...

The group members who have been meeting would like to propose creating a community-led Diversity, Civility, and Inclusiveness (DCI) Working Group.  Community health is a broad topic that covers many different aspects and that left the scope too open ended, so this new effort would be clearly scoped to focus only on DCI issues.  

Scope

Activities will include:

* Devising and implementing various ways to measure relevant attributes, such as demographics or employer diversity among contributors, and tone of communications.

* Based on those metrics, generating recommendations to the TSC or to projects directly about how they might improve DCI.

* If actions are taken to improve an area of DCI, attempt to measure the impact of those actions.

Work Products

The anticipated initial work products will include (but is not limited to):

The community has already taken some steps to improve DCI, such as creating and using the All Are Welcome Here slide, focusing on increasing geographic and gender diversity in the 2019 mentorship program and more (existing actions could be documented more).  Work products from the WG will build on those existing actions and will include new actions that address DCI issues identified as areas of improvement by the WGThe scope of this working group is broadly around Diversity, Civility, and Inclusiveness.

Based on the prior months of exploring what aspects we could address, the group decided to focus on one area first, gender diversity and inclusion, and then learn from that experience to expand into other dimensions of DCI. We recognize there are many reasons to select one group or another as a place to start, and we have settled on this area after lengthy discussions of the circumstances, possible approaches, and not blocking on making progress from optimizing for perfection.  The experience with the 2018 TSC election having only men who were nominated also motivated the group to choose gender diversity as the initial focus.   Further record of the groups progress towards this initial goal is captured in the Background and References section below. We also welcome participation in this group from those who wish to focus their energy on other related aspects.

Work Products

The community has already taken some steps to improve DCI, such as creating and using the All Are Welcome Here slide and focusing on increasing geographic and gender diversity in the 2019 mentorship program.  Work products from the WG will build on those existing actions and will include new actions that address DCI issues identified as areas of improvement by the WG.

Activities will include:

* Devising and implementing various ways to measure relevant attributes, such as demographics or employer diversity among contributors, and tone of communications.

* Based on those metrics, generating recommendations to the TSC or to projects directly about how they might improve DCI.

* If actions are taken to improve an area of DCI, attempt to measure the impact of those actions.

Understanding the current state: In 2017, Hyperledger conducted a survey of the developer community to assess various attributes of the community and collect suggestions for improvement. Understanding the current state is critical for the success of the community and our ability to measure the impact of initiatives to create a more inclusive and diverse ecosystem. We are proposing a collaboration with Accenture – who already has a team putting research into the field – to gather key insights on the current state of diversity, civility, and inclusion and in the Hyperledger community through quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews across the ecosystem and identify action items and focus areas to enable the advancement of DCI.

Collaborators (other groups)

This working group will collaborate with other Hyperledger working groups, the TSC, Linux Foundation staff, and the project maintainers.

...

...

Dan Middleton has offered to be the interim chair and the goal would be to have another community member selected as the ongoing chair after the group has been active for a short period (WG start + 3 months).

Background and References

In preparation for this proposed working group, the informal committee looked at and talked through a lot of materials around diversity, civility, and inclusion. The purpose of this section is to provide the references and receipts for those discussions as background for anyone interested in all the details.

• This is large reference document with many links gathered by Marina Zhurakhinskaya to various diversity and inclusion content relevant to open source communities.
• Presentation by Mandy Olund, an expert in workplace diversity, that worked to help us visualize the scope of the work the group is doing, and narrow down to specific activities for the Hyperledger Foundation.
• This is an example CFP done by the Outreachy group.
• Last year's Hyperledger project developer survey 2018 and the message about the survey.
• This is a Summary of community health discussions at Member Summit and Hackfest in Montreal.
• The Hyperledger code of conduct.
• Metrics gathering for Hyperledger community.
• Working plan to take the group from planning committee into a formal working group with specific objectives.

Reviewed by

•  Arnaud Le Hors
•  Baohua Yang
•  Binh Nguyen
•  Christopher Ferris
•  Dan Middleton
•  Hart Montgomery
•  Kelly Olson
•  Mark Wagner
•  Mic Bowman
•  Nathan George
•  Silas Davis

...