How to increase diversity in open source communities
Maren Westermann
Today state of the art technology and scientific research strongly depend on open source libraries. The demographic of the contributors to these libraries is predominantly white and male [1][2][3][4]. This situation creates problems not only for individual contributors outside of this demographic but also for open source projects such as loss of career opportunities and less robust technologies, respectively [1][7]. In recent years there have been a number of various recommendations and initiatives to increase the participation in open source projects of groups who are underrepresented in this domain [1][3][5][6]. While these efforts are valuable and much needed, contributor diversity remains a challenge in open source communities [2][3][7]. This talk highlights the underlying problems and explores how we can overcome them.
Maren Westermann
Affiliation: DB Systel GmbH
Dr Maren Westermann works as a machine learning engineer 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.
