SAN FRANCISCO, March 1, 2016 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its partnership with Women Who Code to increase diversity in the technology industry and support women who want to attend Linux Foundation events. The partnership includes free and discounted passes to Linux Foundation events for Women Who Code members, as well as an initial donation to the organization to support its greater efforts to support women in technology.
The Linux Foundation seeks to increase the number of individuals from underrepresented communities contributing to technology development through a variety of initiatives. Specific to its events, these initiatives include offering diversity scholarships to attend events, onsite childcare, mothers’ rooms, and enforcing a respectful code of conduct for attendees. The Linux Foundation also recently announced a partnership with Goodwill to increase access to Linux training and certification to disadvantaged populations.
“Increasing diversity in technology takes more than one approach. From our partnership with Goodwill to support people from disadvantaged backgrounds to our work with Women Who Code and a variety of other organizations, we hope to have at least a small impact on this important issue,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “We’re looking forward to meeting and working with women from the program and helping them to advance their careers and contributions in the open source community.”
The Linux Foundation open source events where free passes and discounts are available include:
Open Networking Summit (March 14-17, Santa Clara, CA)
Embedded Linux Conference + OpenIoT Summit (April 4-6, San Diego, CA)
Vault (April 20-21, Raleigh, NC)
Apache: Big Data North America (May 9-12, Vancouver, BC)
ApacheCon North America (May 11-13, Vancouver, BC)
MesosCon (June 1-2, Denver, CO)
LinuxCon + ContainerCon North America (August 22-24, Toronto, ON)
LinuxCon + ContainerCon Europe (October 4-6, Berlin, Germany)
Embedded Linux Conference Europe (October 6-7, Berlin, Germany).
“The Linux Foundation sets the example for other organizations that want to increase the number of women contributing to technology development,” said Zassmin Montes de Oca, WWCode Board Vice Chair. “We look forward to their continued sponsorship to propel women’s careers in technology.”
The Linux Foundation supports a variety of community initiatives and organizations to help advance like-minded organizations that protect and advance free and open source software; increase diversity in technology and the open source community; support career development opportunities for the next generation of IT managers and developers, regardless of background or circumstances; and to empower open source professionals to take on leadership opportunities and advance the most important technologies of our time.
Women Who Code was created in 2011. The nonprofit is best known for its weekly publication the CODE Review and free technical study groups, hack nights, career development, and speaking events featuring influential technology industry experts and investors. Since inception, WWCode has produced thousands of events worldwide and garnered sponsorship from organizations like Google, Zendesk, VMWare, KPCB, Capital One, Nike, Yelp, and many others.
For more information about Linux Foundation events, including codes of conduct and diversity scholarships, please visit: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/.
To become a member of Women Who Code, please visit: https://www.womenwhocode.com/donate.
About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.
###
The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.