Kristi Progri

The CHAOSS project represents a potential force for power and good in open source. This session includes speakers who took part in a two-year long reflection on DEI practices within the CHAOSS project. The session will help other open source projects in their work towards improving diversity, equity, and inclusion by exploring practices within the CHAOSS project first, then using those examples as points of reference for other projects. Our efforts have focused us on newcomer experiences, community surveys, and sustaining the people within the project. In particular, the session will discuss these efforts, aimed at answering the question of: How do we help open source communities to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive?

Intro: Our CHAOSS DEI reflection team is amazing. We have been able to work together over the last few years, building and establishing direction for the CHAOSS project and others. Our work has resulted in many improvements within the CHAOSS project as well as external engagements aimed at better centering DEI within open source.

Main idea 1: Supporting new contributors and making your onboarding process smooth helps with contributor retention.

• Supporting detail 1: Challenges include language barriers, time zones, access to tools from bandwidth limitations or other access limitations, merging in and accepting contributions in a timely manner

• Supporting detail 2: Helpful strategies include improving documentation, open office hours, welcome slackbot, accepting contributions of all kinds, having a newcomer space in slack/communication channels, onboarding calls

Main idea 2: Our two-year reflection process did not always go as planned.

• Supporting detail 1: Building newcomer experiences has been challenging. The CHAOSS global community has grown tremendously, for example, the African chapter has grown to over 180 members in the last few months– and as such, newcomer onboarding and paths to contribution became a priority for us. Our expectation was to make a difference and directly assist newcomers in CHAOSS since many of us can relate to their pain of getting overwhelmed by the many parts in CHAOSS. It is true that we made a significant impact; however, we had to reevaluate our first plan and improve on it. For example, office hours didn't get as much attention as we would have liked, so we adjusted the time and cadence, then went one step further with documentation diversity for newcomers (specifically the teams' sheet and quickstart for newcomers). More recently, we started a strategy document for newcomers' onboarding and have kickstarted newcomer onboarding calls.

Main idea 3: Strategic use of community surveys helps you to better understand the feelings, emotion, and qualitative feedback of the community.

• Supporting detail 1: Make sure the community survey is completely anonymous and no personal information will be collected, and is GDPR compliant. Access to data should be limited and only report aggregated data on a high level. Have clear goals for what you want to learn more about, but be open to organic community response. Also consider troll-ish responses, and follow set standards when asking about demographic data.

Conclusion: We have learned to be patient with our work. Advancing DEI in open source is challenging as we attend to corporate interests, community needs, and, most importantly, the safety of people for whom our efforts have an impact.

Other people: Justin W. Flory Matt Ruth Ikegah Sean Goggins

Debian has been participating for Outreachy and Google summer of Code as mentor organisation. The session would be about the journey of Debian and the discussion of students and mentors on their ongoing projects.

Other people: Jaminy Prabaharan

Diversity User Research: Becoming a Better Listener - Gloria Dwomoh

In order to understand the struggles and/or challenges of minorities in tech and foster a safe environment for their inclusion, we need to be better listeners. One way we are able to get access to the voice of our users is through user research. However in order to increase effective communication we need to learn the art of listening. Several of us were taught to speak, read and write, but we simply assume we know how to listen. There is a saying that less than 2% of people have had any formal education on how to listen, while that is a skill that many of us use in our daily lives. Through this talk we will understand the difference between hearing and listening; we will also explore active listening and how it can better help us in our user research.

Women in Open Source Technologies - Kristi Progri

The Gender Gap is one of the most talked topic since forever, and still a Gap. Where are the women in Open Source? Why is the gap so big? Women participation in open technology and culture is very important so we should all pay more attention. This talk will be focused on the large steps we can take to reduce this gap. Also we will share out experience at our hackerspace in Tirana, Albania since we have lots of women there.

Let's face it: Gender Diversity in Tech is in a quite bad shape. The sad thing about it is that it's even more noticeable in many Open Source communities in particular. But why is gender diversity important?

It’s not just diversity for the sake of diversity. If men and women are equally intelligent, statistically speaking, then out of the smartest ten people in the world, five should be male and five should be female. Thus, if your team is anything less than an equal balance of men and women, then your team is probably not the best it can be.

Unfortunately, if we take a look at a random sample from GitHub active contributors from 2015, just 5.4% of GitHub users with over 10 contributions are female.

Let's talk about the ways we can fix this and what efforts Mozilla does to improve this and how you can help Mozilla help the community, concretely with Womoz (Women at Mozilla) and the Diversity & Inclusion Team at Mozilla.

Other people: Gloria Dwomoh