Address: http://www.wired.com/2014/07/openhatch/
Recent reports from Facebook and Google confirm the wide spread of [note] problems in a large number of technical work. But in the open-source world, this problem is even more serious.
According to a survey conducted last year, only 11% of Open Source contributors are women. In addition, according to the Labor Statistics Bureau, 23% of computer programmers are women, and 39.5% of Web developers.
This is especially worrying when you think technology companies are more and more interested in developers with open-source experience. This means that how to solve the diversity problem in the open source field has become the key to solving the problem in the entire industry. The top priority is to lower the threshold for entering the Open Source world. In the past five years, openhatch, a non-profit organization, has tried its best to do this.
Openhatch organizes an "open-source campus" activity, a series of cross-country activities that focus on helping students of various learning backgrounds understand open-source. This is not intended to promote the diversity of open source, but it is usually an additional role for more people to participate in open source. "We have already held these activities at girls' schools, and we are going to join various student groups on campus to hold more activities," said Shauna Gordon-McKeon, project director.
Everyone's Open Source
Openhatch was founded in 2009 and is committed to helping helpless open-source beginners find their own open-source projects. However, this method has a serious problem: You need to know what open source is before you find the website. By our side, openhatch is being widely used, said Gordon-McKeon. However, campus activities have allowed many people who have never heard of open source to enter the Open Source world. She also said that there were about 1/4 of participants in every study in the activity, and she had never heard of open source before, and even many people had no programming experience.
"I have a background in science," she said. "since I came to this Organization, we have recruited a large number of people with backgrounds in other disciplines ." In an activity, someone contributed to a project called Open Source Shakespeare. "This is a good example of how you can benefit from open source even if you don't have a background in computer or science," Gordon McKeon said. "Our materials are designed specifically for those who have no programming background. Our philosophy is to allow you to learn more about open source, regardless of your background ."
Our philosophy is to allow you to learn more about open source, regardless of your background.
Activities of each study will be conducted throughout the day. This morning's meeting will introduce open-source ideas and some common tools, such as bug tracking and code modification tracking tools git, many open-source projects are used in the development process to discuss and provide technical support for the chat platform IRC. In the afternoon, career planning activities will be held to enable students to learn more about open-source jobs and feel like they are part of the community.
In the last two hours, the mentor will help students make their first open-source contribution. For those with a programming background, this may mean a bug fix. But for most students, their first contribution may be graphic design, a document, or even technical support on IRC. One of the greatest thresholds for entering open source is the way to contribute. At present, the writing of bug reports is very poor, so that a programmer outside of this project can hardly understand this report even if he has rich open-source experience, let alone the new entry. Therefore, most students rewrite the bug report to make it easier to understand.
"This is a place where new people can get something special," she said. "A lot of people are worried that they will be dragging their heads down, but here we say," no, you do this better than those who are better at it. '"
Long-Term Objective
Of course, openhatch itself cannot solve the problem of technical diversity. There are many reasons why women and other small groups are not involved in open source. For example, women do not have enough time to participate in online work free of charge. One of the more disturbing reasons is that women are often harassed in the community.
However, openhatch does play a very important role in open source diversification. Furthermore, they are working hard to help develop the entire open-source community. If you are interested in open source, you will have more opportunities for communication. In addition, regular parties can keep them in touch for a long time. In the words of Gordon-McKeon, this is the most valuable part of their campaign.
"I don't think the importance of open-source communities is exaggerated," she said. "Some people can work independently, but for me and many others, the Community is the vast majority of the reason we contribute to open source ."
[Note]: The original version is diversity problem. The so-called diversity problem actually refers to the problem caused by the lack of diversity, rather than the problem caused by diversity.
To verify the meaning of this word, the translator has read many news about diversity problem from these IT companies on Google to ensure that they are correctly understood.
Towards a new era of openness: The Revolution allows more women to enter Open Source
