 Hello everybody. Two of my favorite topics, no kidding, are open source and diversity so I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be on this stage talking about those two topics together. Part of the reason I feel this way is from the first day I was involved in open source communities I just loved it. The whole idea that all of us are coming together all of you from different companies from around the world to solve problems together regardless of your companies is just a beautiful model and then you're creating something that's freely downloadable. I think it's fantastic. So I just loved it from the beginning. So for me I think there's no better place to work on diversity and inclusion and model this for the world. I think it's really profoundly important. This is the great place to do this. So through my talk today I hope you can walk away some ideas, some best practices. It's not completely comprehensive because there are so many ways to approach inclusion. I really encourage you to go to some of the diversity summit track while you're here because all the people who are running those programs are saying similar but even deeper topics things that you can become involved with. So I don't want to make this all about data but I think it's really important to start with some data and there are a lot of studies. Jim mentioned this yesterday. There are a lot of studies on the importance of diversity and I'd like to say we all should do it from the perspective of it's the right thing to do but there's some really great business sense reasons to do this. So a study from Mackenzie and Company this year did a study of companies in the top quartile. So companies in the top quartile of gender diversity in their executive leadership they were 21 percent more likely to have above average profits. When you increase the diversity to all diversity groups it goes up to 33 percent more likely to have above average profits. This makes business sense. So if it's not enough to do it for the right reasons it's important to do it from a business perspective. Now on the other hand we have a long way to go. I think everyone realizes that from a diversity perspective there's a lot a lot of improvement. One of the studies and some people referenced this study yesterday. Wired magazine did an article and it referenced a GitHub survey taken last year and of 5500 respondents only 3 percent were women and this is a pretty dismal number. So we have a lot of work to do. I just wanted to present those as two data points for what we're working on. Now while diversity is very easy to measure as a percentage the way to get there is through inclusion and this is hard to measure. These are the softer skills the softer sciences. This is about having empathy about being subjective being authentically yourself and it's a culture thing. So it's very hard to measure this. So again I want to give you some ideas in this talk about what we can do to improve the culture which helps people feel more included and then those diversity numbers will go up. I'm going to start with my own story. I actually want to profile some other women that I work with to give you some best practices but I figure you need to know a little bit about me and I have a couple of inclusion stories to share with all of you. I'm going to go all the way back to when I was a kid and not just because my mom's sitting in the room but when I was a kid my parents instilled me with some really basic values of I can do anything you know walk into that room decide what you want to do and feel empowered feel that you can do this and that's that's so important. So it really does start when we're young with our children and also telling our children to include others. So I just want to mention that but my next stop I'm going to talk about high school and the reason I want to bring up high school is because I took my first computer science class in high school and I just I loved it it just appealed to me I was already a math person I love the problem solving accessibility to technology at an early age is really important because this is before we have any bias about what we think we can or cannot achieve. So from there yes University of Edinburgh I did a year in college in my junior year absolutely loved it I don't have a particular inclusion story except that I did feel very included so good job people of Scotland it was great experience my base school was Tulane University and I do want to tell a story about Tulane and that the head of the computer science department there was a woman and I'll tell you at the time I didn't think much about it I just felt like this is this is normal my context growing up was I'm capable of anything but in hindsight how powerful was that to have a woman leading my department to see myself in leadership. So diversity in our leaderships is so so important from there I went to work at IBM I've been at IBM since then it's been a great experience IBM is known for their values we have a great culture we are very inclusive but the story I want to talk about at IBM is not the one you might think this my story is not so much about a woman in tech because I have to say I've had some really great opportunities but about 16 years ago I decided to go part-time work a reduced-hour schedule and to me this was my first inclusion challenge because I'll tell you once you work a reduced-hour schedule people form a bias about how committed you are or how available you are and it's simply not the case so throughout the talk I just want you to think about there are lots of forms of diversity it's not always gender it's not always sexual orientation it's not always race there are lots of factors so really important to include people who work in different types of schedules how we work so my first open source experience was with OpenStack when IBM was a founder of the foundation and the very first event that I went to again I just loved it the idea of all the developers coming together to work on problems to solve in particular at that first event there was a women's breakfast and I thought well I'll go I don't know a lot of people here so I went to the breakfast met a lot of new friends met the leaders of OpenStack because they were there and what a wonderfully inclusive way to start an event I only knew my own colleagues from my company at the event but after that breakfast I had a lot of new friends and when you have that level of camaraderie and friendship you're going to feel more included when you go to your to the rest of the event so that was they said the bar pretty high and from there I went to work on Cloud Foundry Foundation and a number of other foundations as Jim mentioned but I do want to call it Cloud Foundry because when we were part of helping start the Cloud Foundry Foundation I really love that the leaders of the foundation said we'd like to make sure we are highly diverse and inclusive what can we do they ask those of us who are at the table to help start what should we do and a lot of us pointed to OpenStack they by then had started the women of OpenStack and also other diversity initiatives other inclusive groups and and said meet with them and understand what they're doing and to Cloud Foundry's benefit they did the same things they have a lot of the programs whether it's women's breakfast or networking presentations panels anything that gives us knowledge about what we can do to empower ourselves in these communities so enough about me I really want to talk about the stars of the show which are three colleagues of mine that I've worked with for years now and I really think very highly of them I want this to be a positive story sometimes diversity inclusion docs can be quite negative and I want to focus on what's worked for them and help teach you a little bit about that so I'm going to start with Swetha who's right there you might want to meet Swetha while you're here she'll probably be the booth at some point I met her a couple of years ago when I was working in the Cloud Foundry Foundation and she was just just had a lot of energy about Cloud Foundry had a great experience and we talked some about that and based on her experience of Cloud Foundry she went on to work on the Hyperledger project where she's currently working on the Ethereum integration and so just like I did with the other women I said well what worked for you what was your good experience and what more do we have to do so Cloud Foundry again from from a very positive perspective she had the opportunity to work on lots of different projects I think that's a great thing when you when you feel included when you can get access to many different types of technology and projects also Cloud Foundry has this concept of paired programming so when you start immediately you have a partner that you're working with and someone who helps you along the way this is a mentoring type situation this is a great way to feel included and the other thing she told me about I loved is she had a mentor not only at IBM so having mentors in your own company is helpful but having mentors in the foundation she had someone who checked on her relatively frequently and say how are you doing can I help you what do you need this is a relatively simple concept but it's so helpful when you're new to a community and so she was very successful there and then that helped launch her into the Hyperledger project and she's doing quite well so I said but what else do we need to do what else can we do to make communities more inclusive and there were some interesting points because our conversation was not as much about being a woman in technology was about some of these other characteristics that make up us and other individuals in the room so one of it was making sure you take time to prompt the quieter people in the room you've probably seen them they probably come to your projects those quiet people sometimes have a lot to offer I'm not saying drag it out of them but offer them the chance give them the prompt and ask for their input it's been quite some people just need that permission to speak before they're they're going to contribute the other interesting thing we talked about that I hadn't thought about because I am in the east coast of the US and and I have to say sometimes we're a little centric on east coast time for meetings is and she's on the west coast is time zone inclusiveness make sure in your working groups as you meet with people all over the world change the times that you're meeting give that person on the west coast or in China the opportunity to participate in the meeting during their normal business hours because that's when you feel your best and you'll contribute your best so time zone inclusiveness is really very important and the one I the last one I really liked is it's very important is avoiding the back rooms I mean those of us who have been in communities a long time it's really easy to just talk with your colleagues and have the back room chatter but it's very excluding to other people who might be new so it's really important to have discussions in the open have things well documented so anyone new can really feel comfortable contributing so next I want to talk about Miriam I met Miriam several years ago working in the open stack community and she had a great experience she went on to be a core contributor for the trove project and after that she went to work for went to work at the Kafka community and I talked to her and same same kind of questions what worked well for you what else can we do and she had a again we had both had great experience at open stack the women of open stack became more organized we had again breakfast we had networking we had panel discussions and education very structured program and this helped people like Miriam quite a lot because you got to know people you had people who can help you so as she put it communities within communities was a really important takeaway and then as I said well what else can we do she made the point that and I think you should all take away is that it shouldn't just this isn't always about gender or again sexual orientation or race it we need communities for everyone to feel included so we should always think about these communities within communities that we can form to help anybody from various backgrounds feel comfortable and with the people they want to be with and then the last thing that she I really like that she said because it's quite simple is make sure you provide responses and feedback to those newcomers you know if you're a newcomer and you you do contribute but you don't get the feedback what positive or negative just something that helps guide you you're not going to feel included so just something as simple as making sure when when that newcomer has questions or does submit make sure that you give them the feedback that they're looking for they'll feel included and then they'll contribute more so last but certainly not least I want to talk about Daisy I have probably known Daisy the longest we worked also in the OpenStack Foundation together and she has since gone on to work in the open West community and she's proud and I know we're all very proud of her that she's the founder and the first PTL of the internationalization project at OpenStack this is by definition very inclusive so she has a project that's all about making OpenStack accessible to the world very proud of her for that accomplishment um so when I talked to her about what's worked well again women of OpenStack played a big role but when we talked about what more needs to be done it was interesting this time zone issue came up once again she's in China and often people in China end up with the really short end of the stick on this in the middle of the night so we talked about that time zone inclusiveness is really important um seeing diversity in your leadership you know I mentioned this is part of my story it really is important to have the diversity in leadership so that we can see ourselves and know what's possible and feel welcome and then the the last thing um is bottom line offer some help offer some kindness offer advice to those newcomers you know make sure again offer them their prompts to help them feel welcome so again there's not a lot of rocket science here to help people people feel included and it's not always just about being a woman or a fill-in-the-blank um underrepresented group it's about including people and these simple acts can help people feel more included so as I start to wrap up here for you I hope that one of the things you take away is there's so many elements to diversity it's not just about gender and orientation and race there there are aspects up here that I didn't even talk about I recently went to a diversity talk where there was someone who used to be in the military and they were talking about how how hard it can be to feel included because they just have a different way of speaking and acting so there are lots of different diversity groups I just asked that you open your mind to all the groups that we need to make sure um that we bring into our population and communities and then I I've talked about several ideas um there's a lot that our communities can do the foundations can do they can offer communities and networking and and summits like they do and these are really important and very much encouraged but I really hope that you take away one or even two ideas of something that you can do starting today these are really simple acts again it's giving prompts to the quiet person in the room it's being sensitive to other people's backgrounds it's apologizing if you step over the line we talked about yesterday in one of the diversity talks that you might make mistakes um but you can apologize and move on so I just ask that you take one or two of these ideas and start practicing them today and we'll all together move the needle so I'm getting to the end here I want to see if you'd like to test your inclusion skills so I've hopefully you already knew something come in I've given you a couple more ideas so I set up this challenge on the IBM coder community I'm really proud of this worked with some colleagues and there are three challenges there one challenge I just ask you to submit one of your best practices ideas another one is read the Linux foundation event code of conduct which you hopefully you already did before you came here but you can test there's a little little quiz so you can test your knowledge on that and then the third I'm really excited about IBM launched this AI fairness 360 open source project Eric was talking about it earlier it reduces bias in machine learning this is so important we need to do this in our real lives but it's also about the technology to reduce bias as well so if you go to that challenge you can download the code try it yourself and take a little quiz and hopefully earn yourself a badge so I encourage you to go try it's very fun and I look forward to your feedback on your ideas for best practices and so I've given you a lot of ideas and bottom line I would just suggest that if you forgotten everything that I've said if you forgot everything in the diversity track always lead with kindness it will get you there I know it's not enough to always be nice we need to be sensitive to backgrounds but if all else fails just be kind to those in the room and sensitive so thank you for the time thank you Linux Foundation again for giving me this opportunity to talk about this important topic so thanks thank you thank you