This post was co-written by Adina Cretu & Vivek Singh. All costs for accepted female candidates for Gitcoin’s recently announced KERNEL program will be covered by the KERNEL Scholorship, funded by Gitcoin & ConsenSys.
This post was co-written by Adina Cretu & Vivek Singh.
All costs for accepted female candidates for Gitcoin’s recently announced KERNEL program will be covered by the KERNEL Scholorship, funded by Gitcoin & ConsenSys.
Heyo Gitcoiners & Gitcoinerettes!
Back in December 2017, when Gitcoin first met the interwebs, we celebrated every time we saw 100 more coders, designers or thinkers join our community. Almost 3 years later, we’re at 40k developers around the world. It’s beginning to feel like one giant, tightly knit oyster of open source enthusiasts.
We’re seeing buidlers of all ages, from all over the planet and with all types of skills and expertise levels boarding the Gitcoin shuttle. It makes us proud and hopeful to notice the diversity in our community.
But we’re always aiming for a melting pot – more nations, more colors, more identities, more genders.
As a diverse team ourselves (we work across continents, genders, races, ages and backgrounds), we know the best ideas and results happen when 2 simple requirements are met:
KERNEL is designed to make these 2 success criteria meet and our scholarship program is one step in our commitment to an extremely diverse cohort.
As of 2020, just 14% of the software engineers in the USA and 17% of IT&C specialists in Europe are women. And while 74% of girls are interested in STEM and computer science, their interest is not yet reflected in the structure of companies, communities and teams out there.
Similar statistics show for people of color. Black employees represent 1% – 6% of the technical roles within big tech companies, despite making up 13% of the US Population.
We know Rome wasn’t built in a day – it did take way longer than it took blockchain to surface and challenge the status quo. But we also know everything grows from a seed. And we’re inspired by the success of community efforts before us, including Black Girls CODE — who currently leads the Crypto For Black Lives matching round with close to $11K in donations with 13 days left to go.
We chose The KERNEL Scholarship as another step towards meaningful diversity – calling all women and people of color with a passion for Web 3, open source and product development to join our first KERNEL cohort.
We’re building a strong community of 150+ bright doers & thinkers, to share, learn and grow together. We hope these will be your peers for the next decade in Web 3. Open source founders and tech experts will mentor, inspire, and assist cohort mates in building projects and more importantly, community in open source. The 8-week program meandering through Web 3 starts July 7th, 2020.
This is just one of the steps we’re taking to make Gitcoin a creative and inclusive hub for everybody passionate about open source. Because just like the software says – we’re open.
And while this is not a simple conversation, we feel we need to simply hack the bias. So tell us your ideas, your experiences and your thoughts on Townsquare.
If you know any potential interested candidates, please let them know about the KERNEL scholarship. Genesis Block, our first cohort, will be open for their applications on a rolling basis through kickoff on July 7th.
If you’re considering KERNEL — we’d ask one question:
If you had 8 weeks with 150 great minds supporting you, what would you want to build?
Is there a cost for the KERNEL Fellowship?
There will be a cost for accepted participants to attend the program. The $ amount is intended to generate commitment from successful applicants, not to be financially prohibitive. The KERNEL Scholarship will be available and liberally applied, so please don’t hesitate to apply and let us know if you’d like to be considered for the scholarship
What is the timeline for the program?