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Building an inclusive open source community at Open UK

Amanda Brock, Open UK

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Amanda Brock, Open UK

Amanda Brock, CEO of Open UK explains how the open technology advocacy organisation is trying to make open source a more inclusive environment

Amanda Brock, CEO of Open UK didn't intend to pursue a long career in open source. A lawyer by profession, Brock joined the open source software (OSS) company Canonical back in 2008 as General Counsel and initially planned to stay for a few months. She ended up staying at Canonical for five years.

"The bit that was unexpected was that I really engaged with the open source community. I'm neurodiverse, [Brock was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult,] and joining Canonical felt like I'd come home. I felt that I was in an environment I belonged in for the first time in my life. I've always felt at home in the community of open source developers and engineers that I've met.

"After I left Canonical I engaged with various open source communities. I stopped being a lawyer five years ago, and I've been running Open UK for just over three years."

The first thing that Brock and her newly expanded board of Open UK did was to expand the remit of the organisation beyond software to include hardware and data.

"We purposely shifted to focus on this general term, the business of open source. That sounds like we're really focused on companies but we're focused on the people who make up open source, who are in the business of open source, whether they're paid to be in it or not, whether their contribution is through paid employment or community contribution."

Brock explains why this shift made such a difference to the organisation - by bringing in an international dimension that wouldn't have fitted in before.

"We've got folks who work for all sorts of different international open source companies. We've got folks who work for non-tech companies as well as tech companies. All of those people have a place with us and we focus on the people."

Open UK now stands on three pillars; community, legal and policy and learning.

"It's about bringing people together to create the collective voice, the strength and numbers," explains Brock.

Open source's women problem

Unfortunately, Brock's experience of feeling welcome in the open source community is not one shared by many female developers. It is well documented that the open-source community has not been as gender or ethnically diverse as many, including Brock, would like to see. Women are underrepresented in technology across the board, making up around 27% of the overall tech workforce although that proportion is much lower in specific areas such as development. In OSS it's even lower.

An American paper published in 2021 found that women represented 9.8% of open source contributors. The research also indicated that where women were involved in open source communities they were more likely to make non-code contributions. Women coders submitting pull requests had a high rate of merge acceptance but this rate reduced if they explicitly identified themselves as women. There's only one explanation for a finding like that, and it doesn't reflect well on the open source community.

There are plenty of other statistics which highlight the biases shown by some in the open source community. Only 9% of Github account holders are female, and according to research by the Linux Foundation, also published in 2021, women and transgender people of any gender were more likely to experience exclusionary behaviours than men.

Brock acknowledges the extent of the diversity challenge facing open source communities but also makes the case for optimism among new generations of coders.

"I think Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) have really worked from the start as a group to put diversity at the heart of what they're doing and that's really helped Open UK because what we've ended up with is a really diverse group of people working in cloud native and Kubernetes. If you look at Linux as the first generation with the operating systems and the first lot of open source really being successful, I think the second piece after Linux is Kubernetes and cloud native, and because they've built such a diverse community, you really see a difference. We have a lot of younger people in that community and it is clearly more diverse community than the historic open source."

Speaking at an event last week to celebrate International Women's Day, Brock shared some statistics about Open UK, and the inaugural State of Open Con which took place in February.

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Amanda Brock speaking on International Women's Day

"When I took over at Open UK in 2019 we did a launch event at the House of Commons and we had to use Open UK's existing mailing list to invite people. I got up at that event and said and said ‘good evening, lords, ladies and gentleman,' and I stopped and looked around the room and realised that I was the only woman in the room.

"So I want to share with you how far we've come. For State of Open Con we had 56% male speakers, 44% who identified as female, non-binary or other. In our audience we had just under 30% female. Our split between white Caucasian and every other ethnicity that people could choose was 50/50. I don't believe there's been a tech event in the UK that will have those stats, but it shows you it can be done if you take the right approach."

Brock is in the midst of gathering further DEI data from Open UK members and has committed to publishing that data when all of the surveys are returned. However, around two thirds of members have completed it already and the results to date give cause of optimism.

"About two thirds have completed it and we're sitting at just under 30% female. Now that isn't great. But when you look at open source, the status is around 17% female [Brock is referring here to the Linux Foundation report] so we are getting towards doubling that."

The demographic data of the Linux Foundation survey that Brock referenced in her comment showed that 14% of those responding identified as women so Open UK has more than doubled that rate among its own membership. Nonetheless, it's still notably short of 50/50 and Brock acknowledged at the IWD event that there was still a long way to go. Open UK have recently employed a full time DEI officer for the first time which indicates how seriously she takes the diversity of the organisation she runs.

"We're not an organisation that's about diversity. We're about open technology. We just put diversity and sustainability at the heart of everything we do. And I think in doing that we're starting to show a shift and a change that hopefully others will follow."

Building an inclusive open source community at Open UK

Amanda Brock, CEO of Open UK explains how the open technology advocacy organisation is trying to make open source a more inclusive environment

Open source's women problem

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