Sowing the Seeds of Diversity

By Mark Smith
Date: Wednesday, 5 June 2013 09:00
Duration: 45 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English
Tags: culture diversity

Open source has a problem. When you look around most of the talks or mailing lists, you will find a distinct homogeneity to the people present. There's a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest is that we optimize for a particular style of participation and interaction that appeals to a narrow range of people.

The good news is, this isn't an immutable fact of open source -- we can do better! When you broaden your project culture so that a wider range of personalities and interaction styles feel comfortable, you get a better and stronger team.

In this talk, we will present some of the ways in which our project, Dreamwidth Studios, has fought against this problem and succeeded. We will go over some some very important things to know when it comes to building an environment that is friendly to all comers, such as:

* Development: processes, tools, and structure for maximizing contributions
* Newcomers: how to make sure they stay, how to grow their skills
* Culture: what to do with poisonous people, prickly personalities, fiefdoms, and other typical problems

...and more!

This talk is applicable even if you aren't a project maintainer. Many of the things we will talk about can be applied in your day-to-day work in open source.

Attended by: