2024-09-26 –, Louis Armand 1 - Est
Open Source Software, the backbone of today’s digital infrastructure, must be sustainable for the long-term. Qureshi and Fang (2011) find that motivating, engaging, and retaining new contributors is what makes open source projects sustainable.
Yet, as Steinmacher, et al. (2015) identifies, first-time open source contributors often lack timely answers to questions, newcomer orientation, mentors, and clear documentation. Moreover, since the term was first coined in 1998, open source lags far behind other technical domains in participant diversity. Trinkenreich, et al. (2022) reports that only about 5% of projects were reported to have women as core developers, and women authored less than 5% of pull requests, but had similar or even higher rates of pull request acceptances to men. So, how can we achieve more diversity in open source communities and projects?
Bloomberg’s Women in Technology (BWIT) community, Open Source Program Office (OSPO), and Corporate Philanthropy team collaborated with NumFOCUS to develop a volunteer incentive model that aligns business value, philanthropic impact, and individual technical growth. Through it, participating Bloomberg engineers were given the opportunity to convert their hours spent contributing to the pandas open source project into a charitable donation to a non-profit of their choice.
The presenters will discuss how we wove together differing viewpoints: non-profit foundation and for-profit corporation, corporate philanthropy and engineers, first-time contributors and core devs. They will showcase why and how we converted technical contributions into charitable dollars, the difference this community-building model had in terms of creating a diverse and sustained group of new open source contributors, and the viability of extending this to other open source projects and corporate partners to contribute to the long-term sustainability of open source—thereby demonstrating the true convergence of tech and social impact.
NOTE:
[1] Qureshi, I, and Fang, Y. "Socialization in open source software projects: A growth mixture modeling approach." 2011.
[2] Steinmacher, I., et al. "Social barriers faced by newcomers placing their first contribution in open source software projects." 2015.
[3] Trinkenreich, B., et al. "Women’s participation in open source software: A survey of the literature." 2022.
Built on collaborative communities, open source is critical infrastructure on which our digital world depends. It's important that me+we are represented in the communities sustaining open source.
Bloomberg joined forces with the NumFOCUS Foundation in 2023 to pilot a new approach to open source sustainability to address the lack of diversity in—and drop-off rate of—new open source contributors to the pandas project. The result is a framework for sustainable open source contribution that open source projects can scale for growth and companies can scale for business and philanthropic value. This new volunteer incentive model leads the way in breaking down boundaries between philanthropy and technology.
This series is leading the way in breaking down boundaries between philanthropic and technology alignment and impact for public good. This informative talk describes the structure of the series and how it helps to reimagine both the definition of philanthropy and how D&I leaders can raise the bar for technical excellence.
- Welcome and initial remarks (5 mins)
a. The importance of open source to Bloomberg
b. Intro to Bloomberg’s pandas Sustainability Series - How Bloomberg sustains Open Source though philanthropy (5 mins)
a. Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and its Sustainability pillar
b. Intro to the firm’s Open Source Dollars For Your Hours program
i. Turning hours spent making open source contributions into charitable donations to the non-profit of engineers’ choice - Impact of the Bloomberg Women in Technology (BWIT) community (5 mins)
a. Intro to BWIT Philanthropy
b. BWIT’s partnership with OSPO to build collaborative communities in the open source ecosystem
c. Reimagining the definition of philanthropy and demonstrating how women leaders in engineering continue to raise the bar for technical excellence - Pandas Sustainability Series (5 min)
a. How we made it happen
b. High notes
c. What we learned - Create your own sustainability series (5 mins)
a. How you can do it too - Audience Q&A (5 mins)
Alyssa helps lead Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) in the Office of the CTO. Bloomberg's OSPO serves as the center of excellence for Bloomberg’s consumption of open source software and engagement with the broader open source community. When not helping define open source strategies and implementing partnerships and best practices, she is typically cycling to a mountaintop... or sleeping after having done so.
Devpriya Dave is a software engineer on the FX Options team at Bloomberg. While at Georgia Tech obtaining her master's degree, she helped design and build the system behind Georgia Tech's Machine Learning for Trading online course (https://www.udacity.com/course/machine-learning-for-trading--ud501). She is passionate about STEM mentorship and is always looking for ways to give back. In her free time, she enjoys reading books with a cup of coffee.