[moving to dev@diversity] I spent some time thinking about this overnight. (I had trouble sleeping. Which is quite rare for me.)
It's going to be more subtle than "people who were excluded" of course. People self-select out of places where they don't feel welcome. But finding people who *didn't* join a community is difficult. Even if you solve that problem determining whether someone really didn't join because they felt unwelcome or because they weren't going to join anyways and needed a reason to explain their inaction will be difficult. What might be easier is to look at duration of involvement. Volunteers generally have a finite time-period of active involvement before they withdraw their efforts (best case they have more than one such stretch of active involvement : o). People who feel like they are welcome and belong will have a longer duration of involvement than those who don't. So we could look at it both from a high-level/numbers point of view and a low-level/anecdotal point of view. Do women/minority groups have a shorter average period of active involvement than others? Pick a woman/minority group member who stopped activity after a short involvement and ask them about their experiences. Maybe they started a new job and just didn't have time anymore. Or maybe the tone of discussion on the list left them feeling unsafe. Or maybe their life priorities changed. Or maybe they didn't feel like they could contribute at the level required for the project. (and so on.) Wdyt? Best, Myrle On Tue, Jun 18, 2019 at 9:03 PM Daniel Shahaf <[email protected]> wrote: > Myrle Krantz wrote on Tue, 18 Jun 2019 16:30 +00:00: > > The survey provides an incomplete picture and the data is imperfect. In > > addition, we need to find ways to think about diversity that do justice > > to the international nature of our foundation and our projects. > > I've mentioned it on private lists but I'll repeat it here: being an > email-centered culture, our social bugs are probably different than > those of traditional corporations. For example, it would be practically > impossible for us to discriminate against bearded people even if we > _wanted_ to, while a PMC could easily be exclusive towards people who > don't have GitHub accounts. > > > But this survey is at least an excellent argument for seeking more > > data and a deeper understanding. > > I would suggest to seek case studies: accounts by specific people who > were/are excluded. > > Cheers, > > Daniel > [please Cc] >
