 Hello everyone, welcome to my talk. I'll be giving a talk on building a diverse and inclusive open-source community. Thank you to the Linux Foundation for giving me this opportunity to virtually present my talk and also to give my talk at the Diversity and Empowerment Summit. My name is Ruth Ikega and I am a community lead at Chaos Africa, and I'm also a GitHub star and a technical writer. Before I go into the meat of my talk and tell you why this talk is important, I would love to share with you what diversity, equity, and inclusion means to me. DEI means to me, to me, when I hear about DEI or when I talk about DEI, it means that regardless of my differences and my experience, that my perspective is being put into consideration, my thoughts are being heard, and my feedback is being implemented, that I'm carried along in conversations where I do not know much about, and that I feel a sense of belonging in the community. Why this talk is important is because open-source projects, as you know, are made up of people that come from different diverse backgrounds. When people are from different diverse backgrounds, diversity, equity, and inclusion, centering diversity, equity, and inclusion, it's really important to your open-source projects and community. In this talk, I'm going to be sharing, I am an active member of the Chaos Group. Don't worry if you're just hearing about the Chaos Group, I'm definitely going to share more about the Chaos Project. I'm going to be sharing the diversity, equity, and inclusion, working group metrics that we have put together, and our different focus areas, and I'll also be sharing the project and the initiatives that have come out of the DEI working group. So Chaos, the Chaos Project, is a Linux Foundation project focused on open-source community health. At Chaos, we develop metrics and software that help define open-source community health. And by measuring health, we are able to improve the transparency, you're able to improve the transparency of an open-source project to allow people, you know, allow stakeholders to make informed decisions about different issues as regards community health in your project. And we do this, we create metrics and software through working groups. And by working groups, you know, we come together on different areas as regards community health. We have about five working groups, the diversity, equity, and inclusion working group, which of which I'm going to be sharing our metrics with you today. And we have the Riggs working group, we have the Value working group, we have the Commons working group, and we have the Metric models working group. If you want to know all about these working groups, you can check out chaos.community and, you know, no more about these different working groups. But for today, we're talking about DEI. So at Chaos, these metrics that we create, you know, help us think about different complex issues that are related to open source project community health. It helps us, you know, analyze our efforts, analyze both a community's efforts to DEI in this specific talk, to DEI, and also to, you know, look at any indicators of things that issues that we might be missing out, you know, these metrics help us inform us about how we think about these different issues. So the essence of this talk is to, you know, share with you the different, the way we look at DEI, at the Chaos project, and, you know, we're sharing this with you, it will help you, you know, start, either start of that conversation or even measure how DEI is improving in your open source community or even in your project. So in a couple of minutes, I'm going to be sharing how we look at metrics in the DEI, specifically in the DEI working group, and, you know, how these metrics, you know, can help you measure DEI in your own community. So in the diversity and equity and inclusion working group, so a typical working group session is we have meetings every week. And, you know, on these meetings, we create these metrics, you know, we collaborate on the Google Doc, which is always very interesting to do, you know, we get together and we create this metric. But the important part I want to point out here is the different focus areas we look at. So generally in Chaos, in these different working groups, we have different focus areas in which we create the metrics, in which we categorize and put in the metrics. For example, the first one, the focus area on event diversity, our goal here is to enable you to identify aspects of diversity and inclusion at open source events. So we have created, like, different metrics, and when we create these metrics, we pose a question out, like, for example, the Code of Conduct at Events, which is a very important part of having an event. There should be a Code of Conduct, all right? So we pose that question, how does the Code of Conduct for Events support? How can you, how does your Code of Conduct, you know, at your open source events, support DEI? You know, there are other metrics that are under this focus area. And when we pose these questions, this enables us go into the conversation on how you can analyze how your Code of Conduct speaks to DEI, and if it is working, if it is effective, or if it needs improvements, right? There are other metric examples here. We do metric releases every six months. So if you go to the chaos.community and slash metrics release, you're going to see the different PDFs and the latest release of the different metrics we have. So another focus area we look at is governance, you know, the same thing applies, how, you know, DEI and how is your project governance inclusive? You know, the Board of Directors or the Council is there, like, are you centering diversity in the Board? You know, the Code of Conduct of the Project, we also look at the focus area leadership, which is really very important. Is there inclusive leadership? Are people able to get mentorship in your project? You know, people that are underrepresented groups or people that are of lesser experience, you know, when they come into your project, are they able to, you know, get mentorship or people that even from, you know, supporting you support sponsorship for underrepresented groups in your community? Another focus area we have is the project and community focus area. And this is where the hardware, like community engagement occurs. So we have different metrics that speak to this focus area. Now, I would, I wanted to give you, like, a description or, like, how each metric looks like. You can also go to the chaos.community slash metrics and click on this different metric as well. But I wanted to show you how, you know, these metrics look like. So usually we have the question, that's the first part of the question, where we talk about, and this, I highlighted this particular metric because it's really very important because anytime I go to open source projects, I am an open source advocate as well. And I speak to a lot of beginners, you know, in my course of bringing people to contribute to open source. And, you know, the most important, the most, the biggest feedback I've gotten is as regards finding issues to work on. So beginners, say for example, beginners when they get on open source projects, it's really hard to find issues that speak to their specific skillsets or even speak to their, what they want to contribute to, or, you know, if they are beginner, if they are beginner friendly issues. So this particular metric helps you analyze issue label inclusivity, helps you, you know, think about how well your issues are properly labeled to invite new contributors or even like skilled contributors or even non-code contributors and also other types of contributions that are in your open source projects. So we go for that to deeply describing what this metric is and the different objectives. If you can see this screenshot, you see that the different objectives as related to this metric, you know, new form of friendliness is the issue are the issues appropriately labeled. You know, there are different issues that speak to new form of friendliness the most popular label, the good first issue for new contributors to start up in your project, right? Is there mental availability for that particular issue? And, you know, putting all these things out there helps you, helps the contributor narrow down how they want to contribute to that particular issue, right? You know, putting a usable title and description, this is something that I see a lot where people just open the issues and when you open the issue, there is fixed this and there's nowhere to go. There's, you know, GitHub has made it very, very, very good that you can even have issue templates in your open source project. So definitely do make use of that if you're not using issue templates in your open source project. So these are the different objectives we look at and we also go for that with, you know, advising or even recommending ways that you can implement this issue. So part of this screenshot has been cut out because of space and to allow you see it. But we also provide tools. We also have tools, software. Like I said earlier in my talk, software that can help you analyze this metric like the Grimoire Lab and Orgor. So we share tools that, you know, can provide, analyze that metric for you in the different metrics we create. We also share data collection strategies on how you identify different general labels, inclusive labels and even skill-related labels, right? And if you want to check out more of these issues, more of this, sorry, more of these metrics, you can go to chaos.community slash metrics and you get a list of all these different metrics. Now, another part of this talk is where I want to share with you how, you know, the chaos DEI group, the project initiatives that have come out of the DEI working with not just create metrics, right? We look for ways that we can apply these metrics, this DEI metrics we have created in practice. And we look for ways that we can practicalize them, you know, to make a change, right? And some of these projects is the DEI badge initiative which I am a huge part of and one of the maintainers of this initiative. And this DEI badging, the event, speaking to event badging, it's a peer review process where open source event applicants, open source events can apply to the KLDI badging and receive a badge for their efforts on fostering diversity, equity and inclusion. And I'm happy to say that the OSSEU summit has been one of the conferences we have been badging over two years now. And if you go to the website, the OSSEU website and you check the diversity and equity and inclusion page, you're going to see our shiny badge there. So shout out to the DEI badging team and all the awesome reviewers we have. So basically the process here at the event badging is an applicant submits, you know, their application and their application is made up of the different metrics. This event badging has come out from the different metrics that we have created in the DEI badging initiative are the questions in regards to events, diversity, on that focus area events, diversity, those are the metrics, event accessibility, you know, code of conduct. So we ask all these questions during the application process and the open source event applicants is able to put in those questions, answer those questions as regards demographic. And then when the application is being submitted, we have it's a human review process. So two reviewers are assigned to that particular event and the reviewers go through, we have a checklist that the reviewers go through these different events and, you know, give their feedback and we have a board that collects the results and gives a badge. We have different badge levels, the gold badge, the silver badge, the diamond badge as well and also like a pending badge, depending on how the process went through. And we also have the, and this project has been growing over the years since 2020, I am so happy that I am part of this project and over time we have been able to give recommendations to, you know, open source events on how to, you know, center DEI, even in their website, you know, inform people about their code of conduct, give like recommendations to them. Project Badging is, you know, in the works already, it's, and we are going to launch that soon. And, you know, Project Badging is also using the same, the same model of, you know, projects, open source projects applying to the chaos projects to, you know, get a badge and, you know, we go through the process and ensure that the projects, the projects, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion. Another project that is really, that has been coming up lately in the DEI Working Group is the Diversity Interview Project. So this is an interview campaign we are going to be doing with the underrepresented groups in open source and shout out to Anita for, you know, leading this work. So what we are going to, the focus here on this interview project is to, you know, interview and hear the perspective of different underrepresented groups in open source on how our metrics are being useful or how we can, you know, shape our metrics to speak to them, get feedback about our metrics. And I'm proud to say that in the chaos projects, we are always looking for ways to improve on our existing metrics. And we always, you know, ask for feedback. Another, this is not a project, but this is a team that's, you know, was sponsored by the Ford Foundation and it's there last year in 2021, which I am also a part of this team. You see, I care about diversity, equity and inclusion so much. So yeah, kudos to me. But yeah, like I'm also a part of this awesome team. What we do here is we have been looking at, we embarked on a journey in 2021 to go through our processes, you know, to go through the chaos group in general, to audit the chaos group, look at our DI processes and how we can, you know, improve on how we can, even with our improvements, how we can also teach other communities and from our learnings, other communities can learn how to, you know, improve DI in their open source projects. If you check the chaos community blog, we have a detailed blog post that, you know, speaks to this work and we hope to share more of our learnings with you in the future. Also, another part is of the chaos project that, you know, even came out of the recommendation, one of the recommendations from the DI audit team is, you know, opening up local chapters and which I am one of the community leads of Chaos Africa. And this style form we recently had a lot of, we had, as of, I think during the outreach, the first outreach at the start of the year, we had a lot of applicants from Africa and we thought about, you know, creating a local chapter, creating local chapters, you know, with the Chaos Project, we also have presence in Asia Pacific community. So we created the local chapters and over the period of three months, I must tell you that there has been a very good engagement from the African open source community, you know, contributing because then you get to be with, you get to be in a group of people that you share the same background with, you share the same culture with and we get to collaborate more, we get to, you know, build more projects and participate in the larger group. So the main focus of the Chaos Africa group is, you know, finding challenges, you know, we are looking at challenges that African open source contributors face and how we can, you know, solve those challenges with the different metrics we have created in Chaos Africa and Chaos in general. So if you're interested in, you know, using our metrics, you should definitely use it. You can check out, you can go to chaos.community slash metrics and you can also go to chaos or community slash participate to, you know, find out more gift feedback, you can participate in our different meetings, our different meetings and give feedback on our metrics. Another important thing I want to bring up is, you know, how can you, what are the different things that you can do personally even in your own corner, in your community, you should start that conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion. Some weeks back, I had a conversation with a friend and where that conversation stemmed from, you know, talking about how different countries have, are in different phases in DEI, you know, speaking from the African perspective, some countries have, still have laws that, you know, bind against diversity, equity and inclusion relating to gender. So different people from different communities do not know, do not know some issues as regards DEI. But the important thing is, you know, starting that conversation, you know, teaching others, carrying others along, removing that, telling people where, we're ensuring that we carry out these intentional conversations, keep bringing up those efforts, you know, keep finding ways to improve DEI, keep finding ways to include others, ask questions, you know, carry others along in the conversation. Let's keep talking about it to get there. I'm so, I'm so excited that I got to give this talk and thank you so much for listening and you can connect with me at Ruti Kega. I'm definitely down to talk to you about chaos Africa or about opening up local chapters. I'm definitely down to talking about community management. You know, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, also Ruti Kega on the virtual platform as well. I'm definitely love to chat with you and let you enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you.