I love reporting back from events where we grow our inclusive contributor base! On the Saturday after the Grace Hopper Conference, four of us ran a workshop to onboard future OpenStack contributors. Grace Hopper is a celebration of women in computing and over 4500 women attended the conference this year, showing great growth over the years. Iccha Sethi came up with the idea way back in April and we organized our workshop in the months leading up to the event. This year is the first year I’ve ever attended such a conference and I really enjoyed the experience, writing about it on the Rackspace developer blog.
Here is a photo of our group of merry patch-makers:
There were a dozen open source projects there for 200 participants total. For OpenStack, Rackers Iccha Sethi, Jessica Lucci, Ashwini Shukla and I all served as technical support to the ten people who participated. For starters, Iccha presented about OpenStack, using the great decks from openstack.org/marketing. Next, we ran through introductions and a short icebreaker activity where we did a cloud simulation activity. Everyone enjoyed acting like cloud servers passing red Rackspace squishy balls like they were files on a network. 
Then we settled into our laptops for the main workshop, getting DevStack running on a bunch of Rackspace Cloud Servers and working on a first patch! By the end of the day, we had two new patches up for Glance, the Image Service project. We would have had a few more patches in if mid-afternoon flights hadn’t got in the way. Here are two of our happy patchers:
We also had Susan Lauber in our group, who is one of the first OpenStack trainers ready to give OpenStack training through RedHat. The Foundation sent OpenStack stickers and the newest OpenStack t-shirts which flew off the tables! It was so great to see so many women working together on OpenStack. I’m looking forward to the OpenStack Summit where we can see even more people in person. If you’re attending the Summit in Hong Kong please save the date for the next Women of OpenStack gathering – Monday, November 4, 5pm-7pm. Details will be shared soon to all Summit registrants.
The conference and open source day was full of recruiting opportunities for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. I’ve been inviting OpenStack organizations to sponsor an intern, and I wanted to also ask through this blog. If you’d like to get involved with the Outreach Program for Women, there are two opportunities that come to mind immediately. We have some mentors in mind but always want good ideas from mentors for projects that an intern could complete in 3 months. Also, each internship spot is sponsored at $5750 twice a year. If you’d like to donate, please go to http://gnome.org/opw/ and click on Become a sponsor! Let the admins know by October 10th if you are interested in joining the program.
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