Meet Your Mentors: Women in Open Source

Prompted by an off-hand remark during an IRC conversation about how many women were mentoring for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, we decided it would be great to chat with several of our women mentors and find out more about how GHOP is going for their communities. During our latest podcast, you'll hear from:

• Noirin Plunkett from the Apache Software Foundation
  
• Addison Berry and Angela Byron from Drupal
• Amy Stephen and Elin Waring from Joomla!
  

You'll likely recognize several of these names as mentors for Summer of Code. Among the many topics we covered, the phenomenal contributions of our GHOP contestants made up the better part of our conversation. You'll also hear more about best practices for encouraging women to participate in open source and some thoughts on women and community management.

Many thanks to Addison, Amy, Angela, Elin and Noirin for joining us.

You can download the podcast in mp3 or ogg formats. Alternatively, you can subscribe to it.

We always love to hear from you, so if you have thoughts on the podcast or tips for helping communities be most welcoming to female contributors, post a comment and share your thoughts with us.

GenMAPP and the Cytoscape Developer Retreat

The GenMAPP project enjoyed their first Summer of Code this year, and things went so well for them that they invited several of their students to the Cytoscape developer's retreat. Maital Ashkenazi joined the development team in Amsterdam for the retreat and she was kind enough to send us a report from the event. Maital writes:

The annual Cytoscape retreat and symposium was hosted by the Human Genetics Department of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam last week. Core developers, plug-in writers and Cytoscape users gathered for four days packed with tutorials, an application showcase, public symposium and development planning. This year, the GenMAPP project, along with Cytoscape, mentored four Summer of Code students. Three of us attended the conference and presented our work.

On the evening prior to the conference’s start, we went to a “meet and greet” event. It was great to finally meet two of my mentors in person. We have been working together for the past six months, and we've met in Second Life, but this is the first time we actually got to see each other in real life.

The first and last days were dedicated to software development and planning. Although I've been present in numerous software development discussions, usually during my work at high-tech firms, it was fascinating to learn how groups from around the world collaborate. The atmosphere was great; I loved watching these passionate and dedicated developers discuss priorities, envision architectures and set timelines. I especially enjoyed the decision process regarding the core redesign intended for version 3.0. We separated into two groups, each in a different room, and discussed aspects related to the new design. There were programmers with years of experience and familiarity with Cytoscape core and others less experienced, yet everyone's opinions were listened to and carefully examined. When we re-gathered we realized that one group studied this subject top-down, while the other went bottom-up. Discussions kept going and decisions were made.

The third day of the retreat was application showcase day. I had the opportunity to demo my plug-in, a search tool that enables searching biological networks on multiple attribute fields using logical operators and wildcards. It was exciting to talk in front of such big crowd. I demonstrated some aspects of the query syntax and showed how simple queries can be used in order to gain biological insight from a biological network. The first question after my demo was “Where can I download this plug-in?!?!” A big smile spread over my face, as I was just realizing that people were interested in my work. That smile kept growing as more and more people approached to congratulate me on a successful demo. Most satisfying of all, though, was to hear people suggest that I turn my plug-in into a core plug-in and have it distributed along with Cytoscape! Seeing what other plug-in developers have come up with brought up a few new ideas that I would love to incorporate into Cytoscape.

I want to thank Google for helping to sponsor my travel to the conference, but I want to thank Google even more for exposing me to the fascinating world of open source. Now that I have seen how open source development gets done I am even more excited to be a part of Cytoscape developers’ team than I was before I met them in person.

This journey would also not have been possible without the help of the conference organizers, who sponsored my accommodation. Thank you!

Many thanks to Maital for giving us a better view of the GenMAPP and Cytoscape developers' world. You know we always love to hear from Summer of Coders about the conferences they've attended - whether you're a kernel hacker or a bioinformatics geek - so post a comment and let us know what you've been up to lately.

Summer Sweetness x 2

Sure, getting accepted into Summer of Code is cool. Hammering on that keyboard until those last few lines of code are checked in, even cooler. Gaining committer status with your project, truly sweet. IMHO, though, the coolest thing about participating in Summer of Code is the chance to get deeply involved with your project community, so much so that you end up on the other side of the table, mentoring students for your project. After all, who knows the trials and tribulations of SoCer student life better than a former participant?

Our first Summer of Code podcast features one such SoCer student turned mentor, Angie Byron with the Drupal project. In addition to hearing more about her experiences as an SoCer, I also had a chance to catch up with her about her presentation on Women in floss at the recent Flourish conference. She also has some great suggestions for this year's students.

We're really excited to be bringing the podcast to the community, and we're even more excited to hear what you think. Leave a comment about the podcast and tell us what you'd like to see in future editions.

You can directly download the first episode, or you can subscribe to the podcast.

Enjoy the show!

Women in Google Summer of Code

We've had a lot of requests from the community on some general statistics for the program, and we'll have more posts in the coming weeks on various interesting statistical tidbits about our students of yesteryear and today.

First, the pretty good news. Consistently between 2005 and 2007, approximately 4% of SoCers are women. While we'd like to see that number increase over time, we're still quite happy that it is double the usual percentage of women reported in the overall open source developer population. We're also proud to support some other efforts to encourage women to participate in open source development, such as the GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program.

The very good news is that our community is passionately invested in getting more women into open source development. Each time I talk to members of our mentoring organizations, I consistently hear enthusiasm around having female students working with them. And where organizations haven't worked with women in the program, they are actively seeking ideas on how to attract more women to their projects.

We'd like to hear more from the community on this topic: how can more women be attracted to open source development? Or, to put it a different way, how can we ensure we're shipping way more women's t-shirts next year?

You'll notice that comments are now on for the blog, and we look forward to hearing from you. Please bear in mind that all comments should be respectful and constructive. (In other words, don't make us use that delete button.)