Hi Tamao
All I can say is ..Wow!
Thanks for taking the time to put down your thoughts, observations and
general knowledge on this. I'm still taking it all in - but it's clear
to me that there are some opportunities out there that we can start
looking into.
Thanks also for the offer of help on the contact side and I'll let you
know if I need some.
Thanks
Sharan
On 23/05/16 21:18, tamaonakah...@gmail.com wrote:
My personal approach has been to work with pragmatic career-focused women (like
myself) because it helps to have some singularity of motivation. I can't solve
all of the diversity in tech issues, but I contribute in my own way by running
the SF Women's JUG and partnering with organizations such as Women who code. So
from that perspective, here are my 2 cents fwiw:
1. Career-development angle: personally I would start with organizations such
as Hackbright whose primary goal is to train and put women in the workforce. As
I feel is pretty established among engineering managers and that Jessica
McKellar emphasizes (https://youtu.be/IXnNgLmd6BM), having open source
contributions on your resume definitely helps during the interview process. I'm
sure that this is part of the ASF recruiting language, but I think it would
help to actively inject that into partnership activities with organizations
such as Hackbright. I specifically mention Hackbright as well because one of
our VPs at my last job mentioned that among all of the code schools hires, he's
been most impressed by the quality of Hackbright graduates (who are women if
you didn't know). They've hired 7 Hackbright women to date with great results.
I reached out to my Hackbright contacts and they've said that they don't have
an open source program in place, but they are pursuing it and would love to
consider partnerships with the ASF. I'd be happy to connect you.
Women who code is also committed to getting women jobs in engineering, but their meetups
tend to have a lot of beginners from my own experience (I've attended and hosted many).
It may be more difficult to inject the "contribute" message through their
meetups, but they are helpful to spread the word through their NL. Also, in the very
least, if there isn't one already, there should at least be one talk on making
contributions at their new annual conference. If you don't hear back from them, I'm happy
to connect you again.
2. Focused sprints?
PyCon and the Python community in general has better diversity numbers from
what I've seen. I feel that they do a pretty good job at making the sprints at
the event fun and inviting (https://youtu.be/hOtKgFaFcz0) for many. The next
one is coming up (https://us.pycon.org/2016/community/sprints/) so if any of
you are there, it may be worth checking out. They always do an intro to sprints
session (which you can see in the above Jessica McKellar video). Since you're
already talking with PyLadies, you can get more details on how they and
DjangoGirls are involved in recruitment for that.
WWC meetups and Railsbridge immediately introduce their women to Git and
GitHub, but from what I know they are dealing with beginner coders so they
don't talk about contributing to Ruby or Rails.
3. Featured projects and mentorship
I often feel overwhelmed by the myriad of projects that get put forth and then I'm told
"pick one and start contributing!" Personally, if you did some type of
partnered session with Hackbright students or at a contribution-specific WWC Meetup, I
would see value in doing a weekend sprint where you select a couple of key projects to
walk people through the steps to contribute. One of Hackbright's strengths is their
mentoring structure that continues after graduation. Perhaps having some ASF project
owners to volunteer as mentors specifically to walk a group of new students through a
series of sprints would be one way to go.
4. Code of Conduct and diversity ownership
I'm glad that this thread is here because as Sarah Sharp emphasizes
(https://youtu.be/ZCvK_7FagGE) diversity is everyone's responsibility and so
often the minority is tasked with unpaid/after-hours work to represent a
company's diversity or even build its diversity program. The topic came up at
this year's women in leadership conference (http://www.wilconference.org) in a
very disturbing way as well. We heard a good number of stories of women
(already getting paid less than their male counterparts) being asked to put in
extra unpaid time to go to some recruiting event to be the (female or female of
color) face of the company. It's important to understand this as a shared
responsibility.
Finally, since I mention Sarah Sharp, let's hope that after all of this
recruitment that we don't have the same debacle that happened with her, Linus,
and other foul-mouthed community members (http://m.slashdot.org/story/188877).
At least from what I've heard from other Linux community members, her work is
greatly respected and it seems a loss to the technology that she is no longer
contributing. Similarly, Rod Johnson made remarks to the Scala community a few
years ago that it will have challenges growing healthily if they continue their
trend of showing disrespect in the forums and strongly criticizing people who
are just getting started with Scala (https://youtu.be/DBu6zmrZ_50). Members who
receive a great deal of generosity during their growth are likely to pay it
forward.
Hope this helps!
Best,
Tamao Nakahara
@mewzherder
devrelcon.com
On May 23, 2016, at 9:27 AM, Sharan Foga <sharan.f...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks Alex. It all helps :-)
Thanks
Sharan
On 23 May 2016 18:08, "Alex Harui" <aha...@adobe.com> wrote:
Also, not specific to software: http://leanin.org
HTH,
-Alex
On 5/23/16, 6:36 AM, "Patricia Shanahan" <p...@acm.org> wrote:
Systers, http://anitaborg.org/get-involved/systers/
More generally, the Wikipedia article on "Women in Computing",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing, has some possible
resources.
On 5/23/2016 3:45 AM, Sharan Foga wrote:
Hi All
Just a quick update. I've sent out an email to the following groups so
far:
- Pyladies
- Phpladies
- Women Who Code
- Girls Who Code
- Black Girls Code
I'll post any feedback I get. Also if anyone thinks of any other groups
they'd like me to contact then please let me know.
Thanks
Sharan
On 20/05/16 14:26, Sharan Foga wrote:
Thanks very much to everyone for their feedback and support.
Rich - I will contact these groups to see what feedback and advice
they can give.
Thanks
Sharan
On 20/05/16 14:05, Rich Bowen wrote:
I would suggest that the most constructive thing we could do would be
to
reach out to pyladies and phpwomen and other similar organizations
and ask
for recommendations and assistance in setting up a similar entity
here.
On May 19, 2016 11:18, "Sharan Foga" <sharan.f...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All
I'm interested in finding out how we could encourage more women to
participate on Apache projects. It's a discussion topic that came up
last
week while I was at Apachecon. My understanding is that we don't
have any
current strategies in place so I think it could be good to look at
gathering some ideas about how to tackle the problem and also hear
about
any lessons learned from any previous or similar strategies.
What do people think?
Thanks
Sharan
