Learn more about our: Mentors | Mentees | Projects
Start osmp in your city!
Have a local Code for America brigade and Girl Develop chapter in your city? Create your very own osmp to grow and diversify the local tech scene.
Check out our organizers guidebook to see what we learned this year, fork your own version for your program, and comment with feedback.
The Program
The Open Source Mentorship Program (osmp) is a partnership between Code for America brigades and Girl Develop It chapters. The series spans 10 weeks and pairs female mentees and mentors to work on civic tech projects. The original conception was “Summer of Open Source”, piloted in Philadelphia over the summer of 2014. Met with great excitement from the success of the experiment, CfA and GDI cemented the partnership so that other brigades and chapters across the country might replicate and extend the impact of this collaboration.
Building off of the success of last year’s “Summer of Open Source”, we wanted to offer a crash course in open source and a chance to get hands-on project experience in civic tech. For many participants this is their first exposure to the tech community and the tenets of open source.
Our organizers
Ashley Bernard, GDI Philly
An osmp veteran, Ashley began her involvement with GDI as a mentee during the program’s pilot run last year. Those ten weeks were enough for her to fall in love with both the Philly tech community and GDI’s mission of increasing diversity. In addition to evangelizing the good news of GDI, Ashley spends her days as a project coordinator at Delphic Digital, her weekends having Tea with Strangers, and befriending strangers’ dogs in the time in between.
Maggie Deptola, Code for Philly
Maggie joined Code for Philly in the Spring of 2015 and was immediately tasked with putting her skills in organization, witty emailing, an playful nagging to good use as a Program Coordinator for this year’s osmp cohort. She recently joined the RJMetrics team as an Onboarding Account Manager, and spends her spare time being a karaoke all-star and exploring the great outdoors.
Why it’s important and why you should join
“Open Source is all about patience and persistence. The road is long, the obstacles are many, but projects can be super fulfilling and rewarding if you stay the course.” —Christina Deemer, osmp2015 mentee
1. Disrupting the status quo
You might have heard that women are underrepresented in the tech industry, but did you know of all open source contributions, only 11% come from women? Open source depends on contributions of all kinds—imagine if more women felt empowered to bring their voices to the table. With only a small percentage of females currently participating, women are untapped potential waiting to be activated. The Open Source Mentorship Program is a good place to start. Let’s change expectations about who defines the open source movement and how people find their place in this vibrant community.
2. Transformative Experience
The program is conceived of as a way to increase practical knowledge and explore the strengths of open source. But even more significant is the personal development that both mentees and their mentors experience. Participants discover new capacity and build identity as part of the open source movement. osmp 2015 is an opportunity to not only improve individually, it’s a chance to be part of something bigger than any one person, any single interest.
3. A Warm Welcome to the Local Civic Tech Community
It’s one thing to introduce women to open source and civic tech, but to remain active and engaged, for any person, there must be a network of support. Whether you’re brand new to programming or have been in the tech community for awhile, we guarantee you’ll meet fresh faces. “Open source is social by nature”, so let’s leverage our strong civic tech community to cultivate relationships in addition to skill.
You can learn more about the inaugural 2014 cohort here and about building a program in your own city by visiting the official partnership page. Already started? Awesome! Check out the guide we put together and fork it to share best practices from your own experience.
Mentorship
8 mentors
Mentors are senior technologists as well as respected figures in the civic tech community. As mentees navigated their way through the unfamiliar and challenging terrain of ambitious projects already underway, mentors provided guidance and ongoing support over the length of the program.
4 tiered mentors
In the spirit of persistent learning, tiered mentors are intermediate-level technologists who are simultaneously developing their own skills, while endowing beginners with the knowledge they’ve acquired. Tiered mentors are both learning as well as teaching, so they provide a balanced perspective and ask the right questions.
Learn more about our mentors
9 mentees
Our mentees make the program. These are women who are hungry to learn. It’s not small feat to join a community, learn new tech skills, and make significant progress on a project while also juggling the rest of life. These are impressive women to say the least.
Learn more about our mentees
Support
This year’s program was made possible by the generous contributions from
Weekly sponsors included:
Mentor appreciation gifts included:
