My name is Susan Stewart. I am a professional web developer; I work from home so that I may spend more time with my five-year-old son. I volunteer at the local elementary school teaching a computer club for junior high school students. I am as nonviolent a person as you could possibly meet, yet my government prevents me from carrying a firearm while violent criminals do so freely.

Today, my mother and I attended voter registrar training at the local NEA headquarters. We can now register new voters anywhere in Illinois.

It seems that having some sort of special program to "reach out" to women is the trendy thing in FOSS right now. Debian Women has been around for ages, but now we have Ubuntu Women, the Gnome summer camp for women, and Gentoo is talking about starting Gentoo Women. I suppose I should be impressed that in each case they say "women" and not "girls".

I'm tempted to check out some of the above groups just to see what's going on. I've pointedly avoided them thus far because I totally and utterly fail to see how they can be a good thing for FOSS, or a good thing for the kinds of people whose involvement most benefits FOSS.