 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2016. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE, happy to have on the program the two winners of the Women in Open Source awards here at 2016 on the show. We have from the academic award winner, Pretty Murthy, congratulations. And on the community, Jessica McKellar, thank you both so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, great. So Red Hat's been doing this since 2015. Pretty, what would start with you? Give us a little bit about your background and what you were working on that led to this award. I did my undergrad in India, after which I joined IBM, the Linux Technology Center, where I worked as a kernel developer for three years in the area of CPU power management. That was fun because I got to explore a lot of interesting subsystems in the kernel and got to meet a lot of great developers in the kernel community. Following that, I wished to expand the breadth of my knowledge. It would help me contribute better to Linux. So I chose to do my masters in Carnegie Mellon University in electrical and computer engineering. And that's where I'm now. Great. Jessica, a little bit on your background and what you were working on. Yeah, absolutely. I started out as a kernel engineer as well. I started out number one way back in the day. These days, I'm the director of engineering in Dropbox. So I'm doing a lot of work sustaining the engineering organization there and promoting a diverse and inclusive culture, which is similar to a lot of what I do outside of work. I'm particularly involved in the Python community. I have put in a lot of effort to make it a community with a bunch of really great people to make it a community that is inviting to people of diverse backgrounds, in particular to beginners. I've run a lot of programming workshops and initiatives to encourage a diversity of people to come into the community. One of the things that I'm proudest of is I've been working with our conference series for many years, and we've been able to move the needle on representation of women as speakers at our large North American conference, PyCon, from 1% a couple of years ago to 40% for 2016. And what's exciting about that is that really proves out that we've figured out how to do this in an unbiased and sustainable way. So I can get hit by a bus tomorrow and it's still gonna work, and that's the true measure of success for that type of outreach. Yeah, looking at your backgrounds, looking at the things that you've been working on, it's really interesting to see, it's not just the technical work that you've done, which is outstanding. I mean, you're developing in the kernel, which it was funny you mentioned in the video, you said, well, I wanted to just get started somewhere simple. I don't know that there's a less non-simple, but that was fantastic. But it's writing, it's presenting, it's like you talked about, you want to be CIO of the United States, it's that part is really inspiring. How did you get from going, I'm doing engineering to, I want to have a much, much bigger role? Well, when I began as a kernel developer, I was extremely impressed and happy that the kernel community was so open to new developers. They were not hesitant to help us out, they would hand hold us and lead us through kernel development. That inspired me to give it back to the people who were joining the kernel community as well. And it's a challenge to work in a kernel, considering that it wants you to have good quality code in it. And it's not easy for new people to get into the community. So I thought it would be nice to hand over what I received from the kernel community itself. And there were great people around me who inspired me to do that. It's about leverage and it's about impact on scale. So that you can do really good work as an individual contributor to a project. There's an opportunity though to set up the system, set up the frameworks that enable other people to enable other people to do good work. And so that's the lens through which I think about a lot of this stuff. For me, it's like the super meta point of all of this, why I spend so much of my time in open source communities is I want people to learn how to program. Honestly, I want people to learn how to program because when you learn how to program, you have this really powerful experience about changing your environment and I want people to take that mentality and to apply it to a broad set of problems in the world. So it all comes back to that. How do you have that impact, that scale? One of the challenges that we hear about, we're at conferences every single week, there are events and meetups going on. The diversity piece comes up, whether it's women, whether it's just general diversity. Talk about what you did at PyCon. Because that's a huge, huge change from zero to 40%. But we see this at every event. What are some of the tips that other event organizers could learn? Yeah, and what's been really fascinating about this is that that work looks exactly the same as the inclusive culture and diversity work at companies. So it's totally transferable experiences. So step zero, you need to have a place that people in diverse backgrounds actually want to come to. So you need a conference that has talks that are interesting to a wide range of people that feels welcoming and supportive and safe for a wide range of people. So you need the culture to support any additional work. That's step zero. Step one is sort of the top of the funnel. You need to reach out to and attract diverse folks to want to attend and also to speak at a conference. That piece of the puzzle involves setting goals and then measuring how you're tracking against those goals. So you set goals, you measure how you're doing, and then it's mostly a lot of work. Like I can show you my email inbox from the months leading up to every PyCon, and it's me sending hundreds of emails to people who I think would be great speakers at the conference who've never done it before. And then, but there are 20 of me, 20 other people who are doing the exact same thing, and it becomes a numbers game. If you have an unbiased evaluation, talk evaluation process, and once people's talks get accepted, they want to come to a conference with a really great rich environment, then it's just a numbers game. Reach out, have a systematic, sustainable way of reaching out to and attracting many people, and that's all it is. Pretty, on the academic side, how are they doing with diversity in the STEM organizations? Any commentary on that? Well, at Carnegie Mellon specifically, we have a good number of female graduates, but they have several women communities wherein they encourage more girls in each of these departments, each of the departments in Carnegie Mellon. They offer a lot of scholarships for us to visit plenty of conferences. They encourage us to come back, share our experiences with the rest of the university, and I haven't seen any kind of bias towards the women graduates in Carnegie Mellon. Probably it's true across the universities as well. The professors and the students are quite open to, are extremely open to working with women graduates, and I personally have not explicitly seen any sort of a challenge for women graduates in specific. It's a very open environment. You talked about diversity in programs. We're seeing it in companies. The more diverse the people are working, the more ideas, the better ideas. What technology is inspiring you? What are the things that you're excited about right now that inspire you that you're interested in working on? Well, specifically, I think technology is changing the lives of a lot of people all across the world in such rapid ways that I cannot remotely even imagine. I mean, the very fact that I'm here and my parents back home are able to speak to me on a daily basis. They are able to get live feed about what's happening here. My father is tweeting along about the- Yeah, feel free to say hi to mom and dad. Hi mom, hi dad. And so the news is spreading so fast and it seems like they're close to me. I mean, this itself inspires me a lot, given that the lives of people have changed for the better. And it only seems like it's gonna get better and better. And I want to be a part of this transformation and contribute something. It seems like I'm taking in, I'm at the receiving end of all of this, and at some point you feel like, is there something that I can contribute to this world? Just to make sure that you are a big part of this ecosystem of this technology revolution. That's great. What about you? Your part of your world is an open community. It's part of it on the commercial side. What's motivating you these days? What's exciting? I mean, I think I'm similarly attracted to the communication, the collaboration, the connecting people aspects of what a bunch of really innovative companies are doing right now. That's part of why I'm at Dropbox. Dropbox is an opportunity and a huge mandate to connect people in a bunch of different contexts, in particular business context. For me, I'm a real, I'm a true manager these days because the way that I think about the world is setting up a sustainable system, setting up a sustainable engineering culture. What's exciting for me is having an opportunity to be a part of a journey at a company that is you go through these sort of, these scaling and these size inflection points and how do you continue to sustain and evolve the culture, the engineering practices, the product development practices that produce the best possible outcomes by increasing the large teams. So I think about it from a systems perspective these days and that's the part that gets me really excited. I think that's great, because you're looking at it from, how as an individual can you inspire and you're looking at it from a, inspire groups and stand of sustainability and so forth. You have to look at that whole spectrum. Yeah, and you need both, for sure. Absolutely, together. Great. So I want to give you both the final word. What message do you want to share with your peers in the community about your experiences here and moving forward? Well, I can only say that the world is getting a better and better place, thankfully, and you look around and you find so many inspiring people and that pushes you to the edge. And I probably will tell people and it's probably also the same message I keep telling myself over and over. Don't stagnate, keep learning and keep improving. And it looks like the world has a lot of opportunities for us to give back to it. And this looks like the perfect time for, especially for technology, the software industry and all those women out there who are probably holding themselves back or have some sort of hesitation to contribute in any way should step up and move forward. And this is just absolutely the right time. And I think they will get all the help they need. They don't have to worry about it. My main thought, we're so fortunate to get to be up here and getting all of this really great support from the Red Hat community. It's a team effort. It takes a village to do any of this work and just like the recognition of how much of it, it's a long-term, communities are long-term investments. It's a team effort. It takes a village and just really reinforcing that message is important to me. Yeah, well, it is, you're very excited. It is a teamwork, but both of you passionate. You're excited about this. I mean, you're great spokespeople for the things that you're trying to do that's fantastic. I appreciate that. Well, Jessica and Preeti, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the award winner. Big shout out to Red Hat for running this program. Also, check out SiliconANGLE.tv. We have broad coverage of women in tech, including we recently announced a fellowship in partnership with The Ground Truth, where we're looking to train the next generation of technology journalists. And those fellowships are for women journalists. So check all that out. And thanks so much. You're watching theCUBE.