This document discusses diversity and inclusion in open source communities. It begins by looking at metrics for measuring diversity, mentioning dimensions like gender, age, location and tenure. It then discusses challenges in identifying subpopulations and collaborations within a population. The document also discusses how diversity alone is not enough, and that inclusion, attraction and retention of diverse groups over time are also important. It provides examples of codes of conduct and how they are used in open source projects to improve inclusion.

1. Nicolaas Pietersz. Berchem (1620 - 1683). Harvest, KMSKB, Brussel
Diversity and
Inclusion in Open
Source Communities

2. — Robbert Jongeling

3. MS Windows post-
release fault
prediction
Precision:
predicted & correct /
predicted
Recall:
predicted & correct /
correct
Code churn
79% 80%
Code complexity
79% 66%
Code coverage 84% 55%
Code dependencies 74% 70%
Organizational
structure
86% 84%
Socio-technical
network
77% 71%
Nagappan, N., Ball, T.: Evidence-based failure prediction.
In: Oram, A., Wilson, G. (eds.) Making Software: What Really Works and Why We Believe it? O’Reilly 2011

4. Fabio Palomba, Damian Andrew Tamburri, Alexander Serebrenik, Andy Zaidman, Francesca Arcelli Fontana, Rocco Oliveto,
How Do Community Smells Influence Code Smells? ICSE (Companion Volume) 2018: 240-241
“Community smells”, problems
in team communication
“Code smells”, problems in
source code

5. Bastiaan Heemskerck, Men and women, some carrying baskets, ca. 1700, KMSKB, Brussel

6. I know a lot of female
programmers […] But I don’t recall
ever having one of my questions
answered by, nor have I ever
answered a question by a female
programmer here at StackOverflow.
Why aren’t there more of them
participating, both
with questions and answers?
there is NO appeal for me in
answering questions.[…]
it doesn’t entertain me and I
don’t find much fulfilment in it

7. Pieter De Bruyne, Man-Vrouw (1974), Design museum, Gent
Gender?

9. Andrea

11. https://github.com/
tue-mdse/
genderComputer

12. Update: Multiple Tools
Josh Terrell
et al.
gender
Computer
Bin Lin, Alexander Serebrenik: Recognizing gender of stack overflow users. MSR 2016: 425-429
Adding GitHub helps
Different data sets require different techniques

13. Update: NamSor

14. Update: NamSor

15. 0
25
50
75
100
Open Source StackOverflow Drupal Commercial
4
37,5
72
86
55,5
95
28
10
75
Women Men Unknown
Bogdan Vasilescu, Andrea Capiluppi, Alexander Serebrenik:
Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study. Interacting with Computers 26(5): 488-511 (2014)
FLOSS 2003 sample 4144 multiple mailing
lists
NSF survey
“math + CS”

16. Drupal / Wordpress StackOverflow
Duration of
engagement
Comparable
Men engage for
longer
Questions
(relative to
duration of
engagement)
Comparable
Women ask more
questions
Answers
(relative to
duration of
engagement)
Comparable Comparable
Bogdan Vasilescu, Andrea Capiluppi, Alexander Serebrenik:
Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study. Interacting with Computers 26(5): 488-511 (2014)

17. Women are less effective than men in
competitive environments.
Perform similarly in non-competitive
environments.
Loss of effectiveness stronger when
women compete against men than in
single-sex competitive environments.
Women shy away from competition and
men embrace it
Uri Gneezy, Muriel Niederle, and Aldo Rustichini. Performance in competitive environments: Gender differences.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(3):1049–1074, 2003.
Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund. Do women shy away from competition? do men compete too much?
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3):1067–1101, 2007.

20. Jeff Atwood
“putting the information
that works for me, right
personally, like things
I’m interested in but also
at the level when it is
helping other people and
they can contribute”

21. I-DESIGN

22. I-DESIGN
Shrink It and Pink It!

25. I-DESIGN
Participatory
techniques

26. Nicolaas Pietersz. Berchem (1620 - 1683). Harvest, KMSKB, Brussel

27. Nicolaas Pietersz. Berchem (1620 - 1683). Harvest, KMSKB, Brussel
Does diversity help?

28. People prefer working with others
similar to them in terms of values,
beliefs, and attitudes [Byrne]
People categorise themselves
into specific groups. Members of
own group are treated better
than outsiders [Tajfel]
Diversity is bad

29. Multicultural social networks
promote creativity
[Harvard Business School]
Diversity is good
Diverse problem solvers
outperform high ability problem
solvers [Hong & Page]

30. OSS:
24 / 7

34. August Rodin, Le Penseur, KMSKB, Brussel
gender and
tenure
team
diversity

35. Pieter De Bruyne, Man-Vrouw (1974), Design museum, Gent
First contribution
to the project
Analysis
point
{
Project tenure
Tenure

36. August Rodin, Le Penseur, KMSKB, Brussel
gender and
tenure
team
diversity

37. Bogdan Vasilescu, Alexander Serebrenik, Vladimir Filkov: Perceptions of Diversity on GitHub: A User Survey. CHASE 2015,
ACM, pp. 50-56

40. August Rodin, Le Penseur, KMSKB, Brussel
gender and
tenure
team
diversity

41. The Blau
index

42. Coefficient
of variation

43. Nicolaas Pietersz. Berchem (1620 - 1683). Harvest, KMSKB, Brussel
So,
does diversity help?

44. Bogdan Vasilescu, Daryl Posnett, Baishakhi Ray, Mark G. J. van den Brand, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu,
Vladimir Filkov: Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams. CHI 2015: 3789-3798

45. Bogdan Vasilescu, Daryl Posnett, Baishakhi Ray, Mark G. J. van den Brand, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu,
Vladimir Filkov: Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams. CHI 2015: 3789-3798

46. code sees no color or gender
I have used a fake GitHub handle (my
normal GitHub handle is my first name,
which is a distinctly female name) so that
people would assume I was male
interactions are usually
positive too, with occasional
sexism, but nothing more then
one encounters in the rest of life
I'm the only female developer,
as well as the youngest, which
can sometimes be frustrating.
Mostly positive. A few collaborators were difficult to collaborate
with, hard to discern the real cause. Only one or two were
gender related, but one caused me to leave a project.
Bogdan Vasilescu, Vladimir Filkov, Alexander Serebrenik:
Perceptions of Diversity on Git Hub: A User Survey. CHASE@ICSE 2015: 50-56

47. Summary: Studying Diversity
• Population consists of multiple subpopulations
• Challenges:
• Identification of subpopulations
• Identification of collaborations
• Measuring diversity (we have already talked about it)

48. Diversity Dimensions:
Subpopulations
Gender identity First language
Sexual orientation Confidence with English
Age Dis/Ability
Location/Region/Country Neurodiversity
Tenure (project/community) Caregiving (children/elderly)
Socio-economic status
Self-identification as
underrepresented
Race/Ethnicity …
https://github.com/chaoss/wg-diversity-inclusion/blob/master/di_metrics.md

49. Gender identity First language
Sexual orientation Confidence with English
Age Dis/Ability
Location/Region/Country Neurodiversity
Tenure (project/community) Caregiving (children/elderly)
Socio-economic status
Self-identification as
underrepresented
Race/Ethnicity …
https://github.com/chaoss/wg-diversity-inclusion/blob/master/di_metrics.md
Diversity Dimensions:
Subpopulations

52. W. Stevens. Teamworks builds ships. United States shipping board
emergency fleet corporation. Museum Vleeshuis. Antwerp.

53. Collaborations
Bogdan Vasilescu, Alexander Serebrenik, Mathieu Goeminne, Tom Mens: On the variation and specialisation of workload—A
case study of the GNOME ecosystem community. Empirical Software Engineering 19, 4 (2013), 955–1008.
Not only technical

54. Collaborations
Nicole Huesman, Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar, Allison Price. Gender Diversity Analysis in the OpenStack Community. Bitergia.
Work commissioned by Intel Corporation. November 2017
Not only technical Not only repositories

55. Arthurian Romances, French (ca. 1275-1300). Beinecke MS 229, Yale University Library, USA.
Diversity is not
enough!

56. https://github.com/chaoss/wg-diversity-inclusion/blob/master/di_metrics.md
Inclusion
How well do we
enable these different
people to work
together?
Attraction
How well do we
extend a hand to
newcomers?
Retention
How long do different
people stay
engaged?

57. https://github.com/chaoss/wg-diversity-inclusion/blob/master/di_metrics.md
Inclusion
How well do we
enable these different
people to work
together?
Attraction
How well do we
extend a hand to
newcomers?
Retention
How long do different
people stay
engaged?

58. Given the choice, I would never send another patch, bug
report, or suggestion to a Linux kernel mailing list again. My
personal boxes have oopsed with recent kernels, and I ignore
it. My current work on userspace graphics enabling may
require me to send an occasional quirks kernel patch, but I
know I will spend at least a day dreading the potential toxic
background radiation of interacting with the kernel
community before I send anything.
I am no longer a part of the Linux kernel community.
Sarah Sharp, http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/05/closing-a-
door/

59. To answer the obvious "so now that the bug is fixed and the account
is unblocked and Duncan is doing something different you're
coming back, right?": no, that's not why I left. I left because the
response I got to the bug was indicative of a severe problem
with how dispute resolution and handling of this type of issue
works.
I've heard a lot of suggestions from individual commentators which
seem to boil down to "in the future, email Person X or Person Y" but
what I need is the confidence that the system will work not just
for me, who knows some of the R Foundation and Core folks in
a passing way, but for people who don’t.
Olivier Keyes, https://ironholds.org/blog/an-r-update/
Photo by Guillaume Paumier

62. What is a Code of Conduct?
"Principles, values, standards, or rules of
behaviour that guide the decisions,
procedures and systems of an organization
in a way that (a) contributes to the welfare of
its key stakeholders, and (b) respects the
rights of all constituents affected by its
operations.”
International Federation of Accountants, 2007

63. http://todogroup.org/opencodeofconduct/

64. GitHub hits
1
100
10000
Contributor Covenant
Open Code of Conduct
Python
Citizen
Ubuntu
Django
Geek Feminism
7 Common Codes of Conduct have
>500 hits across GitHub Projects
Parastou Tourani, Alexander Serebrenik, Bram Adams: Code of Conduct in Open Source Projects. 24th IEEE International
Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering, pp. 24-33, 2017

65. GitHub hits
0
5
10
15
20
Contributor Covenant
Rust
Twitter
Mozilla
Ubuntu
Django
Open Code of Conduct
Citizen
Geek Feminism
52 out of 150 most Watched GitHub
Projects have Code of Conduct

66. RQ1. What do Major Codes
of Conduct Stipulate?
Willem Van Mieris (1662-1747), Kaartspeler met kaarten in de hand, KMSKB, Brussel

67. From Tom Zimmermann’s chapter about card sorting in “Data Science for Software Engineers” ft. Mei Nagappan and Brittany Johnson

68. 5 Topicspurpose
honourable behaviour
unacceptable
behaviour
enforcementscope
Diversity
Respectful, patient, kind,
community-oriented,
considerate, collaborative Sexist/racist
language,
contempt,
harassment,
violence, threats
Team with the
power to decide
upon the course of
action
All community members
(paid/volunteers) in all
community spaces
(online/offline)

69. RQ2. How are Codes of
Conduct Used in OSS Projects?

70. Parastou Tourani, Bram Adams, Alexander Serebrenik: Code of Conduct in Open Source Projects. SANER 2017

71. Developers & CoC

72. Developers & CoC

73. Jan van Bijlert, Mars Vigilant (left, ca. 1630) and St. Sebastian attended by St. Irene (1624)
Researchers & CoC

74. Researchers & CoC

75. Researchers & CoC

79. Nicolaas Pietersz. Berchem (1620 - 1683). Harvest, KMSKB, Brussel
• People of different genders might have
different needs. Involve them early in your
design.
• Encourage diversity in your teams
• Diversity in ideas and not only in numbers
• More than diversity: inclusion, attraction,
retention