 Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for coming to this talk. My name's Karen Sandler. I am a lawyer with an engineering background. This isn't really a legal talk, but because I'm a lawyer, I have to say this is not legal advice. I am not your lawyer. Yes. Anyway, now that we've moved on from there. I'm also the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I see some t-shirts. Yes. And I am a Debian user and non-uploading Debian developer, which is so cool that there is that category. It makes me feel really invested in the Debian community and want to do more for Debian, and it's really awesome. And I co-organize a program called Outreachy, which I'm going to tell you about in this talk. So just to give you a little bit more about who I am as a person and why I'm here and why I care so much, I literally have a big heart. My heart is three times the size of the normal person's heart. It's really like three times as thick, which is totally fine. I'm asymptomatic, except that I am at a very, very high risk of suddenly dying. It's like 2% to 3% chance per year compounding, and I was diagnosed at 30. So it's all fine and good because I have a pacemaker defibrillator, except that when I was prescribed the pacemaker defibrillator, I asked about the software on it, of course, and asked for the source code to no avail. So I can't see the source code in my own body. So I am a cyborg without being able to see the source code in my own body, but I am unique. And sort of confronting the whole, this is a very strange, is there like a lot of, is this bouncing around? Can you hear weirdness when I move? Yeah, is that a little better? OK, great, tell me if that happens again. Thank you. So sort of seeing directly how software, how we rely on software, and in my case, the software is literally screwed into my heart, right? It literally, my life relies on it. It's a metaphor for all the software we rely on, and it made me realize how important the ethics of our software are and how important free and open source software is in particular. And so I went from someone who thought that open source software was cool to someone who thought that software freedom was essential. And that means that I spent a lot of my time worrying about just the general ethics and safety and general overall state of our software. And it's part of why Debian is so important. But today, I'm mostly speaking as one of these group of people. These are the outreachy organizers. We're a committee of five people. It's still doing it, isn't it? A little bit. A little bit. It's OK. Yeah. Don't move. OK, so raise your hand if you have heard of outreachy. Raise your hand if you have never heard of outreachy. It's great. So there are three or four people here who have not heard of outreachy. Outreachy is a program where we have paid internships for underrepresented groups to participate in free and open source software. And I'm going to tell you all about how the program works. But before we get there, I just wanted to give a few minutes to talk about how the program came about and why we think it's so necessary. One of the funny things about giving this talk is that at conferences where often there are so few women and minorities, often a very high percentage of those people attend the talk about the programs to help bring more people. So it's interesting to look around the room and see that this talk, in particular this audience, is a more diverse audience than I think is representative of the conference as a whole, I think. My flight got delayed, so I was a little late in coming. But it still gives you an idea about how the art, are you fixing the, is that better? Do you want to do it? No, that's a better. OK, BDale says it's OK. So it's OK. So I just wanted to give a few minutes to talk about, first, my personal experience at these conferences, or at conferences in free and open source software generally, I can tell you that lots of times when I show up at conferences, people assume that I'm not really there because I'm interested. They assume I'm there because I'm a spouse or significant other. They assume that more corporate conferences than I'm a marketer, despite the fact that I'm so passionate about software freedom and I think about software freedom pretty much all the time. And I have a technical background. I was an engineer before I went to law school, despite that fact, when I'm executive at a nonprofit, despite the fact. So when I'm at, with other executives of nonprofits, and trade associations, or whatnot, people always assume that I'm the one who doesn't have the technical background and always explain basic technical concepts to me, whereas the men who are similarly situated, some of them, for example, have marketing backgrounds, but nobody ever assumes that they don't have a technical background or couldn't understand what was happening. When I check in as a speaker at conferences, people often ask who I'm picking up my badge for. That hasn't happened in a little while. And the experiences I've had have been really amazing. I can also tell you that I have been groped at conferences. I have been hit on within two minutes of getting to the venue. It's just a very intense experience. And not everybody has these experiences, and I do attend a lot of conferences. But it only takes a couple of people who are aggressive jerks for the few women that attend to have a bad time. And studies show that the problem is actually a lot deeper than that, because in studies where people were asked to review patches that were written by developers, if the patches were identified as being written by women, then they were marked of lower quality. But when the gender identities were removed from the patches and were given code review, in general, the ones that were written by women were shown to be rated of a higher quality. So these biases are deep, and they're prevalent. And I think we all have a lot of unconscious bias that we need to sort of think about. The studies show it out. And then the statistics on the participation of women in particular in free and open source software are pretty abysmal. In software, generally, it's about 25% women. And that includes proprietary software and free and open source software. It's about 17% to 18% of students within the United States are, and in many other countries, it's about that, are women. And then in the studies for free and open source software, it's like anywhere, the lowest is like many studies. A couple of studies have shown like 1%. One study showed 4%. One study showed 11%. But the most recent studies showed, I think, about 3% or 4%. And so the numbers are really low. So where there are women in computing, especially not coming to free and open source software. And I keep hoping that these stats are gonna change. But, and I've had this slide up for a while, but actually I think that the only thing that has happened is that the number of students overall that are women in computing has been continually dipping down over time. I think in the 80s, it was like 30%. And it's now down to 17 and 18%. In some places, it's starting to increase as diversity initiatives have started to become successful. So we'll see how that develops in the next few years. And then the Wall Street Journal published a whole bunch of information about tech companies in the US and their data about women participation in technology jobs at their companies and also leadership positions. And so this is a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal website. And they have, they've put these together and you can see the, I just picked a random company. I think it's actually Microsoft, but I wasn't necessarily picking on Microsoft. They're all roughly comparable for the big companies. And you can see that the number of women is quite low, but then the number of blacks and Hispanics is also really low. And what we found from those studies is that about one to 3% of the tech workers reported in the studies were black and only two to 4% were Hispanic versus a 13% of black and 17% Hispanic within the United States. And so we've been running a program for gender diversity for quite some time. And when the Wall Street Journal published these studies, we realized we had to also expand the program too. So I won't spend too much time on the justification for the program, but I'm happy to talk to anybody about it one-on-one if you'd like. There are tons of resources out there. The Geek Feminism Wiki aggregates a lot of this information and there's an interesting study published by Joseph Regal. So there's tons of data out there and I'm happy to point you to that place if you want to know more about why these programs are necessary. This program started because in 2006, oh, a question. So the question is why do we think that the percentage dips for free software? There are probably a lot of reasons for that. So some of the reasons why people think that's the case are one, for one, it takes a lot of discretionary time to contribute to free and open-source software and statistically, men have more of that time than women or really any member of these underrepresented groups. There's a thinking that, I'll actually get more to that as I go because what we did was we decided not to worry about what it actually was that was keeping women out of free and open-source software and instead take all of the reasons that we thought that women and other underrepresented groups might not be participating in free and open-source software and address them all systematically and try to address them all so that we can overcome all of them without having to identify what it was that we think that might be keeping underrepresented people away. And so in 2006, the GNOME project noticed that it had 181 applicants for Google Summer of Code and none of them were women, zero out of 181. And they were like, well, we have to do something about it. And so in 2006, they launched a program called the Outreach Program for Women and they basically mirrored GSOC but made it specifically for women. And they did this program and I think there were six participants that year. Was anyone here participating in the organization of that program in 2006? Okay, so Molly maybe a little bit. She did proselytizing for it. Okay, so in 2006, there were six women that came into the program that GNOME launched just for GNOME and they had one summer round where they had those internships and the program wasn't, it was successful but it wasn't really that successful because none of the women that participated in the program stuck around in the community and it basically fizzled out and it was just a one-shot deal. And then in 2009, the GNOME project realized that it needed to do, there were various political things happen and they realized they needed, they had a very low participating percentile of women at GWADAC, it was like 4%. And I guess I'll just say and a possibly sexist comment made by a speaker and so they decided they needed to revive this program and I came in as executive director of GNOME shortly after that. And so the outreach program for women was relaunched and it was reexamined again with all of these sort of tweaking the program to figure out what works and what doesn't work. So what we do now, the program is now called Outreachy and GNOME is a participating community but the program is separate from GNOME now and is at the Software Freedom Conservancy where I'm executive director. And it's a program that happens two times per year. There's a summer round and a summer round depending on where you are. And it's basically dedicated to support software freedom by increasing diversity and we've generally tracked Google Summer Code in terms of inspiration for the program and its basic structure. The program has been really successful. We have dozens of free software communities participating now. Debian participates, Linux kernel participates, GNOME still participates and it changes a little bit every time some communities come in and some communities come out. We've had 368 people who have come through the program already and there are 39 working right now on their internships. Raise your hand if you were a participant of Outreachy. So awesome, that's like participant, not a mentor. So just like an intern participant. I think it's the same for four or five people. That's so great. And the program has been really, really impactful. The people who come through this program have been doing a lot of amazing things during and after their internships, not just in the work that they're doing but also in the overall impact that they're having on our communities. From those participants, we have a lot of new speakers. I think 75 people have come through the program and have given full length talks at conferences which then starts to change the face of free and open source software and when newcomers come in, they see that there are more, that there are diverse people that participate in a project. One of the reasons why we think that women and other underrepresented groups are less likely to participate in tech is because there's nobody like them that they see participating in the community and it contributes to something called imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is exactly as it sounds, it's the idea that you feel like at heart, maybe you're an imposter, you don't belong, that people will discover you ultimately to be the fake that you are. And lots of people have imposter syndrome, men and women and everybody, non-binary people, everybody, lots of people have imposter syndrome but it is very prevalent, especially amongst women in tech is what studies show and I can say that I'm someone who has imposter syndrome and here's an example, I am probably the only person in the world who has researched medical devices and free and open source software and the legal regime around them and every time I give my medical devices talk, I'm still terrified that someone is gonna discover that I'm a fake and I don't know what I'm talking about but there's probably nobody else in the world who is focused on these issues quite so much, it's ridiculous, it doesn't make any sense and one of the things that studies show is that because there are fewer role models, you see fewer people who are like you, who are holding themselves out as experts, you know, you doubt, subconsciously you doubt yourself and so knowing that there is such a thing as imposter syndrome and somebody else on stage I heard talk about an imposter syndrome one, I was earlier in my career and I was such a relief to hear it so when I do this talk I try to mention it because it's good to know that this is a thing it's quite common and women are just much less likely to hold themselves out as experts. I was interviewed for a documentary, rather they asked me to do an interview for a documentary about software patents and I said, oh, no, no, no, I'm not the person you wanna talk about it here, you should talk to these other people, they're much more knowledgeable than me and they're the right people and then when I was in the same place as them the director said, can I sit down with you and I said sure and he closed the door and I was like, what is gonna happen here, this is weird and he said, I have to level with you, I've asked a few women in the field to interview for this movie and none of them have said yes, all of them have said the same thing you have said which is you should talk to these other people, I'm probably not the right person, you'll do great if you talk to these other people but when I ask men and women in the field who I should interview, they mention you and yet you tell me that you're not the right person to be interviewed, what is going on, why won't you interview for this, like why, I said I know that there are women who are experts in the field, I can't publish my movie if I don't have any of them represented in the movie, I'm gonna have to not do the movie because it doesn't represent the experts in the field and I won't feel good about it and so I said, aha, that makes perfect sense and so I said to him, okay, I will do this interview if you tell me the questions in advance and you promise you won't make me look like an idiot and he said, you're an expert in the movie, if you don't know what you're talking about I'm not gonna use your footage, why would you even worry about that and it suddenly made a lot of sense and he said it's very hard to find women who will hold themselves out as experts and so and I also find that when I'm at conferences where there are people doing interviews, women are and non-binary people are much less likely to kind of push themselves in and say, hey, if you're looking for someone to interview I'll do that and so it's even less, potentially even more disproportionate so I always now sort of check in and say, do you need someone to interview because I'd be happy to do that and often they say, yes, that's great, we would love to have you interviewed, they say no, I'm like, great, no problem, anyway, imposter syndrome's a real thing, having women speakers, having non-binary speakers, having minority speakers is really important in just making people feel that the work that's being done by a diverse group is visible. New mentors, 18 people who have come through the program have become mentors for either Google Summer of Code or Outreachy and in fact, one mentor, sorry, one participant not only became a mentor but her mentee became a mentor so she became a grand mentor. So pretty cool and it's sort of like the impact that this program is having on the community is substantial. New community members so we require that participants in the program blog and so seeing a diverse set of people participating in the community discussions is really important and as the Outreachy program becomes older so we revived it in 2009 and then a few years later we expanded it beyond GNOME and included Twisted which is a Software Freedom Conservancy member project and then we expanded further to include the Linux kernel and Debian in the very next round I believe. So seeing, as the program gets older people who participate in the program become more experienced and are becoming leaders of projects which is amazing. There are participants in the program who have gone on to become board members. For example, Valerie Young is on the SPI board and hold other positions of prominence in membership committees or a variety of very visible and very essential ways in the community. We also have new community initiatives that have been formed. So for example, there's a Chicagoans hacking on GNOME which was formed by a alum of our program who is also on the GNOME board of directors. And then two women form the women in free software for India in free software and another woman started the Nairobi Dev School. So initiatives to help bring more people into free software and help bring free and open source software to a wider group of people just from our program which is really cool. There have been 15 Debian participants since 2013 which is quite a lot and pretty exciting. And they've worked on a variety of projects from translations to reproducible bills to QA and it really can be just about anything within the project. So how we do the program is that we, one of the things that's really critical to the success of the program is addressing underrepresented people directly. Early on in the program we figured this out because I spoke to a participant of the program who had said she had thought about applying to Google Summer of Code but it just didn't feel like it was right for her and she felt like maybe it wasn't something that she could do. And then when she saw that outreach program for women which is what outreach was called then was specifically inviting women. She thought, oh, maybe I could do that. And she went on to participate in Google Summer of Code after she did Outreachy. I think 25 people have gone from Outreachy to Google Summer of Code. So we're sort of helping the people who come through the program find other opportunities and specifically naming the people that we wanna participate who aren't already present in our communities is a really important part of that. We accept students as well as non-students. Google Summer of Code is only for students and we found this out early because when we were originally designing the program for women to participate in free and open source software we realized that there were a lot of different parts of times in like a women's career where there's a common need to reboot. So many people participated in the program after having children, having different kinds of changes in their role. Quite a number of women have come through the program who for various reasons were always interested in programming, always interested in development, always interested in tech, but for various reasons felt pressured or for some reason to not pursue a career in tech and Outreachy was a way to allow them to give that a try and to switch careers. And that's been really helpful. We had one woman who was mopping floors when she got the Outreachy internship, one woman who was homeless, one woman who was working at the cheese counter at Whole Foods. So it's really a really important part of the program that we have the opportunities to non-students and we also provide some opportunities to non-coders. Documentation, for example, is a really important way that people can get involved. We also need to value those skills in our community in ways that we don't always. And so by allowing them to be also paid internships, we show how important they are to us because they're essential to the success of our software generally. And then there's a secondary component, which is that some people who are interested in doing development work, but feel like they aren't brave enough to jump in right away or feel like they may not be as skilled. Having the chance to participate in another way gives them that bridge. So there was a participant who was with the GNOME project who got a marketing internship with RET and then she took that and then did GSOC as a developer and used that to pivot. Another woman who had an internship at Wikimedia did documentation and basically used that to build her relationships and to get confident in the community and then felt strong enough, but it felt like it was the right time to be able to start contributing as a coder and started to do that. We connect participants with mentors, statistics show that people who are members of underrepresented groups are much less likely to jump into channels and say, hey, can somebody help me with this thing? So having a formal process where we have mentors who are designated as being available at a particular time is really important for the success. And then it's good in general because having mentors identified as part of the program means that anybody knows that those people are available and happy to help. So it creates mentorship opportunities for everyone, which is really great. We also require a contribution as part of the application, which has been really helpful, making sure that the participant can do the work that's part of the internship is a really important part of the application process, but it's greater than that because everyone who applies to Outreachy becomes a contributor to a free and open source software project. So we only accept, I think a little less than a third of the applicants that we get generally, but 100% of the people who successfully complete an application can put on their resume that they've contributed to a free and open source software project, which is pretty cool and really important. We had over a hundred applications per cycle. So it's a lot of people and we do get a lot of repeat applications. So when people don't get accepted the first time, they've already started contributing and if they continue contributing, they become a much stronger candidate and often get accepted later. And we of course promote the program as best as we can, which we need a lot of help with. During the program, we focus on manageable tasks rather than having like one big project because a big project can be very intimidating and it sets people up for either passing or failing rather than doing something which is very in the spirit of free software of having small incremental improvements. And this means that sometimes participants do a lot more than you expect them to and sometimes it means they wind up doing a little bit less and the important thing is that they keep contributing and that they're learning and becoming a part of the project. I was a mentor for an internship once and I put enough tasks that I thought were for the entire internship except that my applicant did all of the tasks during the application process. So that does happen once or twice. But then we've also had people who completely underestimate the projects that they have set aside for the interns. So they think that the project that they have, it would take them three weeks of work to do but for a newcomer it would take a lot longer and so sometimes that's a, you know, having it split into small manageable tasks means that it's not, you know, interns don't feel like they're just being set up to fail, which is really important. We require our participants to blog so everybody can see what's happening and what work they're doing and they can become a part of the community a little bit better. We have an IRC channel, we try to have meetings though we've been not as good on that recently but we're doing the best we can and having the IRC channel means that there's like a little bit of a support network and that the participants are connected with each other and I can tell you that I've even been in a situation where I've had bad things, you know, where I've experienced sexism at conferences or on my blog or in my response and I've gone to the channel to get support from the people who are there. It's just helpful to know that there's a safe, you know, there's a place where people understand what you're going through and that makes a big difference and we help sponsor travel. We have built into our amount is $500 to travel to conferences to make sure that the interns get to the conferences where the work that they were doing is the most relevant and that's the best way that we can get people into our community is to have them work on something, then come and talk to everybody about it and then have a welcoming environment at that conference so that they realize that they can take their work to the next level and really become a part of this whole free software thing. After the program, we encourage the continuation of mentorship relationships and for some participants that goes on for a long time after the projects and it depends on the particular mentor but we also encourage them to pursue other free software opportunities and we try to spread the information about that. As I said, a number of people have participated in Google Summer Code after so that's pretty, we encourage them to present at conferences and we'll review their proposals and just encourage them to submit which is really important and we also encourage past participants to become mentors and to just generally participate in answering questions and spreading the word about RET. Most importantly, we hope that our participants value software freedom and that they understand that free and open source software is something that's special and taking that to wherever it is that they go next even if they don't stick around in our communities is really important. I would be a bad executive director and very remiss if I did not acknowledge the sponsors of RET. We have really cute names for our sponsorship levels so the very top level is Ceiling Smasher and then we have Equalizer and Promoters and then Includers are people or organizations and companies that support one or more interns. We require that the communities that participate in Outreachy find the money for at least one internship and then we do our best to fundraise for more so some communities have enough money that they can sponsor multiple Outreachy interns but we require that there is at least one so that we know that the community has some skin in the game that they really support Outreachy. They're not just signing up because they want us to fund an intern and it's hard for us to fundraise anyway. We're a charity, we do the best we can. We've luckily been in the situation where we've never had to turn an awesome candidate, an awesome participant down because of funding and I hope that continues to be the case but we just do the best we can with the fundraising that we have available to us. So you can help, you are here which is amazing, pretty much. The way that these talks work, it's so frustrating. The people who come to these talks are usually the people who know about the program exists. They know it's important, they know it has value and usually as I said this talk is way more diverse than the rest of the conference. So it's always funny but getting the word out and I think that if you're not a part of these underrepresented groups that we're trying to outreach to, it's perhaps even more important that you're here because I can't even begin to tell you the injustice of how it feels to feel like because you're a part of an underrepresented group it is your burden to reach out to other people of your group. It's so difficult because most of the people who are here, as I said at the beginning, there are all of these obstacles seen and unseen in participating in the community and you're probably here because you've worked, because you really care, you've worked hard. The study show, you have to work that much harder to be seen as, you know, you have to work that much harder and be that much better to be seen as just as good as everyone else. So you probably really wanna do that thing that drew you here to begin with. So, thank you. So it's important that we don't leave the outreach solely to the underrepresented groups and it's in fact everybody else that really needs to hear about these programs and the problems and help remedy the situation. So helping to spread the word is really important. We're a charity and we are not smooth marketers. I wish we were, we don't have a ton of extra resources for marketing, so we really rely on word of mouth and the enthusiasm of people who care about these issues and care about free and open source software and diversity. So help support Debian's participation in Outreachy and if you're involved in another free software community, encourage them to participate in Outreachy. Suggesting to your company that they sponsor the program is an amazing way to help. Often companies are looking for diversity programs to support and Outreachy is a very pragmatic program. It is, we've got solid metrics, we have a very deep impact on the individuals that participate and as the program continues, we're starting to see the face of software freedom start to change and I think that we'll see even more of that as time goes by but a lot of companies are just looking for things like this to fund and we've had sponsorships come through in all different kinds of ways. So some companies put it through their philanthropy department, some put it through engineering because they're funding work that they want done, they think is valuable and some of them fund it through a diversity fund. So there are a whole bunch of different ways that and some fund it through free and open source software sponsorships generally. So there are a bunch of ways and finding someone at your company who cares about that would be really can do a lot and then donating individually to Outreachy and Conservancy is a huge way to help. We're always sort of at the end of the day when we got all these amazing applications in, we're like, okay, so we want to accept all of these people that look like they're going to succeed and how do we do it? And then I go and we'll go and we knock on doors and sort of say, oh, we just need these two more internships funded and we can accept everyone and so far it's worked but we have in the past had to draw on general Outreachy funds that we've had and it's tough. We also have hired a contractor to help us because the running the program is so much work. It's like a mountain of work and we were doing it entirely on volunteer labor for a while and it was just not tenable. So donations would really help a lot but it's starting to have a really big impact. Google Summer of Code alone went from 7% women in 2011 to 12% in 2016 and it's been a constant increase. The Linux kernel, we've had about 30 women become kernel developers through our program. It's kind of amazing. And so this is a Baturja graph that they put up where 5% of women in the Linux kernel in 2005 to about 10% in 2016. So anyway, that's the general idea about Outreachy and how it works and I can now, I think I have like five minutes for questions. Does anybody have any questions? Yes. Oh and I'm gonna, well okay, we'll just do that. It's not working but if you shout it, I'll repeat it. I've been very lucky to mentor people in Outreachy and Google Summer of Code over a number of years. Just one thing I want to share is a lot of this and even if you haven't got time for mentoring, if you only have time to help encourage people to join the programs, a lot of it is just about giving them their confidence to apply. Showing them the videos of the successful interns participating at DEBConf and other events. I've just sent you a photo of one former intern. I don't know if you've got access to your email there. This is quite exciting. I just saw this at a conference recently. Okay, well, did you have a question? Now I was just gonna, this was my one point, was just that just motivating people, showing them photos and videos to show them that other women are doing this successfully and when they see these things, their faces change immediately because they can see that they can do it too and then they apply. And even if you don't have time to mentor yourself, just helping people to get started, it's not that hard and we can all do that. I have another data point perhaps for your statistics because I was mentoring four Google Summer of Code students, one of them was a women and I've also mentored two women in outreach here. And my experience was that the women were always same good as a man and last year I had one woman in outreach and one in Google Summer of Code and the woman was very independently working, quite autonomous and the men were really needing kick and ash so I can say that the women was really better than the men explicitly. And this year I'm also very happy and in addition I want to say that I'm running for my project some kind of mentoring project for one month and I also try to get women and I also got two very good women. So it's not that, as you said, there's people have experienced that they are bad so this is not the case. The only difference is that they need to be a little bit more empowered and to be more self confident. This was some... Yeah, I mean statistically that's true. Everyone's an individual so you sort of have to take the individuals as they come so we don't want to generalize too much but statistically what you're saying is absolutely true. Hey, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what from the outreach perspective makes a really great mentor. Oh, what a great question. So there are a bunch of resources that we make available for mentors. I think the biggest thing is to understand that mentorship takes a lot of time and having a specific amount of time that you've committed every week preferably on more than one day per week and making yourself available to your mentor, to your mentee and it's a tough line to walk to know sort of how much to help and how much to let the participant figure out, figure things out on their own but I think that as long as you make yourself available during specific times and with the time zones considered and then I think one of the good things about outreach is that during the application process you can figure out where that person is and you need to meet them wherever it is that they are and understand that they're gonna need to learn. I think one of the most important things about mentorship is it's not about getting somebody else to do the thing that you would have done in the same amount of time that you're doing it. It's to understand that we need to bring people into our communities in a way that they can learn and become contributors. So it sometimes can be frustrating for mentors because I think that things should take a certain amount of time and then they take longer or people do it differently but the important thing is to focus on the process and to help the participants or whoever it is you're mentoring and it's generally, it doesn't need to be just with an outreach but in general with mentoring it's important to sort of let people understand the ways that they can ask questions, hook them into other members of the community so that they know they can establish a network and help them understand how to learn so that they can answer questions themselves and go independently. Yeah, can you hear me? Yes. All right. I think it's a little bit misleading when we tell ourselves that the individual people that are different from us don't have the confidence to come in because then say I am a young male developer. For me I don't always notice all the informal channels that have been flown open for me and invited me in that are not available to that person who is different from me. So the idea that there is something about them that lacks confidence is inaccurate. It is something about the institution that opens doors for some and not others. That's a really excellent point and that's true across the board. There are, it's a little misleading because you think that well we do so much of our work remotely and online that what difference does it make if someone is part of a different gender or of a different race. But there are all these subtle cues that are subtle and overt ways that people are excluded. And the biggest, most obvious one is turning up at a conference. Like when you turn up at a conference and so for example as a woman, when I show up at a conference there have been times when I have seen like a hundred people before I've seen another woman. Like you're not sure who you should approach, right? It's not like, it's a totally different experience and it can be very off-putting and that's just a metaphor for all of the channels that are not necessarily available to everyone equally. When I, the very first time that I signed on to IRC and I'm old so I won't say what year it was but the year began with a one. But when I first signed on to IRC I wasn't thinking about what my handle was so my handle was Karen, right? And immediately I got priv messaged by like 20 other people with very questionable handle names and I like logged off immediately. And that's something that would have been invisible to anybody else who had been in the channel that I had signed on to. You just don't see it. So just because you don't see the bad behavior doesn't mean it's happening because there are so few people participating from these underrepresented groups they see a disproportionate amount of the bad behavior and if you're not a part of that group you're just less likely to see it. I have a question on the corporate sponsorship side. Do you, do companies just contribute to a general fund or do they sponsor specific work or specific projects or how does, can you say a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I guess I'm not gonna be able to do that. So the way that sponsorship has worked previously or the way we've designed the sponsorships is that companies can sponsor particular internships. So for example, if you know of a company that wants to sponsor Debian internships that funding can be earmarked for Debian internships. And then we can have sometimes, so for example when the FSF sponsors, I hope I'm not going too far by saying this but when the FSF sponsors they say, oh good, I got a thumbs up from Molly. They say this can go towards any GNU project. So GNU Media Goblin and GNOME have both participated and so they can be, you know, and some other projects can say, oh well, some other companies say, oh well I'm happy for it to go towards internships for these four, you know, different communities that participate. And then we have some companies that just give us flat amounts towards our general fund. Honestly, that makes a really big difference having the money towards the general fund because it just keeps the program going. I can't understate how much work it is to just keep the program afloat and then the Software Freedom Conservancy does all of the accounting and all of that stuff. And it's just the mountain of work because it's 80 internships per year and each person has to get paid a different place. There are, you know, we have to manage all the applicants that go into the program, all the different applications. We have to email people about whether they've been accepted and rejected or, you know, and then just managing, coordinating with all the mentors, we have agreements, we have to, the infrastructure around the program is really big and to make sure, one of the reasons why I think the program has been successful is that where they call it like a high touch program. So like we have a lot of contact with our, on average, with our participants, but all of that takes time. And whenever anybody has a problem or a question, we wanna make sure that they have the appropriate attention. So everything just takes a tremendous amount of time and getting donations of one minute generally is a really great way to do that. Can we sneak in one more question? Maybe someone who hasn't asked, oh. I don't know how much Debian funds at the moment. We, is that public knowledge? I'm not sure what Debian has made available but there are two interns per year. Does the spy board member know if that's public? But I can't imagine it would be. It strikes me, we have a slight problem with money in Debian in that we can't find things to spend it on. And why don't we just fund as many applicants as we get? Great, I think in the past sometimes, oh there's a plunge. You've got fast amounts of money in, yeah. So why don't we just fund what we, anybody that turns up? It like spreads it around, right? Because if Debian funds, we require the Debian fund one intern to participate and then we really try hard to fundraise for any more. I think in the past there have been rounds where Debian has paid for more than one intern. But some rounds we've contributed general funds so it would be great to have more of Debian money. So how about we fund anybody that doesn't get funded by external sponsors or something? Great, yeah. And then people can know that and they can think, rather than, well I'm no good so I won't get funded so it'll be number seven. If there's seven we'll fund them, why not? Yes, but we only accept applicants that we think will are set up at that moment to succeed in the program. Oh yeah, absolutely. So it's one of the things that we've figured out. And one more quick question. I know we were over time. Quick, quick, quick. It wasn't really a question, it was just about what Kathy was saying. Just, I mean, like I grew up in Mexico and in Mexico, I'm seen as white. My ancestry is mostly from Spain. And when I came here it was a shock for me to live in Canada. It was a shock for me to discover that I'm not white, apparently. To start running into a bunch of sort of sort of racism and being treated as an outsider and a bunch of things like that. And then the next sort of intensification of that came when I changed my hair and my style and then it became much more powerful. And even here at this conference, a community I have been participating in for well over 10 years, I don't remember how much. The other day I was talking to someone I wanted to ask for something. Of the project and I was singled out for some behavior that I've seen a lot of people engaging at the conference. Whether it's right or wrong or what the specifics are, I don't think it's germane. But immediately I thought, of course, you know. It's the way I look, it's if there's going to be a complaint about that, it's going to be about me, you know. And I was questioned about how much I contribute to the project. You know, it's fair in this specific conference, I haven't done a lot, but I have, like specifically financially, I have put in a lot in the past, you know. So, I don't know. I think it's a common experience. And thank you for sharing that because I think it informs the overall discussion. Thanks everybody for coming to this talk and for helping to promote diversity issues in free software, it's really important. Thanks.