Helen Faulkner, Ben Burton & Debian women housemates
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
14 Feb 2024
Helen Faulkner was one of the first women to become engaged with Debian. Helen's Debian-Women profile tells us she got involved through a housemate. The housemate is never mentioned by name, why?
There have been a lot of false accusations about a Debian mentor in Google Summer of Code. As long as this is going on, we can simply go through each and every relationship in Debian, one-by-one. Or two-by-two perhaps. Less than two percent of Debian Developers are female and it looks like almost everybody has had at least one relationship. It is just part of Debian culture, for better or worse. Most organizations would let sleeping dogs lie but Chris Lamb and Molly de Blanc (Mollamby) established a culture of bringing out the dirty laundry.
We believe the housemate is Ben Burton (bab) who is also from Australia, like Helen.
When group discussions take place in Debian, Helen and Ben sometimes appear to be supporting each other's arguments. Somebody reading these historic records from Debian today wouldn't know whether or not Helen and Ben were living together. Debian doesn't publish a Conflict of Interest register. Email signatures don't contain Conflict of Interest disclaimers either.
Here is an example from an IRC meeting in 2004.
Here is an example from debian-vote:
Helen: I agree with Ben ... [snip]
and messages where Ben defends Helen...
The question to which Helen was initially responding ...
We can see that Ben signed Helen's package uploads.
In August 2004, Helen asked to be added to the Debian keyring and there was only one advocacy, from Ben.
In January 2005, Helen was approved (report). Ben is the only other Developer who signed her PGP key.
In reply to Helen's approval, Amaya writes welcome to the cult. How telling. Is Debian a cult?
By 2014, it looks like Helen has lost interest in Debian and she is no longer Ben's housemate. This appears to be the same pattern with every female Debian Developer.
Subject: Re: women mentoring project Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 19:43:35 +1000 From: Helen Faulkner <helen@thousand-ships.com> To: cordial.emily@gmail.com CC: Debian-Women <debian-women@lists.debian.org>
Hello Emily,
I gather that you have emailed mentoring@women.debian.org <mailto:mentoring@women.debian.org>, which, the last I looked, sent emails to myself, Leslie (I'm so sorry I have forgotten her surname) and Erinn Clark. The email address of mine that it points to is one I no longer use because I am no longer involved in Debian. Maybe this is the case for Erinn and Leslie too, I'm not sure.
Is anyone able to edit the LDAP so that mentoring@women.debian.org <mailto:mentoring@women.debian.org> points somewhere else?
Is anyone interested and able to take over the mentoring program, which as far as I know hasn't operated in around 3 years or maybe longer? It involved matching interested mentees with mentors who could help them to become involved in Debian.
I'm sorry I can't help more, Emily. Posting to this mailing list with your questions may be a good way to ask for help with your Debian interests, and it is certainly a supportive place for women to ask questions, albeit rather a quiet place these days.
Helen
(please CC me in any reply, as I am not subscribed to this mailing list any more - life keeps changing doesn't it...)
Helen's contributor page shows no real activity since 2007 but she wasn't removed from the Debian keyring until 2022. Keeping her name in the keyring for an extra 15 years distorted the statistics about how many women are really doing work for Debian today. Did she resign or was she expelled?
Ben's NM dashboard page. Ben is now a Professor at University of Queensland. The Debian contributor page for Ben shows he has continued contributing to Debian long after Helen vanished.
Helen is a genuine physics researcher, she has co-authored various papers using the initials H.M.L. Faulkner between 2000 and 2005. █
