 This is Silicon Angles, the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the ceiling from the noise. I'm enjoying my co-host Jeff Frick, and we're at the end of our three days wall-to-wall coverage, over 30 interviews, a lot of blog posts, great coverage, great event. But one of the things we're really passionate about at Silicon Angles is fostering innovation and sharing and providing open source content and doing all that great stuff. But one of the things we're really passionate about is getting the word out about getting more people programming. And our slogan is where computer science meets social science. And I'm pleased to have Anita Cano here from the Canome project. Yes. Thanks for joining us. And we want to talk about getting more ladies involved in coding, bringing women and open source together. Absolutely. And obviously women in tech is a big focus you hear a lot about. Sheryl Sandberg had just recently wrote a book called Lean In, and there's a variety of other conversations. There's always debates around, oh, not enough women to see you. But that's not about it. This is about coding. So let's talk about, and what do you want to share with the folks here? Let's talk about this. Well, my exposure to OpenStack was through the Canome outreach program for women. And I'll just talk a little bit about what that means. Canome is a project that does desktops GUI for Linux operating systems. And they noticed in about 2006 that there was gender disparity and they wanted to work towards gender parity. And they tried a number of different things, and the only behavior that they found actually changed results in how many women were contributing and how many women were going and attending the conferences was actually doing internships. Getting women signed up, making a commitment to them and actually paying the women a stipend for their work. And that ended up in more contributions to the master branch, to the code repo from women and also more women showing up to conferences and also continuing to contribute. That was in about 2006. And this program that I was involved with just, this was the first cohort in January of opening it up for other organizations. OpenStack was one of 10 organizations that took on women interns. And the requirements for becoming a GNOME outreach for program intern was be female or identify as female, not have done the program before and be available for the time commitment. The time commitment was three months, standard work week of 30 hours a week. So that is the program that I came into OpenStack with and it's been really, really beneficial because that provided me the support that I needed both emotionally, technically and financially, sorry, emotionally, financially and technically to get me over the hump with open source. Things are kind of in a raw state. They're always a work in progress. So they're not necessarily user friendly when you have to use them. And when you're coming in and you're coding, you have to create a development environment in which you can actually test your code. So make changes and test your code. And so actually creating that for OpenStack did present some issues for me and it was only with the help of my generous mentor and the whole internship team that I was able to continue to have hope and keep going back and asking questions that I was able to get that development environment created and actually start making contributions. And who was the internship with? Was it with the OpenStack Foundation or was it with a participating company that had OpenStack work going on? That's a really good question and it's really important to understand how this was set up. There were three sponsors for the internship. There were three positions and our three sponsors were the OpenStack Foundation, RackSpace and Red Hat. So thank you to those organizations for making those positions available. They sponsored the positions but the money was distributed by the foundation. So the foundation acted as an administrative umbrella organization. The money then went to the GNOME Foundation who were the umbrella organization for all 25 interns in this round and then they were the ones to actually distribute the money. So in terms of what company or corporation did I intern with, I don't actually know. It might have been a third, the foundation a third red hat and a third RackSpace. The point was is that all of the money came from the foundation so my loyalty, my emotional attachment and my gratitude goes towards the foundation. That actually freed me up when I was doing my internship. When I came in, I came in through one door working on the Glantz project and the Nova project and then I moved around. I did a commit to docs, I did a commit to Cinder and then various other things happened as they do and I ended up in the infrastructure team and so working with them. And because I wasn't limited by any one company I could go ahead and follow my nose and find out what was really attractive to me and just show up and start diving into code. So great experience, how do folks get involved? I know, first of all thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you. This mission, so for the folks out there that want to get involved, other women with open source, website links and what should they do? Absolutely. If they're on IRC, they on the FreeNode server they can come to OpenStack-OPW, that's the channel I'm in. My IRC nickname is Antea. Ping me, say hello, say you watch this broadcast and I'd be happy to have a conversation with you. If you would like to contact Ann Gentel as the point person for OpenStack Foundation she's the administrator of the program. She'd be another good person to contact. What's her email address? Her email address is she's anngentel at Rackspace. I'm not sure of the exact syntax but if you do a search in Google at anngentel at Rackspace you'd be able to come up with her blog page and you'll get her email from there. And another way in is on the irc.gimp.org server and go to the OPW channel and that's where all of the OPW mentors and interns idle and ask for Marina or Karen SQ, those are the administrators for that program and they're actually taking applications right now for the next cohort that takes place this summer and they're actually looking for more people to apply and more mentors to apply if there's OpenStack people and wanting to mentor and they didn't know about the program before. Please contact any of those three points and let us know your interest and we'd love to work with you. Nina, thank you so much. Obviously there's so much to get involved in as an avenue to come on board into the communities. A lot of communities are welcoming more and more women. Also the ability to learn. I mean, Stanford offers free mobile development. The tools to get the COMSI education is out there. So if you want to brush up on something, there's a ton of resources. You've got Khan Academy for the younger kids but in the computer science, you've got Code Academy, you've got a variety of other avenues and I recommend going to the Stanford courses on mobile. They're a really great online course with the professors, great CS courses there. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We want to see more women in tech programming and building code. Again, all it takes is an app in the App Store, throw it on some cloud, maybe build some OpenStack in there. Absolutely. And again, the job market will explode. Obviously, it's demand. That's right. So contributing, be having fun and building the market. So thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Be right back with our next guest after this short break here inside theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of OpenStack Summit 2013.