Put open source to work
July 16–17, 2018: Training & Tutorials
July 18–19, 2018: Conference
Portland, OR

Better Together Diversity Networking Lunch (sponsored by Google)

12:30pm1:45pm Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Location: Portland Ballroom
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 2 ratings)

Sponsored by:
Google Cloud

Open source is only as open as the voices who contribute to its development. Please join us at this networking event to learn how to diversify the voices in your open source communities from community organizers who are consciously making it happen.

In addition to time for networking with other attendees, this lunch will feature a presentation:

Active diversification

We’ve heard that the tech industry needs to address the diversity problem and be more inclusive. However, it’s rare to hear how people are solving the problem. Griselda Cuevas and Hector Paredes explain how they are bringing cultural diversity to open source by creating an open source community in Mexico.

Mexico is known for its large software manufacturing centers, and Guadalajara is even called the Mexican Silicon Valley. So it was surprising to find out that open source projects are not a big part of the software culture. This is why OSOM (Open Source Mexico)—a community focused on bringing the experience of contributing to open source projects—was founded by IBM, Google, and Tacit Knowledge. The purpose of this community is to work on cultural challenges that make it hard to participate in open source, from the language barrier to feelings of not being “good enough” or not being welcome to a new community. These are situations lived by all minorities.

Gris and Hector discuss how OSOM is approaching this opportunity, detailing how OSOM is structured, the main focus areas of the group, and the impact it has had in the Mexican ecosystem, in order to inspire and empower other minorities to create similar initiatives to boost diversity and inclusion in their communities. They call this “active diversification”: they lead by example and expose groups to the communities they want to diversify; they empower them; and they work on smoothing the entry barriers.

Griselda Cuevas: Gris is an open source program manager at Google Cloud and an aspiring data scientist. She has worked on developing online communities for the past seven years and is now collaborating on the design of an algorithm to predict author quality in online forums at Google. Gris is interested in natural language processing, information retrieval, and open source technologies. She holds a master’s degree in operations research and data science from UC Berkeley. Gris loves the Beatles, juggling, and Mexican food, of course.

Hector Paredes: Hector is a senior software engineer at Tacit Knowledge, where he focuses on systems integration and works on ecommerce. Hector’s previous experience includes work in the banking, government, and telecom industries, among others. He is an enthusiast of free software and open standards and is interested in cybersecurity, cloud-native applications, and DevOps.

Rachel Roumeliotis (Welcome and introduction): Rachel Roumeliotis, Vice President of Content Strategy at O’Reilly Media, Inc., leads an editorial team that covers a wide variety of programming topics ranging from full-stack, to open source in the enterprise, to emerging programming languages. She is a Programming Chair of OSCON and O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Conference. She has been working in technical publishing for 10 years, acquiring content in many areas including mobile programming, UX, computer security, and AI.

This event is open to all OSCON attendees with a Platinum, Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass. There’s no need to RSVP. We’ll see you there.

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