Boston, MA and Mexico City
Paola Villarreal is a self taught systems programmer with 15 years of experience that has worked with governments, NGOs and companies promoting openness as a way of doing things. She currently is a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow working with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts on topics related to civil rights and technology.
Authored Comments
Thank you, Tim, for your sharing your personal experience. Unfortunately, it is not a common thing to have such levels of diversity in many, many IT companies. Just look at how many black people were hired by Facebook last year which, IMO, is symptomatic of how our industry is behaving.
Also, no, the solution is not to pay them, it is to actively outreach to underrepresented people so they get jobs in organizations that currently do not have tech skills and that would definitely benefit from having them while they create a reputation and connections in the FLOSS community.
So, no, it is not to create "some non-profit organization", they already exist and they have unfulfilled IT needs that OSS and underrepresented people in IT can fulfill.
Thank you for reading and your comments.