 Hi, thank you for joining us on Superuser TV today. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourselves? Hi, yeah, look, I'm Kavith Munshi. I'm the CTO of a company called Actira. I'm also on the open-set board of directors as an individual director. And I kind of run the, I'm one of the co-founders of the diversity working group. So, thank you Kavith. I'm Nithya Ruff. I work for Sandisk. And I'm the director of open-source strategy for Sandisk. And I'm also a member of the Women of OpenStack working group. And we are very involved with the CINDA project as part of OpenStack. Great, thanks again for joining us. So, can you please give us a little background on what does the diversity work group does and what Women of OpenStack does as well, please? So, the diversity working group was established to ensure and to kind of take stock of where the open-set project and the foundation stood with regards to diversity. And we cover gender, geographical, social, economic, age. We cover all kinds of diversity. And our aim is to kind of help the foundation become as inclusive as possible. So, this is, we are more about looking at what's there right now and what steps to take in the future to ensure that the foundation meets its diversity goals. I think it's a wonderful, big tent that Kavith leads because it includes everybody. And one of the constituents that PFO is focused on is women because women in tech are really a very, very small percentage compared to the opportunities in tech. They're also going to run into shortages in programmers and coders in tech. And we need everybody to be engaged, everybody to be involved in what's happening in tech. So, our main focus in Women of OpenStack is to help new people come on board with training, with onboarding, with friendly faces type of breakfast meetings. We also help with mentoring. We help with other training programs. Today, for instance, we did GetGarrett training so women can understand what that is. And then last but not the least, we're also trying to create a more inclusive community by engaging with the men of OpenStack and helping them be advocates and allies to women in OpenStack. Great. And so you mentioned, you know, diversity working group kind of looking at what's there today and how do we meet the goals and you're enabling new people to join the community and participate actively in the community. The diversity working group had a survey that they conducted. What were some of the findings from that survey? Great question. So what we actually found out was there were a lot of subgroups that kind of face the same issues of starting out on the projects. They found that it was a bit difficult to get started. They found that the onboarding process was difficult. They found the medium of communication, mainly IRC, to be a bit difficult. They also felt that it was a matter of reaching connecting with the right people, getting the right attention. And we also found that there were certain subgroups that felt they were not being included as much. This went to LGBTQ members of the community. Women also kind of felt that they were not being included as much. So the survey was very telling in so far as it gave us a good idea of the commonality of the problems that people faced and gave us a few areas to focus on and kind of attack to ensure that people felt included in the process. No, I concur. And so was the get-get training you just mentioned, was that decided on based on some of the findings and the tooling that he just mentioned? Absolutely. And in fact, we had men and women at the training. It was open to everybody. And we had an upstream university Saturday and Sunday of this week, you know, prior to the conference starting. And that was also as a result of what Kavith was saying. I think we want to attract and retain and develop coders in the project. And this is the best way to do it and make it as easy as possible for them to get engaged. We also did command presence training on Sunday, which helps people who have to deliver bad news to execs or leadership to be able to do it with grace and with composure. And so these are some of the things that came out of the survey results. I need some other training. Yes, it is good training. Great, so it sounds like, you know, we've accomplished a lot in the short amount of time that we've been focused on these initiatives. What are you focused on now? So what's next from your groups? Sure, so I think we have seen the results from the survey and we have seen some of the initiatives taken at the summit level, at the board level, right? So what, and at the foundation level, what we would like to do personally is, personally, what I would like to see is taking the upstream training local. So go to the various days that are happening, the China Day, the India Day, the Taiwan Day, and kind of organize the upstream training there or maybe a part of the upstream training there. So people who cannot get to the summit also get an opportunity to feel included. I think we also want to provide a better forum for women and other minorities to have a voice. I think we should now focus on doing, taking the initiatives locally and each user group is very well equipped to do that. So it's about empowering the user groups now. Those are really wonderful initiatives and we had a breakfast meeting on Tuesday morning and we worked in subgroups to really uncover what are the next priorities we need to work on before Barcelona. And before I share those priorities, I wanted to say we made a tremendous amount of progress as a women of OpenStack. Just a few years ago, we were 5% of the conference and this conference in Austin, we are 12% of the conference. So that's a huge step and I think numbers and metrics are one of our priorities for the future as well, which is keep track of code commits, involvement in projects, because that will show us progress and that the needle is moving. The second priority is more buddy system for new people coming to conferences, new people coming into OpenStack so that they feel that there's someone they can go to as they progress into OpenStack. The third thing that the women of OpenStack mentioned is to see more speakers, diverse speakers in the open source, OpenStack ranks, whether it's at the keynote level or otherwise, and to make sure that these speakers get the help they need to prepare because they're often the first time suppliers for abstracts or selected and help them be really good speakers on the panel. And lastly, continue to do the mail advocacy work because I think if men are 70, 80% of OpenStack they need to be part of the inclusion equation and they need to be allies, they need just like Kavitha's and Imad, Susu and Mark Mule and others are. So we'd love to continue that program. Great, well thank you and have a great summit. Thank you. Thank you.