 Hello everyone, thank you for coming to a panel on strategies to foster diversity and inclusion on OpenStack community. We have some great panelists here today and at the end I think we should have some time for Q&A. So I'll start by introducing myself. I am Agnes Sigler and I work at TrackSpace. I'm also one of the directors on the OpenStack board. Diversity is something that's very important to me because, well, I would like to see more women and more diverse people in OpenStack community in general. So the panelists I have today are Nicole Huseman from Intel, Amy Marish from Linux Academy, Allison Vandal from Suzy, Daniel Ijkarda from Bittersia. And I'll let them introduce themselves. Daniel, you want to start? Okay, so hello everyone, my name is Daniel, I'm one of the founders of Bittersia. Basically what we do is we analyze and produce metrics about open source communities. Allison Randall, I'm a distinguished engineer at SUSE and also president of the open source initiative and on the OpenStack board. So I've been doing open source for about 20 years, even though the name has actually only existed for about 18. And most of my experience is participating in open source communities as a developer, as a project leader, but then also working with companies to help them collaborate better in open source. My name is Amy Marish. I'm an OpenStack course author at Linux Academy. I've been involved in tech for maybe longer than Allison. I've been everything from a dev manager to operations, director of operations, open source as well as internal. And my name is Nicole Huseman. I am a community and developer evangelist. I've been in the technology industry for about 17 years. I've worked in open source at Intel for the last six. And I work in Intel's software and services groups, specifically in the open source technology center. Thank you. So Daniel, you mentioned that you have a company that works on data. Can you provide us with some data in terms of where we are today in terms of diversity and inclusion in OpenStack community? Yeah, so let me start bringing some context. So if you look basically on the internet, you have some numbers about big companies like Google and Pinterest and others. What they are claiming is that their workforce for women is around 30% in their companies, while in the tech teams is something between 15 and 20%. So we have that context from the big players, let's say. Then we started to produce some numbers about OpenStack project teams in Tokyo Summit with some conversations with Nithyan Raph, she's currently in Comcast. So for us, we presented some numbers about the OpenStack project teams' gender diversity. Basically, the numbers are around 11% for the last year. So we are talking about that 11% of the population, of the technical contributions, basically working it and getting what we are analyzing, it's around that 11%. And we proceed with the Linux kernel that I felt was perhaps a bit more aggressive environment. Numbers are quite similar, so they are around 10.5% of the population. And then I went for trendy technology like Hadoop. Numbers are a bit lower, so they are around 8%. So this is basically the numbers we are producing. By the way, we are now working with Intel to produce a number hopefully useful for the Women of OpenStack working group. The idea is to have questions from the audience, from this Women of OpenStack working group to help them to make decisions. I remember there was a wiki with challenges detailed by this group. We can help them from a quantitative point of view. And this is probably one of the goals of this project here. Then just another remark. We were analyzing the PTL's name, basically, and the people there. So as far as I remember from the jam provided by the foundation, there are around 60 people, three of them are women. So we are talking about 5% in terms of leadership, but it's probably quite interesting as well. So this is basically all. Any data on other underrepresented minorities in these communities? Not so far. One of the things, and there's someone from the OpenStack Foundation Board. We would love to have access to the membership information. Some of the people are providing such information. Of course, it's private information. But we would love probably to anonymize that information and produce those numbers, because this is probably the only way we have for this. Just to say from a more technical point of view, what we were doing was to analyze the first name of the developers. We are talking about 10,000 different identities. For those, we were doing heavy time consuming manual polishing for the data. And then those are the numbers that we are producing. Thank you. So clearly there is a big gap in terms of women. I'm assuming other underrepresented minorities in OpenStack and other open source communities. Allison, what roles do you think elements like culture and language play in this? Yeah, so I think the key principle here is empathy. And that is realizing that if you can sort of imagine yourself in someone else's shoes, you can see what they may be dealing with that hinders their activity. You sometimes hear people say, well, why don't they just X? Not realizing that there's a very good reason that X is more difficult for them than it is for someone else. And I think language is a huge barrier around the world because it takes so much longer to parse the information and understand what people are talking about and then contribute back when you have this entire extra layer of processing going on at the same time. Culture is complicated in other ways in the sense that it gives you sets of assumptions that may not be the same sets of assumptions as other people in the project. So when you're working on a set of assumptions that don't match, then the majority of the contributors may think, well, of course, it's perfectly obvious that you should be doing this thing and someone who comes from a different culture, you know, it may be perfectly obvious to them that you should do something completely different. And that has some dynamics in gender as well, not just global diversity in the sense that... So I'm very aware that being raised in Africa and the fact that I didn't go to a school where I had teachers telling me I was bad at math and computer science and instead I had a father who taught me grad school computer science in high school. You know, like, that was a privilege. I was very lucky and I know not everyone had that fortunate experience. So just...it goes back to empathy. Being aware that sometimes what's in someone else's brain is not the same thing. It's not the same thing that's in your brain. Very true. Amy, have you observed any other barriers besides culture and language? You have started working in OpenStack community not too long ago, so maybe there's something quite obvious? I was very fortunate on the contacts I made to get involved in OpenStack, but one of the things I've noticed and I've sent as many people as possible was the talk that was on Monday with Major Hayden. Watch the replay if you were not there on imposter syndrome because it was after seeing his original talk that was held at Rackspace when I was there that I started going, I can do the getting Garrett lunch and learn. I should kind of do that and putting myself out there whereas before I was just happy being a little sysadmin, staying with my computer, staying with my servers. But the more contacts and the more you put yourself out there, it just opens so many doors. I would have never pictured myself being an instructor even though I have a master's in education because standing up in front of people is like the scariest thing on the face of the planet. But when you realize that, yes, you do know that, yes, you can teach it, also with jobs, there's studies saying that if men can do two out of the five things, they apply. Men want to be able to say, I can do all five things, I think I should apply. And it's true because we are very analytical and hard on ourselves. But it's not just women who are involved with imposter syndrome because Major, who I think is one of the greatest people on the face of the planet, will tell you he suffers from it as well. I was at a Google Sandbox two weeks ago when they put imposter syndrome up on the board and you don't think of that as taking place at Google. So it affects everybody and it affects where you hold yourself back when you shouldn't be. Those are really excellent points. Thank you for sharing. I had no idea you had master's in education, so I think your current role is perfect for you. So there are all these gaps and I think today we would really like to talk about what can we do to reduce the gap and strengthen the diversity and open stack community. Amy, do you have any ideas? One thing you cannot be afraid of is logging into a channel and going, hey, I have a question. You're very fortunate to be at Summit if you recognize the name on a badge and you have a question for them. Go up, introduce yourself, ask your question. Summit is one of the greatest places to put faces to names and make those contacts. So do it. Don't be scared to do it. Nicole, do you have any advice? Yeah, and I actually relate very much to what Amy was talking about in terms of imposter syndrome. I actually attended Major Hayden's session yesterday and want to go back and he provided a link to even more information. One of the things in terms of getting involved it's often scary to get involved. Although I joined Intel for the second time six years ago and quickly became an open source advocate and worked on telling the story around Intel's role in open source, it wasn't until last year that I really started to... And mentors are important, right? So lots of folks I know, know Carol Barrett and Malini Bandaru. They were instrumental in me really stepping forward and getting involved. In Toronto last year at LinuxCon I went to dinner with a couple of friends and I realized at the table that I was the least technical one there and I apologized for that. And then I quickly realized through conversations with Malini and Carol that what I brought to the table though not technical was equally important in being able to tell the story around why writing lines of code is important and what that means in a larger context. And I really began to see that the strengths that I brought to the table were equally valuable. So I guess one of the words of advice would be don't apologize for not being technical. There are other ways that you can contribute and make a difference. So that's one of the things that I would put out there which is from personal experience. That's a very good point. Even if you are technical and you find yourself in a room with open stack developers don't apologize for not knowing how to write code if you are actually operator because I bet they don't know how to deploy open stack. So don't apologize for things you don't know because you know way more than you can keep track of probably. Alison you have been an open source community for a long time. Why have you seen work and not work and trying to reduce this gap? I mean mentoring is one thing that I've definitely seen that helps a lot especially you know for all aspects of diversity helping people who have some sort of difficulty getting involved and helping them to cross that bridge because it is kind of like putting a hand out and helping them jump over the brook to get over whatever it is that's hindering their path. I think for me and I can't necessarily say it's true for everyone I think curiosity is the most powerful motivator in the world and when you're driven by your own curiosity because this technology is fascinating or this community dynamic is fascinating and how could these people work better together it curiosity is incredibly powerful and it can actually power through obstacles that otherwise would be potentially insurmountable. You know I found people who try to do this because you know oh it's good for my career or oh I really should and you know somehow those motivators are not powerful enough to really push through but yeah curiosity and making the world a better place are far far more powerful so it's like tap your inner curiosity figure out what it is deep inside you that actually drives you and that's what's going to power you through. That's some really good advice because yeah the things I had done best that was the things I was genuinely interested in not just something go learn this new technology and like oh my god it's another hardware one I'm not going to learn so for me that's I know that immediately so thank you for sharing that. Nicole you mentioned mentors earlier have you had some good mentors and what have you seen work for you? I have been extremely fortunate I grew up with a father in the scientific field and he works in physics and so I grew up with confidence with him continually asking my sister and I you know so five years from now what do you imagine doing so my father was really my first advocate but I've also been fortunate enough across the length of my career to have some really great I mentioned Carol and Malini but some really great male advocates who have been instrumental in providing me with air cover so to speak or making sure that I had a voice in the room at the table both on the hardware side of life I used to work at Techtronics and I have several guys there very good friends and then on the Intel side as well and they have been the importance of male allies the role that male allies play in really increasing what Daniel talked about originally the 10 to 11 percent I think is really critical the role that they play I know it's been important in my career and I think just from an overall perspective really bringing them forth I know it's interesting both on the Linux side we have a group called Women in Open Source that I'm involved with and then on the OpenStack side Women of OpenStack and I'm continually telling all of the guys in the room right please come join us we need you as a voice as well and we need your support and advocacy and collaboration and I've really appreciated that within my own career Thank you, thank you for sharing Daniel, how about you? One of the things I would like to share with all of you is that I'm in the end a non-English native speaker so it's quite challenging sometimes to come here and say something at the very beginning I remember when I was doing my PhD my PhD advisor basically has this Spanish accent in the end and they were there basically telling the people some stuff telling some stories and having someone that you can identify with is quite great and here in OpenStack the working group I attended the Barcelona breakfast for Women of OpenStack and basically what you see there is people that you can identify with they are giving a talk and I can do this so something I wanted to share Thank you for sharing Amy or Allison do you have something to add to this? So I've also been fortunate to have men who have supported me when I was at Rackspace I had a job that wasn't a great fit and my director actually when found me an engineering gig because I wanted to do OpenStack I wanted to be more involved so when you have someone you should go here you're no longer going to be one of my reports but that's where you need to be and I'll tell Agla and she knows it all the time I thank her all the time for getting me involved and just pushing me in little directions so if you need someone to push you in a direction there are people out there who will help you do it but don't be afraid to do it on your own as well Yeah at least in open source communities if you have work to be done if you're really passionate about something just say I want to help and you'll have more work than you are able to do so please just raise your hand and you'll find mentors and advisors and people that will promote you for it because I was swamped with different activities I was involved in and I asked Amy to help me out with some things and I was blown away by all the work she did you know one of the things that we talked about in preparing for this panel discussion today it seemed to come to light was the work ethic right and not being afraid to dive in and do the work and you know that led us then to talk about the mentors that we've had in our careers but I think just the willingness to dive in and do the work and having that strong work ethic you're recognized for that and then you know allies come to your aid because they recognize that you can do this work that you do have things of value to provide to the team great thank you so much I think we have a few minutes to either add some additional comments on things we haven't covered if not we are we have time to answer any questions you may have hi I actually got two questions but I'll just start with one for right now you talked a lot about mentorships which I think are very important especially as people regressing their careers for everyone regardless of their cultural background so with that being said are there any things that you're doing kind of right now to kind of pay it forward in terms of you guys at least some of you mentioned had great mentors but are you also kind of mentor in others who may be facing some of the challenges that you're starting to develop in your career so one thing that took place on Monday was the women of open stack speed mentoring which is just really short split up into technical tables and career tables and we moved the mentors around to the different tables to speak to people but we also have the long term mentoring I put in that I could do career or technical so I actually have a career mentee who is here at the summit and we touch base and it's a program that allows you to get as much out of it as you want to and if you don't have a mentor who's going to reply to you let us know because we want that interaction and you know me at one company talking to somebody at another company we do different things but there's certain things in my career that I did but don't over commit when you commit to something make sure you follow through 110% because it's noticed if you don't on the technical side if you want to learn something new don't be afraid to ask for training don't be afraid to go and talk to people and ask questions personally I always have several women that I try to mentor at Rackspace either someone that got introduced to me with someone that said hey this young woman could use a mentor or this person would really like to advance in this field but also not only do I have personal mentors but at Rackspace we have several programs for mentoring so if your company doesn't have a mentoring program you know see if either you can start one or find someone that will help you do it what's working really well for us at Rackspace we have something called mentor circles where we have a mentor and it's usually somewhere from Rackspace leadership and each mentor will have five or six mentees and they meet once a month and they cover different topics like how do you ask for a raise or that might be important to them at the time and that model really works well especially for some people that may be the first exposure to mentoring and it's easy to sign up so that program really works well for us and I hope the other companies have something similar I know Nicole mentioned that Intel has mentoring programs as well yeah Intel has extensive mentoring programs indeed so I have the long term forms of mentoring mostly in actively recruiting diverse board members for OSI and then mentoring them I'm mentoring two people that might potentially be the next president and people in OpenStack and also at my job but there's another form of mentoring that I think maybe doesn't get mentioned as often and it's almost a more on the fly sort of mentoring because you meet someone new at a project and encourage them to give a talk or encourage them to go for core and it may only be a sentence that you say to them but you would be amazed when an impact that one sentence can have on that person's life so it's worthwhile just looking for even the very lightweight mentoring opportunities yeah that's very true and personally like I have mentors but they probably don't know that they're my mentors because I'll just go to them and say hey Allison, what do you think of this I am thinking of doing this what do you think the best steps are so don't be afraid to ask it does not have to be a formal relationship it's great if you have one but if you don't go and ask people anyone you admire if they're not willing to talk to you find someone else but most most of the time people are really willing to help and ready to answer questions how about you Daniel I wanted to share a couple of thoughts that so in terms of mentorship the outreach program seems to be quite interesting for the numbers because there are some peaks of activity there attracting women so it works something that we would like to have is to understand how the retention rate is in this case the second one are the open stack summits so after some weeks the open stack summit a new bunch of women come to contribute in a more technical way so it's quite interesting so it works I'm so glad to hear that and I'm sure the women open stack training that Amy helps out with I'm sure that helps tremendously a lot so thank you Amy any other questions with diversity is that it's not that I don't think women think they can be in tech or think they have the skills but sometimes it's not marketed real well to women where like sometimes women have things they look for in their job that are more important to them like what impact they'll make on society or how they're contributing back and these social aspects of working on teams and stuff do you feel like there are things that we could do within our community to sort of because I think that there are great use cases where open stack and being part of the community really can make a difference in the use for positive change in our world do you think there are opportunities to maybe market ourselves and our community a little bit different to attract people looking for different job satisfaction factors yeah definitely I think so I think the doing good for the world aspect of open stack is not advertised well enough I was really glad to see the keynote yesterday the last keynote student just talking about remember this really is we're doing good for the world here we're protecting the rights of you know future generations through technology so I think things like that are really important and we don't talk about them enough yeah so everyone here has a job you have to tell people how awesome open stack is and it's saving the world in one way or another and I know it's it seems like oh well it's just easy to tell people but I think we all have to encourage everyone like whether it's women and diversity or just young adults that are looking for their career and thinking it's like okay what am I going to do right they're being you know they're looking up at Google, Amazon, Microsoft because those are the names that they're familiar with but they may not have been exposed to open source so tell them about open source whether it's open stack or another open source community have them get involved try it out I think software development and software in general is a great career for women when I was in college one of my professors said told me that she believed that women were a lot better at writing code that it was a great field for women because let them express their creativity and problem solving skills at the same time so that really stuck with me and I'm like yeah I can do this this is great so please encourage people you talk to that are searching what to do next and are wondering what their purpose in life is or what they want to do I think that's also part of the larger storytelling that I was talking about earlier was why do these lines of code mean anything right I mean what does this right I started to focus on Intel's core Linux enabling in persistent memory and compute accelerators and kind of thing and what I'm doing now is to say okay this does make a difference to artificial intelligence to machine learning to deep learning and why is that important well it allows us to do X, Y and Z and you know that's actually one of the reasons that I became such a big open source advocate six years ago right when I first started my career in open or in open source was the do good G it actually you know it has an impact in the world and I think it's really important to communicate what that impact is I think we have time for one more question Hey, so I was curious because OpenStack is largely viewed as one of the more corporate sponsored open source movements and that a lot of people who work on OpenStack are full time employees investing in it if there had been any work or work to kind of work with those companies directly on their diversity and their sort of programs because obviously they're the ones that are doing the hiring and sort of making the policies that may or may not be attractive to women or people of color is there any of that corporation facing work being done? So I don't know that the foundation has talked to the companies about it you are absolutely right I have noticed the same thing and I think quite a few companies are already trying to increase the number of women working for them already I know Intel has a great program for that at Trackspace we go to Chris Hopper every year and try to hire as many women as we can and companies are conscious of that diversity they're already working on that I think it would be great if foundation encouraged companies to have more women working on OpenStack if there were some sort of incentives I think that would be great I don't know how feasible that is but I think we definitely can ask what do you think Allison do you think that would work? I think it would work, yeah I think it's a conversation we could even have developers are on the board but just across the set of member companies in general I think that's a conversation we could have because it does go beyond just hiring diversity in hiring it also goes the companies make decisions about who to give extra time to who to say you can work upstream or you can work half time upstream and you should go for core and I have observed even in a diverse team they have the women on the team saying you should have that guy go for core I don't mind contributing I know I'm an expert in AngularJS but you should have that guy over there do it because I don't really they're shy to aim for that and these are people that don't have any background in open source so it's new so I think that's actually a really important part of that lift over as if you could have that encouragement from their manager and partly responsible for helping them think about their future and what paths they want to take it's a really good perspective, thank you I don't have to talk about Intel from an Intel perspective we've taken a very public goal of full representation I think it's by the year 2020 don't quote me on that on the year but we actually published twice yearly reports against the public goal that we've taken and Allison was right it isn't just filling the diverse hiring diverse folks but also once you hire them do they land in a place that's a great place to work and I think in just reading some of the reports that Intel publishes we have a we're doing well against the diverse pipeline piece of it but do we have an inclusive environment I think that we place a big emphasis there as well do we land in places where we're appreciated and valued and the environments are welcoming and safe environments in which to work thank you I think we are out of time thank you Nicole Amy Allison and Daniel for being our panelists today and thank you everyone for coming and for great questions