Open Source Summit Europe + ELC Europe 2017

ROSE (short for Red Hat Open Source for Education) is a cross-community effort lead by Red Hat Israel that brings students from Tira and Ra'anana to the Red Hat offices to learn about the Linux operating system and Python programming. As part of the ROSE project, the students learn about Open Source, basic Linux shell skills, and Python programming. As a final project, they write an algorithm in Python for a self driving car in a race game. The project gives an excellent opportunity to 8th grade students to experience both the world of coding and communication with other communities that they are not regularly in contact with. How does this work? How can coding bring people from different cultures closer? Can we make it fun? In this session, we will present the project structure, the team activities, the code competition and our experience leading this project last year.

Creating diversity in the workplace should be an essential goal for all organizations. and groups. However, decades of research show that people instinctively classify others by race and gender, and respond to one another based on stereotypes and social norms. Implicit biases often lead to inequalities in promotion and pay, and creates an environment of "not belonging", especially for women and underrepresented groups. However, there are tools you can use to recognize and interrupt bias. Bias won’t be totally eliminated – but let’s interrupt it and become more equity-minded and also understand that psychological safety is one of the most important factors to consider for interrupting bias and encouraging engaged participation – especially when challenged with difference.

Do you feel left out or uncomfortable at the company Christmas Party?
Do you avoid \\\"the water cooler\\\" and limit interactions to \\\"business only\\\"?
Do you find many such business-social interactions are fraught with potential landmines and opportunities for exclusion or misunderstanding?
Do you see colleagues excluded or unable to participate when activities are informal, under-structured, or Ill-organized?

This study in the NYTimes highlights how many of us are wary of the way business socializes today. 

This session will present a set of specific examples and stories from our direct experience of some of the less obvious opportunities for networking, learning, mentoring, and collaboration that are presented by ongoing day-job activities as well as thru outside events and forums.

Since much of successful mentoring and collaboration occurs informally, there are many unidentified or difficult-to-see barriers that can create missed opportunities. We believe that the desire to assist each other and collaborate is often present but unrealized. We will provide some examples of lowering the \\\"activation energy\\\" for such positive interactions and creating an equality of opportunity for colleagues and team members.

The examples we discuss are applicable to individual contributor employees, to leaders and managers, and to anyone with a job description OR a personal passion that includes mentoring or collaboration. These issues are not limited to technology workers or open source projects, but we believe that there are unique opportunities in these realms that are sometimes hidden or easily missed.

This talk explains how Linux is introduced to school students in government schools in the state of Kerala in South India, and how that is changing a generation of students by helping them to understand and get interested in the STEM careers early in their life.
The speaker will share her personal journey on how she started her own technical career through this movement, which improves the usage of Linux based OS(s) on personal systems. High school students in government funded schools now have access to modified Linux systems where students can learn and explore open source software with the help of trained teachers and volunteers. Grass roots programs in the regions to help improve technical skills and employability of students will be showcased in the context that despite the increasing populace worldwide, the adoption of Linux OS on personal systems still leaves much to be desired.

This talk will share the story of how Red Hat utilized an open collaborative approach to promote inclusion within our global teams. We identified 4 key themes for improving team dynamics; including other voices, diversity makes us smarter, embracing passionate dialogue to elevate performance and finally, avoiding unconscious bias to enhance meritocracy. Through an email campaign and online discussion forum, we engaged our the manager community in an open dialogue to share best practices for inclusive teams. Over a series of 4 months, we offered strategies on improving team dynamics and sought open feedback as managers tested these techniques within their teams. We asked managers to share their personal stories; from the challenges they faced within their teams to their successes or failures at implementing strategies to improve inclusion.

In this session, and in the spirit of open source, we’ll share these stories, tips for inclusion, and what we learned from this experience with you. We are now rolling out this learning on inclusive teams to all associates so they can support each other in building a diverse, inclusive meritocracy at Red Hat.

The technology industry has been a major source of innovation and economic growth, but its ability to encourage diversity among its ranks lags. In 2016, women and underrepresented minorities accounted for 30% of the larger tech industry, while comprising roughly 10% of the Linux and OpenStack communities. To harness the full power of technology to tackle a broader set of societal challenges will depend, in part, on our ability to encourage a diversity of ideas, experiences and talent. Join us for an interactive discussion as we explore the numbers and what they mean, and in turn, discuss concrete, actionable steps that we can collectively take to foster a diverse, inclusive environment within our larger open source community.

If we want to find out how diverse our open source communities are, where is the best place to start? Running a survey always sounds like a pretty straightforward task to accomplish this, and at the time it always does. During November/December last year, Sharan organised and ran the first ever diversity survey for Committers on Apache Software Foundation projects. In this presentation, Sharan shares her experience of running the survey, the results and some of the unexpected challenges involved along the way.

How do you spread the bug to learn and get engaged in technology when there is no exposure? This talk is on soft skills to spark interest in getting more women in computing. Judy will share her story growing up in rural Kenya, her accidental journey to technology through open source and how she is mentoring and helping other women and African students to join in open source. Judy serves as the project maintainer for LibreHealth radiology, and will share on her journey in health open source projects, failing in technology, mentorship and merging her passion of technology into a medicine career. By attending this talk you will learn soft skills on how to be a champion for diversity in technology in everyday activities.

Women are critical to the success of WTSI and addressing gender balance at the highest levels has been prioritised, with this ambition being linked to core funding. Our staff surveys consistently support this sentiment - in our 2016 staff survey, over 92% of the responses on Equality and Diversity were positive. Impactful changes that have transformed the Genome Campus into a more attractive place to work have been catalysed by the Sex in Science Programme, such as strengthening aspects of recruitment, retention and workplace satisfaction. Career and leadership opportunities for women have been improved; with enhanced policies and better family friendly on-site facilities. By shining a spotlight on existing processes and practices and challenging the status quo, we demonstrate that it is possible to drive institutional and cultural change and shift the demographic of leadership.

Some things are under our control. And some things aren’t. Life’s like that for every one of us. For those belonging to an underrepresented demographic however, age-old societal beliefs about money, family and responsibility often manifest into unconscious biases which make the goalpost elusive. So how do you swim upstream and get to where you aspire to be? Where do you seek inspiration from? What tools can you leverage? Nandhini took charge. She decided where she was headed, and did not succumb to setting invisible barriers around herself. To Nandhini a successful career meant being happy, which translated to pursuing her heart and her dreams. Her conviction in herself led her onto a relatively unconventional path: starting with her pivot from a hardware engineer working on 64 nanometer chips to building large scale distributed systems as a software engineer. Nandhini’s eventual transition to a leadership role afforded the opportunity to not just build great products, but also build diverse, high-performing teams. In this session, Nandhini will share personal anecdotes about her professional choices. She will present her perspective on driving her career bus, and how that helped her plough through and not back off. Her perseverance, self-belief and confidence have been the sharpest tools in her kit. She hopes to inspire others to find their own toolkit to have a successful and rewarding professional career.

Where are the smart women at? If the answer isn’t “right here”, then why, and how do we fix that? Solutions to the problem of underrepresentation of women (and other groups) tend to focus on the leaky pipeline: how women fall away from the tracks and how we can keep them on board. But what if the problem happens before that? Smart, creative women are using their talents elsewhere. We need to find them where they’re at- to keep working on that pipeline, but at the same time to start digging our own wells. Increased diversity benefits us all. If we wait for the next generation to arrive, we miss out on this one. How do we do this? As one of those women, Aoife will share how Togán Labs are working to recruit, train, and benefit from the perspectives and skills of people from a wide variety of backgrounds.