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
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