diversity in open source

August 06, 2009

Being a woman in open source is “like walking into a sports bar on game night and wearing the wrong team’s jersey… it can be the friendliest group in the world and you will still feel a little awkward”

Kirrily Robert talks about two open source projects that have a majority of developers who are women. She contrasts this with a FOSS study indicating 1.5% of open source developers who are women in an industry with 10-30% women. Her talk starts with sobering facts, then she moves on to tell inspiring stories and provides practical tips on how we can create diverse and welcoming communities.

archiveofourown.org: 100% women (20+) developers, started with beginner programmers, Ruby on Rails and javascript

dreamwidth.org fork of the livejournal code, 40+ coders, 70% female, they recruit non-programmers, and have an inspiring diversity statement: “neurodiversity is a feature not a bug”

You can teach programming, but you can’t teach passion…. and you can’t teach diversity.

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