Panel: Women In Open Source

Shared how I get involved with open source on GitHub and how one can get start contributing themselves.

Name

Girl Develop It SF - Panel: Women in Open Source

Location

Unity HQ - San Francisco, CA

Date

June 26th, 2018 - 6 pm to 8:30 pm

Role

Panelist - Women in Open Source

About

Open Source is a great way to find your community and get embedded in a public-facing software project! Come hear from women in open source about how they evaluate open source projects, how folks can dive into new code bases, and learn some best practices for contribution.

Quotes

Blog Posts

My Notes

Intro

Hey everyone - so happy to be here. I’m Frances and I’m currently a front end engineer at Slack on the Customer Acquisition team.My team is in charge of slack.com and basically everything a user can interact with before downloading or using the actual app itself.In terms of open source, I celebrated 5 years on GitHub back in April of this year. I joined in 2013.And since joining I’ve been involved with all aspects of open source. - maintainer, contributor, backer, organization lead, etc - it’s been a huge passion of mine for quite some time.

Questions

• What are you looking to gain from contributing to one or more open source projects? Credibility
• What, based on your unique background, is it possible for you to position yourself to gain? What are you unlikely to be able to gain, based on your unique background?
• Anyone can gain from contributing to open source
• Requires more maturity than hackathons
• How can junior contributors get an overview of the open source projects out there?
• See below
• FreeCodeCamp - guide: freeCodeCamp/guide
• Hacktoberfest: Hacktoberfest 2017 - DigitalOcean
• What should I do if someone responds negatively to my questions or pull request? Talk about diversity & community profiles

Problem

October 19th, 2017Open Source SurveyOpen Source has a problem with diversity. GitHub recently conducted a survey which revealed that 95% of the respondents were identifying as male. This is even worse than in the tech industry overall, where the percentage is only about 76%. Every other week, there seems to be another case of a maintainer engaging in targeted harassment against minorities. People somehow deem it completely okay to let these things slide, though.We collected responses from 5,500 randomly sampled respondents sourced from over 3,800 open source repositories on GitHub.com, and over 500 responses from a non-random sample of communities that work on other platforms.Responses from about 6,000 random users on GitHub from about 4,000 different repos. And then about 500 from those off GitHub - like Bitbucket or GitLab. So in total 6,500 people and potentially 4,000 different projects.Women are more likely than men to encounter language or content that makes them feel unwelcome (25% vs 15%) as well as stereotyping (12% vs 2%) and unsolicited sexual advances (6% vs 3%).The gender imbalance in open source remains profound: 95% of respondents are men; just 3% are women and 1% are non-binary. Women are about as likely as men (68% vs 73%) to say they are very interested in making future contributions, but less likely to say they are very likely to actually do so (45% vs 61%).Incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem, observed by 93% of respondents, yet 60% of contributors say they rarely or never contribute to documentation. When you run into documentation issues, help a maintainer out and open a pull request that improves them.

Solution

• Fill out community profile completely
• Add issues with first-timers-only label
• Emoji helps in being nice in responses

Community Profiles

repo/community

Resources

• Open Source Diversity
• How to Contribute to Open Source
• First Timers Only - Get involved in Open Source and commit code to your first project!
• GitHub Pull Request Tutorial: Learn to Submit Your First PR
• Your First Pull Request - Showcasing good starter issues
• jlord/git-it-electron