 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. Of course, this year, the event is happening all online and that gives us an opportunity to meet with Red Hat executives, customers, partners, and practitioners where they are around the globe. In this segment, one of our favorites ever years, we're talking to the women in open source. And joining me for this segment, first of all, we have Delissa Alexander, who is the executive vice president and chief people officer of Red Hat. This award fits under her domain. Delissa, it is great to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having us. All right, and we have two of the award winners. So first, if you see right next to Delissa, we have Nethah Hussein, who's a doctor and PhD candidate in clinical neuroscience at the University of Gothenburg, coming to us from Sweden. Nethah, great to see you. Thank you very much. All right, and we also have Megan Bird Sennicke, who's a manager of research and operations at the open source program office at Google. Megan, thank you so much for joining us also. Thanks for having me. All right, so Delissa, let me hand it off to you as to give our audience a little bit if they're not familiar with WIP and open source, what the initiative is, the community, and what might have changed from previous years when we've talked about this? Sure, so we realized that the tech industry is a great industry for diverse populations, but a lot of diverse populations don't realize that. And so as the open source leader, we wanted to shed a light on the contributions that some of our underrepresented populations are making in open source that's really inspire more people to join communities, to participate, to contribute. We know that more diverse populations help us to innovate more rapidly. They help us to solve more problems. And so it's really important, especially today with what's happening in the world, lots of important problems to solve that we really invite more of our underrepresented populations to join in the communities. Awesome, so absolutely, there are lots of people that volunteer, there are lots of people that do it as their day job. Megan, why don't we talk, you have a role open source for us, Google has a strong legacy in open source in general. So tell us a little bit about, you know, what you were working on and what you're being recognized for here. Yeah, well, a lot of the recognition comes from my work with the Drupal Association. I had been with Drupal for eight years helping to build that foundation and supporting that community and lots of different ways from fundraising to community events, running sprints and helping with their developer tools. And so that was a lot of what the award was based on. And now I'm at Google and I've been here for about a year and a half and I run their research and operations. And so Google is an expression of open source and we have thousands of people using thousands of projects and we wanna make sure they do it well, they feel supported, that we are good citizens in the projects that we participate in. And so my group provides the operational support to make sure that happens. Yeah, Delisa, you know, one of the things that's always fascinating when I go to Red Hat Summit, there's so many projects, there's so many participants from various walks of life. Last year at the show, there was a lot of discussion of, you know, it was a survey really and said that, you know, the majority of people that contribute now, it's actually part of their job as opposed to when I think back, you know, you go back a couple of decades ago and it was like, oh, well in my spare time or down in my basement, I'm contributing here. So maybe talk a little bit about the communities and, you know, what Megan is embodying since she worked on a project now that she's working for, obviously a good partner of Red Hat that does a lot of open source. Yeah, I love the way she described what her role is at Google and it's fascinating and Google has been really a huge contributor in the communities for years and years. So I think that what we're seeing with the communities and with people saying, yeah, now it's part of my day job is that 20 years ago, the idea that open source development would be kind of on par with proprietary development and on par in terms of being used in the enterprise and the data center was something that I think many people questioned. Proprietary software was the way that most people felt comfortable making sure that their intellectual property is protected and that users could feel comfortable using it within the parameters required. So that was the way it was 20 years ago. And then now you think about, you know, most companies there is some form of open source that is part of their infrastructure. So now open source is no longer the disruptor but it's really a viable alternative and organizations really want to use both. They want to have some proprietary or they want to have some open sources. So that means like every company is going to need to have some need to understand how to participate in communities, how to influence communities and Red Hat's a great partner in helping enterprise customers to be able to understand what those remits might look like and then helping to kind of harden it, make sure things that they need to have applications they need to have certified or certified and make it really usable in a way they're comfortable within the enterprise. That's kind of a special role Red Hat plays but it's just a tribute to where we've come in a world in terms of open source being really accepted and thriving and it helps us to innovate much more rapidly. Yeah, and there's no better way to look at not only where we are but where we're going and talk about what's happening in the academic world. So that brings us to Netha. So you are the academic award winner. You're a PhD candidate. So tell us a little bit about your participation in open source. What it means to be part of this community? My PhD project involves using virtual reality to measure the arm movements of people with stroke. So we have participants coming in into our lab. So they wear these 3D glasses and then they start seeing virtual objects in the 3D space and they use their hands to touch at least objects and make them disappear. And we have all these movement data fetched into our computers and then we write code and analyze the data and find out how much they have recovered within one year after stroke. This is my PhD project but my involvement with open source has happened way before like in starting from 2010 I have been editing Wikipedia and I have been writing several articles related to medicine and healthcare. So that is where I started with open knowledge and then I moved onwards and after my medical studies I moved to research and worked on this awesome project. And so there are multiple ways by which I have engaged with open source thus far. That's awesome. Netha my understanding is also some of the roots that you had and some of the medical things that you're doing have an impact on what's happening today. So obviously we're all dealing with the global pandemic and COVID-19. So I'd like to hear, Netha what's your involvement there? You were talking about data obviously so it's critically important that we have the right data getting to the right people as fast as possible. Definitely, yes. Right now I'm working on creating content for Wikipedia, writing on articles related to COVID-19. So I mostly work on writing about its socioeconomic impact, writing about COVID-19 testing and also about the disease in general, mental health issues surrounding that, social stigma associated with it and so forth. So I use all these high quality references from the World Health Organization, the United Nations and also from several journals and synthesize them and write articles on Wikipedia. So we have a very cool project called Wikipedia Project COVID-19 on Wikipedia where people who are interested in writing articles creating data, uploading images related to COVID-19 come together and create some good content out of it. So I am a very active participant there. All right, and Megan my understanding is you also have some initiatives related to COVID-19. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about those. Yeah, you bet. Well, one that I'm loosely affiliated with is COVID Act Now and that is a combination of developers, data scientists, epidemiologists and US state government officials. And it's looking at how, what does the curve look like and how does that curve get flattened if governors made decisions faster or differently than what they're making today and how does it impact the availability of ICU beds and ventilators. And so that is a tool that's being used today by many decision makers here in the US. And my contribution to that was they needed some resources I reached into Google and found some smart, generous volunteers that are contributing to the data sets. And actually I just connected with Netta through this award program. And now she's connected and is going to start working on this as well. Yes. That's fantastic. Yeah, I mean, Delissa, we've known for a long time you want to move fast, you want to connect lots of diverse groups, open sources is an important driver there. What else are you seeing in your group with your hat as the people officer? Obviously, this is a big impact not only on all of your customers, your partners but on Red Hatters themselves. Well, it is a huge impact. We're so fortunate that we have some experience working remotely. We have about 25% of our population that historically works remotely. So we have that as a foundation. But certainly the quick move, the rapid move to really thinking about our people first and having them work from home across the globe, that is unprecedented. And at this point, we have some individuals who have been working from home for many, many, many weeks and others that are really entering their fourth week. So we're starting to have this huge appreciation for what it's like to work remotely and what we can learn about more effective inclusion. So I think, you know, back to the idea of women and open source and diversity inclusion, one of the things we always pride ourselves in is that we focus on inclusion. And we think about things like, okay if the person is not in the room with their remote let's make sure we're including them, let's make sure they get to speak first, et cetera. Well, now we're learning what it's really like to be remote and for everyone to be remote. And so we're creating this muscle as an organization. I think most organizations are doing this, right? Creating a muscle that you didn't have before we're really, really having to think about inclusion in a different way. And you're building a capability as an organization that you didn't have to appreciate those that are not in the room and to make sure they are included cause no one's in the room. Yeah, really important pieces. And Delissa, you know, one of the things that's always great about Red Hat Summit is you bring together all these people as we just heard, you know, your two award winners here, you know, got connected through the awards. So maybe give us a little bit of a peek as to what sort of things the community can still look forward to, how they can continue to connect even though we're all going to be remote for this event. Yeah, this event is going to be a great event. And I hope everyone joins us along our journey. We are fortunate that Red Hat, you know as the open source leader really wants to take a leadership position and thinking about how we can shine a light on opportunities for us to highlight the value of diversity and inclusion. And so we've got a number of events throughout the summit that we'd love people to join in. And we're going to be celebrating our women in open source again at our women's leadership community lunch. It is now not a lunch, it is now a discussion unless you're having your lunch at your desk. But we're having a great conversation at that event. I mean, invite people to join in and we'll have deeper conversation and also another look at our women in open source award winners. But these award winners are just so amazing every year that applications that are submitted are just more and more inspiring and all the finalists were people that are so impressive. So I love the fact that our community continues to grow and that they're more and more impressive people that are joining the community and that they're making those connections so that together we can really shine a light on the value that women bring to the communities and continue to inspire other underrepresented groups to join in and participate. You know, research obviously is an area where open source is pretty well used. So just give us a little bit of viewpoint from your standpoint, yourself and your peers. You know, I would think from the outside that open source is just kind of part of the fabric of the tools that you're using. Is it something that people think specifically about of course, or does it just come naturally that people are, you know, leveraging, using and even contributing to what's available? The tool I'm using is called Q-Test. It's an open source tool written in Python. And so that gives me the possibility to have a look in deeper into the code and see what's actually inside. For example, I would like to know how, what is the size of the target that is shown in the virtual space? And I can know that correctly to the millimeters because it's available to me in open source. So I think these are the advantages which researchers see when they have tools, open source tools. And at the same time, there's also a movement in Sweden and in most of Europe where they want, where researchers are asking for publishing their articles in open access journals. So they want most of their research republished as transparent as possible. And there is also this movement where people want, researchers want to have their data put into some open data repository so that everybody can have a look at it and do analysis on the data and build up on that data if other people want to. So there's a lot going from the open access side and open knowledge side and also the open source side in the research community. And I'm looking forward to what COVID-19 will do to this movement in future. And I'm sure people will start using more and more open source tools because after the pandemic. Yeah, Megan, I'm curious from your standpoint when I think about a lot of these communities, meetups are just kind of some of the regular fabric of how I get things done as well as just lots of events tie into things. So when you're talking to your colleagues, when you're talking to your peers out there, how much is kind of the state of reality today having an impact in any learnings that you can share with the audience? Yeah, that is definitely a challenge that we're gonna figure out together. And I am part of a group called FOSS Responders. We are reaching out to projects and listening to their needs and amplifying their needs and helping to get them connected with resources. And one of the top three areas of need include how do I run an online community event? How do I replace these meetups? And what is wonderful is that groups have been moving in this direction already. And so Google could release a guide of how they run online events and they provide some tooling as well. But so has WordPress put out a guide and other projects that have gone down this path. And so in the spirit of open source everyone's sharing their knowledge and FOSS Responders is trying to aggregate that so that you can go to their site, find it and take advantage of it. Yeah, definitely something I've seen one of the silver linings is, these communities typically have been a lot of sharing but even more so, everybody's responding, everybody's kind of rallying to the cause. Delisa, wanna give you the final word. Obviously, this is a nice segment piece that we usually expect to see at Red Hat Summit. So what else do you wanna help share with the community as final closing thoughts? Well, I think that we're not done yet. We have been so fortunate to be able to highlight the contributions that women make to open source and that is an honor that we get to take that role but we need to continue to go down this path. We are not done. We have not made the improvements in terms of the representation in our communities that will actually foster all of the improvements and all of the solutions that need to happen in the world. So we're gonna keep down this pathway and really encourage everyone to think through how you can have a more inclusive team, how you can make someone feel included if you're participating in a community or in an organization so that we really continue to bring in more diversity and have more innovation. Well, excellent. Thank you so much, Alyssa, for sharing it. Thank you to both of you award winners and really look forward to reading more online, definitely checking out some of the initiatives that you've shared, valuable pieces that hopefully everybody can leverage. All right, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.