Program Announced for The Linux Foundation Diversity Empowerment Summit North America

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the program for the Diversity Empowerment Summit North America, taking place September 14 in Los Angeles, CA as part of Open Source Summit North America. The goal of the summit is to help promote and facilitate an increase in diversity, inclusion, empowerment and social innovation in the open source community, and to provide a venue for discussion and collaboration.

The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit is the premier open source technical conference in North America, gathering 2,000 developers, operators and community leadership professionals to collaborate, share information and learn about the latest in open technologies, including Linux, containers, cloud computing and more.

Due to the large number of high quality diversity-related submissions for Open Source Summit North America, The Linux Foundation added the new Diversity Empowerment Summit (DES) to the schedule in order to accommodate as many talks as possible. In addition to the sessions at DES, many diversity-focused talks were also accepted for the other four events.

"One of the things that makes open source great is the fact that contributions to both code and the community come from individuals around the world from a huge variety of backgrounds," said Linux Foundation VP of Events, Angela Brown. "The record number of diversity-related topics submitted for Open Source Summit this year reflects the importance the open source community puts on these issues. We are excited to be able to provide a venue to facilitate discussion and teaching about these important topics."

Session highlights at Diversity Empowerment Summit include:

• Chaos Theory + Civil Liberties = 21st Century Corporate Practices - Kate Ertmann, GO
• Open Your Arms to Open Source - Solutions to Bring in Social Innovation to All Walks of Life All Over the World - Arpana Durgaprasad, IBM
• You're Not a *Real* Software Engineer - Amy Chen, Rancher Labs
• CO.LAB: A Collaborative, Mobile Learning Experience - John Adams, Red Hat

The full lineup of all Open Source Summit North America sessions, including those at the DES, can be viewed here.

Other diversity and inclusion activities at Open Source Summit North America include:

• Diversity and needs-based scholarships
• Speed Mentoring
• Recruiting Program
• Women in Open Source Lunchhttps://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/open-source-summit-north-america/extend-the-experience/women-open-source-lunch
• Kids Day
• Hacking for Humanity - A Social Innovation Hackathon with Girls in Tech
• Literacy Program + Children's Book Drive

Onsite resources to increase accessibility to the event include:

• Nursing room
• Complimentary child care
• Wheelchair & medical equipment rental from One Stop Mobility
• Quiet room where conversation and interaction are not allowed
• Communication stickers to indicate an attendee's requested level of interaction
• Non-binary restrooms

Registration is discounted by $150 through July 30, and academic and hobbyist rates are also available.

Members of the press who would like to request a complimentary press pass to attend should contact Dan Brown at dbrown@linuxfoundation.org.

Open Source Summit North America is made possible by Diamond Sponsors IBM and Intel; Platinum Sponsors Cisco, Google Cloud Platform, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Red Hat and SUSE; and Gold Sponsors Cloud Native Computing Foundation, {code} by Dell EMC, CoreOS and VMware. Lunch will be provided to attendees on September 14th courtesy of Diversity Empowerment Summit Lunch Sponsor Intel.

Additional Resources
YouTube: The Linux Foundation Event Experience (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WUeelICQ2U)

LinuxCon North America 2016 Event Recap
(https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america) 

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found atwww.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page:https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage.

Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact:
Dan Brown
The Linux Foundation
415-420-7880
dbrown@linuxfoundation.org

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SOURCE The Linux Foundation