On Wednesday, April 18 at 16:00 UTC Emma Marshall (System76Chick) presented on being a Media Liaison.

Career Path

• Has been a journalist since she was 14, working for school and local newspapers throughout high school and college
• Began using the social networks to report and promote local businesses that she encountered while working for the newspapers
• Established great relationships and became addicted to this new kind of reporting and staying connected with the businesses
• Stayed with the newspaper industry for a few months after college, as a managing editor of a local paper
• While working at the paper she did promotional work for a company called Apex Movement where first witnessed viral growth through social media promotion
• Transitioned from the newspaper industry into marketing and social media and feels it was “best choice I ever made because I now I have the best of both worlds- reporting and social media”
• Discovered the power of FOSS by using WordPress.org, beginning in 2010
• Developed the company intranet for a large corporation and created a place for the employees to come together as a community to share their daily work experiences
• The community she created as a result of bringing employees together on wordpress.org fueled the internal viral marketing campaign, which led to a Guinness World Record
• She also produced 60 videos in a year and was acting as a reporter within the company
• Describes her work using WordPress.org was what Jane Silber mentioned as a “stretch job” and to keep going with the open-source pursuit where she wasn’t limited to proprietary restrictions

Current Work

• Currently works at System76
• “Discovering System76 and Ubuntu was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
• Her daily work involves a lot of Ubuntu promotion, especially with our Loco efforts
• They offer free stickers, which takes time to manage and coordinate all the other groups who send them out in other countries
• She was also put in charge of all the social networks and they route all the press inquiries her way
• The CEO allows her to work on different computers every month and allows her to take time in the hardware room “to learn more about computers in one day than I’ve learned throughout my whole life”
• Currently working on a series of how-to videos for 12.04 to help people transition from different OS

Q&A

The session wrapped up with a Q&A session, with questions including:

• How do you find the energy to maintain social media?
• How many requests from LoCos for fliers and stickers would you say you get in a 6 month cycle?
• Have you got any tips for people who would like to promote/market a opensource/freesoftware project or opensource/freesoftware company?
• In starting to get involved in FOSS, have you felt your level of expertise to be acceptable, or is there a lot of pressure to keep becoming more “techie”?

And more! Full logs which include answers to these questions and more are available on our wiki:

http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/CareerDays/MediaLiaison

If you’re interested in getting involved, please see the Ubuntu Women Career Days wiki page or email Cheri Francis or myself (lyz@ubuntu.com).

These sessions are open to the whole community, you don’t need to be a woman to attend or participate.

On Saturday, February 25 at 17:00 UTC we welcomed Amber Graner (akgraner) to give us a review of her career leading up to her current position as a Community Manager and to offer details about being a non-developer who works in open source.

Current Career

• Works at Linaro
  • Specialist basically means that what she focuses on or specializes in particular area or topic, in this case it’s various aspects of community and its growth and management.
  • “Does that mean I claim to know all there is to know about community? Nope. Does anyone? Nope. However, I learn something new everyday and I try to share that knowledge daily.”
• Also works as a freelance writer and journalist who contributes to Ubuntu User Magazine and other Linux New Media publications as well as one of the current co-authors of the Offical Ubuntu Book (Pearson). Currently under revision for Edition 7 set to hit shelves after the 12.04 release.
• Not a developer
  • She is often asked: “Well then how did you get a job in FOSS?”
  • Her reply: “Just because I don’t write code doesn’t mean that I am not technical. Nor does it mean I am not capable of understand or learning the concepts and processes behind FOSS nor does it mean I can’t get involved and make a difference.”
  • The same holds true for anyone who wants to be involved in an open source project or find a job in open source.

Career Path

• There were many volunteer opportunities where she grew up in a rural town in Western North Carolina.
  • Whether it was raising money to buy the next fire truck, pitching in to help out a neighbor, playing a team sport, or being on the student council–the opportunities for learning about being a volunteer abounded.
  • Being part of a community shaped who she was a very young age.
• Interest in computers was shaped in the mid to late 80′s
• First computer, a TI-99, in 8th grade (about the age of 13), the school was given a TRS-80 model III, and as luck would have it her Uncle who was a local Dr. also got one for his office. If she wasn’t on the computer at school, she was on the one her Uncle had in his office.
• Upon graduation high school she went to one year of college and then joined the Army to become an Intelligence Analyst (96B), was stationed at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina and had the opportunity to work on conflicts such as Panama, Liberia, Haiti and she also deployed to the First Gulf War.
• Got to test all the latest automation that was being developed for the intelligence agencies (from ’89-’93). Not only that, she helped test J-Stars as well, as it replaced the older SLAR technology during the First Gulf War. (Note her efforts in testing (J-STARS/SLAR) technology in deep attack missions during the first Gulf War she was awarded a Bronze Star) It was also in the Army where she was first introduced to Unix then Linux via slackware through some testing that the 82nd Airborne Division was experimenting with.
• In later roles she helped test other systems, trained people at the companies she worked for on the latest desktop technologies, and even helped with a few manual conversions over the years.
• At UDS-P (Ubuntu Developer Summit to plan the Precise Pangolin 12.04 release) she had the opportunity to interview with Linaro and from there started with them later that month

Getting involved with FOSS

• In spite of all this experience with technology, somewhere a long the way, she got the (wrong!) impression that she wasn’t technical enough to work in FOSS
• Began using Ubuntu in 2009
  • Started blogging about that experience and joined the Ubuntu Women Project
  • Rikki Endsley of Linux Pro Magazine, happened to see her blog, and started following her. Then one day they asked her to write for them.
  • Was asked to review Jono Bacon’s Art of Community and the Official Ubuntu Book
• Experience with Ubuntu Women
  • Upon joining, asked “Do I have to become a MOTU to contribute?” (MOTU: Masters of the Universe, “keep the Universe and Multiverse components of Ubuntu in shape. They are community members who spend their time adding, maintaining, and supporting as much as possible the software found in Universe.”)
    • absolutely NOT
  • Ubuntu Women Project member and author of several Drupal books, Emma Jane Hogbin told her once, “Don’t think everyone who joins an open source project has to become a developer. Use the skills you have, learn the ones you want, and just be yourself.” AWESOME advice.
  • Other members were kind enough to point her to the documentation and encouraged her to figure some things out on her own. “While it wasn’t always easy it’s paid off.”

Advice for getting involved and working with FOSS

• If you have something to offer a project chances are you have something to offer a company and its community.
• Don’t discount any of your experience – regardless of whether you got a paycheck to do it or you volunteered. Work is work regardless of if you can deposit money for having done the work.
• When applying to work in FOSS INCLUDE all the skills you’ve learned, regardless of where or how you learned them.
• When writing a Resume/CV, have it reviewed by people you trust, limit it to one page and create a webpage for all the other details. Organize it in logically categories and include a link on the CV or resume.
• If you are writing a blog, do the best job you can and let your personality shine through. Don’t be afraid to promote your blog, and let others know what you are interested in.
• Find a mentor. Find someone who does what you want to do. Find out how they got there, how they do what they do, then set a course for self-improvement.
• Learn by doing, don’t ask people to give you answers all the time – it will pay off for you.

Full logs are available on our wiki:
http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/CareerDays/CommunityManager

If you’re interested in getting involved, please see the Ubuntu Women Career Days wiki page or email Cheri Francis or myself (lyz@ubuntu.com).

These sessions are open to the whole community, you don’t need to be a woman to attend or participate.

On Saturday, November 12th, we welcomed Canonical CEO Jane Silber to the Ubuntu Women Career Days to give us an overview of her career in tech from her beginnings as a Software Developer to her current role as CEO.

Career Path

Jane takes is through the path of her career so far

• First became interested in computers in High School
• Majored in Math/Comp Sci in college
• Joined a software startup in a garage in Washington DC
  • Joined as a software developer, but also ended up doing a fair amount of research, statistical analysis, data modelling
  • Very classic startup: everyone working hard, doing all sorts of roles beyond your job description
• Went to grad school for an MS degree in Management of Technology
• Went to Japan for 2.5 yrs and worked as a software dev/researcher/manager
• Returned to the Washington DC area and got a job with a small software company
  • Joined as a software engineer, moved in to team management roles and eventually became VP of the company
  • Spent 8 years at the company, and another 2 after the company was sold to another
• Following that year she I moved to London, met Mark Shuttleworth through a mutual friend, and joined Canonical as COO in the summer of 2004 (Canonical started in April 2004), became CEO in March of last year

She also discusses some of the gender-based bias, both subtle and overt, she encountered and how she handled it.

Some advice she offers on the topic of the gender inequality in tech:

• There is a lot written about girls/women in science and technology and she doesn’t subscribe to a single, simple theory about what is right or wrong or how to fix it, but there are a couple things that she has read over the years, that really fits with her experience. Studies show that
  • Men are more confident in the work place
  • Women express more self doubt about their abilities
  • Men are more likely to apply for jobs that they know they are not fully qualified for (in comparison to women applying for jobs they know they are not fully qualified for, not in comparison to jobs they are qualified for)
  • People doing hiring are more likely to judge men based on potential (e.g., “he’s got the core skills, he could do it”), and more likely to judge women based on experience (e.g., “she’s never done this before”)
  • In many/most people’s careers, there is a pivotal “stretch job” – the job that really pushes you beyond what you’ve done before
    • If she were to offer advice, it would be to be open minded, to look for the stretch roles if that’s what you want, to remember that you don’t have to have done everything before.

Q&A

The session wrapped up with a Q&A session, with questions including:

• What was the hardest part about transitioning from a s/w developer into a management role?
• In your experience specifically and in your opinion about technical management in general, how important is it to have extensive programming experience when it comes to managing teams in a tech company?
• Are you a part of any technical career organizations (think USENIX, ACM) or specifically women in tech organizations (WITI, Women in Tech), do you find value in them?

Full logs are available on our wiki:
http://wiki.ubuntu-women.org/CareerDays/ProgrammerToCEO

If you’re interested in getting involved, please see the Ubuntu Women Career Days wiki page or email Cheri Francis or myself (lyz@ubuntu.com).

These sessions are open to the whole community, you don’t need to be a woman to attend or participate.