OSCAL, Open Labs, Mozilla & grooming women for Outreachy
[Article 2.5 years old]
Reprinted with permission from the Free Software Fellowship.
Monday, 11 October is the UN's International Day for the Girl Child. The definition of Girl Child varies from country to country. In the law of Albania, the age of consent can be as low as 14 if you can convince (bribe) a judge that a 14 year old girl has achieved sexual maturity. Legal text.
What does it look like when children aged 16 and 17 make software for big corporations to use?
Today we find out
Here is a team photo from Ura Design, one of the Albanian companies using the hackerspace as a front for people trafficking. In the team we see a former Outreachy, Renata Gegaj beside a future Outreachy, Anja Xhakani.
Anja started with Open Labs when she was 16, we see a younger photo in her profile on the Open Labs forum:
Here is a copy of the profile photo:
She began dating the director of Ura Design, a former Open Labs board member and Mozilla Tech Speaker, Elio Qoshi, before turning 18:
Anja and other teenage girls follow the men around at OSCAL. They have to wear red uniforms, just like the women in the Handmaid's Tale and they have to stand so the men can sit with their laptops.
Insurance company Munich Re admitted their salesmen from Germany were rewarded with a "sex junket" to Budapest. Women at the event were colour coded with ribbons and they were stamped each time somebody took ownership of them. In Albania we also find youngsters wearing ribbons and stamps:
When a 16 year old girl child comes to the hackerspace and hears about other women winning tickets to Brazil and Outreachy scholarships that pay more money in 12 weeks than most Albanian women earn in 12 months, the girl may want to look at their code and see how those women were selected.
Debian Community News recently revealed that the Github profiles of the six Albanian women already selected for Outreachy and Google Summer of Code (GSoC) are rather stagnant. When a 16 year old girl child comes to the hackerspace and sees this example, why would she be motivated to learn development skills and publish her work?
The FSFE have recently announced their Youth Hacking 4 Freedom program. The five month unpaid internships, disguised as a competition, have been denounced as child labor. FSFE targets the same group as the Albanian laws on statutory rape, youth between 14 and 18 years of age. Matthias Kirschner has written in the announcement:
we would like to encourage teenagers of all genders to join!
Here is the photo of the FSFE President Matthias Kirschner with young women at OSCAL in Tirana, Albania:
It is not only teenage girls. Ura Design and other Albanian companies used the Open Labs front organization to exploit the 16 year old sysadmin Boris Budini. Older IT professionals know what is really going on at Open Labs and refuse to work there for free so Elio and Redon have to scrape the bottom of the barrel looking for 16 year olds. Here is Boris Budini (16 years in OSCAL2018) with Mariana Balla (Fedora/Red Hat/IBM) and Redon Skikuli:
Chris Lamb from Debian appears to be completely comfortable with these people, another photo from OSCAL17 shows Redon Skikuli, Chris Lamb and Italo Vignoli planning to bring another event, LibreOffice Conference (LibOcon) to Albania so the developers can enjoy the Albanian hospitality:
When men gain positions of power, they feel a sense of entitlement. There is nothing new about this. █
