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.

visit the speaker at: GithubHomepage