Luis Ibáñez works as Senior Software Engineer at Google Inc in Chicago. Opinions expressed in this site are his own.You can find him in github at: http://www.github.com/luisibanezand in twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/luisibanezHe previously worked as a Technical Leader at Kitware Inc., and Director of Open Source Community Development at the Open Source EHR Agent (OSEHRA). At Kitware he was closely involved in the development of open source software for medical imaging applications, in particular, working with the Insight Toolkit (ITK).Luis is a strong supporter of Open Access, and one of the editors of the Insight Journal, an OA Journal that enforces the verification of reproducibility. In collaboration with other instructors, Luis taught a course on Open Source Software Practices at RPI between 2007 and 2013, and also at the State University of New York at Albany between 2011 and 2014.Luis Ibáñez received a B.S. in Physics from the Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga, Colombia) in 1989 and a M.S. in Optics from the same university in 1994. He received a D.E.A and Ph.D. degrees from the Universite de Rennes I (Rennes, France) in 1995 and 2000, respectively. In 1999, Luis Ibáñez joined the Division of Neurosurgery of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and participated as a member of the MIDAG and CADDLab groups. His work at UNC was related to the development of algorithms for 2 and 3D registration applied to image guided surgery. He also participated as developer of the INSIGHT Registration and Segmentation Toolkit sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. Luis Ibáñez joined Kitware, Inc. in February 2002 where he was one of the main developers of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) coordinating its maintenance with other developers and the user community; he is also one of the main developers of the Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and participated in crafting the operational principles of the Insight Journal. Luis Ibáñez is a strong supporter of Open Access, and the verification of reproducibility in scientific publications and is a regular speaker in ITK training courses, and in events disseminating the principles of Open Source. In August 2014, Luis joined Google Inc as Software Engineer, to work with the corporate engineering team in New York city.
Authored Comments
Gary,
You bring an interesting point, that goes to the core of the issue: the reality or perception that work in IT is disconnected from human interaction.
Seen from the surface, and when observed over short periods of time, it is common to get the perception that the IT field is devoid of human connections.
However, the more one works on open source and on software in general, the more evident it becomes that the real issues in our communities and projects are not tecnological problems but "people's problems".
Many projects languish due to social friction among the contributors, and lack of skills on managing human motivations and on appreciating the type of rewards that are valued in a gift economy. (In plain words, there is a lot of "jerk" behavior among us, which sometimes is more tolerated among males, but that still is equally damaging to the communities).
What is true in IT in general, becomes more accute in an open source environment where a lot of the work is done on a volunteer basis, and a good deal of motivation arises from the pursuit of meaningful-work, connection to something larger than ourselves, satisfying interacions, and development of a sense of belonging.
The consequence of disregarding the importance of a balanced composition in the social structure of our open source communities, is that when projects reach the maturity and dimension when it is evident that people's issues are becoming more prevalent than the day-to-day dealing with the buzzword technology of the day, (typically when they have more than 20 contributors and more than 5 years of history) they find themselves devoid the gender diversity (and age, and race diversity) that would have empowered them to overcome the social structure challenges, to grow further, and to turn into a powerful and productive social organization.
The advocacy for diversity (gender, age, race,...) is usually presented in terms of social justice for the underrepresented groups. In our case, it is my opinion that it is urgent to pursue diversity for the purpose of leading our open source communities to reach their full potential.
Not having women evenly represented as active participants of open source communities, leaves our communities in a vulnerable situation where we can not reach the scales of hundreds or thousands of participants, much less the level of hundreds of thousands, where the benefits of the network effects of openness and free flow of information and knowledge reach the highest returns.
Ohloh reports that, from the 500,000 open source projects they track, about half of them have only two or one contributors, while less than 2% have more than 50 contributors. For each one of those half a million projects, we should ask ourselves: Why didn't this project grew to the scale of the Linux Kernel community or even bigger ? What is it about this nascent community that left them stock in a team of only 2 or maybe 5 people.
I suggest that lack of women participation is one of the main structural reasons why these communitites fail to germinate. I will also suggest that lack of students involvement, and and lack of active engagement of young people (12 year olds to 25 year olds) is a close second reason.
Open source communities should dedicate 30% of their efforts to continuously recruite new participants, and when doing so, we should ensure that these new members are coming from a diverse pool of gender, age and backgrounds.
Thanks for the interesting article.
Your comments on integration of art and science resonate with a recent talk by Sir Ken Robinson on "Educating the Heart and Mind".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1A4OGiVK30
There is another side to the coin of having women underrepresented in Open Source communities, and it is the impact that it has on these communities missing to reach their full potential.
The lack of gender diversity, in my opinion, is one of the reasons why many open source projects remain ungerminated, with communities of a few contributors, while they could have become thriving communities of hundreds or thousands of community members.