On September 16th, Naomi Arnold from the Networks Group in EECS attended the Grace Hopper Celebration’s Open Source Day. This is a virtual all-day hackathon celebrating women who work in open source software. Open source software still has huge under representation of women with, by some estimates, less than 10% of open source contributors being women.
Naomi represented the Raphtory project. a collaboration with QMUL, the Alan Turing Institute and Pometry. Raphtory was showcased in the Open Source Day alongside some well known projects like Matplotlib, Open Street Map and Node.js. The objective of the event was to celebrate women in computer science and help first-time contributors get into open source with a variety of workshops to get involved with. Naomi said: “It was great to have some users testing the Raphtory software and get some feedback about the user experience with getting started, and we got some issues resolved and cool features implemented that we’d struggle to find time to do just within the core team.”