Open Source Bridge

Excerpt

Description

The members of this panel have mentored or interned in the Outreach Program for Women, and we know it works — it improves the gender balance inside open source communities, and we consistently get reports of great experiences. About a hundred women have now graduated from the Outreach Program for Women, which is now on round 8 of its mentored, paid internships.
OPW’s approach has structural elements that we can use as a model for other programs focusing on other axes of diversity. The application process starts with community participation, doesn’t require interns to be students, doesn’t only happen in summers, has decentralized its funding, and has many other elements we can use as design patterns for future projects!
OPW aims to help people join open source projects, while acknowledging their intersecting identities and the historical reasons for their exclusion.
In this session we’ll:

• Briefly narrate the project’s origin story
• Show some statistics: the increasing numbers of mentors and interns in each round, and the increasing numbers of women in GSoC as a side effect
• Discuss a few success stories: projects that thrived, and women whose OPW experience helped them keep participating in FLOSS and do even more amazing things
• Mention some interesting wrinkles:
  • OPW’s trans-inclusive, genderqueer/genderfluid-inclusive language
  • Interns who did OPW during maternity leave or whilst coming back into the workforce after childrearing
  • Differences from GSoC: mostly self-funded by projects, non-students welcome, all FLOSS tasks/activities welcome, and it’s structured so that as part of the application process you try out the work, talk to people you’d be working with, and see the community before you apply (demystification)
• Discuss key questions for the future:
  1. how can we replicate this model to fight other -isms?
  2. how can we get the money to get more projects involved?
  3. what do interns do after OPW, and how do we improve that “offramp”?

Tags

outreach, women, gender, mentorship, internship, mentors, mentoring, marginalization, pipeline, recruiting

Speaking experience

Speakers

• 

  Sumana Harihareswara

  Wikimedia Foundation
  • Website: http://www.harihareswara.net/
  • Blog: http://www.harihareswara.net/ces.shtml
  • Twitter: brainwane
  • Identi.ca: brainwane
  • Favorites: View Sumana's favorites

  Biography

  Sumana Harihareswara is Senior Technical Writer at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she works in the Engineering Community Team (formerly TLDR). She was keynote speaker at Open Source Bridge in 2012, code4lib in 2014, and Wiki Conference USA in 2014.

  She has worked at Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org, Fog Creek Software, Behavior, and Salon.com, and contributed to the MediaWiki, AltLaw, Empathy, Miro, and Zeitgeist open source projects. She is a blogger at GeekFeminism and a member of the board of directors of the Ada Initiative, and was editor and release organizer for GNOME Journal. Harihareswara has presented at Foo Camp, PyCon 2014, Open Source Bridge 2013, Open Source Bridge 2012, Open Source Bridge 2011, Open Source Bridge 2010, several Wikimanias, and MindCamp Seattle 2008, and keynoted PICC. She has led or organized several Wikimedia hackathons, taught several courses at UC Berkeley, and performed at Bay Area stand-up comedy venues. She holds an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University and participated in Hacker School in 2013, and lives in New York City.

  If you want to keep up with her, you can check out Cogito, Ergo Sumana for blogging or @brainwane for microblogging.

  Sessions

  • * A Few Python Tips
    • Title: A Few Python Tips
    • Track: Cooking
    • Room: B201
    • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
    • Excerpt:

      Nothing fancy here, just several tips that help you work effectively with Python. This talk is licensed CC BY; please feel free to reuse it at your company or conference.

    • Speakers: Sumana Harihareswara
  • * The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next
    • Title: The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next
    • Track: Cooking
    • Room: B202/203
    • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
    • Excerpt:

      We’ve mentored and interned in the Outreach Program for Women, and we know it works — it improves the gender balance inside open source communities. We’ll discuss why it works, how it builds off of Google Summer of Code, and discuss replicating it, expanding it, and looking at the next step in the recruiting and inclusion pipeline.

    • Speakers: Sumana Harihareswara, Liz Henry
• 

  Liz Henry

  Mozilla, geekfeminism.org
  • Website: http://bookmaniac.org/
  • Blog: http://bookmaniac.org/
  • Twitter: lizhenry
  • Identi.ca: lizhenry
  • Favorites: View Liz's favorites

  Biography

  Liz Henry is the Bugmaster for Mozilla and is on the Automation Tools team.

  She was formerly a developer and producer for BlogHer. She helped organize some BarCamps and Wiki Wednesdays while working for Socialtext, and dabbles in Python, Perl, and php. Liz has presented at KiwiCon, Hackmeet, The Story, Internet 2013, SXSWi, BlogHer Geek Lab, linux.conf.au, DrupalSouth, She’s Geeky, Maker Faire, ETech, and many more conferences.

  Her books include Unruly Islands and The WisCon Chronicles: Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction . She lives with her partner and their children in San Francisco.

  Sessions

  • * The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next
    • Title: The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next
    • Track: Cooking
    • Room: B202/203
    • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
    • Excerpt:

      We’ve mentored and interned in the Outreach Program for Women, and we know it works — it improves the gender balance inside open source communities. We’ll discuss why it works, how it builds off of Google Summer of Code, and discuss replicating it, expanding it, and looking at the next step in the recruiting and inclusion pipeline.

    • Speakers: Sumana Harihareswara, Liz Henry