Open source is more than code — it’s culture, power, and politics. In this talk-panel hybrid, we’ll explore how free and open source software can either include or exclude, depending on the choices we make as contributors, maintainers, and community members. Through real examples and lived experience, we’ll examine the hidden barriers faced by queer, neurodivergent, and racialized folks in open source spaces — from inaccessible documentation to toxic contribution models.

We’ll break down what it means to build inclusive tools in public, and how design, governance, and community practices shape who gets to participate. Expect a mix of technical insight, practical tips, and critical reflection, plus voices from across the open source world — not just developers.

Because your README is never neutral, and neither is your code.
“Queer people belong in open source — and we’re here to change how it works.”

Farzada is a transdisciplinary researcher, poet, and storyteller with a background in theoretical biology, physics of complex systems, and computational neuroscience. Since earning her PhD in 2011, she’s worked deep in the academic trenches—writing grants, publishing science, setting up computing clusters, open-sourcing code, and mentoring students—until a sharp edge of loss nudged her into a stranger, kinkier corner of inquiry.

These days, she’s composting her career like a well-loved research garden and cultivating something new: public-facing, embodied, and a little unruly. Her tools? Storytelling, exhibition-making, multi-species dialogue, and co-sensing experiments that don’t aim to simplify complexity, but to sit inside it, and think with it.

She speaks across boundaries—between science and art, human and more-than-human—and longs to bring queer tenderness and analytical rigor to everything from collective code-writing to land-tending. She forks power, commits collectively, and often does so barefoot.

She thinks the future might be fungal, poetic, and open source.