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Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013/Documentation/diversity equation

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Session: Alolita Sharma // The question of culture: changing the diversity equation of open source

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Abstract

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The culture of open source presents significant barriers to encouraging contribution from a diverse community. Many open source projects believe that contributions can come from anywhere and everywhere and that they promote the emergence of innovative software from their communities. However maintaining an open collaborative model with a diverse group of contributors from all over the world is hard. Encouraging and spreading the culture of diversity in open source engineering contributions is key to driving innovation. Successful open source projects like MediaWiki/Wikimedia, Firefox/Mozilla have used a variety of strategies to increase participation and diversity. The aim of the presentation and following discussion is to show what works, what does not and how culture, diversity and open source innovation are closely related.

Starting point / Insights

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Definitions:

  • Free software
  • Open source
  • Open content

Open source values:

  • "Show me the code"
  • Git commits matter
  • Communicate via gerrit and bugzilla
  • Prove yourself or dropout!

Open source project activity

  • Apache HTTP server
    • C++ code base
    • 67 core conributors, 2 women
  • Mozilla core
    • C++ code base
    • 984 active developers, 4 women of the top 100
  • MediaWiki
    • php, javascript
    • 186 active developers, 6 women

Challenges

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Barriers to diversity

  • Brutal competition
  • Too much "macho" culture
  • Work life balance
  • Did not like the job they were in
  • No room for growth
  • Not paid on par with male colleagues
  • Organisational culture
  • Did not like boss, colleagues they were working with

Socio-cultural factors

  • Open sources software reflects / emulate real life
  • Predominantly white males
  • Self-selecting
  • Staying in comfort zone
  • Underlying cultural values
  • Culture begins at home and in society around us
  • Men do engineering
  • Open source is a man's job

Women representation in science tech engineering and math

  • ~18-27% women in computer science
  • Tech industry jobs: 18-20% women
  • Open source projects: 1.5% women

Ideas

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  • Threshold of competition, beyond which it is cut throat
  • Living in a diverse world
  • It's a "win-win" when open source projects have diverse developer communities
  • Diversity outreach and hiring is key
  • New ideas come from everywhere.
    • women, newcomers, lgbt, friends, family, globally
  • Nurture innnovation. encourage experimentation
  • Practice what you preach

Questions / Next steps recommendations

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  • Encourage outreach
  • Encourage mentorship and sponsorship
  • Showcase technical work by women
  • Support women as community leaders
  • Encourage women as technical speakers and attendees at conference
  • Zero tolerance on any type of harassment
  • Create safe spaces to work
  • Enforce online code of conduct
  • Practise respect
  • Encourage newcomers
  • Assume good faith (disputed, could be used to say “someone didn’t intend harassment”, support people in power, "it was just a joke")

Questions:

What is your experience working on an open source / open content project?

  • Technical aspects, editing wikipedia strenuous
  • Relatively okay, in linux user group before
  • Worked in linux and was in university class
  • Welcoming, but when highlighted lack of diversity, community was suprised and thought it off topic
  • Mostly working with other white males
  • I was the only girl in a local hackers space, 90% positive, guys give support, followed up if one of the guys discriminated, feel the atmosphere can be just as good, encouraged to continue
  • I am always only woman, i don't really suffer, got used to it
  • Had positive experience

Factors affecting diversity imbalance?

  • Women did not feel competent enough
  • Poor imbalance, not enough women participating
  • Education, no prior example of higher education in household
  • People are less willing to do volunteering
  • Skillsets, structure of the community, affects gender imbalance
  • "Not one of the boys", inability to socialise with collegues
  • Having no peers

how did you help improve diversity?

  • always be polite (online)
  • enforcing code of conduct as well as mentoring and welcoming
  • having pretty interfaces and reduce complexity
  • be present and visible at public events and on mailing lists
  • peer to peer mentoring, very key
  • women as community managers, levels and tempers scale of interaction and ability to be obnoxious
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