Exploring diversity in open source communities @ Festival del Software Libre in Mexico. We looked at the ASF and general github data as well as discussed a new program to encourage more people from Mexico to get more involved in open source.

1. The Importance of Active Diversification
And its impact in innovation

2. Gris Cuevas
@griscz
● Googler in the Cloud
● Mexican Data Scientist
● Co-Founder of OSOM
● First Time Dog Owner
● Worker of 11 countries
I want to grow the Free & Open
Source Software culture in Mexico

3. Who am I?
● My name is Holden Karau
● Prefered pronouns are she/her
● Developer Advocate at Google focused on OSS Big Data
● Apache Spark PMC (think committer with tenure)
● Contributor to a lot of other projects
● previously IBM, Alpine, Databricks, Google, Foursquare & Amazon
● co-author of High Performance Spark & Learning Spark (+ more)
● Twitter: @holdenkarau
● Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/hkarau
● OOS Livestreams: https://youtube.com/user/holdenkarau
● Github https://github.com/holdenk
● Related Spark Videos http://bit.ly/holdenSparkVideos

4. We have a surprising amount in common
● Live in San Francisco and work for glorious employer
● Breathe same air, mortal
● Considered minorities in open source & tech industry
● Distinctive fashion sense
● Whisky (sort of)
● Like dogs

5. Who are our dogs?
@booprogrammer
Drawn by @impurepics
Brodi Benvenuto
@winedoogler

6. Some links (slides & recordings will be at):
http://bit.ly/2JBIsXs
^ Slides & links
(after)
CatLoversShow

8. Diversity in Open Source
The Industry’s Landscape & Mexico’s place in it

9. The elephant in the room….
sheologian
Photo by
thelmawilcox

10. Historical Perspective
● quote from “The Goods Girls Revolt”
○ “Writers come to magazine over the transom,” he said, “and women aren’t coming. We can’t
do anything if they aren’t interested”
● And a similar quote from open source luminaries
○ “I don’t have any experience working with women in programming projects; I don’t think that
any volunteered to work on Emacs or GCC.” - RMS
*The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace
by Lynn Povich
sheologian

11. What you can’t get from this?
● Causation. Which correlation ain’t.
● Legal advice
● Academic quality data
Quirky Confectioner
Lawyer cat
objects!

12. Some Data!
Apache Software Software Foundation Projects for Gender:
● ~50 projects
● ~30gb of commits & posts
Human reviewed:
● Sampled down to ~1600 “recent” code contributors + all ~2600 committers
Github Commits for country contributions (by domain):
● ~11gb of commits
Andrey Belenko

13. How was the human data collection done?
Instructions:
Find the gender of the user in question. You can look at the e-mails sent in
response to them, but also feel free to search online to find other information
about the user (use the project information disambiguate cases of multiple people
with the same name).
List additional links possibly about the user used (e.g. linkedin, twitter, etc.)
Provided with:
E-mails in response to user, project name, author name, and github name
(All depending on what could be found)
DocChewbacca

14. So what do ASF & Jupyter projects look like*?
Some limitations apply, e.g. there are clearly non-male contributors in zookeeper but it’s a small enough % they aren’t sampled.

15. Some correlations: Khairil Zhafri

16. And this is exacerbated by communication challenges
1
Baldwin, C. Y., & Clark, K. B. (2003). Does code architecture mitigate free riding in the open source development model. Harvard Business School.
“The benefits of Open Source can take many forms. They can have
economic or intrinsic value, like compensation or professional
reputation… the benefits compensate developers for the costs of
communication and integration, not the cost of their coding effort…”1

17. Sentiment of mailing lists J. Triepke

18. 64k
8M

19. 1.8k
78k

20. Mexico in the Landscape:
Mexico has a very small community of
contributors and donors to F&OSS...

21. Mexico in the Landscape:
… and so many talented Software Engineers
behind the scenes (users).

22. Mexico in the Landscape:
There are few & siloed groups supporting the
usage and participation in F&OSS

23. The Impact:
● Software manufacturing mindset
● Slow innovation cycles
● Fewer research & development projects in F&OSS

24. Taking Action
Open SOurce Mexico (OSOM) = Exposure + Integration

25. The OSOM Framework
Industry Government Community Academia
Integration
Exposure

26. The OSOM Framework
Integration
Exposure

27. Photo from: http://www.top-video3.com/2016/11/top-10-funny-babies-eating-lemons-for.html
Exposure

28. Photo from:
https://www.google.ca/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjO9qGB2ZHdAhUGU98KHYsoC1UQjhx6BAgBEAM&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmybermudaparent.
com%2Flessons-from-a-lemonade-stand%2F&psig=AOvVaw01BKzjrImrTsm-vOx6NCRI&ust=1535612623066119
Exposure

29. Creating exposure opportunities in universities
Industry Government Community Academia
Integration
Exposure

30. Integration

31. Integration
F&OSS
Fostering industry
collaboration
Empowering
culture creation
Mentoring &
Coaching
Influencing governance
(non-code contributions)

32. Integrating by activating all four pillars
Industry Government Community Academia
Exposure
Integration

33. WHAT ARE WE DOING
Open SOurce México (OSOM)
Advocates of
“OpenSourceFirst” culture
to increase innovation and
economic growth at
Mexico

34. “Foster an Open-Source-First culture that drives economic
and innovation growth in Mexico by 2020”
OSOM’s Vision
We are a group of OSS enthusiasts & thought leaders who
work with the Mexican tech community, industry, academy
and government to drive an open source culture by
empowering, coaching and demonstrating the value of OSS.
OSOM’s Mission

35. Exposure

36. Integration
Recognizing non-code contributions in Apache Projects
….

37. ¡Gracias!