The topic of the difficulties women face in the open source community comes up often. Here at OStatic we've discussed everything from the gender bias and harassment some women say they face, to highlighting the projects that are helping change the way females experience the developer community.

Open Education encompasses a wide range of ideas and practices: open educational resources, open learning support, open credentialing, open access, open scholarship, open teaching, and others. Sometimes open education is enacted by a national government or as an institutional initiative, other times an open education practitioner can feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

One feature of the free software/open source development model that is largely unique and differs from the proprietary model is sheer diversity.

There are a ton of different groupings where you hear "Why aren't there enough XYZ's in our (community|profession|hobby|party)?" Those in the majority wish to be more inclusive of whatever the minority is, but don't know how.

The Linux community is very fragmented. This does not have to be a bad thing at all. Diversity is important for innovation and choice for users. However, because there are so many different projects, people sometimes get at other Linux users within the community.

One of the greatest problems hindering desktop Linux is its diversity.  With 800+ distributions, dozens of user interfaces and lots of different applications that do the same things, it's no secret that the Linux world is convoluted for developers and users.  But if Mark Shuttleworth has his way, the free-software community might become a little saner.

You know what, I love being a community manager. I love the challenges, I love the opportunities, and I love the diversity of application and work.

Mark Shuttleworth, the self-made millionaire and leader of the Ubuntu project, has been very vocal about the adoption of free software and that "the free software approach is a better device driver development model." But what does Mark think about AMD's announcements this week with the 8.41 display driver and the just-announced program where AMD will be handing out specifications under NDA and he

Although still very much in its infancy, FOSS LGBT is my little pet project for the LGBT GNU/Linux and FOSS users to come out of the woodwork and band together to help maintain diversity any acceptance in the FOSS community. The goals are similar to the Ubuntu Women project.