Adding voices: Support the Ada Initiative

Diversity is important to communities. Diversity adds new ideas, new concepts, innovative approaches and unique values. Open source thrives on those same things, and open source communities need to recognize and strive to increase their own diversity.

Today, I’d like to share “A Challenge to the Open Storage Community” from Sage Weil. Sage is talking specifically about the Ada Initiative, who is one of the organizations directly addressing gender diversity including a specific focus on open source and open data. Sage is offering to match the community dollar for dollar should we, the open storage community, raise $8192 for them.

Sage brings out incredibly relevant points about diverse organizations and being inclusive of all.  In his own words:

“Research, experience, and common sense have demonstrated that diverse communities perform better: they are more dynamic, they generate better ideas, and they are more pleasant to be a part of. On the gender axis, however, most open source communities–including storage–are extremely homogeneous, with far less than 10% participation from women. It surprised me to learn that this is significantly lower than software engineering in general, where you find women make up about 30% of the community.”

With GlusterFS  as a significant part of the open storage communities, I’d like to see us also work to meet this challenge and to extend our own diversity to all.

Sages full blog is here: http://ceph.com/community/support-ada-initiative-challenge-open-storage-community/

The donation link is here: https://adainitiative.org/donate/?campaign=storage

The Ada Initiative can be found here: https://adainitiative.org/