 Hi everyone, I'm Lisa. Welcome to the Open Source Summit EU version and welcome from wherever in the world that you're joining us. I have an awesome group of people that we have assembled today. We are a very international group. We're all currently based in the United States, but we have been born in or lived in all over the world, particularly Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. So we are bringing a very diverse train of thought to you and not just a Northern American perspective. So when we are making talking about diversity, equity and inclusion, we do have a global perspective that we're bringing even though there are nuances obviously in different parts of the world. So rather than introducing everybody because we only have a short amount of time, I encourage you to go back to the agenda from the conference and look everybody up and look at people's bios and you can also see how to contact us, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter. We are happy to keep the conversation going with you after the facts because we have a lot of information to give you. And I also won't take a lot of time defining diversity, inclusion and a little bit more time defining equity since that's what we're talking about here today, but just from a very high level, just so we all are on the same page. Diversity is about representation of from different ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders, disabilities. It's about the differences in the in the people and whatever underrepresented minority is being systematically oppressed in the region that you happen to live in that underrepresented minority is what you want to focus on. And that's what we're talking about diversity. And then when we talk about inclusion, we're talking about focusing on the experience of the employee, the feeling of being valued. So that includes mentoring support, obvious career paths and advancements and we're what does the executive team look like what does the management team look like all of these things will make someone feel a feeling of inclusion. So diversity is sort of being asked to the party inclusion is being asked to dance. You know it's it's that's kind of the nuance but equity is really what we're going to focus on today, because equity really begins by acknowledging that there's an ending point and actually making commitments to address and correct this imbalance. And that's what we're going to focus on and we're going to focus on tangible ways to do that. And I will say that the four other people standing beside me right now are some of my favorite people in the world and also absolute experts on this topic from very diverse backgrounds themselves and approach this topic in different ways. So I want you to connect with everybody. Follow everyone and keep up, keep, keep track of the really good work that everybody on this call is doing. So there's your definition. So to start, why don't we back up a little bit and let's begin with the end in mind. So if you're talking to a VP or a C level person in leadership at a large tech company is generally where most of us are coming from but not necessarily. So what would you want them to know about DE and I and how would you address, how would you address the executive team so Lauren I'll start with you for this question. Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's especially timely given what occurred in the United States but first but all over the world this past June, where we saw a lot of civil unrest that was due not just to the killing of George Floyd in but also to the broader systemic issue of police brutality in the United States, combined with the fact that underrepresented minorities were dying of COVID-19 and disproportionately large numbers. So as a result of all of that, we reached as a culture and inflection point that companies could no longer ignore and so we saw a lot of them put out statements regarding commitments to anti racism and efforts to increase diversity and inclusion in their companies. So as many pointed out, those words have been said for several years at this point in the tech industry, and we haven't really seen those numbers move much. And so if I were speaking to someone in a C level role at an organization or a on an open source project, I would say, if you are thinking about hiring a chief DNI officer, or a VP to manage DEI at your organization, they should not be reporting to HR they should be reporting directly to the CEO or to the project lead. And subsequently, they need money and budget to implement any initiatives that they would oversee. And one of those initiatives that I think is really important is not just allowing groups within your open source project or your company to organize and to host initiatives and to different people in underrepresented groups like an LGBTQ plus group or a group for veterans, but to compensate the leaders of those groups for their work because it is work it's often work that is done in an employee spare time while benefiting from the organization and so you sometimes see people in high level roles, championing the company and their efforts when those efforts are driven by more junior employees who often don't get rewarded either financially or in their performance reviews for those efforts so I think, again, reporting to the highest level person when it comes to DEI is important, along with compensating people for their efforts and that's that's true in open source as well I thought about this and was tempted to say, well you could send sweat more swag to leaders of affinity groups on your project if you decide to have those but if you have money for swag, you have money for compensation or little bonuses as well so it's something to think about. First of all, you've also done a lot of thinking and talking on this topic, do you have thoughts you can share with us. You know, in line with kind of what Lauren was saying. Well, first off, I would say, you know, anytime I see companies or, you know, an open source, you know, groups starting to focus on that. It's great because it's at least an acknowledgement that there is an issue here like the numbers reflect a systemic under representation whether it's gender or immigrants or other individuals who are marginalized. So, great first step, but as Laura mentioned, and I know I experienced it firsthand with, you know, being in different companies at different sizes where, you know, the first thing they try to do is lean on the individuals who represent who that who that group they want to have represented. And what happens is, these individuals start to carry the brunt and as we've seen this year it was really challenging, you know, where you're doing all the work. You know, as as Laura mentioned, compensation could be one thing. But I would honestly say that I would actually encourage companies to really look outside your organization. If you're not a small startup, you know where you're maybe resource strapped, I can understand that open source groups can be challenging but you can reach out and look for consultancies other organizations that have built best practices they really kind of have these programs kind of honed in and help to develop that so that you're not taxing your employees. It's enough to be just challenged to do your role and to succeed, especially if you're an immigrant or an individual who you really feel marginalized you're just trying to adapt and fit in. That's just an, you know, a very difficult ask to just throw that on them and make them do the work. But but outside of that you know I would learn like compensation all these other things are great. And I would just say, you know, build a program that shows that you really are invested in making change. Yeah, no I agree and so the top down approach is so important but what happens when the top down approach has messaging that is, we could say exclusionary language or a political language for an exclusionary agenda but it's just it's disguised a little bit. You know what what would you do then and I'm going to throw this question to Dimitri. That's an excellent question. So one of the things I think about when we insist on an apolitical posture, especially towards issues related to DNI is, when we do that we're perpetuating what's called symbolic violence so there's a sociologist by the name of pure but you, he coined this phrase I talked about it as a gentle violence that's imperceptible to even the victims themselves through symbolic channels and other forms of channel. So this form of violence causes power imbalances to be not naturalized or even normalize to see this language in the behavior in the workplace. For example, people say well we don't want to play the race card, or we are trying not to see color, or you know I have friends that are like us and so forth. Agendas tend to manipulate and exclude minorities particularly are other people within you know that might be marginalized and tend to erase them and lead them to covering behaviors. Okay, so why is this important. Well it's important because it doesn't allow people to bring the authentic selves to work. It doesn't allow them to shine through to feel supported to feel celebrated. These types of languages apolitical language, political correctness will prevent us from having real engaged authentic relationships at work. It prevents us from having simple ways to address more subtle forms of discrimination so I feel like when you have this type of situation or scenarios happening in the workplace. So what you want to do is you actually want to allow them to bubble to the top you want to pause and ask yourself why these situations are happening. You want to take a deep breath and you want to look outward and see how these issues align with the collective goals and interact with people within the context of the issue and ask yourself questions about what's missing and how do we bridge the gap and how do we build support around allies around people that have experienced these sorts of issues. Yeah, and just well you've built a whole business on helping companies solve this problem. What can you add to that. It's really interesting what we're seeing with company CEOs sharing that. Hey, we're going to be apolitical and now people are talking about diversity and inclusion at a national stage, you know and you have world leaders taking a stance of hey do we should we do diversity inclusion or not. And it's really fascinating to see this reach this point and I couldn't agree more with the manji I think that when we say hey we don't want to bring topics of culture topics of inclusion to our space whatever space that is. We are saying that we're okay with the inequalities that we face as a business community, in this case as an open source community. That means that we're okay with our leaders being mostly male we're okay with our leaders being mostly white, and we're not going to do something to change that. And I think that is that simple reality is very striking, because it actually goes against the trends. When we look at young people today, when we look at Gen Z, and millennials, their generation that disproportionately cares about social social impact and about the and I. So when you're making these statements you're actually excluding a lot of great young people from your company, because the value set is very, very different. And that's one thing. Another thing is that the roles of companies and the influence of companies are growing by the day the role of boards in Europe and globally is is is really consolidated a lot of influence and power. So to say that we're going to actually just focus on business, even though we're having a bigger influence in everyday communities is is a bit counterintuitive. If businesses are going to come in and play a bigger role in our society, then they should actually at the same time play a bigger role in some of these conversations around health inclusion and safety. Okay, and I want Lauren to speak to this a little bit too but I'm going to throw something else in into the question. Should companies embrace moral cultural and economic justifications for having D&I programs. Is that a responsibility of a corporation. So when we talk about the responsibility of corporations and the concept of being a political CEOs sometimes try to frame it in terms of not wanting to get distracted, especially if they're an up and coming startup that doesn't have a lot of time or resources to grow, but the challenge there is that nobody is asking you to put your startup to the side and do nonprofit work full time. There are experts that do that full time. What people are asking is that you as the leader of your organization or your open source project acknowledge that not everybody approaches your organization or your project on equal footing. I just wrote a draft of a chapter to go in the new open source leaders manual coming out in a few months on how open source projects can increase diversity and inclusion and one of the key themes I found in my user research and interviews was that there's very little acknowledgement still that underrepresented minorities experience much higher levels of abuse online than a typical person in tech which is a heterosexual cisgender white male. So when if you're a woman, a black American, if you're a member of the LGBTQ community you are, you are statistically much more likely to have a negative experience engaging online. If you have that experience you are automatically not coming to an open source project on the same wavelength as someone who is less likely to hear that type of abuse. When companies say that they're apolitical, that is taking a political stance because you are saying that you are not acknowledging the bare fact that there is an equal footing which is equity as you said so far. So it's not about straying from your mission, it really should be about integrating DEI practices into everything you do. I mentioned having a VP of DNI or a Chief Diversity Officer, I'm actually of the opinion I would prefer not to see those roles and instead I would like to see the C-suite board come up with a plan to integrate DEI throughout the organization in a much more fluid way. Because at the end of the day you don't need to be thumping your chest talking about it all the time and I think a lot of people are sick of the talk, they would really like to see companies do something and do more. Yeah, I really like that notion. It's not the responsibility of one role and then they try to do their job. It's really kind of everybody's responsibility as part of, you know, this is what builds communities and being human beings. So Dimeji, I know you've done a lot of research in this area as well. So, you know, can you kind of speak to that? Yeah, so Lauren raises an excellent point about being careful that, you know, companies and open source groups being careful that they do not sit within political grey areas. We feel like we can't be apolitical about D&I programs within our organizations because for one, justifications and when you think about providing economic justifications, they're a little tricky, you know, because not all D&I efforts or D&I efforts are easily economically justifiable with hard metrics. So one thing we need to understand is that from the research work that I've done is that diverse systems are resilient systems. And we have to understand that there's a sense of collectivism with which we approach even diversity that's important for us to realize that we're all in this together, you know, without overusing that often overused word term. As the more the difference is included, the more people feel like they belong, the more easily translatable this is to cultural growth and the cultural vision and objectives and they also lead with overall improvements for the company or group. So I think a lot of the research in the comments show that there's a concept called negative externality where even you might feel the benefits of using some sort of a resource, but then people downstream feel the effects of it. So we all have to serve as allies, we all have to serve as advocates, and we have to move in the direction of making sure that we're not apolitical about the work that we do. Yeah, and just while you you're, what are you seeing that's working really well I mean what are you advising the companies to do and what best practices are you putting in in this area. Yes, absolutely. I always like to start with transparency. When you look at diversity and inclusion efforts in in Europe in the United States. You have to do diversity and inclusion conference, and you'll be shocked by how many PR people are there. People are scared to say the wrong thing and present their company the wrong way. And unfortunately I hate to say it, a lot of business executives look at the AI from, you know, a branding perspective, and that is counter intuitive. What I mean is to be transparent, and to share your metrics and how you're performing when it comes to hiring, when it comes to retention when it comes to engagement, and see if there's some, this, you know, some data that is that is striking and saying hey, you know, we could do better in, you know, recruiting and engaging women or recruiting and engaging. So I always start with people of color or underrepresented minorities and in this particular area or region that you represent. So I always start with the data. And once you start with the data and you start with transparency and you forget the marketing. That's where you get the ideas. And there's going to be lots of different ideas. And for those ideas, guess what, bring people from different parts of your organization together to come up with those ideas. Don't confine yourself to the C-suite. Don't confine yourself to, you know, a certain group in your company. Bring an intern to the room, bring managers, bring entry level talent, bring people at different levels to provide feedback. And there you're going to get ideas that are really going to move the needle and measure them across time. One, we do want to acknowledge, you know, there's, there's a lot of companies that have had their risks slapped lately or they've they've put, you know, kind of the wrong thing out there in a blog and and it's caused some anxiety among the employees. There's also a lot of companies that have put out amazing blogs but then have not really have been held accountable and they have not, you know, come through with following through with what they promised. But there are a lot of companies that are doing it really, really well. And I've seen, you know, as a CNCF ambassador I talked to a lot of different corporations and I talked to a lot of different employees and so, you know, I do want to say there is there's a lot of wonderful work happening out there. At the time that we're recording this, I am one week into my job at Cockroach Labs, but I have to say on day one, the CEO had an all hands and was going through the metrics from recent board meeting which was really holding the company accountable for diversity and hiring and this is a metric that is being tracked at the highest level. But then also in saying, you know, we'll top down we're going to force everybody to all of a sudden get involved in all of these different movements that are happening. They took the approach of giving the employees time. There's a there's a day that they get people called like a contribute day connecting contribute, and that way the individual employee gets to choose how you know what they think is important and they get to make a choice and they want to spend that time and it's really the company giving them the time. So whether that's you know, helping register people to vote or if it's marching in a movement or if it's you know volunteering at a certain place. That's definitely putting the power into the individual and then all of a sudden instead of having one person at the top who's doing something you have 200 employees who are doing something and it's thought that that's a lot more powerful. So I encourage corporations out there to adopt that model I've seen that work really well and resonate really well with employees as well. So Joseph, you're out there, one of the activists who puts a lot of, you know, feet on the street have a people who, you know, who can you speak to that or that you think really work. Well, I think there's like, you know, definitely best practice and sometimes I think it's like tangible things that you can like point to. I saw this morning like a really great tweet from like the ever amazing Chris Nova, who we all know in the open source community and she's done so much. And she tweeted something out very interesting where she talked saying like what I'm working at discord and mainly what it was is that at discord they decided to reimburse employees up to $10,000 for any procedure related to not covered by the medical insurance. And to see the response and how that could be so impactful for someone who, you know, is, you know, it's looking for support from their, you know, from whatever they work is pretty amazing. I thought that was, you know, very genuine, as well as there was some call outs of companies where she had previously worked at that, you know, definitely was something where, you know, you see not being done. So for me, I look at like, what are they, what are they really doing? The other kind of KPI I definitely look at is, what does your leadership look like? Is it really reflecting all these things we talked about earlier where, you know, where it should start at? Well, to me, it should be in your DNA as an organization, it should be in your values. You shouldn't have to create this office. So I look at those metrics, those really speak loudly, you know, coming from like an immigrant background. A lot of us have our various backgrounds. I know we all kind of keep an eye to see like, does this really company really promote and reflect what, you know, individuals who are marginalized or individuals in my country that may be underrepresented but trying to just get a foothold in this type of industry. Yeah, and we're going to put links to all these will put a link to Chris's tweet. She's one of my favorite allies and advocates will put a link to some of the research and the definitions and the different things we've referenced. So if you're not watching this live and you don't have access to the chat, and you're watching it on YouTube, then look below and we've got links to to everything that we're talking about on the YouTube channel for the recording. So since we only have like a minute or two left, who wants to give somebody a homework assignment. You know, we'll put it in the chat but go ahead and throw something out there where can people learn more and get more information and do do more and do better. I can begin you know I can say that. This is really, really difficult work. It's a long term journey. We're not going to solve these inequalities in in our lifetime because they're so, they're so stark. And we're so commit you know the business community always wants to take action and do the right thing and do this thing and you know let's build this training program or let's launch this initiative that is going to reimburse this cost and let's you know recruit, you know, 3x recruit this group. So guess what, you'll do that thing and you'll need to do some more. So my number one recommendation is to listen, take time, listen and do it your own way. My way you know I love movies. There's tons of movies around the experience of underrepresented people and whether that's LGBTQ, then the, you know, women, people of color. I'm going to share my movie list, exclusive to this group. Okay. Go ahead Lauren. Yeah, I would say you never fully arrive at being an ally or finishing DEI work and that's a good thing because and it doesn't mean that you have to be perfect to start the work. No one is perfect we all have biases and that's why you need diversity and equity and inclusion so what I would advise people to do is to look at inclusive communities and open source particularly the Kubernetes community and the Mozilla community because they have very active ongoing projects related to inclusion. I would also say prioritize your documentation because that's a huge barrier to participation in open source and easy to read documentation is underrated. Yes, spoken true great words from a writer Lauren's writer herself please look up the work that she's done. That is all the time we have I want to thank everybody and I guess I look us up. We'll keep the conversation going. We're active in the chat and do your homework assignments. Alright everybody thank you thank you to my panelists you are all the best the most beautiful and you're fantastic allies and advocates and activists so keep up the good work everyone thank you so much.