Introduction

Near the end of last year there were some discussions on TSC calls about having a Community Health Working Group or Task Force.  Feedback at the time was that the idea needed to be developed further, so a group of people interested in this topic has been meeting since then and we wanted to come back with an update and proposal.

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 WG.

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.  We also welcome participation in this group from those who wish to focus their energy on other related aspects.

Collaborators (other groups)

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

This group will work with all parts of the community (the TSC, projects, WGs and SIGs, etc) in order to listen to what they say, learn from them about what has worked and not worked and to support their efforts with making their parts of the community more welcoming to more community members.  Linux Foundation staff will also play an active role in supporting the activities of this group and helping to implement recommendations.

Interested Parties

The following individuals have already expressed an interest in joining this working group, and we hope they will become contributors over the first year:

Proposed Chair

The following individual has volunteered to serve as the initial chair for the working group:

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

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 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.

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