“If you’re not being actively inclusive then you’re being exclusive,” said Swarna Podila at the Diversity Empowerment Summit, a day of talks on increasing diversity, inclusion, and empowerment in the open source community. The event took place at Open Source Summit in Los Angeles and was produced by Angela Brown, VP of Events at The Linux Foundation, who helped me summarize the day’s highlights in this 5-minute video.
As a serial entrepreneur, I already care a great deal about building diverse and inclusive environments. However, the Diversity Empowerment Summit made me realize I honestly didn’t know the half of it. Here are the resources mentioned in the video:
- Amy Chen created Ladies Storm Hackathons, a Facebook group dedicated to closing the gender gap in hackathons.
- Tameika Reed created Women in Linux, a community supporting women in Linux-centric tech careers.
- Emma Irwin and Larissa Shapiro spoke about the research they did at Mozilla and what they found to promote diversity and inclusion in Open Source.
- Rupa Dachere created Codechix, dedicated to the education, advocacy, and mentoring of women engineers in industry and academia.
- Nicole Huesman & Daniel Izquierdo led us through OpenStack’s Gender Diversity Report, which examines gender diversity and retention within the OpenStack community.
- Marina Zhurakhinskaya from Red Hat taught us about Outreachy, which provides 3-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech.
It was an empowering day which left me with a bunch of new tools to help me play a part in creating a more diverse and inclusive tech community.
And, it’s not too late to participate in the next Diversity Empowerment Summit taking place in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct. 26 as part of Open Source Summit Europe. Register now!
