GitHub All In: Our first student cohort and what’s next

Last year, we launched All In, a community dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within open source through access, community, equity, and data. When we first started this journey at GitHub to advance diversity, equity and inclusion within open source, we knew that we could not do it alone. We committed to approaching it the open source way—openly, transparently, and in collaboration with those in the open source community.

Over the last year, we’ve reached:
– More than 1,000 community members
– 17 founding partners, and targeting 100+ partners over the next year
– 7 partnering education institutions
– Our first student cohort with 30 students with over 90% of them committed to internships, and targeting 300+ over the next year
– 7,000+ open source community members surveyed

All In is a community of corporate partners, industry leaders, researchers, and foundations. We invite you to join us on what’s next, and take part on this journey to make a lasting impact together.

GitHub All In for Students pilot

Congratulations to the inaugural class of GitHub All In for Students! The 12-month pilot program was in partnership with universities that have been historically excluded and under-resourced. Our 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. Today, over 90% of students have accepted internship offers and the remainder are in the final stages of interviews.

Working closely with department chairs and professors, we supported students across diverse lived experiences. We wanted the student who may commute two hours to school each day because they can’t afford to live on campus, provide caregiver support (especially due to COVID-19), work full time, serve as active duty military, or train year-round as a student athlete to maintain their scholarship. We looked for all things that may have had an impact on their academic experience, but showed that they were hardworking, dedicated, motivated, and just needed an opportunity to thrive.

From stipends, technology resources, added curriculums to support technical education and career development, and more—this was made possible through our partnerships. This pilot is just the beginning, and looking forward we’re hoping to engage and scale the program greatly.

This was made possible through our partnerships with the Linux Foundation, Major League Hacking, All Things Open, the CHAOSS project, and the employee resource groups of our corporate partners. Our founding corporate partners were GitHub, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, Intel, and Fidelity.

Participate and learn more about the program here.

Supporting community with All In for Maintainers

In 2021, we also set the foundation for the All In for Maintainers program, aimed at providing training and technical support to maintainers who want to advance diversity and inclusion within their communities. As part of this, we completed a Maintainer’s Listening Tour which was a series of focus groups, individual interviews, and an asynchronous process where maintainers provided feedback on what’s working, not working, what additional resources they need, and what they want to see in a program.

The tour highlighted the urgency for the open source community to address longstanding and commonly cited themes impacting inclusion and brought to the forefront nuanced issues that have not been discussed at this level.

We’ve released preliminary findings from the tour and key areas of support requested by maintainers, which includes a centralized repository of DEI resources and programming, as well as tools for attracting and maintaining contributors of diverse backgrounds, including accessibility audits, community hospitality techniques, code of conduct analysis, and inclusive language scans and updates. The final report and recommendations from the Maintainers Listening Tour is slated to be released during Maintainer Month in June 2022.

Learn more about the program here.

Looking forward

As we have concluded the first year of All In, we reflect on the immense strides that we have made together with our partners and community members. From the successful pilot of All In for Students, to finding a deeper community connection through our Maintainer’s Listening Tour, and leveraging early findings of our Open Source DEI Survey to tackling opportunities for improvement head on, we are ready to grow All In to new heights this coming year. We invite you to take part in this meaningful work. Let’s open source diversity, equity and inclusion—together!

Visit allinopensource.org to learn more about All In and join the community, and read more about GitHub’s commitment to diversity, inclusion and belonging here.

Written by

Demetris Cheatham

@demetris11