GitHub’s “All In” program is dedicated to advancing DEI within open source.

Two years ago, Demetris Cheatham joined GitHub as a senior director of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Strategy. She has a goal to open source DEI. DEI is used to describe policies and programs that promote the representation and participation of different groups of individuals, including people of different ages, races, ethnicities, abilities and disabilities, genders, cultures, religions, and sexual orientations. Many open-source projects are hosted on GitHub, where you can access repositories or get involved in community projects.

Cheatham understood how open source software development succeeds when large groups of people work together to create solutions to thorny problems. Open-source (OSS) is code that is designed to be publicly accessible anyone can see, modify, and distribute the code as they see fit. An open-source development model is a process used by an open-source community project to develop open-source software. The open-source movement is the reason that technology has developed at such a breakneck pace for the past few decades.

Open source' DEI is streamlining GitHub’s diversity:

The challenges Cheatham saw in promoting inclusion among open-source software developers were the same issues. Cheatham had worked on in her years spent leading diversity and belonging across the social sector and finance industry. Their goal is to expose students to open source and provide a clear pathway to participate in an internship program with one of our corporate partners.

Last year they launched “All In”, a community dedicated to advancing DEI within open source through access, community, equity, and data. It aimed at partnering with corporations, philanthropists, and underrepresented universities to create a more diverse and inclusive community of developers. GitHub to advance DEI within open source.

GitHub was the holistic approach that they were taking to diversity, inclusion, and belonging. GitHub is All In when it comes to advancing DEI within open source. They committed to approaching it the open source way openly, transparently, and in collaboration with those in the open-source community. GitHub had a holistic strategy focusing on its people, including 83 million developers.

As a part of “All In” completed a Maintainer’s Listening Tour which was a series of focus groups, individual interviews, and an asynchronous process. Leveraging early findings of our Open Source DEI Survey to tackle opportunities for improvement head-on, They are ready to grow “All In” to new heights this coming year. The findings inspired GitHub’s pilot program “All In”.

Diversity work often suffers when best practices are siloed, duplicated unnecessarily and when it lacks industry collaboration. when start to make systemic changes, lasting changes, generational changes, and that's what attracted Cheatham to GitHub. Together with leaders in tech, students, researchers, and more we have concluded our first year of growing this exciting community time flies.