🙋 Introductions (come in, say hi)

[bubblemelon (Cheryl Fong)]

Hello! I’m Cheryl, and I love all things Open Source! Currently the Release Branch Manager for Kubernetes (K8) version 1.15 and I also help out with the website for JuliaCon 2019.

You may have noticed the post titled “JuliaCon 2019 Opportunities” under events and meetups, please do check it out. JuliaLang is a budding community with lots of opportunities and we appreciate everyone’s involvement/help.

I’m also involved with diversity and inclusion initiatives for both K8 and JuliaLang. Feel free to drop me a message if you’re interested in knowing more and/or like to get involved.

Super glad to be part of Open Source Diversity and I look forward to meeting you all!

[nilesh]

Hi everyone.
I’m Nilesh from India . I’m a student/developer who loves contributing to open source for fun. I learnt to code when I was 16, contributing to open source was major life changing moment for me. I started into open source when I was introduced to it by one of my senior in my university.

Now I contribute to organizations like Plone Foundation(volto), Mozilla and fossasia. I’m also a Google Summer of Code Student and mentor. I actively seek out learninig new technologies, attending conferences,(sometimes as a speaker too.).

(Last year I went to Tokyo for my organization’s yearly conference, I was delighted to see awesome, helpful communities hanging out together. It was fun )

Cheers,

[daf78 (David Afonso)]

Hello everybody,

My name is David and I’m from Portugal && France.
I’m 41 and I recently started a professional career reconversion in IT!

I went through a 14-weeks Java coding bootcamp, but feel more passionate about JavaScript and frontend development!

I try to improve myself at coding everyday, to keep me in the rhythm, while looking for an opportunity to get in my first job experience as a developer!

Open source community is an effective way of giving and receiving to grow strong all together, as we can keep learning so much more helping each other in a common project and purpose that brings real value to people’s life, which is so exciting and keeps me motivated to go further in this life coding path!

I’m new to programming and to open source community, so, I don’t already know well how this rolls, so some orientation and advices to get myself in are welcome!

Thanks for your time. Wish you all the best.

David

[balirwa (Balirwa Priscillah)]

Hello everyone !
I am Balirwa Priscillah from Uganda, East Africa
I have a background in public health and about to earn a Masters in Health Informatics.

I got to know about open source from my masters classes and found the concept really cool. I do not have technical IT skills but I am passionate about testing and documentation when it comes to technology. My experience in documentation and testing has been made possible due to my work with mUzima ( https://www.muzima.org/) an open mobile software that integrates with OpenMRS. I also recently enrolled for a 3 months paid internship with outreachy ( https://www.outreachy.org/).
This internship is about encouraging involvement with open source software bringing in the rare opportunity of paying interns while also ensuring diversity!

Speaking of diversity in open source is an area that excites me! As a person from a healthcare background, I always wondered how I could contribute to IT projects without any IT skills. Being part of open source communities has been a big eye opener. There’s a lot that the non-technical people can contribute to IT projects and I am glad open source communities are encouraging diversity!
Glad to be part of this!

[JohnWobbly (John Evans)]

Tell us who you are, where you are, what you like doing most on a daily basis, what brought you to open source diversity, and what you’re most excited about for this community.

Hi there! I’m John, I’m in the UK, I like weightlifting (although I’ve sprained my neck this week, so can’t do so much at the moment), I found open source diversity by google searching the term and I’m most excited to find out what I can do to make my open source project get better at having a diverse team.

I’m the project lead on an app called Wobbly. We’re a volunteer team, making a communication tool for precarious workers e.g. at Uber or Deliveroo. We’ve been active for about 6 months now, and are just about to start testing our tool with some real users.

Because it’s a volunteer project, we get a lot of people coming and going. We’ve noticed as a team that we could do a lot better when it comes to diversity, because as it stands the people contributing to the project are generally white guys in between the age of 25-35. And that doesn’t properly represent the people who we think would really benefit from our tool.

So I’m really interested to learn out about any initiatives, projects, best practices etc that would help our project be more diverse. Even the smallest tip would be helpful, so send me a message!

[GeorgLink (Georg Link (he/him))]

Hi John. Welcome to Open Source Diversity.

Have you seen Emma Irwin’s Squash Inclusivity Bugs blogpost? It provides an easy way to get started.

I am part of the CHAOSS project and we believe that beyond take measures for increasing diversity, you should track your progress in achieving your diversity goal.

CHAOSS D&I Working Group has started collecting metrics you could use for this and we would love you input and feedback on them: https://github.com/chaoss/wg-diversity-inclusion

Best,

Georg

[JohnWobbly (John Evans)]

Thanks very much Georg, I’ll check those links out!

[tapaswenipathak]

Heyo folks!

I am Tapasweni, I work with Reliance Jio Financial Innovation Services as Manager for products in Digital domain mostly travel and transit. I move in BLR, Mumbai and Delhi mostly. I like open source and love exploring things I am interested in. I keep in touch with engineering side as well. Great initiative, hope I can help a little!

I will share information about organising OpenSourceDay (One day where mentors will work folks, women given priority and contributed in the project they like, increasing the retention of women in non all women organisation). I will drafting a formal proposal out, I would love a little help in.

Tapasweni

[rishabh]

Hello everyone,

I’m Rishabh and I’m from the Discourse project. I’m a huge fan of the work that you all have been doing and reading all of the discussion here has been extremely informative for me to learn about taking measures for increasing diversity at Discourse and for Open Source in general.

I’m from Mumbai (India) but I’d love to make it to one of the Berlin meetups (one day) just to say hello! Finally, I’m so glad that all of this is happening on Discourse and I’m looking forward to contribute and be a part of Open Source Diversity

[coseenuh (Mike Coscina)]

Hi everyone - thank you to the folks who created this forum. I’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 / 20’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

[nasirhm (Nasir Hussain)]

Hi, I’m Nasir Hussain and I’m a 14 years old techie from 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.

I’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.

[TheKingbyKey (Akshay)]

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...😅

[lwrocks (Laurel Wright)]

Hi! I’m Laurel and I’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 I’m still interested in getting involved with open source projects. I’m interested in learning more about accessibility and developing clean user interfaces. Looking forward to getting involved with the community!

[selgebali (Sara)]

Hey folks, My name is Sara, I’m currently based in Berlin. I’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, etc…

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

I’m not a coder/programmer/ etc, My background was in wetlab–> scientific database curator–>research data manager. So I’m extremely eager to learn from your experiences and contribute to Diversity and Inclusion issues from limited resources areas point of view.

I’m looking forward to being more engaged with the community and please join us in our upcoming events!

Sara She/her

[ginahelfrich]

Hi, everyone!

Really pleased to be here. I’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 projects’ needs.

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

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

Gina (she/her)

[lsmith (Lukas Kahwe Smith)]

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 “meritocracy” 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 … 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.

[Elizabeth (Elizabeth Barron)]

Hiiiiiii

[SMotaal (Saleh Abdel Motaal)]

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) — 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, that’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 it’s a good thing I tried to keep this short… 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

[Magali (Magali Ngouabou)]

Wonderful story

[OriolAbril (Oriol Abril-Pla)]

Hi everyone,

I’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!