 Hi, my name is Lavisha Parker, and I'm here to speak with you today about how I found my space in the open source community, the lessons I learned along the way, and how you can do the same. So in this talk, we'll first open up with what open source is and what makes it something that I think is worthwhile to try in your spare time. Then I'll move on to share a little more about how I found myself moved to explore the open source community and how powerful it can be. Along the way, we'll discuss some of my biggest takeaways I learned through trial and error, and that I'll do with the hope that y'all can use those in your personal lives if you decide that open source is something that's right for you. Lastly, I'll close with a summary of what action items you can take, and what trust signals you can look for if you decide that open source is a good fit for you. And I'll also address what open source organizers can do to lower the barrier of entry for people who would potentially want to contribute. But to start, I'd like to say, hi everyone, I'm Visha. So here are a few facets of my life. For one, I'm a serial hobbyist. I love creating beautiful new things out of raw materials. I'm also a programmer. I studied computer science at Cornell, and I currently work as a full stack developer at Etsy. And at Etsy, the software I build is used to help creative entrepreneurs manage their businesses effectively, and I really love my work. So the part of my life that's most relevant to this talk is my work as an organizer of Progressive Hack Night. The image on the bottom right shows some of the people I organize with, and we're all smiling and exhausted after, excuse me, after a successful hack night a few weeks ago. And I just wanted to take time to introduce myself in the multiple aspects of my life just to show that open source is not something that's only accessible for people who write, speak, breathe, eat, code, whatever. It's something that's open for all of us. So in some ways, I accidentally made my way into what I do now with organizing groups around open source. The concept of open source technology was first explained, or not really explained, but approached or broached with me by a UNIX professor I had in college. The professor used the term open source in a lecture, assumed everyone knew what it was without actually explaining it. And all the class seemed to be nodding along with him as he said, open source technology, blah, blah, blah. So I did my familiar dance and acted like I knew what he was talking about, but just made a mental note to myself to figure out what the heck it meant later. So to avoid doing that here, you can quickly read this definition of open source, but the long and short of it is that open source technology is technology where source code is made freely available and is public to all who want to use it and redistribute it. And you can't really confine how it's used, which is pretty cool. So if you want to learn more about the general definition of open source, feel free to check out the open source initiative. It's a really great group. So, oh, yeah. So anyway, once I was sure of what open source was, I wanted to get involved, but I had no clue how. So I asked around with some people I trusted in the tech space, and they gave me two pieces of advice that I'll recount here. So the first piece was to simply look up stuff that interests me and get going. And this piece of advice is semi-valid. I probably should have asked the advice givers to disambiguate the meaning of stuff. But there was something to the idea of finding something that I really felt passionate about since this is something I'd be doing with my spare time. So though this advice isn't super helpful, I don't think it's detrimental or anything. The second piece of advice I got was to just find a bug and get cracking, whatever that means. The idea of finding a bug in existing open source software, fixing it and pushing it just abstracts away a ton of the stuff you actually have to do with open source. So one of the big issues with this is that most open source projects don't have three crucial bits of information documented that you would need to even do this. Many don't tell you how to get their source code running on your machine. Others don't tell you what bugs exist, and many don't have any listing of what the expected behavior of the product is. So there's really no way for you to just find a bug in it if you don't know how it's supposed to work. So without this information, this is very tough, but there is sort of similar advice that I found online recently that I really like and want to share with you. So this is a quote from a software developer named Sam Jarman. He posted this on the Practical Dev blog. And I really like it, this is what he wrote. So first, to get started, go find a project that you like and start reading the source code. We're not looking for logical errors here or like flaws in logic. We're just looking for straight up typos. So your first four requests should be like fixing the spelling of the word return or using gender-neutral pronouns, something that is a relatively low stakes entry point into contributing to software so you don't feel like you can break something. So I think that Sam's advice is pretty great, but I also understand that spending time scouring through source code of a bunch of open source projects to get started might seem like a bit much. So why does any of this matter? What about open source technology makes it something that you should care about? I think that this is a totally valid question and I think that open source technologies in contribution should be something that's accessible to all, but nobody should feel like this is being forced upon them. So when I think about why open source technology is important to me, I like to think of this quote from Matt Mullenweg to answer this question. He says, for me, open source is a moral thing. You can change the world through open source. You can help crowdsource money to help people pay their waterbills like the Detroit Water Project does. You can write software that helps remove the money from politics and helps politicians use open source software so they don't have to rely on sponsorships from major corporations like the Progressive Coders Network focuses on doing. You can pretty much do anything and that's what personally jazzes me up about open source and I hope that it's something that appeals to you. But it's worth noting as well that the benefits of open source aren't simply being able to stand on a moral high ground. Here, I've enumerated some of what I consider the benefits and detriments to open source technology. So as for the benefits, it's great for networking. If you want to carve a space out for yourself in the tech scene, it's excellent to have people who have your back, especially if it comes to needing advice and you'll be amazed who you can meet as you try to enter the open source scene. Another great thing is that you have way more freedom than your nine to five job. You can take more risks and learn more in open source and even experiment with how you like to interact with the people that you work with more so than you can in like a corporate setting. And just in general, you learn a ton. I found that working with a company like you naturally can't always go out in pursuit of the latest greatest thing or the hottest technology. But with open source, you are the captain of your own domain and you can focus on doing this as much as you want. And my personal favorite bit is that you can help move the world in a direction that you want to see it go in through the software you build. And you'll also gain a lot of domain knowledge in that space by doing it. So I could sing the praises of open source all day, but I think it's important to note some of the less pleasant things that I've personally experienced in ones that I've heard from friends. So for one, it can be pretty hard to enter the space. And I know that that was a bit of a trigger for imposter syndrome for me. But I'm still working through it. It can also be a huge time suck. So you're coding outside of your regular job. That's gonna take a lot of time and that can be really hard with family obligations. So there's also no HR department or anything. So there can be some unrestricted, really negative attitudes around. I've never experienced this, but I have heard of this from other people who've contributed, so it's worth noting that. And the last one I did personally experience, sometimes the project you're working on simply ceases to exist. And you wake up one day and everyone's self-working on it and it sort of stinks, but it can happen. Not frequently, but it does. So yeah, I just think that it's important to weigh the benefits and the negatives, but for me, what I gain definitely outweighs what I feel is lost. So we've learned a bit about open source and how awesome it can be. Now, how did I really go about getting involved in open source and how can you? So I thought open source is really cool in college, but I didn't actually contribute to open source until about three or four years after I first learned that it was a concept or something that existed. And that's largely because I couldn't figure it out initially how to contribute and I was pretty lazy in terms of figuring out for real what to do. So I just let it sit for a while and that's fine. But then the election of 2016 happened and I don't want to politicize this talk so I'll let it suffice to say that November 8th 2016 was my personal call to action. So in this time, I knew that my technical skill was the thing that I really wanted to focus on and I thought that that was how I could do the greatest service to my country and my world. But I still felt a bit stuck and didn't know how to get involved in line. So I did know that I was really fortunate to live in New York City and that there were tons of in-person events here, whether it be political only, technical only, just a bunch of people organizing and I knew that that was probably a good way for me to get to gain entry into some vague idea of this tech activism space I wanted to inhabit. So I found sites like Meetup and Eventbrite super helpful in terms of finding groups that regularly organize around open source and tech activism. And I also started to follow some New York City based activists on Twitter to figure out what events that they were boosting and that really helped me get started. In this search, I came upon a group of technologists in New York City called Make-A-Diff and began to attend their workathons, which were basically hackathons where we worked all day for social good projects. And that was the foot in the door I really needed to get the ball rolling. So at that point, it seemed like I was starting to encounter more and more and more open source projects and it became a bit unwieldy and difficult to sift through them all. So this is my second bit of advice to find what's easiest to contribute to. And if you're just starting off, it's wise to dedicate time to finding which projects have the lowest barrier to entry. As I encountered projects through in-person events, I began to synthesize what questions I felt that I needed to be answered in order to be an effective contributor regardless of what stage of development the project was in. Here are four basic questions that I like to ask and that I believe that I need to see answered in order to consider an open source project, something that would be easy to contribute to. And I'd just like to note that when I say easy, I don't mean that the source, the actual project itself is easy. I really just mean that the hardest thing I should have to think about is the source code that I'm going to write. I don't want to have to worry about how to actually contribute. So just to go through these quickly, the first question, what can I do for this project? You want to know if they have really easily digestible tasks enumerated, if they have something like a new contributor tag on issues that you know exactly what types of problems they would like you as a new contributor to tackle. And second, how can I get set up to contribute? A lot of projects that I found that are really good have a clear guide to contributing called contributing.md or it's usually written in a readme file. It's just like two really good places to figure out how to actually get their code running on your machine so you can start getting involved. And I generally don't start a project until I can at least answer those first two questions. So next question is how can I add the work I've done to the project? So a lot of projects have a strong culture around code reviews. And if they have a large testing environment or pre-production stage, these are all things that are great to know before you try to just ram a commit into their source code and maybe are met with a bit of resistance. And lastly, I like to ask how can I communicate with the people who are working on this? So even if I can answer these four questions for myself, I still need to know that if I hit a snag, somehow it's bound to happen. I can reach out to people and they'll be supportive of me. So I generally also try to tackle this question first in case I'm really interested in the code I'm seeing or the idea of the project, but just cannot figure out how to get started. And it's really cool because once you do find out how to get in touch with people, you can ask them for the answers to all of these questions. And then you can be the first one to document those things and that can act as like your first contribution. So I also like to look for install fests. If the questions aren't clearly answered in documentation, install fests are a great place to look. They're not super easy to find in the city, but they can give you space to get like the answers that you need. Another thing that I think is important to do is to find a group that suits you. In going to these in-person events, it was at one of these events that I encountered the Progressive Coders Network. And it was the exact type of network I needed at the time because it was a series of people organizing around tons of open source projects meant to build the type of world that they wanted to see. It was through this project or this network that I joined a project called Project Swimmy that eventually like died off, that's what I'm still sort of sore about, but I worked on it as a developer and it was just a really awesome experience. So another tip. I always made sure to give my email and general Slack contact info to the people I met at these events in order to forge a longer lasting connection with the groups that I encountered. It also helped because I didn't always have time to attend these in-person events in person. So I was able to help through like asynchronous communications this way. And this practice led me to connect more deeply with the folks that I did encounter at in-person events and resulted in me finding the current joy of my life, the work that I currently do with the open source community called the Progressive Hack Night. So this hack night that I currently run, Progressive Hack Night, is like really just a source of pride for me and it's awesome. So our byline is that we're a bi-weekly gathering of coders and creatives, makers and doers to permit and inspire action. We use our collective talents and abilities to push forward pro-social change in benefit of the common good. So that basically breaks down to mean that we serve as a platform for lifting the voices of activists and organizers while also serving as a space for potential contributors to come in contact with open source projects and really get down and working on these hard problems. And as much as I truly love my work with the Progressive Hack Night, I initially found it really difficult to contribute to open source as a programmer and also spend time defining my ideas and vision for this hack night. And that became a bit of a point of conflict for me, so that leads me to my next point. That you should spend time finding what your contribution style even is. So as you explore open source, take time to really think about how you want to contribute. I think that when we think of open source, we only consider it as directly contributing to source code, but it can be so much more than that. You can become the testings are or a documentation guru or take a spin at being a project manager and you can do what I did and take a step back, like a bit of a meta step back and also focus just around organizing these groups. So in doing so, I found that I love organizing around open source more than contributing to open source, like the typical Coderway. And yeah, I just found that my real talent lied in making sure that I could lower the barrier for others to contribute to these organizations and that's what I think I'm meant to be doing in this space. So find what suits you best. So lastly, create and have fun doing it. There's so much to learn, achieve and see through open source. And I really hope that you all have the chance to do so and find what makes open source so special. Thank you. And this is 7 eighths of this year in committee I work with and I love all of these people a lot. So I thought it'd be nice to end with them. Thanks.