šŸ™‹ Introductions (come in, say hi)

Hi everyone - thank you to the folks who created this forum. Iā€™m looking forward to contributing and learning from everyone! Feel free to connect with me on any other network. I have been involved in open source since my brother got into development at an early age which made me very curious though my teens / 20ā€™s. I have always been in sales, but for the last 6 years I have been with WhiteHat and now WhiteSource.

I am extremely passionate about making sure people feel included in ALL open source communities.

Very best to all,
mike

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Hi, Iā€™m Nasir Hussain :slight_smile: and Iā€™m a 14 years old techie from Pakistan :pakistan: , I started my Open source journey with Fedora Project thanks to Google Code In 2019. I think Diversity and Inclusion is tech is really essential for us to thrive and Free and Open source communities can be a really great place to get started with as diverse teams work & perform better.

Iā€™m extremely passionate about learning, contributing & creating diverse and inclusive open source communties.

Best Regards,
Looking forward to contribute & be a part of Open Source Diversity.

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Hello! I am Akshay Arora.

Just a college student from India.Well this is the first time i have visited any open source community or open source in general and frankly, its quite overwhelming.But i think it would feel great to contribute to codes that people use.So yeah! lets begin this.Help me on this I guess...šŸ˜…
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Hi! Iā€™m Laurel and Iā€™m currently based in Berlin. I completed the full-stack web development bootcamp at Ironhack in March and have been working as a freelance frontend developer ever since. My background is in Digital Marketing and Visual Design. About a year ago I attended an Open Source Diversity meetup. The group here in Berlin seems to have died but Iā€™m still interested in getting involved with open source projects. Iā€™m interested in learning more about accessibility and developing clean user interfaces. Looking forward to getting involved with the community!

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Hey folks, My name is Sara, Iā€™m currently based in Berlin. Iā€™m a research data manager team leader, and the founder of OpenCIDER (Open Computational Inclusion and Digital Equity Resource) (my side project).

Our focus is how to promote the engagement of diverse communities in open data practices. Our resource offers a space for sharing knowledge, advice, good practices, guidelines on how to create accessible spaces and tools for computational inclusion and training, accessible software design, engaging participants from Low Middle Income Countries and those with limited resources.

For example we examine how to provide mobile data grants to offer participants with lower bandwidth, which open source tools are available to use, inclusive open software design, inclusive training events design, etcā€¦

We are looking for folks interested in contributing to the resource and joining our discussions, we have monthly community calls.

Iā€™m not a coder/programmer/ etc, My background was in wetlabā€“> scientific database curatorā€“>research data manager. So Iā€™m extremely eager to learn from your experiences and contribute to Diversity and Inclusion issues from limited resources areas point of view.

Iā€™m looking forward to being more engaged with the community and please join us in our upcoming events!

Sara She/her

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Hi, everyone!

Really pleased to be here. Iā€™m Gina Helfrich, I work at Internews as a Program Officer for Global Technology, where I manage a program aimed at improving long-term sustainability for open source security tools. One component of that project is funding contributors from underrepresented and vulnerable communities to help tool teams in meeting their projectsā€™ needs.

Previously I served as Director of Communications & Culture at NumFOCUS, where I led the organizationā€™s diversity and inclusion efforts.

Looking forward to getting to know the folks in this community!

Gina (she/her)

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Aloha,

I am Lukas Kahwe Smith. I work at Liip (a web agency) as well as Witty Works (consulting and SaaS company to help companies improve diversity in STEM). I have been lurking on here for quite some time and appearently have failed to introduce myself.

I have been doing open source for over 20 years. Like anyone with open eyes I quickly realized that diversity is pretty bad, that interaction patterns in generally often are not ideal. So early on I started focusing part of my attention to improving workflows within open source projects.

But only in the last 5 years or so I realized that this entire ā€œmeritocracyā€ thing is not working. Since then I have started to educate myself on this topic. As I was part of the Symfony Core team (a popular PHP framework), I because the diversity lead and continue to try and foster positive change through educating people on things like unconscious bias and improving safety for marginalized people. Success being somewhat limited ā€¦ but at least we have a CoC now and trained people to handle reports and the topic frequently on the agenda within our community.

Currently I am trying to expand the scope of this to more PHP projects.

Here to learn and share.

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Hiiiiiii :grin: :wave:

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Hey folks,

I am Saleh, currently finally taking a much needed time away from projects to get my life back on track. I had a very atypical journey in open-source, and most of my life really, until it was finally evident to my doctors that I got also diagnosed with ASD (at 34) along with ADHD and Visual Processing LD (at 25) ā€” and struggling for being open about this kind of thing is a burden I no longer want to have to keep.

You can say I by far have the least amount of contribution in the ecosystem in terms of lines of code. But the contributions I can make that way had become harder by the day, and so I had to figure out how to make a difference in my own unique ways.

All my life, nothing gave me more peace than how predictable code is, when it breaks, you know there is a problem, and you can systematically identify and correct it.

But things moved too quickly in recent years, and troubleshooting forced us to have to rely on getting others to understand the problems you are facing. And so it was a tough journey for me to learn that sadly, not all issues will be treated equally. I somehow had to come to accept that problem-solving code was no longer the sanctuary it once was.

And while my own journey was tough, I was also very lucky to come across a lot of exceptional folks along the way. And thanks to many folks in CHAOSS and Agoric, I become empowered to want to fight for inclusion and to stand by my less-conventional but not insane ideas.

So it might be difficult for me to communicate, and that makes it hard to collaborate, especially on code, but at the end of the day, my difficulties are not mine alone. More importantly, there are so many others who have their own share of difficulties, and who would offer far more value than I ever could, if only we could make our ways equally inclusive of their norms.

If you had asked me about neurodiversity in early 2018, I would have not even known what it actually means. If you did in early 2019, I would have thought it was people who are not neurotypical.

As I took time to learn about all this, I realized that the only way it makes sense is to say there is no such thing as a real neurotypical human. That everyone is somewhat neurotypical, and everyone is somewhat neurodivergent, thatā€™s my take on things at least. All while accepting that the burdens are exponentially higher the more neurodivergent we are, because of prejudices and norms, which are destined to change!

I guess itā€™s a good thing I tried to keep this shortā€¦ But as you can see, I am extremely happy to be here, and I look forward to connecting with folks and sharing in the victories we all make together :slight_smile:

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Wonderful story :smiley:

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Hi everyone,

Iā€™m Oriol Abril-Pla. I contribute to several open source packages for Bayesian data analysis. I just discovered this forum thanks to the NumFOCUS DISC mailing list. I am quite new to the world of open source but even in my relatively short journey it has become clear that diversity and inclusion in open source still need plenty of work.

Like most of you, I am passionate about making everyone feel included in open source, and I have been working on this in the projects I contribute to. I hope to learn a lot more here, looking forward to meet you all!

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Hi All!

My Name is Dr. Sarah Kaiser and I am a researcher and quantum technologist :woman_technologist: Iā€™m currently located in Seattle, WA, USA, but have lived in Waterloo, Canada and Sydney, Australia in the last 10 years.

I work on a lot of diversity efforts in my own field of quantum computing and am always looking to improve and learn more about what tools and prior art exists to help make my communities better. I have long been a part of groups like PyLadies and RLadies and I fell in love with what inclusive, open source communities can look like. :sparkling_heart:

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Hi everyone,

I am a big advocate of open source software, as well as open science and diversity in tech. I work for a company who cares and does a lot for the open source community. I co-chair the D&I committee at my company, as well as the AnitaB.org Mentorship Program. I am new to being a code contributor ā€” recently working on some PRs for a few of my favorite libraries. I would love to contribute to the efforts to make open source community a more diverse and more welcoming place for anyone.

I have a background in humanities and computer science. I work in the domains of data science, AI/NLP and actively participate in discussions, initiatives, and various organizationsā€™ efforts for responsible AI and AI ethics. I am located in Austin, TX and happy to have discovered this great group.

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Hello there :raising_hand_woman:t4:

Iā€™m MariangĆ©lica Useche. Iā€™m from Venezuela but currently living in Colombia. I work at BUREA.app as a Software Developer (full stack). I have a blog (Spanish) where I share what Iā€™m learning.

Iā€™m happy to join this community <3

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Nice to meet a fellow Austinite here, Fatma! I see youā€™re plugged into Travisā€™ latest efforts. Would love to hear more about what youā€™re working on.

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Hi everyone,

This forum looks awesome, thereā€™s so many extraordinary people here!

I advocate open source software whenever possible, and also develop and manage a FOSS project Seamly. Previous to Seamly, patternmaking tools were 100% proprietary and prohibitively expensive. Our user community is globally diverse, from Kazakhstan to Guyana to Fiji, with a balanced gender distribution. Weā€™re looking for ways to increase the diversity of our code contributors, community managers, and translators.

My background is network security and global network management. Iā€™ve presented at Libre Graphics Meeting, Open Tech Summit Berlin, Sage Assembly Shenzhen & Seattle, Museum of Design Atlanta plus others, and conducted workshops at Media-Lab Prado Madrid.

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Hello everyone!

I just signed up, so feel free to give me a helping hand when you see me posting something in the wrong place or such. :slight_smile:

My name is Rhonda, my pronouns are she/her, I live in Vienna/Austria/Europe. I am part of the Debian community since 20 years now, was pushed into starting the Diversity Team within the Debian community four years ago, and am still trying to find ways to make the Debian community a more diverse place - because we all know, Free Software lives and thrives so much through diversity of ideas for projects, and diverse backgrounds and thus different experiences and approaches to things help with that so so very much.

Iā€™m trans feminine, bisexual, white, able-bodied, had access to good education, have a well payed job in a country that is quite save. Iā€™m 47 and had a fair share of time on my own to think about stuff. I have a 10 year old kid and want to create a better world worth living in for everyone. Iā€™m also a good hugger Iā€™ve been told. :wink:

Looking forward for exchanging ideas how to create more welcoming and inclusive environments!

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Hi everyone ā€“

Iā€™m Dustin (he/him), and I work at Mozilla. I live in upstate NY in the US (halfway between NYC and Montreal). Iā€™ve been writing, reading, and using OSS since the beginning of forever, and have been continuously amazed by the people I have met doing so. I appreciate the communal, public-benefit parts of open source, but itā€™s the people that really make me stick around.

Iā€™ve had a chance at Mozilla to work on some things that support and enhance the diversity of people working in open source (and at Mozilla), and Iā€™d like to do more. Hopefully I can connect with some collaborators and great ideas here.

Dustin

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Greetings earthlings :smile:

Iā€™m Carol, also known as cybette, and Iā€™ve been lurking in the foss-diversity Matrix room for quite a while, so I thought Iā€™d better say hi here.

Been working at Red Hat since early 2016 in several open source projects, most recently Ansible. Weā€™ve been trying to raise D&I awareness and efforts within Red Hat as well as in the community.

My experiences with open source go back quite a bit, and instead of boring you with all the details here, feel free to check out the piece I shared with IMakeFOSS last month.

I grew up in Singapore, am currently based in Finland, and spent 11 years in Texas in between. I have many diverse weather/travel/culture stories to share :laughing:

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Hey team, I am Edwin Zimba from Zambia. I am a community manager working with Living Open Source Foundation working across some African Countries that include Zambia,Malawi, Rwanda, Ethopia, Cameroon and soon will be in Nigeria. I am happy to convine with like minded individuals and hope to learn more from this awesome team here and hoping to engage with all. do check about the works www.livingopensource.africa

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