Mentoring Project Wins GNOME Community Engagement Challenge

A year after its initial launch and 140 proposals submitted from 38 countries, the GNOME Foundation in partnership with Endless announced the winner of their inaugural Community Engagement Challenge.

The winner of the challenge, BOSS: Big Open Source Sibling, aims to reach underrepresented groups in tech through mentorship and instruction for working on open source projects. A group of 16 Brazilian women, BOSS provides a safe space and structured mentoring to support basic concepts of working in a small open-source chatbot boilerplate project. With a scalable model and their first cohort complete, the women of BOSS are currently recruiting their next cohort to further expand the network of open-source programming.

The mentoring process helps build confidence, filling in technical gaps and engaging the participants. In the BOSS program, besides the technical aspects of introducing newcomers to open source, they tackle challenges to inclusion: namely, intersectionality and impostor syndrome. Intersectionality demonstrates how diversity dimensions, such as gender, race, ethnicity and disabilities, are not mutually exclusive categories but intersecting ones. Impostor syndrome refers to a person's experience of feeling like an intellectual phony despite having the expected credentials. Impostor syndrome is most often experienced by women, but it also affects other minorities. 

“The first step is to recognize that education, processes, tools and technology products are not inclusive. There are several researches that show that our area is very homogeneous, with the majority of developers being straight white men, without children and without disabilities, and these are the people who shape the Industry. And so, technology is far from the imagined utopia, as neutral and a safe space. It has become an extension of power relations related to race, gender, also perpetuating oppression beyond these two dimensions, also reaching people with children, with disabilities, people with different sexual orientations and less privileged social classes.”

BOSS aims to engage a diverse audience and support trainees in measuring their own qualifications and competence to build true inclusion and engagement in FOSS communities. The initiative helps to boost participants’ technical and non-technical skills while fostering a welcoming community. The mentor team, composed only of women with previous experience in both FOSS and chatbot development, will work to not only recruit the next generation of coders but also retain them, critical to increasing diversity in the field.

The goal of the challenge was to generate stimulating ideas that will connect the next generation of coders to the FOSS community, teach beginning coders new skills, and keep them involved for years to come. Judges chose 20 projects to move forward in Phase One and an additional five for Phase Two. 

Also named a finalist in the competition was OpenUK, an organization coordinating the UK technology, business and industry use of Open Technology (open source software, open source hardware and open data) across the UK. OpenUK promotes businesses, projects and people, who use and develop Open, and strives to collaborate across all existing organisations for Open by focusing on community, legal/policy, and learning.

These projects are essential because access to software engineering education and training has been globally identified as deficient in a number of areas. Research suggests that the number of engineers contributing to open source projects once per year is decreasing, and the sector has faced challenges recruiting and maintaining the number of high-quality developers it needs to continue pushing forward.

FOSS provides many benefits compared to proprietary software, including increased personalization and customization, a community that is focused on collaboration and quality, and of course, little to no cost to develop or access. Endless believes that the people using technology should be the ones building it, and the FOSS field reduces barriers for diverse and talented developers to contribute game-changing ideas to the field. 

Endless and GNOME are proud to support diversifying the field by inspiring young creatives around the globe to utilize their talents, ingenuity and imagination to expand coding education, mentorship and technology access to new groups of people. This competition brought to life visions for a world where access to high quality coding education is barrier-free and develops the next generation of highly-qualified, technologically-skilled developers, thinkers, and change-makers.