Open Stack

Some of you may already be aware of Sage Weil’s challenge to the open source
storage community to raise the level of female participation in open source by
contributing to the Ada Initiative [1]. I would also like to share about the
Ada Initiative, and how they are helping open source communities like
OpenStack. I’m also going to increase Sage’s original matching to $10,000 and
extend a personal challenge [2] to the OpenStack community. If you already know
about the Ada Initiative, you can donate now:

https://supportada.org?campaign=openstack

The current status of the campaign can be found here:
https://adainitiative.org/counters/2014counter-openstack.svg

The Ada Initiative has helped over two million women get and stay involved with
open source communities. The organization helps communities understand
a culture that needs to exist in order to successfully achieve diversity. While
women make up about 30% of the software developer community, they only account
for less than 10% of the open source community.

On a personal level this is something that I have been actively committed to
doing and I have had the wonderful opportunity to volunteer as a mentor at
a couple of groups that are bringing diversity to the tech community. The
PyLadies San Francisco group is providing exciting workshops [3] that will give
a foundation to women to expand on. The Women Who Code group is preparing women
for internship opportunities through the Gnome Outreach Program for Women in
open source projects like OpenStack [4]. It's these experiences that led me to
explore how the OpenStack community promotes diversity.

Today the OpenStack community has been including a Code of Conduct [5] in an
attempt to provide a safe, no harassment environment at our summits. We have
events [6] that bring women together to talk about their achievements, to get
others excited on what can be contributed to the community. Our participation
in the Gnome Outreach Program for Women continues to grow with mentors eager to
bring out the talent of our selected interns [7].  Things are getting better
but we have a long way to go.  The Atlanta design summit had attendance of 9%
women, up from 7% at the previous Hong Kong summit.  But this number is still
unacceptable, and as others have echoed in the community, we must work to make
it better.

This is a change I want the OpenStack community to be part of. I would like to
kick start things with the community with a challenge for us to raise $10,000
before Wednesday, Oct 8th, to which Sage and I will match that dollar for
dollar!

https://supportada.org?campaign=openstack

Thanks,
Mike Perez

[1] - http://ceph.com/community/support-ada-initiative-challenge-open-storage-community
[2] - https://www.dreamhost.com/dreamscape/2014/10/06/support-the-ada-initiative-a-challenge-to-the-openstack-community/
[3] - http://www.meetup.com/PyLadiesSF/events/201387112/
[4] - http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-SF/events/195850392/
[5] - https://www.openstack.org/summit/openstack-paris-summit-2014/code-of-conduct/
[6] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkzyNbvl_5g
[7] - https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/OutreachProgramForWomen