Hi Everyone
Thanks very much for the feedback. I think this topic has a lot of
dimensions and it depends how far we want to go with it, and simple is
always a good place to start.
I'm still in the process of gathering feedback, from IT Womens Groups,
Female Students and Developers to try to understand how and where we
could communicate to them and promote the ASF as welcoming place to be.
(As an example one idea that came in from the Pyladies group is that
each of our projects that use python could write an article or blog post
about themselves. Pyladies could then use that article or blog post as a
way to promote the ASF project to their members...)
On the existing statistics side, I'm currently working with Sally to put
forward a proposal for draft survey that we could use to survey our
members or committers. As you say we wont know how representative it
would be but we would have some concrete figures that we could use as a
base. I think that with this survey proposal we are trying to do
something new and as well as the statistics, another main purpose is to
see if this process of collecting information works and if it does, then
could it be something that any of our projects could repeat if they
wanted to.
I'll continue to work on this and post any updates.
Thanks
Sharan
On 31/05/16 17:59, William A Rowe Jr wrote:
On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Ted Dunning <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote:
Sharan,
One possible explanation of an under-representation problem (assuming we
have one ... you point out rightly that we should measure first) is that
*other* factors have given the impression that open source communities are
unfriendly.
I'm not sure 'unfriendly' is the label we are most worried about. We've
heard
from a number of female ASF members that their gender has not had a very
significant impact on their personal participation. YMMV, and obviously we
had heard of other very serious issues, not that these reflected as much on
the organization, but behavior of individuals in conjunction with the
organization.
The under-representation issue -is- rooted in the origin story and formation
of the foundation. I don't claim (I doubt anyone would) that the
self-selection
of some 40 all-male Foundation Members (after the inception - through the
year 1 members nominations) had any malice, or ill intent, or even
exclusion.
This reflected that in these first 3 projects of the foundation, the
participants
were overwhelmingly male, and nominations were based on their contributions.
These were very small communities and reflected those who reached out
to mailing lists with specific needs and concerns about these few projects.
They engaged, and eventually contributed back to those projects in some
not-so-small measure. The fact that they were largely fraternal (both coding
and socially speaking, and was the tone of the mailing lists) and had *very
small sample size* of those hackers who were working in only a few specific
technology spaces suggests this result is not surprising, and doesn't
suggest
active exclusion.
Rolling forward to today, we now cover a large number of technology spaces
with around 200 different projects, and enjoy the contributions of many
thousands of contributors. Some 400+ of these contributors are recognized
as foundation members. We can break down our challenges in a couple of
dimensions...
1. Is the foundation membership representative of the committers as a whole?
Since this is a tough nut to crack, let's look at simpler questions...
2. Are there some projects underrepresented by the foundation membership?
3. Are there some projects with a much more diverse contributor base than
others?
4. Of the more diverse projects, what are the social and technological bits
that those communities are doing right (or what did they simply stumble
into for a more appealing space to a more diverse group of contributors?)
5. What are the obstacles to including more contributors on the committer
lists and PMC rosters of our projects?
6. What are the obstacles to identifying the committer/PMC members of
underrepresented projects to the foundation membership for inclusion?
Few of these questions really speak to gender bias per se, and have been
active concerns of many members over the past 17 years. I think exploring
all of these questions with additional data collection about diversity
(gender,
geographic, etc) is always a worthwhile pursuit.
Cheers,
Bill
