I recently attended two local conferences for women in technology and walked away with a big dose of inspiration and wisdom. When I go to conferences like these, I’m looking to learn how I can be better at what I do, and both events were packed with women who have overcome major obstacles in their lives and made a difference in some way. As a woman and an open source change agent, whose job it is to drive change for greater consistency, effectiveness and efficiency, this was undeniably inspiring.
More specifically, I’m tasked with advocating for open source methodologies within VMware. That can be a hard row to hoe when people feel comfortable doing things the way that they have always done them and don’t necessarily see the need for change. So, it meant a lot to learn about the speakers’ specific experiences. After all, many things sound good in theory. However, until you actually try to implement them in reality, you don’t really know what’s going to work. Here I got to learn about real dilemmas and real responses to them that ultimately led to success. The incredible two women I’ll talk about below delivered speeches that truly resonated with me as an open source change agent.
The first, at this year’s IEEE’s Women in Engineering International Leadership Conference in San Jose, was educator and entrepreneur Monica Lopez-Gonzalez. Monica spoke on the topic of “Leading Innovation through Polymathic Thinking and Entrepreneurship.” One of her main passions is to integrate art and science. She believes that the kind of curiosity that thrives in the spaces between disciplines can nurture the kind of creative problem-solving mindset that we need today. As she observed while showing a slide titled The Road Ahead and talking about the reality of projects that are both hard and engaging: “There is no road.”
When I was in school, fields of study were very defined. You studied physics or computer science or electrical engineering, and that’s it. Today, our most successful problem solvers might study bioengineering with art and data science, or computer science with neuroscience and design. The complexity of the challenges and problems that we face require that we tap into these intersections – that’s where we will find the solutions we need. In the future, as I try to drive change and process improvements, I’m looking to draw on both my own and my colleagues’ broadest areas of expertise and experience, knowing that we’ll need all of it to get to where we need to go.
There’s a second lesson here for the open source community: that we should be working hard to include everyone who is curious about what we are doing. The greater the diversity of background and expertise that they bring, the more successful the solutions we can collectively engineer to generate greater shared benefits. This is one of my primary goals as an open source change agent.
I do want to note, though, that open source is already a pretty good place for anyone hoping to start engaging with technological problems. We have a very low threshold of entry; you don’t have to know any specific skill to be admitted. Everyone is welcome, and if you have an interest to learn more and to contribute, you are empowered to do so.
The other speaker who left an impression on me was at the Women Transforming Technology (WT2) conference, held at VMware’s Palo Alto headquarters campus. Ashley Still, vice president/general manager of Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud Enterprise, gave a presentation on “Lessons Learned from Adobe’s Transformation to the Cloud.” The biggest of those lessons was about being decisive. “Don’t be afraid to burn your boats,” Ashley told us. Make a commitment, get on with it and don’t think about turning back. That’s how she transformed Adobe into its hugely successful new cloud-based model.
I know from experience how hard that can be. Sometimes we want to wait for more data before making a decision and we end up with decision paralysis. Ashley’s talk reminded us that there’s a cost to waiting: we are missing out on the potential opportunities that our new direction would have already created for us.
As an open source change agent, I know that when I’m trying to drive change, I will never have 100% of the data. It was heartening to have my intuition validated. Sometimes you just have to decide that what you have is good enough and run with it. From there, you iterate and move on to the next step. It also made me realize that as I lay the foundation for the change that I want to see, I have signed up to embrace change; I am being transformed by the decisions that I make.
Advocating for change from within can be super challenging. Persistence is key: there are times when people are not ready to listen due to other urgent priorities at hand. If the door gets shut on you, find another door. As a woman in technology and an open source change agent, it was encouraging to know that I’m not alone and that other people who are trying to encourage change face similar challenges. More importantly, I don’t have to go at it alone. I have the support of this great community of women whose insights open new doors—ones that I may not have known existed in the first place.
It was fantastic to see and learn how these two women – and all the others I got to hear from at these two conferences – had the impact that they were hoping to achieve. That alone was motivation enough to go back out and keep working at driving change. It reminded me what acclaimed author Ursula Le Guin wrote about women: “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.”
Meng Chow is a staff open source program manager in VMware’s Office of the CTO. To learn more about what it means to be an open source change agent, stay tuned to the Open Source Blog and follow us on Twitter (@vmwopensource).
