At JavaPolis I decided to attend the JUG-leader BOF (Birds Of a Feather), just to meet them as I thought it would be a good idea to know them and maybe have them send their female members over to us. As the Sun lottery took quite a bit longer than expected, I dropped in at the middle. At first the discussions simply kept going, but then Stephan (leader of the BE-JUG) spotted me and had me introduce myself. After hearing me all present thought it was a great idea and the general consensus was that we needed more women in Java. They also urged me to join the JUG-leader mailing list and made me promise that I would. So now I have added Duchess at java.net to the JUG’s. We still need approval as we have to submit the URL to our site first.

The guys over from Sun also promised to send us some goodies for when we hold meetings.

After we got chased out of the room to make space for the next BOF, we went to a diner nearby and continued the discussions. I chatted some more with other JUG-leaders and the people from Sun.

Just before we went home I went over to Stephan as I was curious if he knew how many women were attending JavaPolis. As I feared he didn’t have a clue, but he did promise us a conference session for next year to talk about Duchess and related topics (like why there are so few of us). So we have some serious things to discuss soon.

Linda