Discussion:
Support the Ada Initiative: a challenge to the open storage community
Sage Weil
2014-10-02 16:22:19 UTC
Permalink
I'd like to take a moment away from your regularly scheduled storage
revolution to talk about the Ada Initiative: who they are, what they do,
and why it is important to open source storage communities. I'm also going
to challenge you to raise $8192 for them, and I'll match that dollar for
dollar if you do. (If you already know who they are and support their
work, go ahead and donate now.)

https://adainitiative.org/donate/?campaign=storage

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 communitiesincluding storageare 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.

This frustrates me on two levels. First, open source is about building
communities around code that bring together diverse organizations and
interests in pursuit of a common goal. Why is something as fundamental as
being inclusive of women a problem here? Our open communities should be
setting the standard, not lagging behind when it comes to diversity.

Second, I am passionate about Ceph not because I think it is the end-all
solution to everyones storage problems, but because it is playing an
important role in breaking the stranglehold that proprietary vendors have
over a large and increasingly critical industry. If we are going to win
the larger battle of making the industry-leading, state of the art, de
facto choice for storage an open platform, we will need all the help we
can get: the incumbents are well-entrenched, they are better funded, and
(it turns out) they are doing a better job of attracting diverse talent.

The Ada Initiative is one of the few organizations who is addressing
gender diversity head-on, with a specific focus on open source and open
data communities. You might already know about their successful campaign
to get most open source conferences to adopt codes of conduct, which make
women and other marginalized groups more likely to attend. Their AdaCamp
conferences for women in open tech/culture, and their Ally Skills
Workshops which teach men how to support women in everyday ways have
proven to be extremely popular and effective both in welcoming and
empowering women. These programs have proven so successful, in fact, that
(for lack of staff and funding) they are currently unable to meet the full
demand for them: all three AdaCamps this year sold out months early, and
they are booking solid for Ally Skills Workshops for the next 3 months.

As Inktank and as DreamHost we were proud to be early supporters of the
Ada Initiative. Today, I am proud to continue that support with a
personal challenge to the open source storage community:

If you raise $8192 by next Wednesday, I will match that
contribution dollar for dollar.

This challenge applies to the larger open source storage world, including
the Ceph, Gluster, Swift, and Linux storage and file systems communities,
and goes until Wednesday, October 8th, when the Ada Initiatives
fundraising drive ends. We've already raised almost $3,000 since
yesterday. Please help us get the rest of the way!

https://adainitiative.org/donate/?campaign=storage

For more information about the Ada Initiative, see

http://adainitiative.org/

Thank you!
sage

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