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Recent reports from Facebook and Google confirmed what we’ve known all along: the giants of tech have a diversity problem. But in the world of open source, the problem is even worse.
According to a survey conducted last year, only about 11 percent of open source contributors are women. Meanwhile, women account for 23 percent of all computer programmers and 39.5 percent of web developers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This is particularly worrying when you consider that tech companies often prefer hiring developers who have open source experience—a preference that is only growing stronger. That means increasing diversity in open source will be key to increasing diversity in the tech industry as a whole. One of the most important ways to do that is to lower the barriers of entry to open source. And for the past five years, the non-profit organization OpenHatch has tried to do just that.
OpenHatch organizes Open Source Comes to Campus, a series of events held across the country dedicated to helping students from a wide range of backgrounds learn about open source. It’s not specifically designed to encourage diversity in open source, but that’s often a side effect of just helping more people get involved. “We’ve done events at women’s only schools, and we’re trying to do more events at schools with more diverse student bodies,” says OpenHatch program director Shauna Gordon-McKeon.
Open Source For Everyone
OpenHatch started in 2009 as a website dedicated to helping connect open source newcomers to friendly projects in need of help. But there was a big problem with this approach: you needed to already know what open source is before you could even find the site. The website is still around and gets tons of use, Gordon-McKeon says, but the campus events bring in many people who have never heard of open source before. She says about one quarter of the participants in any given workshop have never heard of open source, and many don’t have any background in programming.
“I have a background as a science major,” she says. “So from the beginning of my time at the organization, we’ve done a significant amount of recruiting from other backgrounds.” At one event a contributor to a project called Open Source Shakespeare volunteered to help. “It’s a great example of why you don’t need to come from a computer science or science background to benefit from open source,” Gordon-McKeon says. “Our materials are designed for people who don’t have a programming background. The idea is that you learn more about open source, regardless of what your background is.”
The idea is that you learn more about open source, regardless of what your background is.
Each workshop runs for an entire day. The morning session introduces the idea of open source, along with tools such as bug trackers, the code modification tracking tool Git, and Internet Relay Chat, aka IRC, the chat platform used by many open source projects to handle both development discussions and support. Career panels are hosted in the afternoon so that students can learn more about the job opportunities afforded by open source, and what it’s like to be a part of the community.
During the final two hours, mentors help students make their very first open source contributions. For students with a programming background, this might be a bug fix. But for many students, their first contribution may be graphic design, an improvement to a piece of documentation, or even technical support on IRC. One of the biggest barriers to entry in open source is in finding ways to contribute. Bug reports are often written in a way that makes them hard for an experienced open source programmer from outside the project understand, let alone a complete newcomer. So one thing that many students end up doing as part of the workshop is simply rewriting a bug report so that it’s more understandable.
“That’s one of the places where newcomers have something special to offer,” she says. “A lot of people worry that they’re being a burden, but this is where we say ‘no, this is actually better that you do this than someone who is more advanced.’”
The Larger Goal
Of course, OpenHatch can’t solve tech’s diversity issue on its own. There are many reasons that women and other people from other under-represented groups aren’t involved in open source. This includes simple things like women not having as much time to contribute to unpaid work online, but also more disturbing things like the harassment of women in the community.
But OpenHatch is playing an important role in bringing more diversity to open source. And more than that, it’s helping to grow the open source community as a whole. Students with an interest in open source have an opportunity to connect and often go on to hold regular meetups to keep the conversations going. For Gordon-McKeon, that’s one of the most rewarding parts of the campaign.
“I don’t think the importance of community in open source can be overstated,” she says. “Some people work on things alone, but for me and many others, the community is a big part of why we contribute to open source.”
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