2023-08-17 –, Aula
Today state of the art scientific research as well as industrial software development strongly depend on open source libraries. The demographic of the contributors to these libraries is predominantly white and male. In order to increase participation of groups who have been historically underrepresented in this domain PyLadies Berlin, a volunteer run community group focussed on helping marginalised people to professionally establish themselves in tech, has been running hands on monthly open source hack nights for more than a year. After some initial challenges the initiative yielded encouraging results. This talk summarises the learnings and teaches how they can be applied in the wider open source community.
Contributing to open source projects is a highly rewarding activity that benefits not only society as whole but also individual contributors. For example, open source contributions provide a great opportunity for skill development and building a public portfolio. However, contributing to open source projects can be challenging especially for people belonging to underrepresented groups in tech because the majority of these people are career changers. In order to lower the barriers of contributing to open source projects PyLadies Berlin are running monthly open source hack nights during which participants are guided through making contributions to open source projects. After facing some hurdles in the early phase of this initiative, the hack nights have become popular events that attract people from all across Germany and even Europe. In this talk Dr Maren Westermann, the creator of this event series will walk the audience through the work involved behind the scenes, the challenges, and the lessons learned to make this initiative a success.
Learn about strategies for building divserve #opensource communities - learnings from PyLadies Berlin’s monthly open source hack nights presented by @MarenWestermann
Category [Community, Education, and Outreach] –Diversity and Inclusion
Expected audience expertise: Domain –none
Expected audience expertise: Python –none
Dr Maren Westermann works as a machine learning engineer at DB Systel GmbH and holds a PhD in environmental science. She is a self taught Pythonista, an active open source contributor, especially to the library scikit-learn, and is a co-organiser of PyLadies Berlin where she hosts monthly open source hack nights.