This week, we kicked off an initiative for engaging more women contributors in Fedora. Sumantro Mukherjee helped me guide new contributors on this Hangouts call. The purpose was to bring in more woman contributors to the Fedora Project and help them be industry-ready. As buzzwords in the industry boom, these meet-ups are focused to generate awareness in the first few rounds. Then, they address fields like the Internet of Things (IoT), ML, and mobile app development, to mention a few.

Keeping in mind, these are done using the leading edge, open source, Linux-based Fedora, which is also the upstream for RHEL. In the first few minutes, we discussed about free and open source software (FOSS) and the participants’ exposure with the industry. After a bit of in-depth discussion, we figured out that little or no guidance is one of the major barriers when the participants wanted to contribute to any FOSS project. Also noted was the lack of on-boarding guides as another major barrier for not being able to contribute to FOSS projects.

In the second half of the meeting, we discussed how Fedora is released. Some common terminologies like bleeding edge, Rawhide, and branched were discussed. The meeting concluded with the suggestion of topics that the audience would like to learn. A weekly follow-up mechanism will be helpful for community growth.

Meeting details can be found in this Etherpad.

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Network by Martha Ormiston from the Noun Project.