Keynote: Melissa Weber Mendonça - Beyond the basics: Contributor experience, diversity and culture in open source projects

We are happy to announce Melissa Weber Mendonça as a keynote speaker for the conference!

Beyond the basics: Contributor experience, diversity and culture in open source projects

How can we go beyond the basics when engaging new contributors and improving an open-source project's culture around inclusiveness, accessibility, and different axes of diversity? In this talk, we'll explore a few actions and assumptions about these topics and how they are related to volunteer work and the efforts of maintainers and contributors.

The open-source community has been discussing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) for some time. While not all projects are at the same stage in this discussion, many have put in effort around Codes of Conduct, improved language, and addressing some of the barriers newcomers may face when they want to get involved. What is not yet clear is the next step: how can we go beyond the basics when engaging new contributors and improving a project's culture around inclusiveness, accessibility, and different axes of diversity? What are the possible metrics we could use, and how can we get insights into each project? How are these issues related to volunteer work and the efforts of maintainers and contributors? In this talk, we'll explore a few of those topics, discuss what actions might have more impact and how to be transparent around these issues.

About Melissa Weber Mendonça

Melissa is an applied mathematician and former university professor turned software engineer. She works at Quansight, developing open-source software and working on consulting projects. She has been involved with the Brazilian Python community for some time, with a focus on outreach and education. She is a maintainer for NumPy, and believes in the power of open-source contributions beyond code.