Collectives and Identity
The free and open-source movements are a massive experiment in decentralizing the creation of software among a diverse collective of unique perspectives. This offers a potential glimpse for communities to form radical new ideas that upend the status quo.
There is a conversation in the room that only this people at this moment can have. Find it.
On paper, this may appear as the utopian egalitarian ideal capable of giving both equal voice and access throughout the development process. We bring our entire selves to these creation-oriented ecosystems and that can bring as much synergy as friction.
Indeed, many people get involved with free and open-source software seeking to contribute back to the community. However, prejudice – already an existential problem within computing – have only further distilled within these communities.
We must actively work towards equitable and accessible systems that value our perspectives yet hold us accountable to biases. This may require radical new ideas and implementations, but we can still learn the value of our voice within the crowd.
Who Contributes?
There are limitless reasons why people contribute to free and open communities, spreading the gamut from altruistic to narcissistic – and just looking to get a paycheck. The people who become integrated into these spaces are just as varied as the software projects themselves.
Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
The ways in which a free and open-source project is organized can greatly impact their software. The inverse may also hold true – the software itself can play a role in the community that forms around it. These tensions are a dynamic process and every project responds to them differently.
Debian – the most popular community-supported Linux distributions – maintains a social contract that defines the expectations for affiliated volunteer developers. Each applicant must undergo a vetting process to better understand their technical skills, as well as their motivation and identity. With each influx of interest, the process has become more stringent. There are many reasons behind their contributions.
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Community Involvement Many volunteers are looking to give back to the community and find fulfillment through simply being involved with others. They may use the software everyday and want to support it.
This can take many forms: participating in hackathons; undertaking code reviews; updating documentation; or simply sharing the word.
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Continuing Education Some volunteers are seeking to learn a new skill or further develop one they already have. Established open-source projects often excel at onboarding new community members, providing valuable structure and mentorship.
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Paid Work Not all people who contribute to open-source projects are by necessity unpaid volunteers. The largest contributions to projects like the Linux kernel are by paid employees working for the companies like IBM and Intel.
Similarly, corporate Linux distributions like Red Hat provide paid hours to developing the Kernel for their own software. It is not uncommon for contracted work to be incorporated into open source software.
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Side Projects Some developers create their own software to solve a problem and end up sharing their solution freely, while others may seek fulfillment by creating something people like to use.
Solving puzzles with a community or fixing an irritating bug can scratch an itch. At the end of the day, it's about personal enrichment. |
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Personal Motivations Developers may be motivated by personal reasons stemming from emotional, political, social, interpersonal, economic or professional reasons.
Contributing to open-source projects can fulfill political agendas, build up a developer's portfolio, or create a reputation within the community. |
People are multifaceted and each volunteer may approach the project with overlapping motivations. Volunteers are free to resign at any time, for any reason – even without prior warning – through a simple public statement.
Diverse Perspectives
The free and open-source movements have grown steadily since the 1990s by offering solutions to everyday problems. A diverse community has emerged within people using the software, but the developers have remained rather homogenous: primarily young men.
Diversity in Open Source Is Even Worse Than in Tech Overall
There are noted disparities within the diversity of the computing field and this has only become more concentrated within open-source communities.
https://opensourcediversity.org/
What's perhaps even more interesting is that the trend seemed to have gotten worse during most of the past decade. Seven years ago, Breanden Beneschott, now co-founder and CEO at Mechanism Ventures, found that 5.4% of GitHub contributors were women — a considerably higher figure than GitHub's 2017 finding. Daniel Peacock, in a separate analysis, also found that the presence of women in the Debian project (a major Linux distribution) declined over the period 2004-2020.
Open Source Demographics Today
That trend, however, may be changing, albeit at a slow pace.
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Gender Even though programming was originally a femininized profession, there is a critical disparity when it comes to their representation within computing in general. This has only grown worse within the free and open-source projects. While researchers and journalists have employed differing methods for understanding this problem, they all reflect the same problem. Within the field of computing, approximately 22% of engineers identify as women.
For open-source communities, this drops to estimates ranging from 1% to 3% when creating code. When taking into account non-software contributions, this may be upwards of 10%. The most recent 2021 report by the Linux Foundation suggests this has risen to 14% – still an incredibly small portion. Despite the recent increase of women in open-source, only 5% of projects have women as core developers. When software code is pulled from external developer's project, less than 5% of those developers are women. This is compared to over 30% of managers in computing being women.
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Identities
though a higher proportion of sexual minorities and transgender people than in the general United States population. Among the respondents of GitHub's 2017 Open Source Survey 1% identified as transgender, 1% as non-binary, and 7% as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, or another minority sexual orientation,[4] while according to a Gallup poll in conducted in the same year 4.1% of the United States population identify as LGBT.[13][11] A 2018 survey of software developers conducted by Stack Overflow found that out of their sample of 100,000, 6.7% in total identified as one of "Bisexual or Queer" (4.3%), "Gay or Lesbian" (2.4%), and "Asexual" (1.9%), while 0.9% identified as "non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming".[14]
All of these studies used different methodologies and different sample populations for quantifying the number of women contributors to open source. It's impossible, based on them, to draw apples-to-apples, year-by-year comparisons about gender diversity trends within open source. Still, in the absence of more comprehensive and consistent data, it seems reasonable to conclude that open source communities very likely grew less diverse from a gender perspective over the course of the 2010s. The most recent detailed data on diversity in open source comes from a December 2021 report by the Linux Foundation, which found (among many other data points) that:
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Race and Ethnicity
In an 2013 article for the NPR, journalist Gene Demby considered Black people and Latinos to be underrepresented in the open source software development.[12]
It's likely that other forms of diversity — such as participation by racial minority groups — followed a similar pattern, although there is less data available for those categories of participants. GitHub's 2017 survey — which found that 16% of open source programmers identified with minority racial groups, as compared with about 34% of U.S. programmers overall — is the only data source I'm aware of that examines racial diversity in open source. (As for racial diversity in open source, the Linux Foundation report offered surprisingly little hard data. It noted that "Latinx, Black, and Indigenous groups are less likely to agree that people from different backgrounds have equal opportunities to participate and make decisions in open source," but it didn't provide specific numbers to contextualize this finding.) (As for racial diversity in open source, the Linux Foundation report offered surprisingly little hard data. It noted that "Latinx, Black, and Indigenous groups are less likely to agree that people from different backgrounds have equal opportunities to participate and make decisions in open source," but it didn't provide specific numbers to contextualize this finding.) In 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 28.7% of total employed managers in the "Computer and Information Systems" sector were women. Of all managers in that sector, 9.6% were Black or African American, 15.8% were Asian, and 4.7% were Hispanic or Latino. As this survey indicates, the managers in the technology industry in the United States are predominantly White and/or men. The open source communities skew even more toward contributors who are White and/or men. A 2017 GitHub survey As this survey indicates, the managers in the technology industry in the United States are predominantly White and/or men. The open source communities skew even more toward contributors who are White and/or men. A 2017 GitHub surveyof 6,000 open source users and developers found that 95% of randomly selected respondents were men. Three percent were women, and one percent were non-binary people. |
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Age Open source companies aren't necessarily doing better. Large companies like Facebook and Google have a long way to go, with median worker ages of 29 and 30. There is not as much data available for smaller companies, but the anecdotal experience is that job-hunting is tough when you start to look north of forty.
According to the literature, women represent about 9.8% of OSS contributors; most of them are recent contributors,
Women’s Participation in Open Source Software: A Survey of the Literature
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Disability There’s Always Something to be Done: Liz Henry on Being Disabled in Tech The most recent detailed data on diversity in open source comes from a December 2021 report by the Linux Foundation, which found (among many other data points) that:
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Socioeconomic Developers |
Barriers to Entry
Test
Women in Open Source: We Need to Talk About It
Why Women Are Underrepresented in Open Source
Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men
"It's really easy to argue that tech is a meritocracy, and the reason there are so few marginalized people in tech is just that they aren't interested, and that the problem comes from earlier on in the pipeline. They argue that if someone is good enough at their job, their gender or race or sexual orientation doesn't matter. That's the easy argument. But I was raised not to make excuses for mistakes. And I think the lack of diversity is a mistake, and that we should be taking responsibility for it and actively trying to make it better." — Patricia Torvalds, interviewed by Rikki Endsley in Torvalds 2.0: Patricia Torvalds on computing, college, feminism, and increasing diversity in tech
- Documentation is highly valued, frequently overlooked, and a means for establishing inclusive and accessible communities.
- Negative interactions are infrequent but highly visible, with consequences for project activity.
- Open source is used by the whole world, but its contributors don't yet reflect its broad audience.
- Using and contributing to open source often happens on the job.
- Open source is the default when choosing software.
In 2017, GitHub conducted a survey named the Open Source Survey, collecting responses from 5,500 GitHub users. Among the respondents, 18% personally experienced a negative interaction while working on open-source projects, but 50% of them have witnessed such interactions between other people. Dismissive responses, conflict, and unwelcoming language were respectively the third, fourth, and sixth most cited problems encountered in open-source.[4]
Another study from 2017 examined 3 million pull requests from 334,578 GitHub users, identifying 312,909 of them as men and 21,510 as women from the mandatory gender field in the public Google+ profiles tied to the same email addresses as these users were using on GitHub. The authors of the study found code written by women to be accepted more often (78.6%) than code written by men (74.6%). However, among developers who were not insiders of the project, women's code acceptance rates were found to drop by 12.0% if gender was immediately identifiable by GitHub username or profile picture, with only a smaller 3.8% drop observed for men under the same conditions. Comparing their results to a meta-analysis of employment sex discrimination conducted in 2000, the authors observed that they have uncovered only a quarter of the effect found in typical studies of gender bias. The study concludes that gender bias, survivorship and self-selection bias, and women being held to higher performance standards are among plausible explanations of the results.[5]
Large personalities in open source and complicated views
Eric s Raymond
Linus torvalds
The "very seductive" moral and ethical rhetoric of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation fails (Raymond), he said, "not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language ... simply does not persuade anybody".[24]
3. Female programmers are leaving the tech industry.
If activity on GitHub correlates with seniority and expertise, then the extremely low number of active female contributors (low even compared to female contributors overall) could be explained by the alarmingly high departure rate of female engineers from the tech industry.
If the tech industry can’t retain as many women past their mid-career mark, then it’s likely that they won’t be contributing to many open source projects either.
https://www.toptal.com/open-source/is-open-source-open-to-women
Why are there fewer people represented who aren't white men
There are a few possibilities to consider when thinking about an answer to this question:
1. Maybe there isn’t a strong correlation between programming talent and GitHub activity.
Both agreed that while being active on GitHub is typically a good indicator of engineering expertise, the reverse isn’t true, mentioning that they know plenty of great engineers who aren’t involved in open source at all. The tech industry agrees too, with many companies assessing GitHub profiles during hiring processes (although this practice seems to be quite biased, which isn’t really a surprise given the results of my study).
Anna-Chiara commented that it takes a great deal of confidence to contribute to open source, something that she thought may be more difficult for female developers to overcome, given the tech industry’s poor history with welcoming women.
There are certainly several biases that could potentially be at play with this GitHub data (including the fact that almost 25% of the names couldn’t be classified as male/female with confidence).
"Any time that I spend contributing to [open source communities] is time I could also be spending volunteering to advance LGBTQ equality, fighting against police brutality, and other issues that I care about, and that disproportionately affect underrepresented people—in fact, it's what makes us underrepresented in the first place," explains Perry Eising (He/They), who works as a community manager at a for-profit tech company that hosts open source projects. "It's challenging to justify to myself to spend time being involved in (sometimes hostile-feeling) OS and tech debates when I have so many causes that require my attention and efforts."
Nisha Kumar (She/They) is the technical lead for container build, packaging, and distribution at the Open Source Technology Center at VMware. She also serves as co-maintainer for the Tern project, and a contributor to the SPDX and OCI communities. She juggles these projects with her role as her child's primary caregiver. To Kumar, these dual roles are nothing new; as a girl growing up in India, she balanced schoolwork with chores, running errands, and caring for family members. These endless tasks left no time for her to pursue passion projects.
If not for her ability to work on open source during the day at VMware, she's unsure if she could contribute today. Kumar told me:
"As a woman in tech contributing to open source in my day job and getting compensated for it, I find that I still don't have the time to contribute to open source projects I am personally interested in or even volunteer for my local open source communities because I need to also take care of my child and household."
The internet is not an equally hospitable place. Women, people of color, and LBGTQ+ people are disproportionately targeted for online harassment, with women twice as likely to experience online sexual harassment as men. And this was prior to 2020.
The year's confluence of a global pandemic and mass civil unrest has led to increased attacks against people of color, specifically Asian Americans and Black Americans. If attackers feel emboldened to hurt people in the flesh, it's no surprise that this occurs online as well. If you work on open source projects with Black and Asian contributors, make no mistake: They are in pain.
"I don't see any acknowledgement that the internet, in general, is mostly inhabited by white men who are hostile to women and URMs," Kumar says. "How would anyone expect folks who are in general harassed on the internet to suddenly trust an open source community to not behave the same way toward them, despite what its Code of Conduct document says?"
Kumar's concerns are well-founded. Open source communities don't have a reputation for making most feel welcome. For years, project maintainers have written calls for help, saying they "feel drained, unappreciated, and even abused" on their worst days. A 2017 survey of 6,000 GitHub contributors found that 21% left projects they were working on after experiencing negative behavior. With the odds of such behavior that much higher for people from underrepresented groups, it's surprising they contribute to open source projects at all.
When managers vet new employees or community contributors based on "culture fit" the outcome is rarely good for diversity. Small homogenuous communities may even work for a little while, but they aren't sustainable. Culture fit is an issue for women and people of color as well as other under-represented groups, but our industry seems to have a real problem picturing older women in technical roles.
"I don't think I get the same level of respect for my experience that a man would get with the same number of years of experience." Nellie, a programmer in Seattle.
At first glance, open source seems immune to the multi-pronged problems with diversity and inclusion plaguing technology companies. Open source ecosystems operate online; contributors work across countries, languages, and timezones to power projects that drive technology forward. In some cases, people contribute purely out of love for these projects, not for free beer and stock. Given the prevalence of such altruistic intent, the thinking goes, open source is a true meritocracy, a space where all can thrive regardless of their pronouns or the color of their skin. But if there's one thing that industry advocates love more than meritocracy, it's data. And when the data shows who contributes to the open source ecosystem, it paints a damning picture.
Lack of time to contribute for free
Globally, women continue to earn less than White men for performing the same professional roles. They are also increasingly likely to be their homes' primary earners, and they're more likely to do unpaid labor in the form of housework, childcare, and other domestic tasks.
As a result, they have less spare time to do even more unpaid work by contributing to open source communities. When they do make those contributions, they often do so during work hours—because they already work for organizations that let them do it.
https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community
It's difficult to go much further without mentioning the undercurrent belief in meritocracy that is particularly pervasive in open source communities, especially around participation in GitHub.
Meritocracy is the belief that those with merit float to the top - that they should be given more opportunities and be paid higher.
We prize the idea of meritocracy and weigh merit on contribution to OSS. Those who contribute the most, goes the general belief, have the most merit and are deemed the most deserving. Those who contribute less or who don't at all contribute to OSS are judged to be without merit, regardless of the fact that they have less access to opportunity, time, and money to allow them to freely contribute.
As the people who exist within this supposed meritocracy don't exist within a vacuum, we also have to realize how our actions affect others. Meritocracy creates a hierarchy amongst the people within it. Some of those at the top or striving to at least be above other people have been guilty of using their power for bullying, harassment, and sexist/racist/*ist language that they use against others directly and indirectly. This creates an atmosphere where people who would otherwise be deemed meritorious within this system choose not to participate because of a hostile, unrewarding environment.
The idea of a meritocracy presumes that everyone starts off and continues through with the same level of access to opportunity, time, and money, which is unfortunately not the case. It's a romanticized ideal - a belief in which at best ignores and at worst outright dismisses the experiences of everyone outside the group with the most access to these things. A certain demographic of people have three or four steps above other people, so the playing field is not even.
One of the puzzling aspects of open source software communities is that, although the gender, racial, and other identities of open source contributors are typically not obvious to their collaborators, members of underrepresented groups have traditionally been even more underrepresented in open source than they have in the tech world as a whole.
Debian has made efforts to diversify and have members represented from the community. Debian Women in 2004 was established with the aim of having more women involved in development. Debian also partnered with Outreachy, which offers internships to individuals with underrepresented identities in technology.[214][215]
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/diversity-inclusivity
https://opensource.com/life/16/3/can-we-talk-about-ageism
know many women that either don't contribute to OSS because they've been dismissed for being women - being too pretty, not pretty enough, being forced to prove their competence more than their male counterparts because they're women. I've talked to women who use gender-ambiguous GitHub names and don't post a picture of themselves as their avatar because of how quickly this happens. In addition, the sexual harassment, slurs, and other derogatory language that are used directly or indirectly at these groups of people causes many to not want to participate at all.
Additionally, there are very public instances of assuming someone is male.
"No one is forcing anyone to contribute to open source."
While that on the surface is true, the imposition is there. Many jobs require open source contributions to even consider a candidate.
The Value of Your Voice
Relative lack of open source activity from women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) seems surprising at first, but a closer look reveals some persistent problems regarding inclusion in open source communities. Inclusion is often used as a synonym for diversity; in fact, it is its own principle. To quote Meg Bolger, "Inclusion is about folks with different identities feeling and/or being valued, leveraged, and welcomed within a given setting (e.g., your team, workplace, or industry)." Some persistent, systemic barriers keep women and URMs from being included in open source communities. Without addressing and rectifying these systemic problems, diversity in open source won't improve.
https://opensource.com/article/17/9/diversity-and-inclusion-innovation
The current inclusion of the historically disadvantaged might help wash some consciences without changing anything from the root. However, what is needed is a mental and structural paradigm shift. From there, it will be possible to build a more horizontal structure where decisions are made more inclusively and democratically.
Beyond the limited data about open source diversity today, there's also reason to believe that cultural changes within the open source world, and new initiatives designed to encourage greater diversity, are contributing to more inclusive open source communities.
https://guidebook.theopensourceway.org/attracting-users/building-diverse-open-source-communities-by-making-them-includive-first
There is arguably more talk today than ever about diversity, equity, and inclusion within the open source world. But is that talk translating to meaningful change? Are underrepresented groups actually participating in open source software development to a greater extent than they did in the past?
The answer seems to be a tentative "yes" — although it's hard to say for sure, given the limited scope and inconsistent nature of the data available about diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source as of 2022.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/04/07/how-the-open-source-community-can-build-more-accessible-products/
For software to be considered open source, it must not discriminate against any people, groups, or fields of endeavor. In other words, open source software must be available and accessible to all users, which includes people living with disabilities. In many ways, the open source community and technologists focused on accessibility are a natural pairing: The more accessible the product, the greater number of users benefit, and input from a diverse group of users is necessary to build a product that is truly accessible.
"A distinguishing feature of open source software versus proprietary software is that open source software tends to be used by a diverse community of users with different priorities, needs, use cases," says Greg Myers, support engineer at GitLab. "I personally feel the more diverse and inclusive that community is, the better the end product is."
Engineers that draw from the insights of the open source community when developing their software benefit from a broader set of inputs than those that work with a proprietary codebase. In many ways, the standards that define open source software overlap with the process of accessibility in software development.
"Accessibility aims to do the same thing, right? We want to make sure that as we're building software, we're building it with a diverse set of folks that are going to use it, and might want or need to use the technology in different ways," says Brendan O’Leary, senior developer evangelist at GitLab.
Creating clear guidelines for behavior, such as a code of conduct, is one important way to address this issue. Women in particular were more likely to contribute to projects that have such codes, the survey found. Nadia Eghbal, who works for GitHub’s open source team, says that community leaders should make it a point to call out bad behavior when they see it, to let people know that’s not normal or acceptable behavior. Giving people the tools to block or hide problem users instead of having to wait for moderators to step in also helps.
In general, there has been more discussion within open source communities of the diversity issue over the past several years. And while it may be tempting to chalk that up to the broader social justice conversation that has taken place around the world over the past couple of years, the focus on diversity and inclusion in open source seems to predate the latter shift (although it may have been amplified by it).
For example, Linux creator Linus Torvalds famously took time off in 2018 to educate himself about empathy — a decision perhaps motivated by a sense within open source by that point in time that harsh and non-inclusive behavior was becoming increasingly intolerable.
Consider, too, efforts in 2017 to push Kubernetes to abandon its "master" terminology — a change that hasn't been fully implemented but that nonetheless points to efforts within the open source world starting around 2017 to take diversity and inclusion more seriously, even from a symbolic perspective.
And then there is the simple fact that the Linux Foundation in 2021 funded a detailed report to survey the state of diversity in open source. That's not something that the Linux Foundation, one of the most influential institutions within the open source world, had thought to do previously, despite regularly releasing studies focused on other aspects of the open source ecosy
How to contribute to open source software projects
Financial Support
Donations
Sponsorship
Non profit funds
Open Collective is a crowdfunding platform focused on grassroots groups. It enables organizations, communities, and projects to get a legal status and raise funding through subscription or one time payment. It's particularly favoured by open source projects.[1] It currently hosts funding for thousands of open-source communities.[2]
https://www.spi-inc.org/donations/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_in_the_Public_Interest
Software in the Public Interest, Inc. (SPI) is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit organization domiciled in New York State formed to help other organizations create and distribute free open-source software and open-source hardware. Anyone is eligible to apply for membership, and contributing membership is available to those who participate in the free software community.
https://www.pledge.to/women-in-linux-4579
Community Support
Documentation
Feedback
Finding forums, chat apps, websites
Forums and mailing lists
Polls and feedback
Emergent strategy
Irc chatroom
I offer, from this defensive and sacred place, a protocol for those who are most comfortable approaching movements from a place of critique, AKA, haters.
1. Ask if this (movement, formation, message) is meant for you, if this serves you.
2. If yes, get involved! Get into an experiment or two, feel how messy it is to unlearn supremacy and repurpose your life for liberation. Critique as a participant who is shaping the work. Be willing to do whatever task is required of you, whatever you are capable of, feed people, spread the word, write pieces, make art, listen, take action, etc. Be able to say: ‘“T invest my energy in what I want to see grow. I belong to efforts I deeply believe in and help shape those.”
3. Ifno, divest your energy and attention. Pointing out the flaws of something still requires pointing at it, drawing attention to it, and ultimately growing it. Over the years I have found that when a group isn’t serving the people, it doesn’t actually last that long, and it rarely needs a big takedown—things just sunset, disappear, fade away, absorb into formations that are more effective. If it helps you feel better, look in the mirror and declare: “There are so many formations I am not a part of—my non-participation is all I need to say. When I do offer critique, itis froma space of relationship, partnership, and advancing a solution.”
4. And finally, 1f you don’t want to invest growth energy in anything, just be quiet. If you are not going to help birth or raise the child, then shhhhh. You aren’t required to have or even work towards the solution, but if you know a change is needed and your first instinct when you see people trying to figure out how to change and transform is to poop on them, perhaps it is time you just hush your mouth.
Development Support
Feature requests
Pull requests
Contributions