 Last night I had the pleasure of sitting down to dinner next to Jessica Lord and I got to hear a little bit of her story and I'm really excited to get to hear some more. So I'd like to invite Jessica to the stage. I'm Jessica. I'm a developer at GitHub. That is me in the circle and that's like a third of GitHub. There's a lot of people on the other side of each of the image but it's actually kind of crazy to sit here and say that I'm a developer at GitHub because three years ago I was here. This is the iconic brutalist architecture building that is Boston City Hall and it is concrete on the inside as well. And I worked there on the ninth floor and I was an urban designer. My degree is in architecture and I worked as an urban designer for the city which is sort of like architecture at city scale. And specifically I worked in the urban design technology group which was perfect because I loved technology. I wasn't a coder but I grew up with computers and I liked doing stuff and I could use a little bit of HTML to make a mess of things. But I mostly worked on things like sustainable neighborhood regulations, doing height and shadow studies. I even got to tell Dunkin Donuts like exactly what their sign should look like if they want them to be in the city. But I felt like there wasn't enough technology and I don't mean I wanted like infrared drone technology. I wanted technology in government to be the kind of technology that a lot of us take for granted. A lot of the free online services that we've come to use every day. The fact that there are photo sharing and photo sorting sites that let you tag and date and collect your photos. At the City of Boston we were writing our own photo sorting software and it just made no sense that we would do that when these other services are available. There's plenty of great usable CMSs but yet we spent half a million dollars for a custom close source CMS for the planning department's website. So these kind of things just felt kind of well infuriating. More than anything I really believed that every city was trying to do the same thing. Every city wants to be the best city that it can be. And so surely there's tons of overlap between cities and what they're doing, what they're trying, what they're failing at, what they're succeeding at. And so why weren't these things shared as common knowledge? And I really believe that we should be putting it all out there and working together. And so I tried to make changes. I tried to start some new things but I hit wall after wall after wall. And then in 2011 a new organization had started in the States called Code for America. And one of the first cities they worked with was Boston. So it was a fellowship program and the fellows were in City Hall and that's how I learned about Code for America. And I thought it was cool their mission to make better software for government but I thought it also seemed really nerdy. And I was a creative. But some months passed and I was more frustrated and it was free to apply for the next year's fellowship and so I thought well what could it hurt? In the application you had to include web projects you'd worked on and well I hadn't really worked on that many. But I had this DIY blog with a friend of mine that I'd sort of forced her to do with me. And it took a lot of work and there would be times where she was like why are we doing this again? And I'd be like because we have to share what we know. And she wasn't as excited about that as I was. So I actually was kind of embarrassed to put my DIY blog on the application but I wanted to check all the boxes and fill out all the little text things and so I used it. And I actually later found out that it stood out to people and helped me get accepted into the fellowship. So in January 2012 I moved to San Francisco to geek out for a year. And I think that you can do the math that that was three years ago so I'm still geeking out. But so Code for America was awesome. This is my class of fellows, the 2012 fellows. I'm hidden there behind the founder. And this is a completely staged photo. This was not we worked at all. But so the very first week of Code for America I got a GitHub account. It was one of the first steps of being a fellow. And I learned the word open source. And I learned that open source represented this idea of common knowledge that I had felt so strongly about. And then I found that there were other people who were as into it as I was. And so it was incredible. And I spent the year learning a ton of stuff. And I went to my first software conferences and people stood on stage and they presented their code and their solutions to problems. And it just it kind of blew me away because the architecture and design world I'd come from is really really more individual. You keep your ideas close to you associated to you and a lot of times private. And so I just was really inspired and pumped by how people were helping each other and sharing what they were working on. And then I learned JavaScript in real time because I had promised to build a JavaScript app for the city I was working for. And everything Code for America does is open source. So the only way to do anything is to put everything on GitHub. So I immediately adopted that philosophy. And I worked all the time and I put a ton of stuff on GitHub and I talked about what I was working on. I met a lot of people and I tweeted and I don't know how really but someone at GitHub got wind of it and thought it was cool. And that is how I ended up at GitHub. And I'm thrilled because GitHub is awesome, right? GitHub is the place where everyone is putting their code. GitHub is that well of common knowledge. And I made it here without a computer science degree and without any real production coding experience. And I don't know. Sometimes I wonder how much GitHub really knew about what I did. But it's too late now. So it's fine. But so that's something in tech that we tout sometimes that you can get into tech without having a degree in computer science. And I do think it's really cool that I meet a ton of people who come from all kinds of backgrounds and who don't have degrees in computer science. And then the fact that you can use GitHub as your portfolio. Like I used to have an architecture portfolio to show what I was working on and how I worked. And I was able to use GitHub in that same way. And so those things, they're great and well, they seem kind of great. But actually it's not leveling any playing field. And so now I want to talk about what, how it's not actually that great. Because the reason I'm here is not because of those things and like this uniqueness about tech. I'm here because I'm privileged. To do Code for America, I had to take a huge pay cut. I burned through all my savings to move myself across the country to a city where a one bedroom apartment is $3,500 a month. And Code for America gives you a stipend for the year. And then to learn JavaScript and contribute to open source, I worked nearly constantly. My Saturdays and my Wednesdays were the same. My noon was the same as my 9 p.m. And a lot of the people I came to know were living the same way, too, that were contributing to open source. And so I was able to do this. And the only thing that suffered in my life was my DIY blog, which I no longer post to. But this dramatically cuts the pool of people who can really contribute to open source. If you don't have the monetary resources, if you have dependents or anyone to take care of, how do people who don't already have enough work constantly for nothing? What if you have a child? What if you need to work another job? What if you have a parent to take care of? Open source is still something that's really hard to make a living at. So another reason I'm here is because of community. I fell into a fantastic community. Through developers at Code for America, I was basically like handed right into communities where I came to know people. And I didn't have to try and look at all the communities and find the one that was right for me, right? Someone pointed me to one. And I didn't have to cold introduce myself to anybody because someone introduced me to somebody else. And the community I found was amazing. They were supportive and empowering. And they gave me their time and they taught me things. And then I had the privilege of living in San Francisco where so many developers are based. And so I came to know a lot of people personally. So then I wasn't afraid to ask them questions in real life. And then I could go on IRC and ask them questions too because a lot of the people in the chat rooms were people I knew personally. But tech communities aren't exactly known for being welcoming and safe spaces. If I didn't have the support of the Code for America people basically putting it in my lap, how would I have done this? How hard would it have been to find the right supportive community? How much courage would it have taken for me to start asking questions in a strange place? And so open source is amazing. I think we all know that. That's why we're here. But there are problems. Without privilege or community it's really hard to break into tech and even harder to break into open source. And this is just exponentially true for minority groups. The number of women in tech is already low. And then the number of women in open source is so much lower. The numbers are really hard. I didn't want to like hard put numbers in here because you know not every name is gender specific. Not everyone reveals their gender and not everyone identifies with one gender. But roughly there are maybe like 25% of women in tech and it's less than half of that are women in open source. In 2006 apparently it was near like 1.5%. And it's really incredibly hard to break into this. And we've got to do better because open source is so important. This is a really long quote from a guy named EO Wilson who knows more about ants than anybody in the world. He's a biologist but he also writes about humans. And his book Social Conquest of Earth is great. But he talks about how the adoption of anyone innovation made the adoption of certain others possible. And then that just builds and it helps communities get better and well conquer and things like that. I mean the passage is actually about when humans were coming out of Africa. But when I first read this I immediately thought about open source in tech because it's more ideas lead to more ideas and so we can't overestimate the value of this common knowledge. It's so important and so we really need to do better. We need all the ideas from all the people. And so we need an open source for everyone. And not an open source just for the privileged or just for developers even because open source is more than just developers. It's more than code. Open source needs designers to create websites and branding and documentation that's actually legible and journalists and scientists putting their data online. People who can translate languages so that other people around the world can have access to code if they don't speak English. People who take notes. People who work with data. I put organizers here because many open source projects have this problem where there are so many contributions. So many issues and tickets are being opened against their project. They're trying to fix the bugs and write the code and they don't have the time to also go through all those tickets and see which ones are duplicates and which ones are really important. And so it's totally a valuable thing to have someone who's not writing code but helping triage these issues. We have that on the Adam team and it's so valuable. And open source needs to be for whenever. It doesn't need to mean that you have all the free time in the world to give to open source. If you have two hours a week or you can do one thing a year there should be no stigma against that and you should be proud to be a contributor to open source because not enough people can or should be able to give all their time to open source and making it seem that way really hurts us. And so to be for everyone we need to reduce the barriers for everyone and we need to change what open source looks like. On my plane ride here the guy sitting next to me asked me why I was going to New Zealand and I said to speak at a conference and he said oh what about and I said open source programming and he said you don't look like a programmer. And then it was an awesome 12 and a half hours. And so we need to change what open source looks like because if open source is for everyone then it should look like anyone. So let's talk. Getting fired up. So let's talk about some of these barriers privilege. Privilege is about the advantages you have because of who you are the circumstances of your birth the color of your skin your gender who you love they're hard to notice and they're everywhere and so it's important to be aware of how privilege impacts what you do and what you have and try to make active changes to reduce those barriers for other people. Free events are not enough they're great but even if it's a free event you can't get there if you have a child to take care of or someone else to take care of sometimes your hours aren't as flexible as everyone else who may get off at five or can do like lunchtime lectures depending on the city you live in it might be really hard it might take people an hour to get to where your event is and it just becomes completely infeasible for them to get around and and also your city you know there's so much happening in San Francisco but I feel like it's really it really excludes a lot of people who just can't be in San Francisco to attend these events and so there's a lot more to think about just beyond making an event free. Booze is not enough and I don't mean more booze but this was kind of a epidemic in San Francisco where a lot of tech meetups were just open bars in bars and you don't need that to talk about programming and it really creates a space that's not safe for a lot of people and it's not really inclusive. Stack overflow is not enough it's great it's how we all program but we like to say that like oh everything that you need to know is online so you can teach yourself and it's easy well no it's not enough because then you that assumes you have access to internet and you have access to computers and so stack overflow is not enough see if your company can provide paid internships for people sponsorships to conferences that people wouldn't normally be able to go to or donate resources like computers that your company is done with and working for free is not enough again paid internships see if you can contract out people who are already contributing to your open source project and then find a way to use one of the there's a few ways out there where you can tip and donate to open source projects and try to make that a real part of how you use open source so that it becomes more of a viable way of living for people all right community community should be inclusive safe and empowering this is another quote from the same book and it goes to say that humans have accomplished all that we've accomplished not because we were just special and really smart but because we knew how to work with other humans and so it doesn't matter if we make it easy for everyone to contribute to open source if we all can't still work together because once we get all the ideas out there we need everyone working together on the next idea so community is really important to getting people into open source use a code of conduct and don't just link about it really tiny at the bottom of the page talk about it and really enforce it this event has been really great for that promote diversity so that other people can see themselves in your community one thing there's an event that I help out with at github called patchwork and one like small thing that we do but we try to be really mindful of is whenever we write a blog post about the next event we always include the female githubbers that are going to be there so that when other women may come to this they can see that other women go to this event or we have one of the female githubbers actually do the blog post so that her picture is up there and her name and so that women are visible and people can hopefully see themselves at our event celebrate beginners we were all beginners at some point and so have empathy and try to break that that sense that everyone who's a programmer now has always been a programmer and they're really smart and they already know everything I love it when people talk about the stuff they don't know create pathways for beginners to get started one way is if you have a project on github if you if you have issues of things that you would like to see done but you don't have the time for you can create labels called beginner or just design and specific things like that so that people who are new to the space can have have that pathway to finding something that they can get involved with and then give some thoughtful code reviews I mean I know I know we're all busy and it takes a lot to work on open source anyways but the more knowledge that you can share with someone who's taken the time to contribute to your project the better and then get involved mentor host workshops even just improve resources if you spend your time trying to make documentation better for a project it's really valuable and write documentation as if people don't know as much as you know and try and teach people that don't look like you and try and make an open source for everyone thank you