From Ada Lovelace to Grace Hopper, women have played an important part in the development of computing. Female executives such as Ginni Rometty and Meg Whitman have opened the doors of the boardroom; and women-led start-ups abound.

Yet despite these high-profile successes, the overall percentage of women and minorities in tech is still ridiculously low. One place where this really stands out is in the open-source community, where male contributors outnumber women.

“I feel like this community has a lot of very visible women, so when I actually looked at the number of contributors by men and women, I was really shocked to find out it was 3% [women],” said Cheryl Hung (pictured), director of ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Hung spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host and cloud economist Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed  the need for more women in cloud-native computing and how the CNCF is encouraging minorities to become part of the open-source community (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Warning: Open source can be addictive!

Today, Hung is an open-source evangelist on a mission “to increase the adoption of Kubernetes and cloud native by fostering sustainable open-source communities.” Her journey toward the containerization grail began when she was a software engineer on Google Maps in London. Offered a free diversity scholarship to KubeCon Europe in 2017, she took a plane to Berlin. Attending the event changed the course of her life.

“Just that little first step can go a long way into getting people into feeling like they’re part of the community and they have something valuable to give back,” Hung said. “Once you’re in, you’re hooked.”

Returning to London, Hung started a Cloud Native London meetup. She soon had a “strong, open and diverse” community, with over 3,000 members and regular meeting attendance of 200 to 300 people. A little over a year after attending her first KubeCon, she became the CNCF’s director of ecosystem, and KubeCon Europe 2019 saw her on the stage, giving a keynote address in front of 7,700 people.

Jumping from scholarship attendee to keynote speaker in just two years may seem like a stroke of luck, but Hung had already proven she has what it takes to beat the odds. She holds a masters in computer science from Kings College, Cambridge. Famous as the incubator of modern computing theory, and for being the academic home of the “father” of artificial intelligence Alan Turing, the King’s College computer science program is ranked best in the United Kingdom and has the highest admissions standards.

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Scholarships make it possible for hundreds of people from underrepresented groups to attend KubeCon events across the world. But, “there are other things that need to happen” in order to increase the user community and encourage more companies to become cloud native, according to Hung.

One of these “other things” is reaching out personally to introduce more minorities to cloud computing. Hung quotes from a GitHub survey from 2017 that showed women were just as interested in contributing to an open-source project as men but were much less likely to ask questions on a public forum — or to receive unsolicited help. This is a statistic she aims to change.

“This is a community effort. We’re all part of the same group of people … trying to work on the same things. And to do that, we need to get this mindset amongst the community that we need to reach out to more individuals and help them and pull them in,” Hung stated.

End-user participation is key to the growth of the CNCF

There are three bodies that form the CNCF: the governing board, the technical oversight committee, and the end-user community. “In theory, these three should be “co-equal in power,” Hung said.

In reality, the end-user community is currently lesser than the governing board and technical oversight committee, she explained. Correcting this imbalance is Hung’s raison d’etre: “The reason that my world exists is to understand what the end users need and get them active and engaged in the community,” she stated.

Hung’s goal for the end-user community is that they not only understand the value of using open-source projects, but that they move beyond that to “having actual influence in the projects … and then … contributing themselves and becoming leaders.”

In order to reach this goal, the end user has to overcome three main challenges: Navigating the eco-system, hiring experienced engineers, and creating a cloud-native-aligned business strategy, according to Hung. Navigating the ecosystem is the trickiest to solve.

“There’s so many channels, so many projects; there’s no central authority that you can go to and say, ‘I’ve got this problem’ am I doing the right thing?’” she said. The CNCF is addressing this challenge in a typically open way — through peer interaction and knowledge sharing.

“Everybody’s trying to go through the same journey right now; everyone has these common challenges. So, if they can figure them out together and solve them together, then it just saves a lot of time and effort for everybody,” Hung said.

Contracting good talent is the second challenge. As an ex-DevOps team manager, Hung knows personally how hard it is to find employees with Kubernetes experience. Just as with any rare species, a good rule is to seek them in their natural habitat: at KubeCon. “There are companies [who are] just here because they want to be in front of the engineers who are most involved with open source and Kubernetes,” she said.

The CNCF offers resources and training programs in container orchestration, from very basic introductory courses to more advanced training. Hung’s advice for developers is to get a basic understanding from auditing a course such as the Certified Kubernetes Administrator; then gather as much real-world experience as possible.

“There’s no substitute to a year or two years of really running applications and monitoring and scaling them in production and dealing with fires,” she stated.

Challenge number three is incorporating cloud native into the company’s business strategy. Knowing that open-source projects have longevity is important for this level of commitment, according to Hung. Once again, the CNCF ecosystem is there for support.

“For companies that want to get involved into that next level, for example running on a technical oversight committee or being on the governing board, the CNCF can help end users have that level of impact and have that level of engagement within the community,” Hung stated.

A different kind of leadership

Leadership in open source is extremely different from leadership in a typical corporate hierarchy, according to Hung. Traditional leaders are placed in charge. Open-source leaders are role models, recognized by others through their hands-on contributions to the project, technical expertise, and their natural empathy and communication skills.

“To earn the trust of the community, you have to be very clearly making the right decisions and not doing it because you have an agenda in mind or because your employer wants you to,” Hung concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither the CNCF nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE