When looking back nowadays to the work done on diversity, I’ve realized that it has been quite a trip! My first approach to the topic was in an informal meeting with Nithya Ruff, currently at Comcast. She mentioned that the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo reached (as far as I remember!) 13% of women attending the Summit. And this was a great number if compared to previous summits as the percentage kept growing. But she also mentioned that they received a tweet asking about the current number of technical contributions. Then this is where we decided to have a look at that issue: have numbers, and try to produce some of them from a quantitative point of view.

Then researching around, thinking about the issue and others, it seems that the simplest approach was good enough to start producing numbers. And this approach is based on the first name of each of the contributors. This method brings other issues to the analysis, but in general, the mix of GrimoireLab as retrieval platform, Genderize.io as the basic starting point to produce gender data and a huge amount of time manually polishing the data produced some numbers about the technical contributions of women in the OpenStack project teams.

So I got accepted a talk at the OpenStack Summit in Austin titled as “Gender-Diversity Analysis of Technical Contributions in The OpenStack Projects” and available in YouTube. I would say that this was a quite interesting talk for this main reason: community. That was so great and I felt so comfortable talking about these numbers that this pushed me to enter into details in other communities and helped me to introduce myself into the issue of diversity. Indeed the Austin summit had some awesome talks with this respect

After this we decided to produce some other numbers that can be summarized in the following talks and events:

• Talk: “Gender-Diversity Analysis of Technical Contributions in The OpenStack Projects” [sched, youtube, slides, interview] . OpenStack Summit in Austin, 2016.
• Podcast: “Bridging Tech’s Diversity Gap” [post and podcast]. OSCON  in Austin, 2016.
• Event: “Women of OpenStack Breakfast” [sched, infographic, update of Austin slides] . Where we produced an infographic that was presented by Nithya during the breakfast and also produced an updated version of the slides for OpenStack in Austin (I was in the waiting list…, but not fortunate enough!). OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, 2016.
• Talk: “Gender-diversity Analysis of the Linux Kernel Technical Contributions” [sched, slides]. I had the opportunity to have an introduction to the topic by Nithya, thanks!. LinuxCon in Berlin, 2016.
• Talk: “Gender-diversity Analysis of the Hadoop Ecosystem Technical Contributions” [sched, slides]. ApacheCon in Seville, 2016.
• Panel: “Diversity in Open Source Projects” [sched, slides] lead by Susan Wu that invited me and Nicole Huesman as panelists. Thanks for the opportunity Susan! Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe, 2017.

As further steps and some good news, I am happy to announce that we are working with Intel to foster diversity and we are producing in the next months numbers and reports to better understand this situation in the OpenStack Project Teams. Those aim at providing useful information to the Women of OpenStack working group. And in general to help other communities to retrieve numbers with the purpose of having data and making decisions around that data.

Stay tuned!