Originally published at: http://mycroft.ai/blog/celebrating-open-source-day-from-afar/
Happy Open Source Day! Open Source Day is actually a one-day open source conference in Warsaw, Poland. The conference began in 2007 as a way to showcase the benefits of open source to the Polish public, government, and businesses.
While we’re not able to attend this year, we hope to do so in the future so we can continue expanding our Community and show off what open source can do in the voice space. Until we can make it to Poland for the Open Source Day event, we wish the organizers and all attendees the best!
Celebrating Open Source Day with Mycroft
For Mycroft, open source is much more than just having your code available on Github. Mycroft is an amazing open source Community of people that have come together to build a voice assistant for everyone on the planet. Together, we are building an open source ecosystem for voice interaction using machine learning and artificial intelligence.
More than our open source code, achieving our vision requires a diverse and committed Community. For leaders in this Community to feel embedded in our governance and decision making, all members of the Community need to feel supported in trying new things and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.
Having diversity in our Community means that our services provide real value to users while keeping intersectionality at the forefront of our development process. We must work to make our technologies accessible to everyone regardless of the languages they speak or the interfacing needs they have. At the same time, we need to consider both the benefits and the risks of new technologies for different people.
That diversity also extends to the skills people bring to the project. Successful open source projects require programmers, designers, orators, technical writers, testers, ideators, data validators, storytellers, and evangelists – just to name a few.
Contributing to Open Source
Here in the Mycroft world, we think every day is a great day for Open Source. If you do too, check out our new Contribute Page to see the many ways you can help Mycroft! We deeply appreciate the daily contributions from the Mycroft Community, and we know that the growing number of projects utilizing our open source tools do too.
Mycroft is just one way to contribute to open source. To get inspired and excited about other open source projects and learn how to contribute, check out this guide to contributing from Github’s Open Source Guides.