Austin
April 25-29, 2016

Mentoring & Diversity Learn How to Contribute & Succeed in the OpenStack Community

With thousands of developers from dozens of countries, OpenStack is one of the largest collaborative software-development projects to date. Because of its size, there is a huge diversity in social norms and technical conventions that can be difficult to navigate for newcomers. The OpenStack community is committed to providing a welcoming environment for new members and promoting diversity. To support these goals, the community has developed several different programs to help new and prospective contributors find success. We will offer the following programs at the OpenStack Summit Austin.

Mentoring & Learning
  • Upstream University
  • Saturday, April 23 & Sunday, April 24
  • 10:00 am - 4:00 PM CDT
  • JW Marriott Hotel, Level 3
  • At Max Capacity

Upstream University is an intensive program designed to help new contributors learn how to effectively work upstream, by fixing bugs and getting their features accepted into the OpenStack project. The educational program requires students to work on real-life bug fixes or new features during two days of real-life classes and online mentoring, until the work is accepted by OpenStack. The live two-day class teaches them to navigate the intricacies of the project’s technical tools and social interactions. In a followup session, the students benefit from individual online sessions to help them resolve any remaining problems they might have.

Make sure to book your travel plans to arrive in Austin Friday evening or Saturday morning in order to attend the full two-day training session.

  • Command Presence Workshop
  • Sunday, April 24
  • 12:00pm-3:00pm
  • JW Marriott, Level 3, Salon D
  • At Max Capacity

The Command Presence Workshop has been recognized by the Anita Borg Institute and Harvard Business Review. It is intended to teach participants how to handle “senior-level high pressure meetings”. The majority of the workshop is a task-force convened to address a simulated, but very realistic crisis event. In the class, each participant assumes a role, and is given about 30minutes to prepare 1-2 slides. Once the class has prepared, the simulation begins. There is a role-play simulation. It is not uncommon to hear occasional “gasps” of disbelief from the participants. The workshop participants will experience rapid-fire questioning, interruption, and other situations that occur in senior-level meetings, but in a safe environment conducive to learning techniques for handling such situations.

Facilitators: Ruchi Bhargava (Intel), Malini Bhandaru (Intel) and a panel of leaders representative of the OpenStack leadership in the community (business leaders and technical leaders).

  • Speed Mentoring, sponsored by the Women of OpenStack
  • Monday, April 25
  • 7:00 - 8:45 am CDT
  • ACC, Level 1, Expo Hall 5
  • Sign Up Here

The Women of OpenStack will sponsor a speed networking session over breakfast, designed to help new and prospective contributors successfully get involved, contribute and gain influence in the community. If you are interested in becoming a mentor or mentee, please sign up to attend this breakfast!

  • Champions for Change: Engaging Male Advocates for Diversity and Inclusion
  • Tuesday, April 26
  • 12:05 - 2:40 pm CDT
  • Hilton Austin, Level 6, Salon F
  • RSVP Required

A 2-hour lunch workshop on the research and practice of male advocacy, including why it matters and how to take action. This spirited workshop will involve discussions, activities, resources, and key takeaways for both men and women to advocate for more inclusive environments that foster innovation in the technical environment. Led by National Center for Women and IT research scientist Dr. Brad McLain.

  • The Diversity of Innovation
  • Tuesday, April 26
  • 4:40 - 5:20 pm CDT
  • ACC, Level 4, Ballroom G

This panel will focus on the links between diversity and inclusion strategies with technical innovation, talent recruiting and retention, male advocacy, and the OpenStack community. The panelists were nominated by the Women of OpenStack.

  • Git and Gerrit- Lunch and Learn
  • Wednesday, April 27
  • 12:30 - 1:50 pm CDT
  • Hilton Austin, Level 6, Salon F
  • RSVP Required

OpenStack software development is centered around the git and gerrit systems to promote the aspect of community programming.

Git is an open source version control system that allows many software developers to work on a given project without requiring them to share a common network.

Gerrit is a free, web-based team code collaboration tool which integrates closely with git and allows developers in a team to review each other's modifications to the source code using a web browser and approve or reject those changes.

In this session we will walk-through participants to open a bug in a test system and then submit a test patch to a repository in OpenStack. The process involves learning about git along with a cheat sheet of most useful commands and review process in Gerrit. Participants will walk away with working knowledge on these tools.

  • Gender-diversity Analysis of Technical Contributions in the OpenStack Projects
  • Thursday, April 28
  • 11:50 - 12:30 pm CDT
  • ACC, Level 4, MR 15

Women are half of the population in the world, but they are still under represented in the tech world industry nowadays. While there are clear actions in favor of attracting more female developers in order to bring more diversity to the project, the Open Infrastructure Foundation shows a similar trend with this respect.

Some numbers can be easily extracted from the Women of OpenStack group in Linkedin with more than 600 members and 137 discussion. Specific diversity-focused panels during the summits. Women of OpenStack mailing list with close 380 emails in 2015 and 90 different people commenting and changing ideas [own analysis]

This talk will cover the journey of the OpenStack ecosystem gender diversity since it was born till nowadays. This will focus on the analysis of the code review and code development activity. It is intended to be a quantitative analysis plus specific manual polishing process to help in the accuracy of the data. As this is mainly focused on the analysis of Git and Gerrit repositories, this talk will open further paths of analysis for those interested in this type of analysis.

Networking & Community Building

Join the Women of OpenStack for an evening of networking and celebration to kick off another OpenStack Summit. IBM, Intel and EMC will sponsor the Women of OpenStack Pre-Summit Social Sunday evening, featuring food, drinks and live music from acclaimed local artist Tameca Jones.

  • Women of OpenStack Breakfast sponsored by Comcast
  • Tuesday, April 26
  • 7:00-8:45 AM CDT
  • ACC, Level 1, Expo Hall 5
  • RSVP Required

Join the Women of OpenStack on Tuesday morning before the keynote session to hear from other women working in the OpenStack community and discuss how we can help support each other. During the session we'll celebrate our accomplishments over the past year and hear lightning talks from three Women of OpenStack who have recently taken on new roles within the OpenStack community. The speakers and will share their insights on how you can accelerate your learning curve to navigate and become an influencer within the OpenStack community.

  • • Allison Randal, OpenStack Board Member
  • • Lana Brindley, Project Technical Lead
  • • Kendall Nelson, OpenStack Developer

We'll break into small groups to discuss the key lightening talk messages and identify actions for the Women of OpenStack to achieve over the next six months.

Breakfast and coffee will be provided.

  • Fostering Full Equality, organized by the Women of OpenStack
  • Thursday, April 28
  • 1:30 - 2:10 PM CDT
  • ACC, Level 4, MR 15

Following up on the themes related to gender equality presented at the previous Summit talks sponsored by The Women of OpenStack working group, this session will focus on our vision of a world where the OpenStack community is truly and completely blind to meaningless differences in gender, color, creed and culture. What will this new world look like? How will it differ from the current one? A panel of people from all walks of life will explore what that future is and what we can do as a community as a whole to achieve it.

  • Newcomers Need You, How to Be a Good Mentor
  • Thursday, April 28
  • 2:20 - 3:00 PM CDT
  • ACC, Level 4, MR 15

You still remember the first time you've heard the word OpenStack, the efforts you had to make to wrap your head around it and to get your first patch merged. Now you know enough to be able to teach other people and put them up to speed. You would like to be a mentor but you are not sure about how time consuming it might be, you still have doubts and questions. In this session we will try to answer them. We will give advices based on our experience mentoring in the Outreachy and Google Summer of Code programs, suggest some strategies and list the most common mistakes a new mentor does.