 Hi, my name is Brian Douglas, and I'm going to be giving a talk about open source contributions. In particular, open source contributions from communities that are underrepresented. I've got a unique experience I'd like to share, so just keep that lens. But before I actually start, I wanted to jump into a concept. So HBCU is an acronym used in the U.S. for historically black colleges or universities. And this was a necessity that came out of, well, basically out of segregation. We're coming, at the time of this recording, we're only a few days away from the anniversary of Juneteenth, which is the actual mark of two years after emancipation proclamation, which is the law that actually freed all enslaved peoples in the U.S. It took two years until the last person was actually freed when actually let them know in Texas. So that's a big date for black people in the U.S., African-Americans, because it marks a time where not only were we blocked from access to a lot of things, we were also oppressed. But I say all this because three years after that date, we actually had one of the earlier HBCUs, one of the more successful ones as well, which is Hampton University. Hampton University was actually started in 1868. And the goal is really just to teach black people in the U.S. skills and trade and things to actually get them out of the systematic things that we're sort of oppressing them and give them a way to basically make money and have a lifestyle. This is one of many black colleges in the U.S. that were created around this time. And one of the few to actually remain till this day. One of the, actually alumnus of Hampton University is Booker T. Washington. But we don't have to go into more detail. It's one of the build, since the context around, there were a group of people in the U.S. who really just did not have access to information. And the historical black colleges, they still are around thanks to the Civil Rights Movement back in 1964 that was established to basically honor these institutions that were around at a time where people in the U.S. could not have access to this type of information. This like regular information that we just take for granted. And I think that sort of same context and the same lens actually lends itself to open source. And I'll go deeper in that story, not specifically the black colleges, but more about the access to information. That's really the goal around this talk. But before I jump into that, I actually want to talk about my path in open source. And my path actually came around the time, 2015, Node.js was actually pretty up and coming. And I had the task to create a group, a group of black engineers and designers and business people who wanted to collect and build startups, build ideas together. And this group is called Steamrollers. It's no longer around today, but it was built on Slack and another platform called Typeform. Because at the time, Slack, you could not actually invite people to your Slack group without manually sending them email. So we wanted to automate the process of inviting more people to our group. And the way we did this is, well, the way I did it, because I was actually nominated as a tech lead. I was, despite being a junior engineer, I actually had the most technical experience and was able to build an automation, basically a bot to whenever someone submitted their names to a form or to the Typeform, it would then send an email to join the Slack group. Super trivial, it's something that's actually super solved today. But yeah, so my interaction was really just to make this work. And the best way I can actually make it work is to Java's group, or specifically Node.js. And what I like about it is that Node.js actually was pretty available. The solution I found was actually open source. And I found it through this guy, Chad, he actually had a stuff open source and I went on GitHub, found this profile, because I had a lot of questions. I actually did not really know how to use Node.js properly. I was at the time only writing Ruby code for work and then offloading on my front end JavaScript stuff to another developer. So I had to learn how to do Node.js. And I had to learn how to use this project because it basically solved all the problems I wanted to do, except it just wasn't working properly. And at the time, there was a whole I OJS thing that was happening that I wasn't aware of. And Chad was able to actually get me through that. Not easily, it was actually a lot of back and forth through a weekend to the point where he actually solved the problem. And what I appreciate this next experience and my experience in open source is that Chad never once, despite me emailing him in his personal email account, he never once said, hey, please stop emailing. Hey, this is not the proper way to do open source. Hey, you're doing it wrong. He actually just answered my questions. And he answered the questions where I got to the point where it worked and I was able to move on and get the project up and running. But also the entire time, he was actually in Thailand at a K-pop concert, which he shared me a picture here. And I was super appreciative that he took the time out of his day, his week, his evening to actually answer my questions and help me along. And I think there's a lot to learn from that story and that I want to share with other people too, like going forward. Someone actually spent the time to mentor me and grow my career into open source and I'm super appreciative of that. Now today, open source is pretty synonymous with most development. I don't think you could write code full-time at any company and not touch an open source project. I mean, there are at least 10% of organizations that don't use open source, which I have a bunch of survey data from Black Duck, which is a security company. And here you can see the majority of companies are using open source. It's actually pretty synonymous. Looks like 96% of the 1,000 applications that are audited in 2016 contain something open source. So as I mentioned, open source is pretty synonymous like when and it's like ingrained in the way we do code today. Now, according to some actual hiring data from the Linux Foundation as well as Dice Jobs and appreciate everybody putting this information out there and really helps help my story, but also helps everybody else to sort of understand that open source is super valuable. Like opens, there's a lot of companies that leverage the GitHub profile or your contributions or to either identify candidates, but also it's a good way to actually source candidates. If you have an open source project out there and you're getting contributions, it's a good idea. It's a good way for people to actually engage the company itself or the company itself to engage those developers. So if I get some all that, that I just those last few slides that open source is actually really valuable for your career. You can't really move on without it. So with all that being said, I work for this company called GitHub. I like to imagine that everybody's first experience could be their first issue. And that's a quote that I sort of butchered from Stanley, which he was in the context of comic books that I want to set the stage and I just want to make sure everybody knows what GitHub is. If you don't know what it is, it's a collaboration platform for developers. It's a way for you to sort of connect the people to the code. And that's that's what it is. And I personally am a developer advocate at GitHub. That's my name on Brian Douglas. And this is what I look like on the internet as well. So thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for the opportunity to be actually listening to my talk in this as well as the Linux Foundation for hosting this wonderful open source summit. I also joke that I'm a Beyonce advocate and this is intentional because GitHub is a lot of users and Beyonce has a lot of listeners. And I like to say I go to bat for the hive. And that's what I do for for GitHub, specifically. I'm also an ERG lead for sorry, I'm a co-lead for one of our black ERGs or the black ERG at GitHub. This is an employee resource group. That's what the ERG stands for. And it really focused on retention, growth to the black community at GitHub, as well as the black community that uses GitHub. The black cats. So the black cat is something that came up back in 2017. One of my colleagues at GitHub who's still there and I also co-lead with the black cat ERG. She came up with the idea of like, hey, we have all these active cats who have like the Lutrader cat. We've got some cats that represent the Indian community. We've got Japanese representation of cats. Like, why don't we have a black cat? And I think everybody sort of said, yeah, we should definitely have a black cat. So right off the bat, because GitHub is built on GitHub, I can go back and see all the issues. So this is actually excerpts people screen shotting different ideas for for octocats and they were looking for prominent black figures. So figures to the same caliber of like bookers. But we ended up not following on any of these octocats or sorry, any of these black figures. We actually decided on Benjamin Bannaker. And the reason for Benjamin Bannaker is Benjamin Bannaker, despite the existence of HBCU is Benjamin Bannaker did not actually attend in HBCU. He actually was self taught and taught himself science and math and astronomy all on his own. I personally have never heard of Benjamin Bannaker until I joined GitHub. And I think for the majority, most people haven't heard of Benjamin Bannaker, but I think what the biggest deal to that Benjamin Bannaker is that he he actually helped out with the civil engineering in Washington DC. But he also wrote letters to Thomas Jefferson and he wrote letters to Thomas Jefferson on a regular basis to the point where Thomas Jefferson started understanding the fact that perhaps black people were more than just three-fifths of a man and that they were actually able to have educated conversations, which was not a common concept. At the time, so I say all this because the Benjamin Bannaker, I think is really important to the black, the cats, because it actually is a representation of we are seen and we are heard at GitHub. And we represent a very strong voice at GitHub too, as well. Though we aren't, you know, a ton of people like think as of today. We have 60 active members of of the black, the cats that doesn't encompass all black employees at GitHub. But these are all active members who who joined on meetings and actually pushed towards ideas. 2019, we had a black cat many summits. So GitHub itself is a remote company. We're focused all across the world. Our user base is actually across the world as well. And we all get together once a year to all basically see each other in the same room and actually work on different projects and different goals. And the goals that we sort of came out of that in 2019 was one of our main top line goal was just attract and empower black lives and tech. And that's what I was talking about of internal focus, but also external. And out of these goals, one of the goals I worked on personally was open source and education. We had a really strong goal of like there is there is this thought around the pipeline of black engineers being very small. The HBCU market of historically black colleges exist because pipeline of getting people in education and actually giving them to complete education, higher education, specifically black individuals has historically been a challenge. I know it's better much now today. But when you when you think about recruitment and education of black individuals, I don't think when you start thinking about tech, HBCU doesn't really come up a lot in the conversation. So there's more and more of a reason for us to constantly try to talk to the top of the funnel, the pipeline. If you think of onboarding engineers as a funnel, you know, 16, 17 year olds, college students, education is really important. And one thing that we found as well is that the country, quite a few African countries, but specifically Nigeria, as far as open source contributions and contributors ranked number four. And it was a big deal as far as growth back in the 2018, 2019 year. And I bring this up because out of the open source education, we came up with the idea of doing an international hackathon. It's something we've actually wanted to do for quite some time. Instead of jumping full force into the international hackathon, we actually went to this other idea, which was taking the concept of a hackathon focused on collaborating and growing open source or the black community and powering open source. We came up to this idea called floss and code and floss and code was and still is it's a scalable reproducible hackathon in a box. So anybody at GitHub can basically take this concept of floss and code and take it to their community. So it's not specifically for the black community. It's not specifically for the Latin community or even just the general community at all as a whole. People could take this concept internally and host that event on their own. And floss, if you aren't familiar, I mean, again, every issue could be someone's first issue. We actually leveraged this term. And the way we went to sort of quote unquote market was free license open source software. I realize free as in Libre open source software is a thing. And then there's that's the preferred acronym. But honestly, it really doesn't matter because what we're really focused on is actually educating individuals, specifically black individuals for the black to cat's sake of open source. And that's exactly what it did. So the majority of the group, the room did not even know what floss was. They knew of it as the popular dance back in 2019. When I when I think about open source, I think of this idea of if you don't got sauce in your loss, it's a quote actually taken from the godfather of trap music, which is Gucci main. And this is one of the interviews he did and back in the late 2000s. And it's really focused around access to information. Like if you don't really know what you're doing, it's it's hard to know what you're doing. And I think that comes in the really comes in the limelight of open source, when you think about how a lot of people just don't know how to get started. People don't really know what to do or the existence of open source. But I wanted to point out that this the focus for the floss and code event was really we went through the black sororities and fraternities. And we actually reached out to them and said, hey, we're going to host event in Atlanta, would you please come by? And we actually hosted this in June of last year and the real focus was just teaching, educating existing engineers and black students on how to do open source. The focus was actually bringing remotely four different maintainers of different projects. So this is Shelley from the electron project and also providing support. So we had nine black to cats in the room who are also providing support on the ground, as well as a group of in the GitHub engineers who are providing support through Slack channels. And the focus was, hey, we're going to teach you about open source. So we had a panel, we had some talks and we let them know that open sources exist. We let them know through stories of different students who got their first jobs through open source and leverage the stories that they encourage people to do open source in the day. So it was not a hackathon. It was actually more of a hack day and the goal with the goal being everybody's going to have their first contribution to open source today. Local. Also, I wanted to point out that this was all based in East Atlanta. I didn't actually draw that correlation. East Atlanta is actually predominantly black as well as, yeah, it's a predominantly black neighborhood. It definitely has some of the more poor residents in the area as well. And that was one of our focus too as well. We wanted to not focus on the underserved area, just general like the inner city. We wanted to actually focus on the underserved area just generally in the city. When I attend Atlanta events or conferences, I don't usually attend them in Atlanta. I always end up attending them for tech conferences outside of Atlanta instead of the suburbs. So I bring this up because one of the local residents who was a Uber driver actually shared that he'd never seen anything like this. He'd been a part of Atlanta communities and a lot of tech events as well. But what would bloom away is that we were actually shipping code and we were actually learning tangible things to the point where he actually stuck around for like a good hour after even once his ride was complete. He actually stuck around, learned about open source and actually we exchanged contact information as well, which is super appreciative that even someone who wasn't traditionally an engineer was able to get value out of the event as well. I also wanted to point out that we also had represent representatives from the county commissioners as well as the state representatives come through, talk to the event, talk to the attendees around the value of having the technical skills as engineers and to pursue their education as well and complete that. Again, the majority of the individuals in the room were attendees of historically black colleges. We wanted to give that sort of kickstart or ramp up into educating them around the idea of open source. Altogether, we had 75 attendees, one driver, 47 open issues, 17 documentation PRs, four blog posts and two tech PRs merged from this event alone. It was quite a success. If we had one PR opened, it would have been a success. But I think we over exceeded our expectations around having black engineers learn open source. We could not have done this without the partnership of Oh Hub, Opportunity Hub and they basically gave us a connection to our DJ as well. If you did not notice in the background, we do have a DJ in the background. So the entire time the event, we had a DJ playing. We had an after party as well. And then we had a few trucks as well just to celebrate the fact that open source exists, celebrate the fact that we just learned and did something pretty awesome. I also want to point out that we ended up shipping the Nigeria hackathon to based on this concept that we actually learned through Atlanta. We were able to ship that same experience in Nigeria and Lagos, which I'm super appreciative that we were able to do that as well. So I just wanted to reiterate that this is about access and information at a time where information about open source is not freely distributed. I think that we have lots of information out there. I think if you googled enough, you can actually find it. But I think what we need to do is actually let people know that this accent, this information is free access, open source free, but also access to improving your resume, improving your your viability of getting jobs is also available to you. I always I like this quote about from MLK around. I believe we ought to do all we can and seek, lift ourselves by our own bootstraps. But it's a cruel jest to say that a boot to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his bootstraps. And like, I think this really this cruel jest or this this idea of round like, hey, you have the information, just go and do it. Or I'm going to walk into an open source project and this contribute day one. Like, I think that's sort of naive and I think that sort of puts a lot of it sort of perpetuates this sort of injustice and the lack of information sharing that we we have as a community, a tech community. And I just want to just call out and say like the path in the open source is a little bit broken. I think it sort of leans on individuals who have the time, have the capital, have the the experience to be able to jump in there and do something. And it also leans on a lot of like expectation that you should already know about something like this. So I think there's always going to be opportunity for us to continue to teach and to grow communities. And then we can we don't have to actually rely on, hey, looking for pipelines or trying to leverage existing communities. If you're looking for black engineers, if you're looking for female engineers, if you're looking for Latin engineers, we should always be working on that. That's sort of into the funnel, the path of open source. I also talk about this term, intentional gatekeeping. Like if we're not doing everything we can to make things easy and approachable for individuals to do open source, we're we're creating a gate for people to actually get involved. And I'm very, I'm very adamant around saying it even internally at GitHub is saying there's still missing parts to getting involved in open source. Like GitHub is truly the place to discover open source. Why is it that every time I go to I need to I go to contribute to a project? I don't know where to start. And there are some really good information out there that's available to anybody who wants it, which is open source guide. Part of four members of my team who have moved on to do other things within the get up like get up sponsors started this thing called open source guide, which is a lot of free information to starting your own open source project, contributing, understanding licenses, all the information is out there. Good first issue is like another good project is a good idea to as well. And so the way to label the issues for people to know. Coach, here's another project that I've known since I've been an engineer. I knew about this before I even got in the open source of a way to get issues delivered to you by email every morning. And it's like a really good way for you to not no longer struggle through understanding like what is there to get started. But I would say this last three, three slides were really about the information being there. But I think there's still a broken piece where we don't know what to do with that information just because it's there. So I personally, I built a project called open source open sauce. And it's an open source project to manage your open source contributions. I built this back in 2016, the end 2016. And it was really focused around me to saving repositories and taking notes on it to discover later. I really built this project out of the actually I built flossing code out of the idea of this project because I knew there was an imbalance of information. And I wanted to mirror all these ideas into basically building a flossing code that I can have like literally every weekend with myself where I can, what about open source, talk to maintainers and contribute back. One more note that I just want to mention, the idea of mentorship is great, but I think sponsorship is always going to be a step above. And there's an obvious feature that GitHub has, which is called GitHub sponsors. You might not have heard of it, but just know that exists. Um, I personally have been borderline depressed. I don't know if I can openly say I was depressed in the last couple of weeks, just being a black male and seeing everything that's happened in society. Uh, it's been quite hard to watch. And I say that because, uh, a couple of weekends ago, I just basically was just sort of fed up on this, my involvement in open source and knowing that I had done stuff like flossing code, I wanted to give back, continue to give back to my community. And it went so well that I had, uh, I think roughly around 14 people respond and I responded to all of them, uh, cause I wanted to give back to the community that I come from. I want to give back to the community that maybe I didn't even grow up in. Uh, there's engineers from UK's and engineers from Africa, uh, engineers from, um, alab- Huntsville, Alabama. I wanted to give back to this community because I feel like valuing and sponsoring their career, um, and their involvement in open source is only going to help the situation down the road. So when we start talking about getting black individuals on board seats and black individuals, maintaining and working as engineers at company, like we don't have to have that conversation five years from now, because I think if we continue to look at the community that needs the most help or communities that would like to advance themselves into open source, like we should just do it. And, uh, I feel like sponsoring is a way I can, I can help and I can invest in this community. And I'm not, this is not a call out for everybody else to do this. It's just me sharing my story. Um, and sharing Monica's story. Monica, she's been involved in react ladies, um, pretty early on, actually sort of got it off the ground, uh, and doing some really awesome stuff and doing some teaching on egghead. And I found a Monica of roughly a month ago and I've did the call out and Monica responded. And now we have 49 sponsors actually sponsoring Monica. And I think her career will now be directly impacted, uh, because of this event that sort of I just threw out there. And I think, uh, this idea is like really not about the money. I don't get how sponsors it is about, you know, giving money to engineers, but I think it's really more about the access, the access information, uh, because I think what we really need to do is in this sort of unintentional gatekeeping, I know this is not intentional for people to say, Hey, you're not allowed to do open source or Hey, there's not a path for you in the open source today. Uh, I think we could end that and literally to start investing in, in communities, start investing in people and I would really encourage you, let's start freely giving access to open source. If there was somebody with questions, take the time to respond to them, even if it's in the wrong form, if it's to email, that's fine. Push them back into the issues or the stack overflow, but follow through. And if, especially if you have the time, if you don't have the time, consider stopped doing open source because, uh, I honestly think that open source really needs to be inviting and it needs to have to be a pathway for more and more contributions for people who don't look like us. So thank you very much. My name is B Dougie L on Twitter and I'm also B Dougie on GitHub.