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.

— Taj James

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.

— Melvin Conway, "Conway's Law"

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.

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 White men.  This has become more concentrated within open-source communities. 

Toxic behaviors have left underrepresented communities feeling unwanted and they are forced to leave instead of engage.  While there is more visibility on the critical lack of diversity, more needs to be done to create inclusive spaces. We can all do our part creating an accepting community.

Barriers to Entry

Gender differencesFree and biasopen-source 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

https://www.ironhack.com/us/blog/lgbtq-representation-in-tech-challenges-and-opportunities

^{Open Source Survey}

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Debian has made efforts to diversify and have members represented from the community. Debian Women in 2004 was established with the aim of themhaving havemore witnessedwomen such interactions between other people. Dismissive responses, conflict, and unwelcoming language were respectively the third, fourth, and sixth most cited problems encounteredinvolved in open-source.development. Debian also partnered with Outreachy, which offers internships to individuals with underrepresented identities in technology.^[4214]

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.^[5215]

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.The FemaleEthics programmersof areUnpaid leavingLabor and the techOSS 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-communityCommunity

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.

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.

Although OSS projects idealize a meritocracy wherein quality speaks for itself, several biases undermine women, who feel that their quality is not able to speak for itself and report experiencing “impostor syndrome.” Gender biases can represent a “glass floor” and a persistent barrier to entry.

"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. 

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.

"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

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?"

history of industry oppression: according to the history of the LGBTQ+ community and tech, LGBTQ+ influence stretches back to the early days of computing. Historic tech figures such as Alan Turing and Lynn Conway were pioneers behind paramount advances in information technology and microchip design; however, they also faced discrimination and even legal persecution for their sexuality and gender identity. While this type of overt discrimination might seem like a thing of the past, historic anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments bleed forth into the tech community of today.

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.

DebianLarge haspersonalities madein effortsopen to diversifysource and havecomplicated membersviews

Eric froms Raymond

Linus torvalds

"I don't think I get the community.same Debianlevel Womenof inrespect 2004for wasmy establishedexperience that a man would get with the aimsame number of havingyears moreof womenexperience." involvedNellie, a programmer in development.Seattle.

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^{Negative interactions are infrequent but highly visible, with consequences for project activity.}

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/diversity-inclusivityIn a recent survey,³ roughly one-third of women reported that they experienced written or spoken language that made them feel unwelcome in OSS interactions. Discriminatory expletives, swear words, and negative critiques often used in code reviews and mailing lists may be especially insulting to women. Awkward communication styles and terms usually associated with men (for example, “guys”) can also impact women.

In a survey from 2022,³ women reported twice as many threats of violence than men in the context of OSS. Incidents of symbolic violence and harassment against women can hinder their access to the community, such as when men decide to “hire that one because she is hot.”⁴ Women also need to prove themselves (prove it again) constantly, and face judgment, abuse and discrimination, offensive talk, and feel obliged to remind men not to “stare and point” at them.

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]

https://opensource.com/life/16/3/can-we-talk-about-ageismIs Open Source Open to Women?

Just 5.4% of GitHub users with over 10 contributions from our random sample are female.

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.

Feeling outnumbered and alienated, women can feel more comfortable and accepted by other women, and frustrated when they are “the only woman in the room.” Women reported feeling invisible in larger male-dominated groups.

Additionally, there are very public instances of assuming someone is male.

"NoWomen onegenerally feel restrained when communities nullify them when they do not have enough skills to provide contributions on their first day. When trying to find a mentor, upon discovering their mentee’s gender, male mentors can treat the relationship as a dating opportunity. As a result, many women use fake accounts and hide their gender “so that people would assume [they] were male.”²

According to a Linux Foundation survey from 2021,³ women still perceive they have fewer opportunities than men to be a part of the decision-making process in OSS. Although women are increasingly present in community-centric roles,⁶ they still represent less than 10% of the leaders.⁷ Several studies found women’s participation ranges from 4.3% as core developers to 14.2% as participants of Google Summer of Code, showing that they are better represented earlier in the joining process (for example, in mentoring programs) than in core roles. When looking at participation rates, only a few women join OSS to increase their job opportunities. However, if they join, after becoming contributors, this motivation increases. This represents the “shifting belief” that women have in OSS toward building a career, which increases only after overcoming the barriers to joining and becoming contributors.¹

Although women can have merge-acceptance rates nearly equivalent to or slightly higher than men, there is forcinga anyonebias against women’s contributions when the gender is identified, and women perceive this bias. Still, the code submitted by women often have lower churn per comment, women have to wait longer to receive initial feedback for their code changes, and their review intervals can last longer than men’s.¹ As a consequence of the challenging environment, women often decide to hide their gender when contributing to OSS.

Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men

Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, for contributors who are outsiders to a project and their gender is identifiable, men’s acceptance rates are higher. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

Women, more often than men, encounter language or content that makes them feel stereotyped, boxing them into caretaker and parental roles. Both descriptive (how women are) and prescriptive (how women should be), gender stereotypes and the expectations they produce can compromise women’s career progress. Academic literature has shown that implicit stereotypes about gender and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have profound effects on girls’ and women’s interest, confidence, and persistence in STEM education and careers.⁵ Similarly, gender roles and “macho” attitudes can cause gender inequalities in OSS communities.⁴

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.

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."source, something that she thought may be more difficult for female developers to overcome, given the tech industry’s poor history with welcoming women.

WhileThere are certainly several biases that oncould potentially be at play with this GitHub data (including the surfacefact that almost 25% of the names couldn’t be classified as male/female with confidence).

Women often report experiencing impostor syndrome, a psychological concept about a pattern of behavior wherein people doubt their abilities and experience a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. Impostor syndrome in OSS can be amplified by the hostile and toxic culture that pervades communities. Despite being knowledgeable and professionally well settled, women may be more reluctant to publicly display their work.

Lack of time

Nisha Kumar (She/They) is true,the technical lead for container build, packaging, and distribution at the impositionOpen isSource there.Technology ManyCenter jobsat requireVMware. 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 contributionsduring 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 considervolunteer for my local open source communities because I need to also take care of my child and household."

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 candidate.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.

Wage gap: a study by HRC found that LGBTQ+ workers in the US earn, on average, 10% less than their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts. This disparity in pay highlights how historic bias trickles into the modern day, and speaks to changes that need to be addressed going forward.

Other priorities 

"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."

LGBTQ+ Representation in Tech: Challenges and Opportunities

Underrepresentation: according to Lesbians Who Tech, LGBTQ+ underrepresentation is endemic in the tech sphere, causing a lack of connection for LGBTQ+ employees and scarce levels of social capital at work. This lack of visibility stifles the voice and contributions of the LGBTQ+ tech community, contributing to a cycle in which underrepresentation perpetuates itself; aspiring LGBTQ+ tech employees have less role models and examples of success within the industry.

The Value of Your Voice

https://biancatrink.github.io/

Test

Documentation is highly valued, frequently overlooked, and a means for establishing inclusive and accessible communities.

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.

https://www.itprotoday.com/software-development/open-source-is-growing-more-diverse-and-inclusive-albeit-slowly

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

https://opencollective.com/

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}

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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.

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