First time I heard about Ladies that FOSS was at FOSDEM 2016. I was helping with Wikimedia Infobooth when i meet Julia and Lucie, 2 of the organizers of the event. After a quick chat with Julia  we realized that both of us were working on the gender gap issues, so she introduced me with Ladies that FOSS project that they were planning to host on October 2016.

This project aimed primarily at women who want to join a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) project but don’t know where to start.

Only 11% of people in FOSS are women or identify as nonbinary, agender or genderfluid.

“Ladies that FOSS” emphatically welcomes people of all gender identities and aims to give women and gender minorities a special platform to develop their skills.

WMDE’s software development department, believe that this number should be higher, and that there are plenty of FOSS projects looking for women coders. There are plenty of women coders who are looking to get involved and code FOSS. Ladies that FOSS wants also to help bring those two together. They match FOSS projects with women interested in FOSS.

My match was MediaWiki. And my mentor was Matt. I installed MediaWiki locally and i called it “Gretast Wiki Ever”(no, thats not a typo) and start working on my JavaScript tasks that Matt suggested. My first task was: Toggle hide-user checkbox based on expiry time using JavaScript. This checkbox should be hidden for fixed time periods. This feature is only available when it’s a indefinite block.

With a lot of help from Matt i managed to finish the task. This was my first programming experience on a Wikimedia project, and i want to go on further helping maybe on MediaWiki or any other Wikimedia sister projects.

Was a great experience indeed. And this year i want to contribute more than just a participant but helping Julia with the organization stuff for the meetings and the big event.

More details will be updated soon so lets keep in touch on Twitter or here.