The original thread forked off the survey results discussion (as every year) is a train wreck (as every year). In the past, I’ve had good experiences with creating a discussion space exclusive to people who already agree on the general direction.
Therefore, this discussion is exclusive to people who 1. agree that the NixOS has a problem with being sufficiently welcoming to a diverse set of contributors 2. understand why this is a problem and 3. agree that something should be done about it. Any other posts will most likely be considered as off-topic for this discussion. Discussing personal negative experiences or experiences of discrimination is welcome too.
(I’m personally not super interested in participating in that discussion right now, but I want to give it a proper space to happen)
I’m not sure I agree with all the premises, but a diverse community is a definite plus in my books (and it aligns with our values), so I’m supportive of initiatives to maintain and improve it regardless of the premises!
To that end, I’ve had a suggestion I’ve wanted to share for a while: I really like the NixOS logo you added earlier this year, I’d love to have it replace the usual logo on the website (and Discourse, etc.) throughout pride month (June). This is a just a small step, but it’s also fairly easy to implement
Let’s start off where the previous thread should have started: “83% men” is a major slap in a face. That much is true regardless of one’s stance regarding DEI, governance, or moderation (my own values are… well, that’s irrelevant). Doing as bad as “the industry” does is not enough.
That was the original plan, yes, however if unfortunately got under the bus because it was a busy time.
However, I find it important to acknowledge that simply waving a flag does not make a supportive community on its own. We need to put tangible actions behind our words.
As a start, I find it important to look into the reasons why a lot of (predominantly queer) people left the community. To actually listen. And when I do that, the #1 complaint I hear is that way too little is done against trolls, abusers and harassment.
Because @samueldr already mentioned RFC 175, I definitely remember how it was somehow kept open as if it was an RFC like any else, despite it containing a hateful manifesto against several community members. I also remember how known community members teamed up with banned ex-community members on r/NixOS, to harass people at the gates of our community. And stories like these abound, I just picked the first two that came to my mind for exemplary purposes.
agree that the NixOS has a problem with being sufficiently welcoming to a diverse set of contributors
Do you think that is because our community spaces are somehow hostile towards these people or because the technology itself is unwelcoming (complex ecosystem, hard learning curve, little documentation)?
I think that before everyone tries to come up with the solution, it should be a good idea to try to understand why we are where we are.
These problems, though real, do not seem to me to be gender-specific in a primary way.
Where they do include or induce some gender bias will be because they compound with other issues not listed here, and we should identify and tackle those directly.
I would say it is overwhelmingly the former; hostile community spaces.
That’s not to say that there aren’t complexity issues with the ecosystem and learning curve, but with a sufficiently welcoming and supportive community environment, those can be rapidly mitigated and improved. Whereas the other way around doesn’t work.
I’m going to gather together the comments on outreachy from the other thread, because they’re a little too thinly spread for my liking, and it feels like a relatively concrete thing to think about:
@cafkafk suggests https://www.outreachy.org/ (in this comment), which “[…] provides internships to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living”
(I think that community hostility and lack of moderation seems like a bigger / more urgent issue, though I haven’t been in this community long; this outreachy stuff doesn’t directly address that, but I thought it’d be useful to gather here anyway.)
Also for conferences there is usually a pool of “diversity” tickets on which members of underrepresented groups can apply.
Those diversity tickets come either for free or a discount.
Though in general the conference culture around the BEAM is completely different, therefore I am not sure if this can be easily transferred.
I am also trying to get my hands on some figures about how diverse the community is. The perceived diversity is bigger though. But last year’s surveys I was able to find don’t publish age and gender.
edit
I just got a reply from the issuer of the current survey. They do not have any data about age or gender.
For them it felt to exclusive to have a fixed number of replies, while a free form field would have been to much of work to “normalize” and you would never now if “wiman” was acutally a typo or a real gender identity.
I will still ask some poeple about some details of the diversity and inclusion program when I will meet them the next time, even though that will take a while and not happen before the new year.
For next NixCon how about having a group of explicitly reaching to non-male community members to submit talks? This group would not necessarily decide which talks actually get accepted and I don’t think we need to boost these submissions in any way. From another conference (chaos-communication congress), I heard about statistics that these types submissions often are accepted over-proportionally and I believe their submission is anonymous (?) - needs fact checking.
I think this is a good idea that we should add to the NixCon runbook.
In general, it would be great if we had some form of committee that does outreach to women and non-male folks to come to conferences and events (and on top of that submit talks as well!). Also thinking of events like https://oceansprint.org and https://thaigersprint.org that are more aimed at just hacking than giving talks.
I’m happy to put energy into these kind of things. Similarly mentorship is something I enjoy doing.
Can we agree on “underrepresented groups”? There are more minorities than only the usual gender bucket.
Inclusion and diversity does not only mean “women” and “non-binary”. It even goes beyond “straight, bi, homosexual” (and other nuances).
It also means to have folks from areas in the world that usually are lesser involved in tech. disabilities might as well suite this “underepresented group” scheme. And there is probably more, that we are not yet aware of, simply because everyone is focusing on sex, gender and related identities.
I think those are rather different issues to solve; one is mostly caused by toxic masculinity and the other by wealth imbalance or other detracting factors of their environment.
Solutions for one issue will likely have little effect on the other. For instance, throwing money at women won’t make them want to hang out in toxic communities and being nice to chronically poor people won’t make them more able to afford to be part of this community.
The issues are not identical but there is at least some overlap in strategies to solve them. Specifically looking at the intervention of “try to foster more participation from underrepresented groups, so that they’re more able to get their foot in the door and can more easily get their self-advocacy heard” works pretty well on any group, I think, so it does seem better to me to make that initiative be broader than just gender.
That said, if someone says “I have a strategy to make the Nix community more welcoming to women, in a way that won’t really translate to other groups, but it’s what I’m most knowledgeable / passionate about”, I’m not going to stand in their way. In a case like that we should be honest with ourselves (and others) about where we’re doing a good job and where we aren’t, but better to do it somewhere than nowhere.
Can we please somehow avoid bikeshedding about “who the minorities are and what we’re going to call them”? I know its difficult, but there are some actual constructive things to do already listed in this thread lets not derail ourselves.
NixOS logo