Sunday, July 20, 2014: 3:00 pm (Manning): While a common philosophical and cultural thread ties all of us in open source together, the ecosystem is as diverse as the world itself. In fact, open source projects are a kaleidoscope of cultures that influence how they are approached, how teams interact, outcomes, and what type of people they attract. At the same time, open source is suffering greatly from a lack of diversity. Three percent are women, and many users from non-English subgroups feel their voices are not heard in the OS ecosystem. This panel will discuss: how open source projects can build bridges to help incorporate people from non native English speaking communities, examples of when lack of cross-cultural sensitivity goes wrong, descriptions of patterns and regional differences observed in various open source communities, and why the Dutch are some of the best open source volunteers ever.

Sandra Ordonez, Bryan Nunez, Douwe Schmidt