Starting again. Sometimes nothing is the gift

Jessie Frazelle, software engineer at Google. As an open source contributor for four years, she has worked on Docker, Kubernetes, Golang, and runC. Jessie’s contributions to Docker include: 1,478 comments and reviews to pull requests; 341 of her own pull requests; 884 comments to issues; and 114 issues created.

She advocates for inclusivity in open source and organises meetups for women through Women Who Go. At her first meetup, participants made contributions to large projects like Node.js that were accepted. She gives talks on topics such as container technology, getting started with Linux, contributing to software communities as part of your job, and the art of closing issues and pull requests. She also started a conference for open source maintainers called maintainerati.org.

Avni Khatri, programme manager for the knowledge and learning technologies group at Laboratory of Computer Science, Massachusetts General Hospital. An open source contributor for more than 16 years, Khatri has worked across a variety of projects and communities, including: Kids on Computers; OpenACS; and For A Living.

She was a co-chair of the Open Source Track at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in 2010 and co-chair of the conference’s Open Source Day in 2011 and 2012. She builds solutions exclusively using open source technologies like Git, Postgres, OpenACS, Django, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, OpenShift, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Heather Kirksey, vice president of NFV at Linux Foundation. As an open source contributor for more than 10 years, she has worked with OPNFV and MongoDB. At OPNFV, Kirksey initiated collaboration with 10 upstream projects and organisations, engaged more than 280 developers, led the community through three platform releases, and grew the project to include 54 member organizations. She is a member of Light Reading’s Women in Comms, has established a no-tolerance policy for discrimination within the OPNFV community, and hosts the “OPNFV Women and Allies” event.

Karen Sandler, executive director at Software Freedom Conservancy. Sandler has been an open source contributor for 11 years in several projects and communities, including Software Freedom Conservancy, GNOME and Outreachy. She works with companies out of GPL compliance to find non-litigious resolutions in accordance with the Principles of Community-Oriented GPL Enforcement.

She maintains a comprehensive guide to copyleft at copyleft.org. Sandler helped launch ContractPatch, an initiative to educate free software contributors about employment agreements. She expanded Outreachy, to include dozens of free software organisations, helped move the program to the Software Freedom Conservancy, and open it to people of colour who are underrepresented in the U.S.