 Thanks for joining. This talk is called the Community Diversity and Inclusion as a business metric and not just a feel-good tactic, pretty self-explanatory. I'll start with a land acknowledgement. This work was created, not necessarily here, but was created on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Oloni, more specifically the Confederated Villages of Lishan in the territory of Huichin, encompassing regions throughout the Greater San Francisco East Bay Area. I recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland, and we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples. It is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand, but also we recognize the Muwekma Oloni people are alive and flourishing members of our communities today. Great. So my name is Tamao Nakahara. I'm the VP of Developer Experience at a company called WeaveWorks. We are the creators of GitOps, if you haven't heard that. Our key project that kind of triggered that is called Flux. It is an open-source project in the cloud-native computing foundation. It is a graduated project, and it does really cool things with Kubernetes to create GitOps. Please check out the QR code. I've got some members of my teams and others giving wonderful talks throughout this week here. We were at GitOpsCon and also for the rest of Open Source Summit that covers these and other topics. So I've been working in several different companies over 15 years in open-source communities, some a little bit more commercially leaning communities. And many, many years ago, Matthew Reville and I co-founded DevRelCon, the Developer Relations Conference, which has always been really fun. Matthew generally runs the London event, and then we run together the San Francisco event. It was actually kind of cool to bring it online during the pandemic because a lot of people who normally don't have the means to travel, whether to attend or to speak could join. So we're always looking to see if we can try to create a hybrid version of that. It's always really great to meet people that you can't meet in person. But we are excited that Matthew's been working on DevRelCon London. I think the CFP closed a couple of weeks ago. A lot of people have been talking about it with me this week, so they're excited to go to that this year. And then we're in the works of the next DevRelCon in San Francisco. So this is my background in various communities in open-source. So what is the call to action for this talk? I'm just going to say it upfront in the beginning instead of waiting to the end, because I'll continue to repeat it. Because basically, please work regularly with your diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging experts on various parts of your open-source community journey. And because I don't know if people are measured in the same way, but I know in every role that I've had, I am measured on community growth. And so I feel like we're in a unique position in which we have to make sure the community is healthy and the community is growing. And that can't happen if people don't feel safe, welcome, or heard or many other things, right? So it's not a feel-good side thing that maybe you would do on a particular day or have a particular campaign. We're probably all, myself included, we're probably all missing a lot of opportunities to be growing our communities much, much more. If we think our communities are growing a certain way, we probably have a lot of ceilings that we're not thinking about. And so we have a great opportunity that if you're measured on community and that's part of the business strategy of your company, then I feel that hopefully we can justify having this be a key part of it. So some of you might be lucky enough to have a DEI be expert in-house. Maybe they're in the HR department or other places. And so hopefully they are open to talking to you and have expertise to share on ways that you can be thinking about making your community more welcoming, more thankful, and valuing different people. In a lot of our cases, people from all different kinds of cultural backgrounds, language barriers, what have you. And if you don't have one, hopefully we can all argue to have it as part of our business model to hire a consultant. And to do that as regular check-ins because as we know, social conditioning is constant. We were born with certain social conditioning. It's like air we breathe. It's constantly there. I personally, if I slip up on certain things, I forget myself because I know that power is stronger than any other thing to try to make change. But at the same time, then I also bring diligence to study up and work with people. I'm very thankful that I have lots of people in my life who are the experts and I can talk to them and we have resources available to us. In our particular journey at WeaveWorks, we have hired a consultant in the past, but I'm definitely trying to work to make it a regular check-in because you definitely can't go to a workshop and be like, great, we all did a great job and we're good for the next two years. It's just that regularness. So I'm glad I'm very thankful that our company covered for that, but I'm really hoping that we can argue to make this part of the metric of community growth. So again, I am not an expert. I don't want to be here like touting things also in a talk this length. There's no way that this is going to be comprehensive of all the areas that cover this. So just want to make that clear. So thankfully talking to my friends who are experts, I wanted to just sort of shift it then. Like the one thing that I can honestly do is at least share the things that I've heard, the things that I've experienced and thankfully because of my DevRelCon and various open source networks, many other things that people have shared with me in conversations where I was able to learn. So that's sort of the starting point. So hopefully it's not doom and gloom, but it's more like these are things I've heard. These is how we experienced them and wanted to learn. So hopefully some of you may think, oh, like that hasn't happened to us, but I could see how that could. So how can we think proactively to avoid these challenges? So lots of words here. Again, I won't be able to be comprehensive, but these are the areas that I'll sort of cover in terms of the community mistakes and biases that we saw. So for example, in some some choice of words or how people talk, they might like default assume that certain people are cis or maybe of a particular gender identity, sometimes within a binary spectrum. And then sometimes just assuming that people are ascribing to a system of identification as well. Right. So I'll cover a little bit of that. One that's just very ingrained in us and it's very hard is assuming certain bias in terms of how people might be better or less talented at certain skills. And all of that comes through us right through like gender race, geo class ability, etc. Many different biases that were trained on every day. And so those are things that we saw that I'll share bringing that unconscious bias into community for quote unquote free labor. Thankfully where it opens or summits, I probably don't have to explain this one. We live and breathe this, but thankfully also as I get to meet lots of companies who are suddenly discovering developer relations and community. Often the first thing they say is the executives got wind of this and they're like, why aren't we mining this community for free labor. So I'll share that one unconscious bias for recruiting from the community. So I'm not necessarily pro recruiting from communities, but the fact that it does happen. A lot of bias comes into play of like who gets cherry picked or who gets wind of like what opportunities there are. And then in terms of code of conduct, of course we all see that as a beginning baseline. But sometimes, you know, there might be times that it ends up being a way to police behaviors instead of actually trying to get to the root of like what cause people to feel pain and feel upset about something that especially again as we are coming from so many different cultures and often being forced to speak English when English isn't our first language. And then we were just chatting about this. We forget to say thanks. Like we always want to start with thanks, but you know, often remind myself a lot of these situations, you know, need to get started with the thanks and can go from there. So most of these that I'll be my mindset in them and my experiences that I'll share are a lot of is online. A lot of it's text based, a lot of challenges come from text baseness. And then but I just put one line here for as we come back into in person gatherings, like I can't even remember we used to have meetups all the time. But topics like, you know, alcohol, competitions, body language, whatever. So again, I won't be able to cover all the bases, but you know, I just wanted to like bookmark it even for myself as we get back into in person events. So I'm going to share these stories along these lines. Again, if anybody has more, I always want to hear. I'm never tired of hearing them. So in terms of the category of like assuming someone's gender experience and whether sexuality may or may not fall under that. So this is sort of distilled or sometimes actual verbatim things that I have heard that, you know, we found very concerning and wanted to address. So like, I'm pretty sure she's cis. I don't think anyone here cares about pronouns. What's his real name. I think he's gay. And how do you identify. So I'll start with the last one because I know right now it's probably a general practice of people thinking it's the courtesy and you know they're trying to be attentive, asking people, you know, how would you like to be identified like what are your pronouns that you choose. But I just want to add an additional caveat that sometimes people don't actually subscribe to a system of identity. Right. So that's also a general assumption and sometimes people might feel it's kind of a burden of like I don't really want to be subscribing to these categories that we need to box. We're all in a journey. And so those are things that I've heard that like I wanted to keep in mind and say like like how can we make sure that we don't say these things or even if we don't say them like we're trained to bring these biases and how we work with people. In terms of the legal names. I feel I had the fortune of hearing about someone else's misfortune because someone else was sharing this was sort of a semi company slash community thing but it involved software that wasn't designed to bring in people's preferred names it was kind of based on legal names and it was very bare bones. In that case, when it was brought up hey like we shouldn't be sharing people's legal names there should be preferred names. First there's a software problem. And then second there is a human problem where the people who are involved were a bit like reluctant, they didn't really see the value. You know they said well we got all these things that I know this is a priority so thankfully the people who are involved like really fought for it and made it happen. But the damage was done you know like so I was hearing the story and thinking oh I'll be honest to myself I don't know if we're that good like I'll take this learning that someone else struggled in real time in a harm unfortunately way that had harm and see if we can minimize that so in this particular case I said oh hey I notice that we also don't have these fields you know can we also include backgrounds I mean we had things like you know preferred language of speaking preferred language for coding food preferences but we didn't have anything about gender and when I brought it up the response I got was oh I guess you should but I don't think that applies to anybody here. Okay you know that's fine everybody comes to different backgrounds I said well thankfully there is no push back I just like I put it up there and lo and behold of course right people are like putting in their preferred ways of experiencing gender and thankfully also the person who I was talking to said oh you know I didn't realize that I learned something and you know it wasn't like a huge deal but we're always moving it forward. In terms of lookism lookism lookism lookism I mean we are trained to read body language clothing mannerisms and all that and but you know just being aware of that because we've definitely been in places where people would just assume oh these people are cis or they're queer or they're anything and those are so incorrect assumptions and a lot of times it just doesn't it's not relevant to what we're doing in our communities right but they they come in and how we we engage with people. And the final one also is again around lookism I know we all do it like you know we say oh someone brought their partner and then we see their partner we read assume gender and then we make all these assumptions about whatever is going on but you know hopefully we can from these experiences we're like keeping these in mind and trying to keep them in check and not them have them impact the community. Because none of these and I'm sure plain or that I didn't cover do not help with psychological safety belonging and essentially again back to the business metric of community growth. And then in terms of contributions and how we read people as naturally giving their contributions. Some things like she has better people skills and he's a great candidate for mentorship and their whatever institution isn't really as good as ours in terms of their education. People don't care about influencers from or community growth from whatever region that's not Silicon Valley. Some of these I really heard so you know I think a lot of times especially when we're working with it's exciting people want to start their own user groups and they're getting organized. If you do notice that maybe there's a way people present gender and they're sort of people are falling into gender roles. There was a time once we were just like oh it seems like you know certain gender presenting people seem to be the ones who are the organizers and the other people are the ones doing the technical work. And people just assumed well I mean that person seems to like that so you know why should we change it. And so sometimes we go and I find out like oh are you interested in maybe learning more about the technology which you actually want to present like maybe you could start by emceeing and then learning more. We find out some people were engineers and they kind of fall into more like community management roles not that there's anything wrong with that but they fell into those roles because a lot of the gender bias was kind of leading them there. And they were actually interested in doing different things. So I think sometimes you know just coming and assuming that people are in their roles because they want to sometimes it's just a matter of asking and so that was something we learned. People tend to put more energy mentoring others that remind them of themselves. I mean that's a common thing oh this person could be my prodigy maybe this person looks like me or just reminds me of myself. As well as you know the bias that we're trained with based on gender race geoclassibility body look what have you. I still feel like I meet a lot of people who are very tall who are in leadership roles. And that's still something that we do right what what is what is the height thing but it's something very ingrained that we felt we learned. And then also primarily moving the needle in Silicon Valley is bias right like we felt like there are some communities that were really enthusiastic about our open source. And then I said oh can I have some budget to you know do some stuff for them and maybe do some meetups and I was told at the time like well I mean even if you made a lot of noise there. No one in Silicon Valley is going to be convinced that the software is good because they're using it and they've got you know 2000 people who want to run an event or something. So those are real business things you have to work with but hopefully we can argue for you know added benefits like for example in that one I felt like you know there's a lot we could have learned about. How their use cases like how would they be guiding the product you know maybe there are ways that you know as we're always especially in startups like trying to figure out where our fit is. By somehow denying like because of our colonial regional ways of thinking we really limited the chance and then probably even if we didn't say anything we were sending messages and we were sending vibes toward these people that they just weren't as important. So that was something I never want to repeat if possible. And then the free labor thing that I was talking about again like literally people saying you know we need to mine our community for free labor or like oh they're desperate there and so you know this will give them something to work on and it doesn't matter if it's free. And then the final part too it's like oh wait like you know can we make sure that we're having gender diversity is like well but that's their culture if they're not going to like try to advocate to have diversity in terms of gender there it's not really our problem. So those are things that we experienced that we definitely don't want to just like leave unaddressed. But again here I don't know if I have to explain too much to open source summit but you know I think we end up we ended up you know sending those messages out by not being on top of that. There are many many people online who are experts this one just kind of resonated me this is Karen Taylor of CDO Chief Diversity Officer at Workday had a talk online talking about the five tenants five tenants of nurturing belonging. And I'm sure plenty of people have all kinds of tenants on belonging or other areas but what I heard in the talk was then there is a part where Karen said oh and then you could a community could meet all of those and still an individual might feel like well my belonging isn't really met because it's an individual thing each person has different things and there are ways to you know address that. But I felt like well that makes me feel kind of sad because I hope that as community managers we can be as proactive as possible so that people don't have to advocate for themselves again starting starting points and other good points to think about that we're helpful for us. And then the recruiting part we want only stand out people we don't hire know when I heard is don't hire anyone from a country you wouldn't want to visit or where you wouldn't want to have a team off site. Or like they're going to want us to sponsor a visa. So these are all these are things I've heard. And so I really kept those in my memory and I thought like these these is just not going to help for how we think about community. Again you know I think the best ways to keep in mind when general like organic recruiting does happen. You know how are the ways that we if I say we like if those of us are I'm in the Silicon Valley area or if we feel like we're in certain kind of technical technological centers. I do feel that we get trained to think with that mindset like oh people want to come to us and how can I get the best people. And so to be aware of that and you know thankfully we get to work with really really really great people from all over the world and that can work remotely. And so that I have to give my Ted talk photo at the hand gestures. And so you know because I feel like that was translating in the way it got performed and definitely don't want to repeat that. And then I love I was seeing a talk by Lola. I hope I'm pronouncing correctly. De Yemo or ERG expert who talked about personal experiences that didn't nurture belonging. And one of them was that people assume that non U.S. people want to move to the U.S. Which I thought that was an interesting one right like so that point like when you're talking to people when you're working with them maybe you're recruiting them. That's just so whatever centric or like oh they want to come to us they want to visa they want to work here. That's not a given assumption and you know definitely be aware that if that comes into mind. And I love this other one assuming immigrants working in the U.S. aren't citizens. That's I say I love it but I love it because it you know resonates with me. I personally I've always been the token person and every been every place I've been I guess it's giving me resilience and I've kind of gotten used to it. But yeah I've gotten everything like oh you speak English so well and where are you really from are you really born in San Francisco you know still get that stuff and so. I don't know I think it is harmful for me I just it's just been so repetitive my whole life I guess I've gotten used to it but. Those are great things that I thought really resonated with me. Just checking the time OK so using the code of conduct as a way of police behaviors. You know your behavior isn't meeting the code of conduct. So there's a range of things here like one of our experiences was and I know I'm simplifying but you know we have a project and someone tried to contribute. But it's quite a complicated project and the contribution wasn't really going to help it didn't see the bigger architecture was probably going to cause more bugs etc etc. The maintainer at the time probably like overburden really busy just kind of put out a curt note saying like oh this isn't going to work or something like that. That person felt you know not thanked not heard felt that it was you know really brusque they were both non English speakers and so there's maybe added stuff there. Then that person took to social and then tweeted like you know it's maintainers awful and I hit this project blah blah blah. So then some people in the community like came in and tried to address it but their way of addressing it also from their cultural perspective was like hey we have a COC we don't take that kind of language you know stop. And none of it helped right like so I was really thankful that the person did talk to me when I reached out individually and I said first of all thank you so so much for you know contributing code we really appreciate it. We're so thankful that you're using our software you know I love to sit with you and hear like how's how's it going what can we do better. I see that you're trying to get you know some features in there and also you know thank you for the feedback because you know we want to make sure that everybody feels welcome and appreciated. And I was just so thankful that that person wrote back to me and we still been in communication and you know it's like OK it's fine. But I think in various parts of that right like a lot of again I'm not an expert but the way I experienced it was that. First of all we'd not been on top of like saying thank you first of all all the time. And then secondly yes we are all really busy we're trying to do a lot of stuff. But we also had a long discussion about how I think some people have a desire to serve but then that gets like backfired because like we could have just said hey we have a lot of PRs in queue. I don't think I'm even going to be able time to look at it for like three weeks like I hope that's OK. Because that's really what it was it was like the maintainer feeling like I have to respond right away to these PRs or otherwise it looks really bad and instead like went the other way. I think also maybe there are some emotions to how people responded to the social outbursts because thankfully we generally don't have those it's you know it's. I can't think of a lot of other incidents that happen so probably people involved like they weren't used to it. They're like oh my God this is you know how do I shut this down or how can I make it go away instead of going hey like it sounds like this is someone in pain. Like how can we talk and you know how can we see if there's maybe some language barriers or what have you. And so I'm really thankful that we were able to you know most important things build a connection with the person that person didn't just write us off and just walk away and never want to talk to us again. But I thought we learned a lot from that. So again yes all these all these things you know came out of that and it's something we want to be more proactive about. And then the in person interactions. So again this kind of go to be all over the place but in terms of the alcohol stuff I think it's been like at least 10 years that you know thankfully people have been talking like hey when we go to meet ups is always pizza and beers like you know there's a lot of us that don't drink alcohol. What can we do. And now we were just chatting with our good friend Lee Kapili who is on our team who did sing Boba. And so I was like I want to sing kombucha or whatever it is right like I think that's great that we're having those efforts and I'm trying to like personally also re remember these things as we probably will be doing meet ups in person. And then the competition thing. So how do we put this. You know there's often discussion about gender based upbringings based on people's assignments and some people are sort of like raised to be more competitive and some people are raised to be more collaborative. And so I think it's a great thing that you know there's been some movement saying like oh you know it's great if you like things like hackathons and there's competition and there's like you know. Short timings if that helps people get their juices flowing and they're you know working together and creating stuff then that's great. And they want to be at the top of the leaderboard you know there's no there's definitely space for that. But then on the opposite end you know it's been great to see people say well no we want stuff that's more people working in teams and you know communicating and there's in a sense of like. Even if it's like playful making fun of each other like some people don't even want that right. And so in my experience that got manifest in a particular way. And so I was involved a little bit with women who cold code I was definitely going to a lot of their stuff and then I somehow ended up also running a meetup group that was defined as you know quote unquote women's meetup group. So then what happened was a range of people showed up and they said oh I know I'm not defined as women but I really love the description and it sounds like a really nice place to come learn and I wanted to learn together. And so that's where again I'm not an expert but we did the best we could or just said well yes. We've got to this place because of these gendered terms because those are the terms that are given to us that's how we're trained but ultimately we're trying to find a place that was you know kind and had psychological safety and was very nurturing. And so we said of course we wouldn't you know deny people based on that and so you know we had a good time by having several sessions where we went through lessons together and we learned together. Similarly I had also been to women who code events where sometimes there is somebody who brought very toxic. Kind of you know talking over people shutting people out and a lot of times we were just like I don't want to come to this woman who code meetup anymore because it just feels like. However I was trained to you know seek out these safe places it's not happening here so any all to say just from my personal experience. I welcome and was really glad that we had these opportunities and that hopefully we can evolve and not have them necessarily be categorized within gender. You know assignment or gender categories especially because it's that's mostly based on the educations we were given when we were assigned. So again that's also just assuming if someone even if they identify as you know male what have you that doesn't mean that they're not appreciative of having these collaborative spaces. So anyway there's just so many more things again there's no way I can be exhausted on this talk but just want to put things out there and if anybody raises stuff I'd love to hear it. Okay so I mentioned that I run developer relations conference called Devral Khan it's been like seven years or so. And of course during pandemic we brought them online and some of what led to this talk was the opportunity to again chat with many experts. One expert that came on to Devral Khan was Jonathan Ashong Lempty who's over in the UK and works primarily on employee resource groups that ERGs has a podcast. Luzan Mandel is also a good friend in the community who's been working on gender diversity stuff so we just had a conversation to try to learn. And that's sort of what led me to think like oh yeah you know hopefully we are in a unique place where like we're all being paid by tech companies for the most part. Not all you know but those of us like me who are being paid by tech companies and you know maybe we have product led growth strategies and you know we need to grow the community we need to make sure it's healthy. And there's no way to not think about DEIB if that's what your metric is so that's what kind of triggered it. And one thing that Jonathan shared was this idea of like you know community quote unquote means for people and it's idea that a group of people have common values, common interests or common identities. And that's sort of what led to this conversation that first of all I personally grapple even with the word community because I feel like as soon as like I like a thing suddenly I'm in a community. You know and I've been with people who I think we have similar or shared experiences around gender but I don't know if I necessarily feel like I'm a community with them. You know so I feel like we jump to that word really fast. And I was thinking as we are getting paid to grow quote unquote communities first of all we use that word quickly and then these interest values and identities. So Jonathan did say it can be you know one of these or another. It could be more than one but often I feel that we are incentivized to make it appear as though we share all three. Because I do think sometimes default if you know if one person likes Harry Potter another person loves Harry Potter they have a shared interest. And then there's kind of this emotional assumption that like oh so that we must share also the shared values and we have shared identities when it's very often not the case. And then on our commercial side we're kind of goaded to say well hey they all have the same interests they all love our software. And so we kind of nurture the assumption that might not always be correct that we share the same values and the shared shared identities because there's a commercial reason for like yes you're all part of this club and you know. We're going to all do cool things together and definitely for the most part you know there can be shared things. I've definitely had some communities I've built where kind of by surprise it turned out that people are really really innovative in a particular area that might not necessarily have been related to our product. But people caught on they said oh wow like you're running a user group and you have some people from your user community and I want to go to their talk because they're doing really cool things is something I'm thinking about for a year from now. So that we kind of had this like unexpected kind of club feeling from that. But anyway all to say I felt like reflecting on this I was thinking well on one hand we are kind of charged to do this. But under all of these falls all the DEIB stuff that if we just think at this level and we're just trying to you know make these connections without addressing all of the needs that people have to feel welcome and valued and safe. Then we definitely would be creating more harm than good and we're probably again by myself probably have lots of community growth ceilings that I'm not aware of. So again the call to action I'm not a DEIB expert I think you know hopefully this will be something that you can argue to your executives is if you want me to grow the community if that's part of my OKRs. Please please please understand that we're probably not growing as well and as fast as you want us to unless we have expertise in house or expertise that we work to. Maybe also you'd want to become an expert and you can convince your management to train you on that path but this is living and growing things. So again it's not and when I say feel good and I say in quotes these are literally things I've heard executives say it's not feel good it's not additive. It's literally part of building the foundation for a healthy community to grow again like I mentioned I have a QR code we have great talks from our team here. I think I also put our contact info there I also have my contact info here if you're interested in asking me any questions or please sharing your stories. Like I said I definitely learn and grow when I hear things that I'm like oh I might think oh wow that's never happened to me that doesn't exist in our community. And then I you know pause to think well maybe it does you know maybe I'm not seeing it so I'm happy I definitely love to hear people stuff and definitely check out devralcon.com where the last event was in Prague and the next one like I said is in London so thank you.