The problem is that those in the majority fail to realise that their attitudes actively re-enforce that majority, and drive out dissenting voices. It's not deliberate, and it's not conscious, it just IS.

While I haven't read the report, the snippet from it seems to say to me "there IS a problem, and here's the evidence". It's up to us to take that on board and do something about it. DON'T leave it to someone else, try and meet minorities *more* than half way.

And yes, sometimes minorities alienate themselves. But if they don't feel able to be themselves in our company, then that's OUR problem, and we shouldn't be burying our head in the sand.

Cheers,
Wol

Posted Dec 21, 2021 23:24 UTC (Tue) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

Posted Dec 21, 2021 23:35 UTC (Tue) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link]

Posted Dec 21, 2021 23:55 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 8:02 UTC (Wed) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

Posted Dec 22, 2021 13:34 UTC (Wed) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

Which trend? Tech isn't somehow immune from the social biases that exist elsewhere. Nobody's blocked from opening a PR based on any nominally irrelevant characteristic they have, but the way people react to that PR is extremely influenced by those characteristics. My partner's given up on contributing to open source projects they don't maintain after discovering that if they took patch submissions they'd submitted that received no feedback and then resubmitted them under a male-sounding name they'd get applied without question. Discrimination hasn't magically arrived here in recent years - it's always been here, and all that's changing is that we're actually paying attention to what we're missing out on as a result.

Let me put it that way: we're all more or less STEM affine around here. That means the "scientific method" of trying to approach some kind of "truth", step by step should be familiar to you, too.

Part of this is to not take your own perceptions face value, but as the result of some process with an inherent bias (read on "personal equation" for a stunning historical example of what we might consider "early" science). Your perceptions are essential in doing science, but are not, in themselves "Truth".

So you have to check back critically with others. Intersubjectivity, yadda, yadda.

Now if someone from a minority group comes along and says "I don't feel welcome in 'your' community"... you say "trend"? This disqualifies you as scientist right away!

Besides, please, leave god out of this game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_equation

>...realms of what I always thought was reason and knowledge
That's a mistake, making things with other people is a social endeavour.

It plays out in communal behaviour which has in-groups/out-groups where we must choose to overcome those distinctions to arrive at this notion that the best code wins out.

What I think matters when trying to welcome contributors: working code wins out. What I think matters when hosting a community or building a business: working code is harder than you think, so we want to avoid additional hardship for contributors.

If new people no longer face biases that people in the community (at present) can't see and won't talk about, we're closer to the goal that reason and knowledge are valued in this social endeavour.

> I'm assuming that the majority of interactions, in open-source communities (I supposed the verb only applied to software) happen behind an email address, or a nickname, or a combination of the two.

This assumption is incorrect. Email addresses tend to tie to other identities, and in many cases so do nicknames. People can create a separate identity purely for the sake of contributing to open source projects, but they then need to be extremely careful not to link that to anything else. And maintaining an identity that is inconsistent with how you present in the physical world means you're never going to be able to attend a conference and give a presentation on your work or participate in in-person interaction with your peers, something that's going to have a strong influence on how effective your ability to contribute actually is.

> The other assumption I am making is that a whatsoever problem in diversity, equity, and inclusion, should be active (i.e., the community actively discriminates against a person, or treat differently a human being for some characteristics, or explicitly reject contributions from individuals not based on technical grounds, etc)

Plenty of the discrimination that occurs is either subconscious (ie, based on people's existing social biases, they treat submissions differently based on how they perceive the contributor) or due to broader context (eg, a project may not reject submissions from a trans contributor, or discriminate directly against that contributor, but may make jokes about other trans people that leave the contributor feeling unsafe).

> I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions.

This seems equivalent to explaining that you can square the circle as long as you assume that Pi equals 3.2 and then rejecting any counter arguments that reject that premise? Your assumptions are wrong, and as a result the conclusion you draw is also wrong. It's impossible to explain the observed results without contradicting them.

Posted Dec 22, 2021 9:57 UTC (Wed) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link]

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

> I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions. If it goes, then just save your time and go on without posting, don't try to fix me. Thanks!

lol, you must be joking and I'm feeding a troll

...or this is rhetoric and what you say needs a rebuttal: your assumptions and conclusion are wrong, your rhetoric 'begs the question' -- and this discussion continues for other correspondents and the search engines. (It's only fair to balance out what you've said with a contrasting side, right? And why would your assumptions have elevated status?)

...or you don't want to listen to anything different from you and so you need to hear a call to *be better* -- especially when it comes to welcoming people different than you to collaborate with you in the world. I think it's also possible that you need to be told in no uncertain terms that this attitude will make you do things that harm people (whether you mean to or not) and is unwelcome in civil company. When it comes to 'unwelcome', this isn't an approach conventionally used on this site and I'm also a guest of this site's host, so I'l hold in back.

> PS: I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions.

Please lead with that statement next time instead of ending your post with it. If we can't reply to your (faulty) assumptions, it would be nicer to save us the time we took reading it.