarded prizes. These were all submitted by the 13th. The extension of dates, modified 'positive' text and publicity did not help in getting any new submissions The prizes included Live Fedora design and TexLive'2013 in the Flash drives The winners are C. Srividya Ani Dalal The submitted posters are available on the site gallery under CCSA license. The posters were made with GIMP and Inskscape mainly. Ani Dalal's was done in GIMP only with custom brushes. There were differences in the technical quality of submissions as can be seen from the exhibits. Participants were asked to describe the intended representation of the posters. The ideas chosen were simple and direct. Ani Dalal's poster uses an interplay of an image of two people holding hands with a large amount of anti-discrimination related words layered over it. It is intended to suggest "freedom and courage, and dawn of a new world, a better world for all, irrespective of their gender or any other form of discrimination." Srividya's first poster carried the message that LGBT people are humans and that humans should be respected irrespective of their gender or sexual orientation. Srividya's second poster is intended as a simple call for a change in the culture associated with free software through the involvement of women in all stages of its existence. Many women have achieved much in the free software world, why don't more women get involved? The publicity of the event went into various Google+ communities, socio-political discussion groups, reddit and social channels (apart from FOSS channels). This by itself must have helped in increasing awareness about FOSS tools. There is a difference between a person who asserts "I know Fedora and GIMP" and one who asserts "I have not heard of free software". We had many positive comments all through in these channels. Some of the ways in which the impact of events like these can be improved are: A. We should have conducted online courses on the free software tools before the competition. B. The language of the target community should be accommodated in a better way. Unfortunately differences within the organizing committee led to fairly placid approach. The earlier version of the background text could potentially help people with repressed sexualities (that arguably constitute a overwhelming majority) as well. C. For events like these it is important to work on addressing closeted people and groups in hostile environment. As it is the disparate real communities or persons in the abstract LGBT community are extremely alienated from Indian society and even if people want to participate, they may not be bold enough to do so. All things considered, this stands as a good community effort! ___________________________________ Best A. Mani -- A. Mani CU, ASL, AMS, CLC, CMS http://www.logicamani.in _______________________________________________ WFS-India mailing list [email protected] Message archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: To unsubscribe, please login to your account at http://www.wfs-india.org/ and unsubscribe to the WFS-India list from your account settings. -- WFS-India - http://www.wfs-india.org
