If you’re like us, sometimes you get discouraged by all the bad news you hear about women in open technology and culture. It’s hard to keep fighting when it feels like you’re not making progress.

That’s why we organized a panel discussion to focus on the good news at the upcoming Open Source Bridge conference in Portland, Oregon. The topic of the panel is “Diversity in open source: What’s changed in 2012 and 2013.” We will use this panel we will tell some of the many success stories in improving diversity in open source software in the last couple of years.

• 20% women attendees at PyCon US 2013
• 85% of JSConf attendees donated to women in open tech/culture
• Up-and-coming new non-profit Black Girls Code ran several workshops
• Conferences with 100% white male speakers are now called out for not trying hard enough to find the best speakers
• Mozilla’s adoption of community guidelines that prevent advocacy of discrimination on Planet Mozilla and other Mozilla forums
• The rapid growth of PyLadies

We are lucky to have a diverse, talented, and funny set of panelists, including:

• Ashe Dryden, consultant and diversity advocate (and keynote speaker for OSBridge 2013)
• Sumana Harihareswara, Engineering Community Manager at Wikimedia Foundation (and keynote speaker for OSBridge 2012)
• Lukas Blakk, Build and Release Engineer at Mozilla
• Asheesh Laroia, Executive Director of OpenHatch
• Liz Henry, Bugmaster at Mozilla

Ada Initiative executive director Valerie Aurora will be moderating.

Can’t be there in person? The session will be recorded and available for free on the OSBridge web site.