OpenStack Foundation

Dana and I are passionate about making open source communities inclusive and welcoming. The codeathon is a terrific opportunity for us to be tour guides for women of all backgrounds as they explore open source projects like OpenStack. [Dana Bauer]: I love the humanitarian focus at Open Source Day. Egle and I are demonstrating how to deploy humanitarian-focused applications on OpenStack, and it's exciting to think that some of those apps could be the first steps toward making a difference in the world...

The "edge" is diverse, dispersed, often independently owned and operated, and comes with a set of constraints not addressed in the average data center. Old sci-fi films painted a picture of how computers would permeate every facet of life in the future. It has come to pass, and it happened almost without us noticing: having PCs at home became commonplace, our mobile phones turned into small smart devices, and our cars began making decisions for us, controlled by thousands of sensors and controllers. Self-driving cars, augmented and virtual reality, smart homes and more all underscore our rapidly emerging dependence on distributed computing infrastructure.

If software is pervasive, shouldn't the people building it be from everywhere and represent different voices? The broadly accepted answer is yes, that we need a diverse set of developers and technologists to build the new digital world. Further, when you look at communities that thrive, they are those that evolve and grow and bring in new voices and perspectives. Because much of the software innovation happening today involves open source software, the open source community can be an entry point for new people in technology roles. This means that the open source community must evolve to stay relevant...