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Cuddlier, Friendlier FOSS Projects: Good for Diversity, Good for Everybody! Karen Rustad
Hello! Today, I'm writing about diversity in free and open source software (FOSS).
No, please don't run away!
When I hear people talking about improving “the ratio” in FOSS communities, the issue usually is framed as an issue of social justice. We have a fundamental belief that FOSS ought to be egalitarian and open to all, yet it is clear that some types of people participate much, much more than others. Groups like Ubuntu Women, the Ada Initiative, and others, exist to determine and rectify the many causes of that inequality.
However, for many of us, discussions of diversity issues in FOSS (like the feminism “f-word” and other social justice issues in the world at large) have taken on a dreary, dismal air—invoking a gigantic, depressing, unsolvable mess that no individual could ever hope to fix. It seems every good FOSS conference these days has its Obligatory Diversity Talk where the speaker points at FOSS's dismal diversity statistics and particular examples of bad behavior from over the last year, everyone leaves feeling guilty and despairing, and no one develops the energy to try to improve things.
But making FOSS more diverse doesn't have to be boring, or terrifying, or impossible! And it's not all about insensitive conference presenters with porn stills or idiotic jokes in their slide decks. There are FOSS projects, and user groups, with gender ratios far better than the average—for example, in 2009 a successful outreach program took the SF Ruby meetup group from two percent women to eighteen percent in a single year, and they continue to grow. A major key to practically addressing FOSS's diversity problem is that it isn't (just) about bringing more people belonging to group X into your project. It's about making projects not merely available to but enthusiastically, proactively welcoming of outsiders and newcomers generally.
Let me be clear: sexist (and racist and otherwise biased) incidents, whether large or small, are bad, and they give FOSS a bad name. However, many of the impediments to more women (and other groups, though my research is mostly on women in FOSS) getting involved in FOSS are far more subtle. These little obstacles, prerequisites, and annoyances accumulate to have their effect - molehills becoming mountains. They repeatedly filter the set of potential FOSS contributors such that nearly everyone who does manage to join the community comes from the extreme, rarefied end of the bell curve in several dimensions – not just gender or ethnicity, but also things like personality and skill set. Because these obstacles are individually small, though, they are highly solvable.
First, you're more likely to get involved in FOSS if you have a friend who's already involved, especially if he or she is willing to mentor you. For most FOSS projects, spread through friendship networks is practically the extent of any active “recruitment” whatsoever. Given FOSS's existing demographic profile, and the fact that usually our friends resemble ourselves, this sort of recruitment is unlikely to bring in a more diverse contributor set.
Second, most FOSS projects are infamous for having poor documentation, not just for users but also for developers, and insufficient mentorship resources to make up for it. The lack of good docs suits people who have lots of free time (flailing around trying to get a working dev install running with crappy docs is very time consuming!); are highly confident in their technical prowess and problem-solving abilities (irrespective of their actual level of skill or experience); and who have already contributed to other FOSS projects and are familiar with their tools and conventions. Women as a class have less leisure time than men, tend to be less confident in their technical abilities than equally-skilled men, and, as already stated, are less likely to already be involved in FOSS.
Finally, the usual FOSS project suits new contributors who are highly assertive, extremely persistent, and have a thick skin. Anyone who has enthusiastically submitted a patch to a new project, only to see it languish for weeks and find themselves practically begging an aloof project maintainer to review it, can speak of the frustrated, draining feelings that can be inflicted by a FOSS community unwelcoming of newcomers. Vicious flame wars, endless arguing over trivial features, and other inappropriate-yet-common behaviors in FOSS projects, are similarly discouraging to newcomers of any sort, but especially those who already feel like outsiders for demographic or other reasons.
Veteran contributors sometimes tend to see FOSS' difficulty, obscurity, and antagonism as a sort of hazing ritual, with the belief that anyone worth keeping around in the community will soldier on despite them. Certainly, holding that belief is easier than the work it would take to clean up long-standing bad behavior in a given FOSS project. Either way, these characteristics turn away new contributors of all sorts, and especially tend to filter out women and other FOSS minorities.
The lifeblood of any major free software project is new contributors. New contributors provide fresh insight and energy, take on bugs and feature requests that old hands may have burnt out on, and increase your project's sustainability over time. It happens to be the case that most of the potential contributors out there—most of the people who could be making your project more awesome, but for various reasons aren't—probably don't look exactly like you. The flip side of women making up only five percent of Ubuntu contributors is that if that proportion were shifted—if women suddenly made up ten percent of contributors, or the 20 to 30 percent ratio of the tech industry generally—that shift would represent hundreds or thousands more people, period, contributing to Ubuntu.
Focusing on under-represented groups within a FOSS project makes sense - not just as a matter of justice or a means of correcting implicit biases in the product and/or the community surrounding it. Under-represented groups in FOSS are your project's biggest recruitment opportunity. And, the awesome hilarious secret is: outreach and friendliness efforts don't just make your project more likely to attract more female contributors (or whatever target demographic you had in mind); they put your project in a better position to recruit people who don't fit the usual FOSS contributor stereotype in any number of ways: non-coders, GLBT people, usability gurus, non-white people, primary caregivers, blue-collar workers, non-English speakers, shy people, artists, people with disabilities, product managers, residents of non-Western countries, and any number of other diversity dimensions.
Think for a moment: if you were in charge of a Habitat for Humanity chapter, or a church Sunday School, or a university club, how would you try to recruit and integrate new volunteers? Normal humans like to be welcomed and shown how they can be useful. There's no reason FOSS projects can't do that for people.
Here are a few suggestions for making your project more welcoming: Trumpet the fact that you want new people. Provide mentors, resources, and special newbie-centric events to show new contributors the ropes. Keep a damper on negativity and hostility in your project's communication channels.
I am a contributor to the OpenHatch project, and we are one community you can turn to if you are wondering how to make those changes. We help projects run outreach events and highlight good tasks for newcomers, and those efforts have resulted in new contributors connecting with projects across FOSS. You can find us in #openhatch on irc.freenode.net, use our web tools at http://openhatch.org/, and read about our events at http://openhatch.org/wiki/Events.
Whether or not you reach out to us, I hope that you try brainstorming and implementing ways to make your project more friendly and welcoming: the FOSS community's ability to grow both in absolute terms and in terms of diversity depends on it!
Based on my paper “'Suck It Up, Princess': Outreach and Diversity in FOSS Communities” — http://littlegreenriver.com/stuffs/Outreach-Diversity-FOSS.html