On the DevBots blog recently Darby Felton posted a few suggestions of things that could be done to help improve IT organizations from the inside and promote a more healthy environment for everyone involved.

Lately I have been thinking about a few aspects of the information technology industry. Particularly, regarding software development, I am concerned that the following characteristics remain pervasive and detrimental to our industry: far too many software development projects ultimately fail, we tend to lack clear, rigorous standards and credentials that other industries typically employ, and our [lack of] adherence to ethics and professional conduct leaves much to be desired.

He addresses each of these, pointing out that a good number of IT environments have fallen into these issues and steps need to be taken to: reduce the failure rate of projects, hone down the staff to those that will turn out the best possible product and will uphold a good set of standards/ethics while they do.

For as much as gender shouldn't be an issue in IT, sadly it still is. There's differences between men and women in our industry and Elizabeth Naramore has written up a post looking at some of those differences, the gender balance in the IT market and what can be done about the unfortunate shift its seeing towards fewer and fewer women in IT (and in her more specific examples, the PHP community).

I know many women don't get that far to make it to a conference or user group meeting. For one reason or another, they choose to skip the community bonding, leave an open source project after contributing, or maybe even leave the industry altogether. In fact, we're leaving in droves. I couldn't help but wonder to myself what those reasons were, so I embarked on my own little research project.

She looks at the IT job market overall, the distribution of the "gender numbers" in it and why some of it might be happening. She also asks why the gender difference should even matter and what can be done to help keep things even across the board.

She's done an excellent job on both researching and writing up some of the differing perspectives of the IT industry as viewed through a female's eyes and what both those women and the communities that want to draw them in can do.

If you're looking for Open Source events to attend in your area (or just about anywhere around the world), check out this calendar as provided by Init Marketing with a great listing of happenings in over fifteen countries around the world.

Below calendar contains world-wide conferences and trade fairs related to Free and Open Source Software, IT and specific industries. It also shows events where you can meet with InitMarketing.

Countries included in the list are Germany, the US, Japan, Italy, Australia, China and many more. If you have an event that's not on the list and you'd like to see added, leave them a comment on that page and they'll get in contact with you.

As a part of this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (2008), the PHP Women group hosted an unconference session. They talk about the session in this new post to their site.

At ZendCon this year, Juliette Reinders-Folmer of phpwomen.org ran a session in the unconference entitled "Women in IT". In this session she invited the attendees (a fairly even mix of the genders) to discuss various aspects of women working in the male-dominated IT industry, and specifically in PHP. We were lucky enough (thanks Paul Reinheimer of php|architect!) to get the session recorded.

You can download the audio from the phpwomen.org website and check out the forum entry to continue the discussion. Their post also includes several talking points concerning women in the IT industry and how PHP Women can help.