Introduction

Near the end of 2018 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 to evolve the concept.

Following several months of work, that group proposes creating a community-led Diversity, Civility, and Inclusion (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 is clearly scoped to focus only on DCI issues. A formal working group is necessary to forward DCI initiatives for several reasons. Not least of which is without formal standing, the group does not operate with visibility. Lack of basic tools like a mailing list has limited the group's ability to make progress, gain new contributors, and provide visibility. 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. A follow up survey in 2018 did not take place - we believe in part because a chartered body like this one did not exist to drive that work.

Scope

The scope of this working group is broadly around Diversity, Civility, and Inclusion in the Hyperledger open source community.  

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

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 group's progress towards this initial goal is captured in the Background and References section below. We also strongly welcome participation in this group from those who wish to focus their energy on developing the next round of DCI objectives.

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.

Initial work products include:

1. A measurement plan to baseline the community.
2. Gender diversity and inclusion recommendations to the TSC.
3. Gender diversity and inclusion recommendations to Hyperledger Staff.

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.

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.

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 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.
• Content for last year's Hyperledger project developer survey 2018 (that did not take place) and the message about the survey; the folder of all the materials for that 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