The impact of imposter syndrome and equity in open source communities

Watch this interview to learn best practices for promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity with Rizel Scarlett.

Rizel Scarlett is a Junior Developer Advocate at GitHub. She shares some key take-away’s from her talk “Breaking Down Barriers: How Containerization Promotes Equity in the Tech Industry.” Rizel also shares thoughts on why equity in open source should be prioritized and talks about the impact of imposter syndrome for new (and first-time) contributors.

Key ideas

• Containers reduce the complexity to configure open source projects and to get them up and running.
• It’s important for folks to recognize privileges that they have because everyone has privileges.
• Be thoughtful about having good first issues [for your community]
• Make contributors feel welcome, particularly first-timers to an open source project.
• One thing that helped me was having maintainers or contributors that were available to answer questions.