Diversity in Technology and Open Source
All of the members of the [Pocoo Team][1] seem to be white men.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pocoo.org&#x2F;team&#x2F;#team" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pocoo.org&#x2F;team&#x2F;#team</a><p>Is that a reflection of your hypocrisy? Or the difficulty of recruiting people that are not white men? I&#x27;m guessing it&#x27;s mostly the latter.<p>You wrote:<p>&gt; When you start an Open Source project today, in particular one which is further disconnected from frontend technologies there is a very high chance the organic community development will be everything but diverse.<p>and given the following, from [this comment][2] in this thread, which seems probably true:<p>&gt; Major open source projects are disproportionately managed and staffed by people with full-time jobs at major software companies, and the process of obtaining and thriving in one of those jobs is not intrinsically color and gender blind, so this argument isn&#x27;t persuasive.<p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14488000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14488000</a><p>we should be tempering our judgements of open source projects, e.g. that they&#x27;re not welcoming to people that are not white men.<p>I&#x27;m confused as to what principle or principles you think should actually be adopted. Should all open source projects reflect the &#x27;diversity&#x27; of the entire world?<p>Consider the following, from [this comment][3] also from this thread:<p>&gt; LGBT people are overrepresented - almost double their percentage in the general population in fact (7% vs 4%).<p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14488689" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14488689</a><p><i>Assuming</i> that the above is true, is this a cause for concern? Would you similarly be concerned if it were true that, say, Asian people, or even just Asian men, were over-represented in technology or open source software projects? Is that not a cause for concern for you too?<p>It sure seems like the only cause for concern is that there are too many white men. Would anyone ever criticize an open source project for not having &#x27;enough white people&#x27; or &#x27;enough men&#x27;, let alone &#x27;enough white men&#x27;?<p>More from your post:<p>&gt; What&#x27;s worse is the longer you wait to try to get people involved in the project that would naturally not try to join the harder it will be. When your team is 4 men, the first woman which joins will make a significant impact. When your team is already 20 men you need to get a lot more women on board to have the same impact.<p>My problem with this is that you&#x27;re pretty clearly, tho implicitly, devaluing contributors that don&#x27;t help your project meet your diversity quotas. Your team is six white men. Have you considered replacing your existing members with women or people of color? When someone contacts you, your team members, or other contributors to your projects, do you ask them to identify their race, ethnicity, sex, or gender so you can discourage white men from contributing? If not, don&#x27;t you realize that every white man that joins your team or contributes to your projects is making your diversity problem worse? You&#x27;re also implicitly bashing your team members and contributors for being the wrong kind of people because you&#x27;re telling them that their homogeneity is:<p>1. &quot;not healthy for a project or a community to lack diversity&quot;
 2. Contributing to an &quot;echo chamber&quot;
 3. Increasing the difficulty of future diversity
 4. Hurting the project because they are relatively bad at &quot;de-escalating arguments in bug trackers and mailing lists&quot;
 5. Hurting the project because they are relatively bad at &quot;[taking] care of documentation&quot;
 6. They are not &quot;people that make software work in new cultural contexts (localization, globalization, internationalization, etc.)&quot;, i.e. they are unable to understand or work with other &quot;cultural contexts&quot;.
 7. They are not &quot;people that care about user experience&quot;<p>---<p>I&#x27;m sure you agree with me in thinking that everyone that wants to &#x27;participate in technology&#x27; or contribute to an open source project should be able to do so. And moreover, people that <i>don&#x27;t even realize that they would enjoy contributing to an open source project</i> should be given that knowledge – all else being equal of course.<p>But that&#x27;s the key <i>constraint</i> on how much marginal effort should be expended to recruit people that aren&#x27;t already participating and contributing – all else is <i>not</i> equal. Everything is costly to some degree.<p>De-escalating arguments in bug-trackers or mailing lists – let alone even <i>participating</i> in arguments – requires time and energy! And there&#x27;s only a finite supply of either! And opportunity costs are real and pervasive – arguing with people <i>can</i> be satisfying, but it can also be incredibly aggravating!<p>Writing documentation – and editing it, or maintaining it, or re-organizing it, etc. – requires time and energy! Someone has to do it and for most open source projects that means someone has to <i>voluntarily</i> do it. And this neglects the fact that &#x27;localizing&#x27; or &#x27;globalizing&#x27; that same documentation isn&#x27;t even possible unless one knows at least two languages pretty well!<p>If you&#x27;re going to &quot;artificially bring balance&quot; to your open source team, your open source project&#x27;s contributors, or your conference, you&#x27;re <i>restricting</i> the supply of possible people and thus <i>raising</i> the relative cost of whatever it is that you want done, whether it be writing documentation or providing user support in your issue tracker or mailing list.<p>I haven&#x27;t personally observed any significant <i>and unfair</i> obstacles preventing people that are not white men from participating in open source projects, or &#x27;technology&#x27; generally. But I&#x27;m <i>sure</i> they exist. Let&#x27;s get rid of them. But first, let&#x27;s actually identify them, and let&#x27;s be careful with implying that every group of people that doesn&#x27;t near-perfectly reflect the demographics of its wider community or country or whatever is guilty of overt racism, sexism, or other discrimination.