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Some of you may know I am going to co-chair the next FOSS4G. ( Come Hell or High Water, but we are going to have a FOSS4G next year!) I have also participated on the organization of the last ApacheCON and some other minor online events. I have also spoken on many online events by now. And, let me tell you, I am not as optimistic as those people. I really hope this post ages badly and in the following years we get better options for online events. But as of today, I don’t feel we are anywhere close to replace face to face events with online ones. Delivering the talks as streaming is something good but we will be losing most of what makes a conference an amazing experience. Let me tell you why.

You may have heard any or all of these keywords before: middleware, integration, orchestration. And you may be wondering why and when to use them. Take a walk with me to understand when and how integration frameworks are useful. Imagine you are in charge of solving a new need of your company. There is no complete software stack for what you need. You will have to involve your team to create something new. Even if you reuse some components, you have to make them interact and talk to each other. You are an experienced software engineer and have solved previously many of the requirements with some components you are already familiar with. But now you have to orchestrate all these components together and make them work like a clock. Now you need a proper integration. You want all of them to cooperate smoothly in your architecture.

On June I joined Red Hat as a Senior Software Engineer. I always said that I preferred to work on a small company before a big company, because on a big company you can’t be anything more than a number. That you can’t really grow professionally if you are such a small piece on a big machine. I have to say: I was completely wrong. The room for manoeuvre you have on a big company is not comparable to that on a smaller one. Just a month after my latest job change and I am completely in love with Red Hat. I keep asking around me “where is the trick? where is the trap?” because there have to be. Tough it seems there isn’t. If this is not my dream job, it is only one “geospatial” label away.

If someone linked you this post is probable you are organizing an event where diversity and inclusivity is an issue and they want to help you fix that. If you want, you can jump to the subsection that better adjust to your case. Remember: diversity is not a TL;DR , you probably need to read the full article to get a better grasp of what you need. As usual: I’m going to focus on the gender gap because it’s easier for me to talk in those terms, but similar strategies can be applied to any other under-represented group. I was told I have a manel, what’s that? A manel is a panel full of men (usually white and middle aged). Usually this manel is the main panel or the keynoters panel whose members are the most relevant/the most advertised speakers. They are the display case of your event and they may tell more about your event than you probably suspect. Bonus track: Have you heard about the Techdel Test? But I had no women speaker candidates for my event! It doesn’t matter if it was a set of speakers chosen manually or if you sent a call for papers to the internet waiting for proposals. If you have few (or none) proposals that improve your diversity line-up, something went wrong. Because there are women (and PoC and functionally diverse speakers) out there. You just didn’t met them. But don’t worry, there’s many things you can do to improve it.

TL;DR: Ok, there is a video on gvSIG Festival on diversity that cover most of the contents here. Why do we need inclusivity and diversity? Do we really need to explain the problem of diversity? IT is mainly white and male. Even the most egalitarian person have biases due to have lived on a non egalitarian world and this reflects on our community. There are also society pressure to some groups of persons not to work on IT. “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” Martin Luther King In short, diversity should just be a matter of Social Justice. But if you are looking for more purely economical reasons, recent studies have shown that diverse teams are more efficient and provide more quality outputs [1] [2]. This means that even when a company invest explicitly on improve their inclusivity and diversity, the return of investment is usually high. Investing in diversity is a win win situation, but it requires some deconstruction and some effort from all the people involved.

Let’s overlook the statistical justice of having a diverse team. Let’s overlook the social justice of working on a team with high diversity. Go directly to why you, someone interested in having business at the end of the year, are also interested in having a diverse team. Spanish version is on Ping a Programadoras blog. Each one of us sees the world from a different perspective. Because of the vital experience that the society where we grow offers us. Those different perspectives are what makes us see different details on the same situation. And these details are what gives the products and services offered by your company the quality you need to succeed. Are the diverse teams more efficient and economically profitable? Yes Are the diverse teams more creative? Yes.

Me gusta leer ciencia ficción. He devorado sagas e historias sueltas y tengo el kindle a reventar. Pero, en este despertar feminista, un día me di cuenta de que no seguía a ninguna autora. Eran todo hombres. ¿Dónde estaban las escritoras de Ciencia Ficción? ¿Por qué no me había cruzado con ninguna? Así que me puse a rebuscar entre interminables listados de antologías y recopilaciones. Y acabé comprando un libro recopilatorio que parecía ser lo que andaba buscando: una recopilación de autoras que luego podría usar para seguir buscando más libros interesantes.

Una de las cosas que más me ha sorprendido en mi andadura feminista es hasta qué punto todas hemos tenido una evolución más o menos parecida. Con nuestros triggers particulares, nuestras situaciones y nuestras epifanías, la evolución es siempre parecida, cada una con sus tiempos y su velocidad particular.

Año tras año, la GeoCamp se consolida como el geosarao imprescindible para hacer brainstorming sobre las últimas novedades en geocosas. Publicado originalmente en el blog de GeoInquietos Sevilla. La foto de grup del Geocamp ES 2016 a Barcelona #geocampes pic.twitter.com/H44a413tM0 — Geo Inquiets (@geoinquiets) 22 de octubre de 2016 Todo el mundo tiene sus cinco minutos de fama, incluso si no llevas nada preparado, raro será que no participes en alguna discusión. Battery just about to die so this concludes my #geocampes tweeting. Here’s the remaining lineup pic.twitter.com/3eRxBt5NsF — Ed Freyfogle (@freyfogle) 22 de octubre de 2016

This post was originally posted on the blog of a former company. But since they have decided to violate my authorship rights, here is a copy of it. English version is lost. Photo of an asado Este año tuve el privilegio de poder asistir a la FOSS4G Argentina 2016, que se celebró en el IGN de Buenos Aires. Qué puedo contaros de Argentina que no sepáis ya. https://www.instagram.com/p/BD1thIpqcTI ...