 Hello, everyone. Today I'll be speaking on the topic I have been dying to share with everyone since we decided to lead a project research within the CARES community. It is open source DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, transitioning from intentions to impact. So at the CARES community, we have a bunch of metrics around governance, around evolution and development, around software, around DEI events and so many other metrics. However, one day during our DEI working group, we decided to ask ourselves the question, how do we know if our metrics are as effective as we want them to be? Or how do we know if this project are making the impact in a real time as we expect them to be? Well, we're in social housing about this. So we decided to lead an interview campaign specific to underrepresented groups to help us understand the effects and impact of these metrics. And that is what we are going to be discussing about today. I am Anita Ehuman. I'm a developer advocate and a technical writer. And for three years, I've been contributing to open source communities around different projects and different areas. I'm currently contributing to the CARES community where I'm a member of the DEI Badging Initiative. I am also leading the interview campaign specific to underrepresented groups. I am contributing to other interesting communities like Layer 5, Open Source Collective and the Good Ox Project. And I'm also a technical writer at Auto Cloud. So that is all about me. During this section, we're going to be looking at the distinguished during this section, we're going to look at the difference between intentions and impact. We're going to talk about the state of diversity, equity and inclusion in open source, the role of DEI metrics and the strategies that we can use to foster DEI within our respective communities. Then we're going to move further to look at best practices to recruitment, retention and support and examples of some awesome open source communities that are championing initiatives to help foster diversity, equity and inclusion. So let's get into it. Intentions versus impact. When we talk about intentions, what do we mean? We simply, intentions is simply how we feel or what we mean to do, what we have in mind to do about a particular thing or how we intend to do, execute a particular thing. Whereas impact on the other hand simply means how we make others feel and the outcome of our actions. Now, we could intend to do something really, really good to make people feel great about themselves. However, the way in which we execute those intentions determines the outcome that we are going to get, whether we are going to actually make those persons feel good at the end of the day or whether or not. And within the open source space we have seen that there have been so many open source projects that intend to drive, and I've been commencing DEI projects to help drive more engagement and participation from underrepresented groups within their projects. And however, the data and outcome of these says otherwise and this often leaves the question, leave room for the question, what is it exactly that we are doing wrong? And how can we fix it? Well, in 2021, the Linus Foundation led the biggest DEI survey to help understand the state of diversity, equity and inclusion. And after that survey, we were able to get the report that told us, that says that 82% of the participants did feel welcome within their communities or within open source communities that they are participating in. However, 18% did say otherwise and that is the number that we are most concerned about. What happened to that 18%? Well, it is often said that the state of a particular community or a community can always be considered or assumed to be friendly and welcoming but all depends on who exactly it is, what's asked the question and where or how the questions were asked. And so when the questions of do you feel welcome within open source was thrown, we saw that 38% of non-binary and third gender persons did say that they did not feel welcome within their communities. Whereas 28% of people of color specific to not America did say they do not feel welcome within their communities that they're contributing to. 26% of women came out to say they do not feel welcome. 25% of people with disability 18 and then these are the number of persons that we did receive to tell us that they do not feel welcome within their communities. And so what went wrong? This survey also further went on to tell us that 30% of persons believe that the code of conduct which exists in respective communities cannot be enforced or 36% experience a kind of stereotype did say the experience some kind of stereotype while participating in their respective communities. 19% experienced some form of language barriers while collaborating and they haven't gone back to participants then. 17% feel that they have been excluded and not feel belong, feel like they belong within the open source community. And there also have been reports that women non-binary and people of LGBTQ and also people with disability experienced two times more violent threats within open source community that they're participating in. And then there's three times more violent threats to transgender people within this community. Whereas people from underrepresented groups do not generally feel welcome at all. And this survey also tells us that cases of microaggressions through insensitive jokes, racism, sexist comments and hostility are some of the things that participants indicated that they experienced while collaborating within open source communities. And these are like so many challenges that people experience on a day to day base while participating in open source community. And some of the challenges that actually stand into hinder the DEI efforts that most communities are currently making include our conscious and unconscious biases where sometimes people are intentional about trying not to make people on others get involved or putting on barriers and putting on walls that make others not come in. Whereas our unconscious bias comes in the sense that we are not aware of it, but based on our past experiences based on assumptions that we've made we automatically develop this stereotype for specific people and then we host out towards them or put out microaggressions towards these other people. Another thing that hinders this DEI is a lack of representation amongst our leadership where we can see that a lot of times our teams are always filled up with homogeneous leaders. And so it is really, really difficult to get or even see things from a more inclusive view since every other person in the leadership or on the board is of a homogeneous group. And then the lack of multi-cultural interaction where some communities have a particular culture of not welcoming a long standing culture of not welcoming other persons and being hosted to underrepresented groups which often leads to burnouts for most persons that intend to push forward with their participation or even we experience people silence quitting in situations like this because they don't know how to come up to say, okay, this is the reason why I'm dropping out. Their situations or circumstances where this also affects onboarding experiences for some people at the end of the day and all of these tend to hinder people's participation. Now, another common challenge is the lack of sufficient technical skills and knowledge to individuals where some persons do have intentions of contributing. However, they feel like they are not skilled enough to participate and knowledgeable in certain areas and so their contributions may not be welcomed. Now, I know I experienced this the early days of my contributing where I felt like I may not be able to make as much impact as I wanted to because I do not have the technical skills that most of this open source project are expected to have or are developed on and that made me feel like I do not belong within these communities. And this also plays a huge role in so many other persons that at the end of the day intend to contribute or participate. Another huge challenge that communities seem to experience in terms of spreading or championing diversity and inclusion is the insufficient resources. Now, most open source projects in terms of diversity and inclusion they require a lot of resources including time, including money and also individuals to invest so much effort into these topics of diversity and inclusion but most open source projects are unable to actually provide all of this and at the end of the day you'll see a small project that's trying to get things in other but do not have the financial support to actually give all resources to get more underrepresented groups to benefit from this equal rights. And this often makes most organizations hesitant towards investing in diversity and inclusion because it does require a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of manpower. And then another challenge that most persons and communities experience is the ignorance to data. And we're often quick to say if we made efforts to have 1,000 persons participate in our program or our outreach programs and we got 500 people then we've made enough efforts. Next year we're going to try again and at the end of the day out of that 500 persons that we have got from this effort or our initiatives maybe just five or two at the end of the day are retained to actually collaborate and participate actively at the end of the day and we do not bother to go back to review this data to make efforts or make improvements towards it. And well, how do we improve this or how do we actually target some of these challenges? That is where we have metrics come into the picture. Now metrics are a way that we can use to track and also measure the progress of our DEI efforts and the CARES community has developed a bunch of metrics specific to diversity, equity and inclusion that can be used as an indicator to look at the state of diversity, equity and inclusion, inclusion efforts within these individual projects. This metrics can also help organizations to assess their DEI outcomes as well as progress. And by looking at this metrics you can possibly ask yourself as an individual or as a project lead questions like does my community or my project encourage healthy communication and collaboration? Do we have a valid code of conduct that is also impossible? Is my community inclusive? And if not, what is the problem or what is it that I'm doing wrong? Events associated to my project actively inclusive to even individuals from underrepresented groups. Do, does our project also do a great job in terms of being accessible to people or individuals with some form of disability or the other? And finally, how inclusive are our leadership practices within these communities? Now these are some of the questions that are metrics lead you asking yourself after going through them. And some of these metrics currently span across four different areas where we have the events diversity for communities and conferences that have actually gone through our DEI badging initiative for events. You'll see that some of these do come in handy for reviewing your project and helping you understand the state of your diversity, equity and inclusion at your events. We have some metrics like the code of conduct for these events diversity as a ticket which so many persons seem to be benefiting from today. The family friendliness and event accessibility and demographics inclusive experience at events for both speakers as well as attendees, time inclusion for virtual events and then public health and safety for participants within these events and then the events location inclusivity. Another focus area which our DEI metrics cover is the governance where we have the board and council diversity and code of conduct for all open source projects. Then we have another focus area specific to leadership that highlights inclusive leadership, talks about mentorship and sponsorship to projects upcoming open source projects. Then we have the project and the community metrics that highlights areas like the chat platform inclusivity, documentation accessibility, discoverability and usability and also issue labor inclusivity. Another metrics, other metrics under this project and community includes the project burnout, project demographics and also project psychological safety for members as well as maintainers to this individual projects. Now you can see that our metrics currently is tailored towards highlighting the primary areas within open source projects from the community area down to the leadership, down to how events and programs within open source have been carried out. Now all of these metrics are focused towards helping us achieve one goal which is benchmarking can be used to benchmark against industry standards. So using this metrics as an individual community or as a project, you can use it to compare how much efforts you are making in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion for your project and how effective this effort practices that you're putting out is. This metrics can also help you to identify disparities within your community's areas that you didn't even know were lacking in terms of diversity and inclusion but the community can attest to this. And so this metrics also helps draw your attention towards these areas that these disparities exist in. This metric can also help you to measure the impact of your DEI efforts and how effective it is. And then this metrics also help you to set goals and objectives for future purpose. Now over the years, since we started reviewing the communities and conferences for DEI badges, I have noticed that communities that initially and conferences that initially applied for some of our DEI badges and didn't get the gold badge, come back the year after with more improved effort towards their DEI badges with an aim to actually earn that gold badge. Now it is not just about getting the gold badge to them anymore. It is about identifying areas where they are lacking and making contributions or making efforts towards improving on those areas. We've seen communities adopt things like the family friendliness, their code of conduct and making out, make sure that this code of conduct are enforced at their respective events. We've seen communities and conferences support more inclusive practices, take on security measures to help other persons within their communities and conferences, within a specific conference feel safe as they're coming or attending within those participations. So this metrics do more than just give you a benchmark. They help you set goals towards your expectations for your individual conferences as well as communities. And I really look forward to seeing the initiatives under the all in specific to project margin and how other projects or individual open source projects can work towards also measuring the efforts of the diversity and inclusion, not just conferences, which we are currently focusing on. Now by collecting some of these metrics, you get a better picture of where your community is, especially in a larger community where you can't possibly know everyone within the community or see the efforts and actions of every single one within the community. But we want to be certain how effective these metrics are. And that is why we decided to lead the chaos interview campaign for underrepresented groups. And like I said, this was brought on based on us asking ourselves individual questions as a group. And we're able to start planning for this particular project. Sometime August last year, 2022. And then we might be wondering, why did we do this? Well, the reason is underrepresented groups have always been the most potential, the most individuals to benefit from DEI metrics within the open source community. And so what we at chaos are trying to do is to connect with these different underrepresented groups and try to understand the efficiency of our chaos metrics by meeting with these persons one-on-one, asking them their experiences and trying to get feedback based on their individual experiences from respective open source communities. Now, like I said, we began planning this project sometime August, 2022. And then we launched the survey itself in October, 2022. And since then we've had over 150 participants for this project. And during this project, we're able to carry out qualitative, which is a service and currently leading the quantitative interviews. We are trying to accumulate the data. And with this quantitative interviews, we are trying to interview individuals from open source contributors down to maintainers, down to leaders and stakeholders from different group underrepresented groups. So we try as much as possible during this process to not put the labels for people, rather want to hear which underrepresented group is that they identify under and to hear from them, the experiences specific to their underrepresented groups and how they have been holding up within the open source communities. And so we were able to ask questions like, how have your unique attributes or traits affected your participation within the open source space? If these are DEI metrics in any way aligned with their past or present experiences, whether or not our metrics have come in handy or helpful within the participation in the open source space and at what point this was, we are also trying to see if there's a way that these metrics can be improved on or implemented to better support their participation based on the underrepresented groups which they categorize themselves with. And so we have also been able to, so far with the results of the research which is still in progress, we have been able to get really great results and feedback telling us that in so many open source projects, there is an issue with enforcement in terms of code of conduct as some projects up to date are lacking the code of conduct for their particular open source projects. We've also been able to identify some areas that in terms of enforcement, some open source projects do not even have specific standards that they want to follow to help spread topics of diversity and inclusion or to actually align diversity, equity and inclusion goals with. And to date, so many individuals even have comfort to say that they're scared to own up or express themselves within open source communities based on their distinctive feature because they're worried about the outcomes of owning up to who they are or how they identify within communities. And the team behind this particular reason is that the research are awesome individuals from the Kales community like the Girl Gleek, Amstrad Fandom, Sean Goggins, and Matt German Press and myself, of course, where all the awesome persons that have been working to see that we bring this survey to an end and by the conclusion of this, we're definitely going to put out a report to get everyone updated on what we're able to discover during the research in total. We might also put this in terms of white papers and also research papers. So if you're curious about this particular research, you can also hit me up about it. But what we hope to achieve or outcome with this research is simply to hope, we hope to understand how DEI is being practices in this respective open source project based on or from the experiences or from the angle of individuals that are underrepresented. We hope to understand, based on this participants feedback, how we can capture more DEI metrics that are yet to be addressed by the Kales community and within our DEI metrics already. We also hope to adopt and identify potential metrics that have not been discovered or outlined among a list of metrics yet. And we hope that with this research, we can improve on our existing metrics and our approach towards diversity and equity and inclusion and push more on this champion more on how more open source communities can adopt the Kales DEI metrics to help improve on their DEI practices as well. And there's so many strategies that I think or we think that open source projects can work in terms of improving and fostering diversity, equity and inclusion practices within their communities. And then some of these include first practicing allyship. Now I put this at the top because it is really difficult to put yourself in someone's shoes until you decide to, it's difficult to understand how someone else is reacting to certain things until you put yourself in their shoes. That is why being an ally is first step towards actually identifying or tackling some of the challenges that we have highlighted during this section around diversity, equity and inclusion. And we can do this by showing up through actions for individual members within our open source community not just saying the word, I am an ally, putting in the efforts, doing the work. And this means standing up for people within your community when they are being talked down on, which means bringing equal opportunities, opportunities that you think these individuals will benefit from, bringing it to them, mentioning these people in situations that you feel they deserve to take on positions. This is what makes you an ally. And by being an ally, you're definitely going to see other areas where you can encourage leadership representation within projects because we still have to tackle with some of the projects of homogeneous leadership teams. And until we address that particular angle, it might be hard for us to completely educate people within communities about diversity and inclusion or equity if our teams, our leadership teams are still very homogeneous in nature. And then by being allies, we're definitely going to see other ways we can improve diversity, equity and inclusion through accessibility audits for our projects, for documentation, as well as resources. We also move forward to look at how being an ally is also going to make you or bring to light ways that you can create and enforce more code of conduct to support individuals within your communities that identify under specific underrepresented groups because it's one thing to have a code of conduct existing and then it's another thing to actually make that code of conduct effective in such a way that so many individuals benefit from it at the end of the day. And I noticed that there's a common real current, there's a real current statement from most of our participants during this survey from the chaos interview campaign where people say that, yes, the project that I'm contributing to does have a code of conduct. However, I never came across it until I decided to do critical research about this code of conduct. And if a code of conduct exists in a project, I feel like so many persons should be aware of it. Immediately they get involved in that community, right? However, this is the last thing that some persons resort to maybe because they experienced some form of discrimination or some form of unfair treatment before they decided, okay, let me go and look for the code of conduct and see if I am right or there's something going wrong within this particular community. And then we can practice allyship by being open to feedback as leaders, being open to feedback, accepting feedback without feeling like we're being attacked on a personal note, opening up our minds to actually hearing how people feel from the community down to the leaders and down to our co-mentainers and every single person that is within our communities. Every once in a while, try to get feedback. You can do this through surveys. You can do this through, you know, just try to understand the data. But every once in a while, as a leader within an open source community, be open to feedback. And this is one way you can also practice this allyship we're talking about. You can also do this by collaborating with other communities. Like the inclusive naming community, the chaos DEI community, all in communities. These are like different open source projects that have active open source initiatives that produce, help you check or review how your DEI practices are going on. Collaborating with them will help you leverage some of the practices that they've listed out and you can better implement it within your project. You can also practice allyship by fostering a welcoming environment, accepting, opening up to change and fostering a welcoming environment that actually accepts every individual regardless of their differences or their distinctive features. Welcoming them equally within that particular community. You can go on to provide support using resources and also the opening room for more opportunities for individuals to get involved, talking about mentorship, talking about sponsorships and so many other ways. These are ways that you can be an ally to members of underrepresented groups and actually stand your ground while being an ally. And also you can also look out for inclusive language scans that you can adopt and talking about how we accept communications. Sometimes so many persons come within communities and the huge barrier within their collaboration is someone made an insensitive joke or someone said a vulgar term towards them or someone just said something that threw them off and that was the terrible experience they had and they didn't feel the need to come back afterwards. So you can also consider adopting inclusive language scans and this will help to take out or eliminate some of the sexist and racist terms that people often make within discussions. Sometimes which are not intentional sometimes come out as a mistake but with taking note of these inclusive language scans you can easily help other persons to also not bring up this and there's so many boards that communities have implemented to help scan some of these vulgar terms that make other persons feel uncomfortable. If you have a chat platform that you think you can implement some of these boards to scan the languages you can also do stuffs like that and even in your project repositories you can implement some of the GitHub actions that can help to scan some of the languages that are not friendly to help other persons participate. And finally you can be an ally by letting the data inform your decision. So now go back to your community and look from the top of the funnel down to the community level. How inclusive is a top because it's from the leaders that tend to understand how much effort in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion is being made because it doesn't matter how inclusive the community is. If the leaderboard is still on inclusive the community will feel discouraged at the end of the day. I have seen so many persons come up to say that they wanted to participate in a particular community but they decided to check out the team the core team of that particular community and at the end of the day they realized that it's a homogeneous team of white male leaders and so they feel like even if they made effort to contribute their contributions might not be as valued as it would be in an all inclusive team. And so let your data inform your decisions in terms of leadership, in terms of onboarding, in terms of encouraging collaboration, in terms of outreach, try to use your data as a community to make effort towards improving some of these existing challenges as well. And best practices that we can take towards recruitment, retention and support for underrepresented groups are first we can try as a community to carry out outreach programs, outreach programs that help underrepresented groups to participate, outreach programs that bring to light areas within a community that underrepresented groups can also get involved within communities. And so provide opportunities for them to get involved within your open source project and also carry out workshops and mentorship programs that get more persons to also see reasons why they should participate within the open source space. You can also develop inclusive onboarding culture. Now I knew that the early years of my participating in open source, one of the challenges that I experienced for most communities was the onboarding process. Now I've seen so many other persons come forward to say that this was a hindrance for them as well because the onboarding process was not as welcoming as it thought it was. And so as a community leader, if you're trying to support to retain some of your contributors, particularly those for underrepresented groups, then you should work on improving the onboarding culture within that particular community or within that particular group. You should also work on providing more mentorship and training for these individuals and participants and let them know about the nature of your community in terms of diversity and inclusion, areas that your community is working towards improving and areas that needs more hands on deck. You can also provide a mentorship and training towards that as well, offer flexible times and schedules. Now so many persons have said that the reason why they were not able to speak at the conference is because the timing was not convenient for them. Now I understand that the time difference is something that we cannot avoid. However, there are ways that we can work towards developing flexible time schedules for respective contributors within open source communities. And this means if we're hosting workshops or you're doing boot camps and you know that, okay, persons from this particular area might not be able to participate due to the time difference, then that is something to consider as a leader to make sure that it is worked towards so that maybe there's a time shift for persons from this particular time zone or something that covers people from this particular time zone so that everyone in the community feels that they are welcome at the end of the day. We can also work to us providing equal opportunity for leadership. Now over the years, there have been so many reports that come back to give us feedback that give us feedback that a lot of times women and other genders within the communities are not always given the rights that they deserve in terms of leadership and in terms of participation. And we have even the feedback from the Linus 2021 DER reports also states that 82% of the participants or respondents were actually male and 18% of the respondents identified as women and non-binary or third gender members. And so this lets us know that not only is the participation from other genders and other underrepresented groups low compared to the rest, it lets us know that we have to do more in terms of bringing these persons on board in our leadership roles and also finding ways that we can get them involved. Then we should also recognize and collaborate with diverse and recognize and celebrate diverse contributions. Now, Gus from Open Collective, Gus Austin has also been leading some projects to help recognize and also appreciate contributors in open source for their contributions through giving incentives and even paying these people. I thought that was an excellent project because so many times people make contributions within the open source communities for years and for centuries without getting any form of recognitions for those efforts that they have been making over time. But then we see people, other persons just come in the first year and the second year and they're already getting high recognitions for their contributions. And it makes me wonder or ask the question what happened to the existing individuals that have been in the picture before this other person came on or before this other person came into the picture. So we should also consider recognizing and celebrating the diverse contributions from our communities in every way or in any ways that we can. We can also move as further as promoting awareness for mental health and wellness within our communities. Yes, our maintainers get burnt out, our leaders get burnt out. And so many times if not watched or if not monitored, it leads to silent quitting and you see people living in your community at the end of the day and you're asking questions like what did I do wrong or did I not treat you well enough or did you see a better offer? Sometimes they see a better offer where their mental health and wellness is actually taken as a priority compared to your community. So that is something as an individual open source community or contributor, you should also work towards improving on. And then some of the awesome open source projects that I have participated in that have been doing awesome projects. I want to give accolades to these communities because not only have they made efforts towards leading DEI initiatives, but they're looking for ways to champion it and effectively enforce it to other open source communities. I'm talking about the all in projects and I watched a few videos from Dimitri explaining how this project and the scope of this project and also went over it. And I really love how it is going or the direction which the all in project is aimed towards the inclusive naming because so many times our words do more harm than our actions. You might be surprised at how much your words, a little word or statement you utter towards someone how much damage it can make over time without even realizing it. And the inclusive naming community is another awesome one that is taking up this initiative to make sure that within our open source community is the language which we use in communicating how we're able to like communicate with people, the language and naming and basically how we write our documentations, how we approach communications in our chat platforms and so many other things are taking into action and are implemented on to make it more inclusive. And we have these software development, diversity and inclusion initiatives which is also leading other actions towards diversity, equity and inclusion. That is also another project that I really love its goal and I love the direction which this project is taking towards. And I want to also recognize the chaos community for all of the efforts that they are doing in terms of metrics, in terms of also leading more programs around other aspects or other areas to help drive more diversity, equity and inclusion within the open source space at large. And that being said, I would like to wrap up by saying that so far we have seen so much progress and so much efforts was helping to advocate and champion diversity, equity and inclusion. But in order to actually have a fast pace and a widespread of this topic and this discussion around diversity and inclusion, we have to do more than just speaking about it or having our documentation write or highlight these things. We also have to acknowledge that some of our projects are far behind in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion. We have to acknowledge that addressing the elephant in the room from the top to the bottom might just be the best way to actually tackle some of these DEI challenges. We have to also embed inclusion alongside during the project initiation phase and not as an aftermath. Because most times we get to the final stage of a project before we realize that oh, we made a mistakes in terms of getting inclusive members on board or getting inclusive leaders. And that becomes a challenge because already the project is at a large scale and it's had to tackle some of these challenges. We also have to leverage metrics and use our data all the time, every time to inform our decision and make changes towards that using this our data. And finally, we need more hands on deck. We need more hands involved to actually move the topic of diversity, equity and inclusion within our respective communities from just intentions, from just intents or meaning to do it, to actually making impact in real time. Thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for listening. If you also want to participate as an interview, as an interviewer or want to share more light for our DEI interview campaign for the represented groups, you can always reach out and I'll be happy to share more light on that. You can also join us in the Chaos DEI working group if that is a project that you'd want to get involved in or want to know more on. You can also stay tuned because I'll be coming back here to give you updates on the final reports that we're able to get at the end of this research. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for listening.