 So today, I will talk about diversity in open source from an agent perspective. Agenda is this. First, I will talk about why I've chosen this theme along with my background. I will present some open source participation data and a brief history of open source in Asia. I will share a list of potential barriers and ideas to overcome them. And finally, I will close the talk with a summary of key points. It's about myself. I'm Masai Shida, Japanese, a senior program manager at BMI Ospo. In the open source community strategy team, I am responsible for strategic alignment of ecosystem open source contributions across the organization. I run several programs to align BMI's open source contribution with the product strategies, improved project health and BMI's open source competencies. I was born and grew up in Japan. I took muscle physics as majors and studied engineering at university. After graduation, I joined NEC, a global Japanese technology company. I started as a software developer for operating systems, firmware and Windows applications. I would travel between Japan and the US for four years. Then I had an opportunity to lead the UK team for 3G mobile phone development based on 3GPP standard. There I met my English husband, moved to UK in 2005, left NEC Japan and joined Renesus Electronics in New York. At Renesus, I was responsible for the European software development on Linux based tablet and Android mobile phone platforms. So it was my first contact with open source. I worked on Linux BSP to provide SDK and HDK to build the software on Renesus based platform. I worked with Nokia R&D team for the modern development and the turnkey platform development. In 2014, I had an opportunity to work at Cisco, reading a company acquisition as a technical project manager. There I was responsible for infrastructure transformation and data center migration. My career changed from telecoms to cloud and from leading technical development to technical program management. Then I worked at several companies at the global program delivery professional to manage mobile phone application development, security compliance programs and a large scale of digital transformation. During this period, I pulled my career a couple of times in order to support the family and to help my son's education. So please raise your hand if you're from Asian countries. Thank you. So Asia is the world's most populated continent with a great potential to become a driving force of open source. The continent is extremely culturally diverse. Perhaps everyone agrees that open source presence is very strong in North America today and its official language is English. As many studies shows, a variety of perspectives and experiences create a richer and stronger community, and they produce more innovative solutions. Many companies try to promote and recruit a variety of people to increase their diversity. For open source community, it is a little bit more complex. Although many open source foundations run a number of great projects to improve the community DEI status, it takes longer due to its nature. Today, I'm going to identify possible reasons that prevent strong Asian participation to open source so that we can think how to improve it. So the source of graphic data is the 2021 October Spy GitHub. So left diagram is actually a world map, and these two big squares are India and China, shows the number of the GitHub users. And the graph in the right shows that Asia is the second region of the GitHub users. So as data shows, the number of Asian open source developers is high, and its growth is high compared with the other regions. However, on the other hand, Asian representation does not seem so strong in some places. As I often hear that many open source communities are struggling to get strong Asian participation in their open source communities. As of today, many community leaders predominant from the US and Europe, and many open source targets show low or very low Asian participation. So we have a great opportunity to reset the balance. Additionally, if you look more closely, we can see the participation from Asia is predominantly from China and India. The region consists of over 20 countries, and they are positively engaged in open source, supported by organizations who recognize the importance of open source. So let me quickly touch on how each Asian country started the open source initiatives in the last 20 years. Open source history in Asia started with VNACs, along with strong support by each national government. By early 2000, open source was not yet well recognized in most Asian countries. Japan was one of the early adopters of VNACs, and already started to adopt open source. With help from Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, many open source organizations were set up in Asian countries, as listed in the slide. Funding from the central government triggered and accelerated the spread and increased awareness of open source in Asia. And today, many open source conferences are held across Asia every year. I've shown just a few on the slide. However, I'm sure many of you have already attended these, and many others have not shown here. So now we know that the firm foundation for open source exists. Next, let's look at the geographical and social factors that could impact strong participation in open source. I cannot talk for all of Asia, but I've identified some key reasons that could explain the limited participation today. In the last months, I have interviewed a number of Asian colleagues, ex-colleagues, and open source community members. In the last few slides, I'd like to share my findings so that together we can think of how to improve participation. Our ultimate goal is to have as many matured open source communities across Asia as there are in the US and Europe. Time. So time differences and limitations are a significant factor in the participation with open source. This is common to all regions. For some regions, it is a dominant factor. For engineers in Asia, unfriendly meeting times are strong barriers for community participation. The research shows more new members remain in the communities when they actively participate or join the discussions, rather than they just commit code or create issues. One of the steering committee members in India commented, lots of projects in the CNCS space have meetings that are too late for APAC regions. Personally, I've attended some meetings at midnight when I was just starting out my career, but I'm not able to do that right now. Not able to attend meetings means that I lose visibility. I'm lucky enough to have enough credibility in the community, but for those just starting out, this is a huge barrier to growth. There are also times when I've missed late meetings and walking up to see decisions have been made without my input. Although there is a challenge to organize the community meetings at sociable times for everyone, we need to be mindful and flex where we can. Another time-related challenge is having the time available for open source. In fact, most developers across all regions listed in sufficient time as the biggest barrier for contributing to open source projects. The situation varies if you are allowed to work on open source during working hours or not, or if you can afford to spend time for open source outside of your core hours. This would also touch the regional culture and other social aspects, so I will come back to that. Language barriers have been mentioned by nearly all the people I interviewed. It is probably the biggest barrier for Asian people. Language can be also a challenge for other European countries whose first language is not English. However, those countries whose language is Latin-based perhaps find it less of an issue. Most people say reading and writing is not a problem, but it is still a barrier, especially when you are busy, as it takes extra time and work, even with the dictionary and translation tools. Here, real-time conversation in English is a challenge. When the spoken language is heavily accented, when there is background noise or poor audio quality, or more than one person speaking at a time, the situation can be worse. While translating in their mind, the speakers are usually moved on. The diagram in the right is a good example. In Japan, 98% residents are Japanese, so we rarely need to speak in English day-to-day. I have been working in the US and Europe for 15 years, but still take some time to chew my ears into the sound and vocabulary when I talk with people who I meet for the first time. When I write emails and documents, I still use an online dictionary to choose the best words so that I can convey the right message. Quite often, I have a clear logic in my mind, but still struggle to communicate my thoughts as clearly as I'd like. So how about the other countries? India is known as the second largest English-speaking country. The business language is English, however, this is not true for all the other Asian countries. One of my colleagues said that they had very few participants from other Asian countries outside of India in their community meetings. One of the reasons quoted is that they might feel okay with written communication, but aren't comfortable with speaking in English in meetings. In China, less than 1% of residents speak English. It presents a large communication barrier for many international companies. One community board member in China have commented, I've been working in an international company for over 10 years where our official language is English. Based on my experiences, language is the biggest barrier for communication, especially oral communication. And it would impact personal development and team collaboration. It is also the biggest factor stopping people joining the open-source communities. However, in recent years, the situation seems to be improved mainly for two reasons. First, more young people joined who are more comfortable with English due to having exposure to English movies and dramas. And then second, auto translation tools, auto subtitles provided by Zoom Health. In China, it is also known that the document and communication is Chinese only for some open-source projects, especially if the products are developed for the local market only. There are other Asian countries who speak good English. Over 90% of people in Philippines speak English. But there also seems to be other factors behind language like confidence, shyness and fear of confrontation. So it's a complex mix and that cannot be easily resolved with technology and translation tools alone. The effect of company culture, this varies and will depend on the companies, their side, national culture and industries. BMA is a U.S. global company and it appreciates the value of open-source. It's a core part of our business strategy, so we have a strong open-source culture. The companies have been working in previous worlds similar, so I am comfortable to be in this environment. Many of them tend to continue with support and encouragement from their employers. However, this is not the case for all. Employee support is important. In general, many employees don't have the time and energy to contribute to open-source outside of personal interest. An Indian colleague said to me that there are practically no companies who are willing to support their employees to work on open-source in India. BMA and other tech giants companies are the exceptions, but otherwise if someone needs to work on open-source, they need to work in their own time. This does not scale while keeping work-life balance constraints in mind. This is a similar situation in Japan. Unless a company values the open-source concept, they don't quite appreciate the employees spending time to contribute to an external community. There is another aspect in Japan. Although changing jobs is becoming more common, especially among young people, lifetime employment predominates, so many people don't find as huge benefit to build the scale buildings and reputations in open-source communities as other countries. They don't need to seek new employment that often, thus building external reputations through communities is not a great value to them. Gender equity. Based on the number of studies, the majority of people in open-source are thought to be male. Gender bias is also one of the biggest factors that impacts the open-source environment. Unfortunately, it is well known that the Asian countries rank lower than the West for gender equity. At the start of my career, extreme gender bias was common throughout the workplace. For example, when I was working in a global enterprise company in Japan, we had a custom called T-duty, where on the monthly rotation, female employees have to arrive early to make morning tea and coffee to our matches. Young millennials and my son's generation cannot believe this, but we never questioned it at that time. I've also had the interesting story from a female PhD student in China who actively participates in open-source communities. When they select college majors and future careers, girls were always told that being a software engineer is very tiring and stressful job, also requires logical thinking that they lack the skill for girls. Okay, so as a result, many of them won't choose to become a software engineer even if they have pursued a master's degree, but they will still enter this industry, taking a product or operating roles. She also said that the society still expects women to take more responsibilities within the family, childcare especially. Gender issues are a sensitive and complicated topic in the current society and a large barrier to overcome. So social environment and culture are also important factors. I think characteristic tendency at a national level is one of the key factors in open-source community as this culture is unique. Here, I'm not trying to stereotype. We all have different personalities, but we are influenced by the cultural behaviors of our national nations as a collective. It is often said that the people in eastern Asian countries are often hardworking and more shy, feel uncomfortable with conflict, especially in English communications. One big factor is that Asian people feel more uncomfortable in the very confrontational part of open-source development culture. Asian people tend to prefer to maintain or seek harmony rather than risk conflict, especially when communicating in the second or third language. In these situations, it is often said that the person who speaks loudest who takes the credit with the more modest and humble contributors being overlooked. There are other social factors, for example, education and political inferences. Education. There was an observation that many schools still do not actively teach open-source concepts. If open-source participation is not a variation criteria for courses or further education, students won't invest time in it. Also, there is no standard approach or curriculum on how to collaborate with open-source in the public domain. Political inferences must be also considered. The research shows that despite the large number of GitHub users in China, there is a hesitation to contribute to external platforms as they use their own preferred platforms, like GT. A community member in China commented, one of the important drivers behind the impression that there aren't many voices heard from Chinese participants in the international communities could be their different platform usage habits and network barriers. Though Twitter, Stack Overflow and Slack are common across the world, many Chinese developers use their own tools. As per the October's report, developers in China were noticeably creating and consuming open-source projects on GitHub, but they still seem more hesitant to contribute to other people's repositories. Although 7.5 million GitHub users are based in China, more than 8 million users are also using GitHub, which is the China version of GitHub. In other words, half of Chinese open-source developers prefer to use their local tools instead of GitHub. Due to performance and cost, GT users are actually increasing. Finally, this is more subtle point observed by a few members regarding the community elections. They commented that they've noticed there are more chances of someone from the US getting elected in open-source elections over folks from APAC regions. For example, despite the very active contribution numbers in open-source, there aren't many steering committee members elected from APAC, as they could not get enough vote. So diversity is complex and defined by a combination of multiple factors, including geographical and social factors. Open-source is a community in itself, and it is strongly influenced by social behaviors. People who create a community are influenced by their own national behavioral tendencies. People who create a community are relying only on community support from a specific region like the US and Europe will affect project scalability and sustainability. Open Mindset is a key here. We must welcome diversity and actively embrace our differences, collaborative, and be curious. Change has to happen at both ends. Asian people also need to make additional efforts to participate more. They need to be role models for open-source culture and to lead others. Don't be scared of the differences. Be positive and find positive things rather than negative. Appreciate the differences, and this applies both sides to those to include and to be included. For real global participation, we need to seek real inclusive cultures so that communities can actually benefit with a real value act. Now I'd like to invite questions, and also I'd love to hear how your community approached these challenges today, or to hear about other factors that could impact participation. Thank you. Any questions, or can you share your experiences, please? In English? Yes. I have no idea what your person is trying to tell you. Thank you. That's better. I wonder if that is all to translate, or do you have a feeling? Perhaps I should just repeat very quickly. One of the current maintainers, my biggest issue is, or issue, the problem that I experience when dealing with Asian developers is the language barrier, where the emails are sometimes completely, I cannot understand what they mean. I don't get the impression that it is an auto-translation issue, although I'm not entirely certain about it. My biggest problem is sometimes how do I very politely come back to them, and I want to keep them involved. I don't want to scare them away, but on the other hand I have no idea what they're telling me. So that is sometimes a difficult thing, how to best phrase that going back. That tends to be the biggest issue that I experience, I mean, otherwise it is working fine, but how to do that is... Is that sort of complicated technical questions, or is that just no more sort of... No, it's technical. Technical questions, yes. I wonder in my experience, technical questions can be complicated, and also, so what I can raise is probably, you can sort of set the sort of template, so what you want to ask is this, and what you want to say is that, something like, so you can break down, and if you have some ideas, maybe you can just guess and sort of reformat it, and then just trying to ask, is this your point, and come to the point. That's what I did, and also I think I get used to be, not to be understood at all, for example my pronunciation, because I was born and grew up in Japan, working in Japanese company, never thought about coming to UK or Europe, so I didn't go to school basically, here, means that my English is just, I just studied and I did it, so I get used to not to be understood, and so if they ask the questions, then I'm happy to answer. So maybe it's not so, they don't care about to be questioned, and yeah, you can just ask, so what you want to ask is this, you can just guess and ask, so that you can just simplify and break down to the point. I think you can ask, yeah. I don't think they care. What do you think, other people? Yes, please. Yes, so it's very interesting topic because I used to work at Tencent Ospo, this open source program office, and back in the days, I was spending a huge energy on building the culture of open source to help our Chinese colleagues to understand more what are the meaningful ways to contribute to the open source community. I think this is like a lot of Chinese developers, language is definitely a barrier, but also like the understanding on the mindset of the open governance, the governance model, the open source model, it is completely not clear to them. I mean, most of them think that, oh, if I use a GitHub repository, it is kind of like contributing to open source, right? If I continuously using it, it is contributing. If I send a tweet about it, it is also contributing. So very few people work on the pull request, and very, very few people had a heat discussion on the pull request. They don't have this culture. So back in Tencent, we were spending a lot of time to build up this culture, and I don't know how it is going right now because I left Tencent two years ago. But I guess besides language barrier, the culture, the foundation, this kind of education foundation of open source is still missing pieces, at least in China, right? Are you raising China still? No, I'm actually right now based in Berlin in Germany, but I have a lot of connections with Chinese open source communities still. So that's one part. Yeah, thank you for that. Actually, I have spoken to a couple of Chinese people for this slide, and then it looks like, especially in the last one or two years, the government is really proactively involved to spread this concept, open source concept, and according to them, it is changing a lot. So you left Tencent two years ago. Maybe that culture is probably a little bit more spread, but it depends, you know, it's a huge company, and there are many, many companies there, sorry, a huge country, and there are many companies in there. But yeah, I think it's really important to sort of convey what is open source culture, because I was working with open source, but I really understand the culture properly and I joined the BNY Ospoor team, to be honest, and there are so many things I didn't know. So I think, you know, as a messenger, I think you have to just convey, you know, what open source culture is, you can't just use it, you can't be a free rider, you go to contribute, and then, you know, for the efficiency and security perspective and customer perspective, contributing real time to the, you know, the open source project is really, really important. And those things have to be sort of communicated, cascaded to the more bigger communities, that's what I think. But thank you, interesting comment. So I give technical talks in both English and Spanish. Spanish is my second language, and my best resource for that is CNCF's Language Localization Dictionary. So in that entire community, we've got a slack where I can go and say, open source supply chain, that's not easy to translate to Spanish, what do we want to call that, and can we all agree on that? That community and those conversations and creating what you can literally link back to and say, this is what I'm saying, and this is what it means in your language and mine. That has radically changed our ability to reach out and expand and speak fluently, interoperably, between developers. I would love to see more of that in different communities. We're trying to do the same now for cybersecurity and maybe that's something that we can do for the Linux kernel as well, right? Make sure that you can literally just link back and say, hey, this is the concept that I'm speaking to. Would something like that, you think, be a benefit in these spaces? I think that is actually a very good point. One thing that I have noticed with, it happens to be Chinese contributions, but it could be others as well, that it takes a long time, so many revisions for patch series to become accepted. So first of all, your point that they perhaps do not quite fully understand the concepts of open source, and in this case certainly Linux kernel development, the requirements that we set, that might well be part of the background. Possibly communication. It's very difficult for me. It's all very technical English to do with the programming language. I don't have enough of a background to tell if I could phrase it differently and then it would be better understood. But I certainly think that their concept of open source might not quite be the same that the kernel community would have. So that's a really interesting idea. Thank you. We have three minutes to go and then anyone can share your experience or thoughts. Hi. So I work for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap as a community facilitator and I think the contributors a lot from Asia Pacific, East, West Africa, like very different regions, very different languages that people are. So my experience I would say is really adapting your approach. I think that's, like from my perspective, really important of ways of communicating, whether there is a language barrier and I think there's loads of communities where, you know, I'm based in Europe, but you don't have to, like, you can connect with others in different languages. I think translation is also, like, quite important in different ways, I think, in communicating. Like, I've had cases where I ask people, you know, or they say, okay, I'm not comfortable, English is not my first language, and just having that expectation, I think when you communicate, so not just assuming that the other person but really adapting that approach, it's really important from my perspective. Yes, so I want to add some points. So initially I will also say that, you know, back in 10s and I will also say open source knows no boundary, right? So there should be no boundary between, you know, different communities or different countries. But in reality, you know, I later I found my own open source, commercial open source software company, so now I'm managing an international community spread over all of the world. And I'm kind of like, you know, running the Chinese part of this community separately. Right, so I pull out this, you know, regional community manager, and I say that, okay, so, you know, we kind of think or act differently than, you know, the other part of the world, right? Let's say, you know, the western world or the western culture, right? So let's just, you know, run this community kind of independently, right? Asynchronously, right? Asynchronously and independently. But meanwhile, let's keep, you know, the regional manager think up, right? The regional manager should be someone who has this international background who can see the both side, you know, from the west to the east. Yes, exactly, to set up the bridge on the higher level. Because you cannot expect that every people inside the community to be the bridge. I mean, as long as they are communicating with each other in Chinese, or they have a common understanding, common sense of open source, and they feel very comfortable about this community, that's good enough, right? You don't want to be built a utopian world where, you know, everybody kind of, you know, very excited about open source, even though they speak different languages, speak different cultures, some people use chopsticks, you know, this, I think this doesn't make sense to me, right? So that's the strategy that I would have, right? To set up a regional community manager to manage Chinese kind of community, and then have this kind of thinking on top, right? Yeah, you can put the resources to have that. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, right. Okay, yeah. Okay, thank you for your opinions, sharing your opinions and thoughts, and thank you for coming, and yeah. Please continue asking the questions if you still have, and then thanks for joining today.