Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Cool Open Source Bridge Proposals
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I have submitted a couple of talks to Open Source Bridge 2014: "The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next", with Liz Henry, and "A Few Python Tips", a solo effort and the most programming-centric conference talk I've ever proposed.
When I look at the proposals page I just grin so wide when I see so many proposals, on a zillion different topics, a ton of them from women and genderqueer folks! "You can be a kernel hacker"! Apprenticeships! "Power Tuning Linux: A Case Study"! "Replacing 'import' with 'accio': Compiling Pythons with Custom Grammar for the sake of a joke" and presenting as technical and stylishly female and "Making language selection smarter in Wikipedia" and dataviz and OpenStreetMap and mobile design and usability in privacy software and lessons from the Drupal Ladder initiative and Project Ascend and type systems and "Confessions of a DBA: worst and best things I've done in production"! And way more. What a set!
I last counted 189 proposals, 72 of them including as a speaker someone other than a cis man. That's about 38 percent. I hereby applaud the OSBridge organizers for making an inclusive all-genders tech conference where I'm never the only woman in the room.
I plan on going to OSBridge this year for the fifth year in a row (Portland, Oregon in June), and this week I'll find out whether the organizers are accepting either of my talks. But I wanted to share this great feeling: I'm only one of many.
