Blacktocats was created to attract and empower Black lives in tech. The Blacktocats are the original CoB at GitHub.

The Blacktocats' career development initiative achieved notable progress toward fostering inclusivity and professional growth. The initiative brought together speakers from various parts of the company, imparting diverse experiences and insights on navigating the business's operational structure. These sessions enhanced understanding of the promotion process and offered coaching and guidance so members could be optimally “primed” for advancement.

Furthermore, this initiative was instrumental in alleviating the “imposter syndrome” that new Hubbers often experience by providing them with guidance on decoding GitHub and locating relevant information. The Blacktocats also leveraged this initiative as a conducive space for collaborative discussions about career-related challenges. Additionally, the Blacktocats took laudable steps towards leadership engagement, inviting senior GitHub leaders for interactive discussions on career navigation and success tips.

In honor of Juneteenth, the Blacktocats sponsored a learning opportunity with a game show event. This initiative promoted greater awareness and education about Juneteenth's historical significance and cultural importance. Additionally, as part of the internal design conference close to Juneteenth, the Blacktocats  hosted a special session to review the history and current impact of Juneteenth and explore ways to be more inclusive to Black designers in tech.

For Black History Month, the Blactocats community welcomed GitHub employees to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of African Americans throughout history. Reflecting on African Americans's struggles and successes while acknowledging the progress made and yet to be made, we continue to pursue racial justice and equality for all.

Events hosted by the Blacktocats included:

• Dj Sophia Rocks spinning music featuring hip-hop, rap, reggae, and soca

• The origins of Black History Month

• Black History Happy Hour at SF HQ

• Black History Month with GitHub Black Leaders

The Blacktocats supported numerous causes through their Giving Fund and raised over $227k since 2020. For FY23, they selected these causes as their focus:

• Hack the Hood

• OHub Foundation

• My Black My Hood My City

• Resilient Coders

• Shelby Farms Park Conservancy

A total of $47,597 was raised by 47 donors inclusive of company match. This was the second-largest giving fund after our Ukraine fund of FY23! Note: Funds were split evenly across all five orgs.

OctoGatos bring together people with Latinx backgrounds to build a more inclusive universe by energizing and empowering multicultural perspectives.

In 2023, Octogatos offered several coding courses in Uruguay that covered several critical topics, including how to use Git commands, create repositories and check repository status, structure a Git project, send commits, create branches, and more.

Upon graduating from the program, every student could build their own website in the cloud. Gaining these skills and creating a portfolio of their work with a GitHub profile gave students something tangible to point to when searching and applying for jobs in the tech sector.

Octogatos closed the program with a beautiful ceremony with over 200 attendees at the Uruguayan Laboratory of Technology, one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. It’s home to the first Microsoft AI laboratory in LATAM and is only the third of its kind outside the US.

There are approximately 1.3 billion people with disabilities who typically experience lower outcomes across many facets of life, including health, education, employment, and life expectancy. These outcomes are known as the disability divide, one that we know technology can help to bridge.

GitHub sits at the foundation of technology and software development. As a result, we have a unique opportunity to improve the accessibility of technology and the outcomes for people with disabilities globally. Over the past year, we significantly increased our investment in accessibility:

• We created a new head of accessibility role and hired a blind developer with lived experiences to lead our journey and bring together the diverse efforts taking place across GitHub into a cohesive multi-year strategy. We published our vision to empower developers with disabilities to contribute to software development and realize the goal of "nothing about us without us" with respect to technology.

• We significantly increased the velocity of accessibility improvements. A few notable highlights include improvements within GitHub Global Campus that remove barriers for students with disabilities, improvements within GitHub Copilot that enable developers with disabilities to leverage the power of artificial intelligence, and color contrast improvements across GitHub.com.

• We partnered with Access Computing and CREATE, two organizations aligned with our broader goal to empower people with disabilities through accessible technology.

• We launched a new video series on coding accessibility and published articles on the ReadME Project, which amplify the voices of developers with disabilities.

Looking ahead, we are particularly excited about the possibility that AI can improve inclusion and opportunity for people with disabilities.

At the heart of GitHub's developer community, The ReadME Project serves as our hub for sharing knowledge, sparking inspiration, and presenting content that resonates. Though software is central to our stories, it's the diverse array of individuals, each with unique skills and perspectives, that fuels our commitment to nurturing a more inclusive community.

This past year, we told the stories of experts in our community, capturing their lived experiences to help others navigate the developer journey, with a special emphasis on coding accessibility. 

In a world where technology is increasingly central to daily life, its role in bridging the accessibility divide is crucial for the 1.3 billion people with disabilities across the globe. It's not just about creating tools but recognizing that those with disabilities bring essential knowledge to the design table. Developers with disabilities–such as Becky Tyler, Annalu Waller, and Paul Chiou– understand firsthand the challenges and needs that must be met, and their insights are vital in crafting adaptive technologies that truly work. The path to inclusive software doesn't stop at conception; it requires the continuous engagement of people with disabilities, from idea to implementation. By integrating their perspectives into every stage of development, society takes a meaningful step towards full participation for all. This approach transforms technology from a mere tool into an empathetic bridge—connecting us in our shared human experience, regardless of physical ability.

As a corporation and community leader, GitHub has a responsibility to address key local and global societal issues. Our Social Impact team works to embody positive values and lead our business in an ethical way. We deploy GitHub products and tools to be used for good, we activate partnerships between the private and social sectors, and we empower employees to engage in their communities and contribute to causes that align with their values. Together with our employees, developers, and partners—and with a focus on skilling, accessibility, sustainability, and humanitarian response—we drive positive and lasting contributions to the world.

Learn more about how we work to empower developers and employees to make a lasting impact here.

At GitHub, we believe that everyone should have an equal opportunity to not only use technology, but also create it. Building a more diverse and inclusive tech industry makes for better, more innovative products that serve a broader audience and have the potential to positively impact society as a whole. This is especially true of open source software development, which has revolutionized our relationship to technology and transformed the world.

Unfortunately, not everyone has equal access to the educational and infrastructural support needed to join—let alone advance in—the developer community. As the largest open source platform in the world, GitHub is uniquely positioned to lower barriers to entry in open source and help close gaps in representation in tech more broadly. Working with our network of developers and partner organizations, our social impact team connects individuals from historically underrepresented backgrounds in tech with the research-backed tools, training, and support they need to join and thrive in open source.

Addressing the gap between underserved communities and skilling for the future of technology, GitHub has committed to skilling 5,000 people in open source over the next two years. We believe that by working together with our partners to provide the right resources to the people who need them, we can create a future where everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute to and benefit from the power of technology.

All In for Students is an online program for tech students from underrepresented backgrounds that provides open source education, training, and internship opportunities. Together with corporate partners, industry leaders, researchers, and foundations, the program builds upon existing research and initiatives to create a more inclusive environment within open source for future developers everywhere.

When we launched the All In for Students pilot in 2021 with 30 students from seven universities, we had designed the program to be intimate, hands-on, and customizable to each student’s needs. Fast forward to today and we have scaled to reach 405 students from 112 universities and colleges across the U.S. Throughout this journey, we’ve learned how to keep this high-impact approach, while increasing opportunities for students to dive into open source.

More info on a wrap up of FY23 here.

A maintainer is to a community what a manager is to a team: they directly influence the community’s culture, practices, and communication styles. That’s why we launched All In for Maintainers this year, a program that empowers maintainers with the tools and information they need to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion within their communities.

In FY23, we launched the first two programs as a part of All In for Maintainers: the All In for Maintainers DEI Resource Hub and the All In CHAOSS Badging Initiative. 

The DEI Resource Hub has been built by maintainers, for maintainers. When building All In for Maintainers, we conducted a Listening Tour and survey to better understand the state of inclusivity today. A key finding from our research was that maintainers have no way of identifying communities and projects who exemplified best practices for DEI work within their communities. The All In CHAOSS DEI Badging Initiative, in partnership with CHAOSS, is our first step towards solving this problem. The program allows open source maintainers to signal their ongoing efforts to improve and prioritize DEI within their communities and have the ability to recognize those who are leading the way.

For more info checkout on the all In for Maintainers DEI Resource Hub.

For more info checkout on the all In CHAOSS DEI Badging Initiative.

We believe that policy should enable all developers to do their best work, which is why equal opportunity is one of three pillars that drives all of our policy advocacy.

This has been a landmark year for advocating for policies that benefit developers everywhere. As global conflict increasingly extends into the digital space, the interconnected code collaboration community is threatened by internet shutdowns and tech nationalism. Developers play a crucial role in building digital resilience, which is why we were proud to join the Copenhagen Pledge, a commitment to make digital technologies work for democracy and human rights. We've also continued our efforts to make our platform as broadly available as possible. Additionally, we commissioned research from consultancy Tattle, which found researchers in the international development, public policy, and economic fields were interested in using GitHub data, but faced barriers in obtaining and using it. To lower those barriers, we launched the GitHub Innovation Graph, which provides longitudinal metrics on software development for economies across the globe. We're excited for the power and potential of AI to accelerate innovation and lower barriers to entry for developers throughout the world.

GitHub is home to the world's largest community of developers who share their code, work together, and build amazing things. Out of those millions of developers, there are a select few who go above and beyond in helping others in the developer space. The GitHub Stars program recognizes and lifts up those who are not only patient and giving open source contributors but who help educate, inspire, and influence the online and in-person communities in which they live and work.

The Stars program has grown to represent 35 countries and we’re continuing to add Stars in countries like Singapore, Israel, India, Argentina, Italy, and many more. Our Stars represent a variety of lived experiences and roles ranging from CxOs, data scientists, engineers, OSS maintainers, SREs, developer advocates, and content creators. The Stars program has seen many individuals who were just starting out in the industry become well-known super stars in the community. The program also encourages Stars to learn and grow, from getting officially certified through the GitHub Certifications program to growing their OSS ideas and helping thousands utilize their OSS projects. Some role models in this amazing group are:

Gina Häußge, from Germany, is the creator and fulltime OSS Maintainer for OctoPrint. Gina is motivated by helping people, especially young women in tech, debunking stereotypes, and making the invisible, visible.

Ruth Ikegah, from Nigeria, grows OSS communities in Africa and helps onboard new developers into open source. Ruth leverages the power of community to help tech become more inclusive for women through several organizations like She Code Africa, which paves the way for inclusivity through the CHAOSS project and by advancing African open source through authenticity.

Emanuele Bartolesi, from Switzerland, who shares his expertise with millions around the globe by creating courses like Learning GitHub on LinkedIn Learning (where over 20,000+ people have taken the course) and by speaking at conferences.

Miguel Ángel Durán García, based in Spain, is a content creator, developer, community leader, and speaker, who writes content in Spanish for millions of developers, and creates virtual events.

Eddie Jaoude, from the UK, is a community leader, content creator, and OSS maintainer who has grown the developer community EddieHub to thousands over the past few years. He’s growing his OSS project ‘BioDrop’ through the GitHub Accelerator program for the community to use.

These Stars make GitHub the highly inclusive platform that it is today, and we celebrate their ability to nurture the developer community in all its diversity.