Fedora Women’s Day (FWD) is a day to celebrate and bring visibility to female contributors in open source projects including Fedora. The initiative is led by Fedora’s Diversity and Inclusion team. The number of women in tech have been increasing year over year, further highlighting the importance of a more inclusive culture in tech.
On September 21, We had our first Fedora Women’s Day in the UAM Azcapotzalco (Mexico City) and we loved to do it.
Fedora Women’s Day (FWD) is a day to celebrate and bring visibility to female contributors in open source projects including Fedora. The initiative is led by Fedora’s Diversity and Inclusion team. The call for proposals for event organizers is now open until Thursday, 16 August 2018!
During September, in collaboration with other members of different open source communities including Fedora, women in tech groups or hacker spaces, we plan to organize talks, workshops and meetups around the world. These events highlight and celebrate the women in open source communities like Fedora and their invaluable contributions to their projects and community. They also give a good opportunity for women to learn about free and open source software and jump-start their journey in open source as a user or a contributor. They also give a platform for women to connect, learn and be inspired by other women in open source communities and beyond.
This year yet again, we are looking forward to organizing FWD across different locations around the world. We are looking to collaborate with members of different open source communities including Fedora, women in tech groups or hacker spaces to organize Fedora Women’s Day!
2017 was a milestone year for Fedora Diversity and Inclusion Team. We experienced structural changes, established new directions and mapped our goals to a long-term plan improving diversity outreach in the Fedora community. The past year included a lot of ‘figuring things out’ – including our engagement within the Fedora community but also beyond. We have come out wiser, driven and more committed to our goal then ever. Read on to know more about our past and current efforts to foster diversity and inclusion in Fedora community.
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Like any FOSS community project, Fedora relies heavily on volunteers. It is, therefore, no surprise that we’re always looking to increase our contributor base. There is always so much to be done. Of course, many teams work in harmony to keep Fedora ticking. Each team tends to have its own “on-boarding process” for newcomers, which if you’ve been around recently, you’ll have noticed CommOps has been working on improving one by one.
GNOME Outreachy is a global program that offers historically underrepresented people of gender and race stipends to write code for several participating FOSS projects . Inspired by Google Summer Of Code, Outreachy offers participants hands-on internships for contributing to open source projects.
In 2016, the Outreachy internship dates are from December 6, 2016 to March 6, 2017. Participants work remotely from home while getting guidance from an assigned mentor and collaborating within their project’s community.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that gives the user the freedom to use, share, study, and improve it. FOSS contributors believe that this is the best way to develop software because it benefits society, creates a fun collaborative community around a project, and allows anyone to make creative changes that reach many people.
Fedora is participating in Outreachy 2016, with a goal to welcome underrepresented minorities to contribute to the project. Fedora mentors Outreachy interns and helps them get a hands-on experience with developing for an open source project.
A two-day workshop on women in free software and Fedora Women Day were held on the 15th and 16th of July 2016 at the Netaji Subhash Engineering College in Kolkata, India. This event was jointly organized by Ubuntu Women Project, Fedora Project, and the university. It was substantially sponsored by Ubuntu Women Project. The goal of the workshop was also to get new participants interested, improve the level of participation by women, and explore new avenues of free software community development. Given the factors involved, the Workshop on Women in Free Software / Fedora Women Day 2016 (shortened to WWFS-FWD’2016) was a successful one.
Starting the call focused on the Internet of Things
This article is a follow-up to an earlier article on the Community Blog: Women in technology: Fedora campus presence.
This week, we took our initiative further. We guided the new women contributors on one of the bleeding edge technologies according to their interest. Sumantro Mukherjee helped me guide the contributors. Some contributors were interested in Internet of Things (IoT) while some wanted to learn Web Development as bleeding edge. So, we decided to have two different calls in a row.
The first hangout call was on Internet of Things. The contributors were explained the meaning and the structure of how IoT is implemented. It was done with the help of a presentation prepared by Sumantro. After going through the details and theory about IoT, we talked about the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. We went through a little intro and application part of the devices. We further explained the concept with the help of a little demo of the project. The details of the call are available on our Etherpad.
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.
Network by Martha Ormiston from the Noun Project.
At the second weekend in March 2016, Fedora had a booth at PyCon SK, a community-organized conference for the Python programming language held in Bratislava, Slovakia. The event happened for the first time this year, and we made sure it happened with Fedora.
Photo by Ondrej Dráb, CC BY
This post was originally shared on the Announce mailing list.
Fedorans,
As some of you may recall, Fedora added a new seat to the Fedora Council for a Diversity Adviser.
It is with great pleasure that we do hereby announce, that this seat has been filled by long-time Fedora contributor María “tatica” Leandro!
The Fedora Diversity Adviser acts as a source of support and information for all contributors and users, especially those from underrepresented populations, so that issues of inclusion and equity can be discussed and addressed with planning and strategy.
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