Sowing the Seeds of Diversity

Building healthy, sustainable software communities.

Your Speaker

•Mark Smith, co-founder of Dreamwidth Studios

•http://www.dreamwidth.org

•By day, the Operations Lead for Bump Technologies

•http://bu.mp

•Technical jack of all trades with a focus on web technology stacks

Problem Statement

Homogeneity holds us back: the sameinputs lead to the same outputs.

Diversity increases creative innovation andcreates a healthier environment.

Caveat!

•This talk focuses mainly on gender and skill diversity

•There are many, many, many kinds of diversity

•Feedback and help is very welcome!

Dreamwidth Studios

•Forked from the LiveJournal codebase in 2008

•130+ unique contributors (credited on patches)

•70% of contributors identify as female

•50% of contributors are new to Perl or programming entirely

Dreamwidth Studios

Our “Secret”

People are the priority.

Code is just the product.

Typical Open Source Projects

•Expects you to know what you’re doing when you arrive

•Patches rejected if they’re not relatively perfect

•Lack of supporting/educational infrastructure

•No explicit cultural standards

•Little willingness to deal with toxic contributors

The Call for Status Quo

•This community has accomplished incredible things

•The typical organization is clearly successful at producing software

•If all you care about is software, you might be tempted to say “good enough”

•...but is it really?

The Other 90%

•From the speaker’s point of view...

•Realize: people are really, really different!

•Don’t have the advantages of the majority (aren’t root)

•Aren’t typically encouraged to explore, and often actively or passively discouraged

•Also...not everybody drinks beer!

Cultural Baggage

•Stereotypes are often harmful and work against our purposes

•These ideas are also wrong: race, gender, etc. have very little impact on what a person is capable of

•Much of the “secret” is just to provide a framework to fight the baggage

•This is a common theme among groups not well represented here

People First Philosophy

•Kudos, you are already a step ahead by being here!

•Build up the people of your project

•Pay the short-term costs for long-term gain

•Make trade-offs that consider more than just code velocity

•Create a virtuous self-reinforcing circle

One Person’s Take

“This is the kind of reason why DW has a huge crowd of people working on it, [...] who don't at all come from the

traditional Open Source / hobby programmer roots.

I don't think I could bring myself to [contribute] in an environment where the [...] atmosphere is friendly but competitive; obviously I can't compete with people who

have 25 years more experience than I do.”

Positive Culture

•Respect, respect, respect

•Build a culture of acceptance and encouragement

•Everybody is allowed to make mistakes and be forgiven

•Consider explicit: Diversity Statement, Community Guidelines, etc.

•Culture has to be embodied from the top

Culture in Practice

•Value all contributions, small to large

•“Bugs” are just bugs

•Cheering/encouragement squad (impostor syndrome!)

•Patch review timeliness

•Reject patches with helpful commentary

•“No” should always be accompanied with “why”

Negative Culture

•It is important to deal with problems

•Toxic people who are strong contributors still have bad EV!

•Remember the earlier point about forgiveness

•Be consistent and open in handling problems

•Hot-button topics

Then What?

•Change takes time, and nobody will be perfect overnight

•Talk to groups like the Ada Initiative (adainitiative.org), get help, respect the advice!

•Start becoming known for your culture, write about it

•Be ready to welcome and help newcomers

•Take a look at OpenHatch (openhatch.org)

Pitfalls

•Thinking of this as being “politically correct”

•“If I do what he says, I’ll have a dozen women volunteering next week!”

•This is not “one size fits all”, every project is unique

Parting Thoughts

•Do something, be involved, care

•There is help available

•Start with something small

•Be patient: Rome, etc.

Sowing the Seeds of Diversity

Mark Smith // mark@dreamwidth.org

Slides will be linked from Twitter @xb95 and @dreamwidth.