Announcing EquitableTech: Open Source Skills Training of Minority Students

Abstract

Our 2018 STCBP RESPECT Lightning Talk is announcing a new diversity initiative – EquitableTech – for open source skills training of Black and Latino computer science students. With seed funding from a Kapor Center GRIT grant, we are planning one-day introductory workshops about open source software (OSS) modeled after the OpenHatch college campus program. However, our workshops will target minority serving institutions to encourage OSS diversity. Furthermore, we will conduct a survey of minority computer science students to assess knowledge of and interest in OSS. As an introduction, this paper briefly reviews the news reports and the scant empirical literature about OSS diversity