pyOpenSci Meeting Notes - 21 May 2020

Attendees

• Jenny Palomino
• Leah Wasser
• Nathan Korinek
• Joe McGlinchy
• Dean James McGuffee
• Ivan Ogasawara

How can we be more inclusive?

• STEM – education - could we pivot in this direction
• Open science labs – they are currently translating materials to spanish
  • potentially translate contributing guide
  • pelican?? https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/ translator tool
  • Most automatic translation doesn't work well– it needs to be a manual process
    • transifex ?

Groups we could get involved with

• James – in his class – they have projects - and POC are in this pool of students. it's very challenging to find projects for them to work on.

• Mentor program – could we mentor students working on projects at other schools

  • help them with the bigger picture of developing projects and the workflows, etc…
  • could we use all of the folks at diff companies and organizations … potentially link students with projects…
  • maybe there are levels of mentorship –

• some way to advertise for folks who are looking for projects and to connect students with mentorship and projects

  • some sort of discourse interaction where the faculty or person searching – could post what they need and then people could respond…
  • awareness – adding it into presentations, twitter

• CS education community – prototyping mentorship with one student could be a great proof of concept .

• Urisa – professional multi discp org

• outreachy - https://www.outreachy.org/ – student interns

• Diversity in Open Source – lots of groups focused on gender - could we reach out to some of them for ideas / resources / people that we might connect with to increase racialdiversity

  • PyLadies – maybe we could reach out to them as a starting point
  • Women Who Code newsletter – with opportunities
  • Black Girls Code (K-12)
  • https://wiki.python.org/moin/DiversityInPython
  • one group that exists http://www.iaamcs.org/
  • Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network
  • a conference designed to celebrate and encourage diversity in computing http://tapiaconference.org/
  • Leah will reach out to jason W potentially about efforts that are already going on?
  • https://www.linkedin.com/company/african-women-in-gis/
  • https://bgmapp.org/
  • some years ago a group from Spain have written a text about diversity for python communities: https://github.com/yamila-moreno/pepa/blob/master/en/pepa.txt

• Article by npr about a lack of diversity in open source https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/05/248791579/why-isnt-open-source-a-gateway-for-coders-of-color

• Article from wired about lack of diversity in open source as well https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-worse-tech-overall/

Ask – what do we need to do?

Next Steps

1. reach out to diffrent groups
2. think more about building out a mentor network
3. reach out to outreachy
4. leah will reach out to jason!