Women in Tech – Women in Open Source: interesting discussions at LinuxCon

For me one of the most interesting ‘side topic’ here at LinuxCon in Berlin was to discuss with other attendees – male or female – about women in tech, or here better, women in open source. Besides attending a women’s lunch to come together, exchange experience, and plan further activities around communication, best practices, etc. I learned about the program Outreachy:

“Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.”

I meat several young women from all over the globe who got the chance to participate into that program and made that internship. They contributed to a community project from their home place. As part of the program they were invited to this Conf and some of them shared their experience in a panel discussion and gave feedback. The audience was quite interested and ask how things could be improved any how we as a community could do better to attract, involve, join and finally keep more (young) women and other underrepresented groups to the open source community.

I think that we all have to work closer together here, get involved and follow-up on all the feedback we got. I discussed about Outreachy and similar programs with my colleagues and I am really looking forward to follow-up here from the openSUSE side.