<THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. UPDATES DUE JULY 8, 2020.>

The DCI working group was chartered in part with providing recommendations to the TSC to improve diversity, civility, and inclusion at Hyperledger.

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https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-CVCBTVTR7/

Report:

Hyperledger Survey Results_final.pptx

Some selected data:

Recommendations

• Governing board responsibilities
  • DCI is best realized through top down initiatives and support  
  • The board should create milestones and goals (establish baseline metrics)
  • The board should engage contributing companies to fulfill diversity goals
    • Take stock of members D&I efforts and raise awareness of such efforts, and align at scale. 
  • Partnership for pipeline
    • Consider partnerships with Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) and organizations (e.g. Girls Who Code) aimed at increasing diversity pipeline. Partnerships could be centered around recruitment, engagement in hackathons, and training. 
• TSC responsibilities
  • Experience communicated from Cloud Foundry indicates that pigeonholing DCI discussions to side channels is not effective, so we recommend regularly bringing topics, speakers and other DCI-related discussions to the TSC calls, the main established cross-community call with a critical mass of people already joining.  The exact format needs to be sorted out, but could involve a standing 30 minute item every other week or every other month.  That would give space for guest speakers and in depth discussions.  A separate DCI Work Group call would still make sense in order to coordinate the Speaker's Series and to identify other relevant topics to bring to the larger group.
  • Address survey feedback
    • Meeting times are difficult: e.g. Promote more asynchronous meetings
    • Difficulty finding agenda: e.g. Simplify the wiki UI or standardizing messaging in communications ahead of meetings.
• Maintainer responsibilities
  • Training: Maintainers should be familiar with community development best practices 
    
    • HGF 2020 Session and Surveys (https://wiki.hyperledger.org/x/JAHcAQ)
    • https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/inclusive-speaker-orientation/
  • Sponsorship / Coaching
    • In order to progress from contributor to maintainer it helps to have active coaching and sponsorship from existing maintainers. Maintainers should take an active role in developing their community including a pipeline of new maintainers.
  • Adopt inclusive terminology in coding standards
    • Avoid whitelist/blacklist and master/slave
    • See e.g. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/a5f526ecb075a08c4a082355020166c7fe13ae27/Documentation/process/coding-style.rst#4-naming
• Staff responsibilities
  Clarify roles in the community related to making Hyperledger more inclusive and easier to contribute to:
  • We often know where there are roadblocks for contribution and what could be done to fix them.  For example, Tracy & Swetha gave a great talk at Hyperledger Global Forum that covered several tips, recommendations and suggestions.  It is not currently clear though who in the community should be responsible for making those improvements. We recommend a process where projects that want to be more inclusive can opt in to receive support from staff in auditing and updating their contribution infrastructure.  For example, with the support of staff, the Fabric documentation project recently mapped out and documented a process for how to start a translation project and within the space of a couple of months 4 new translation efforts were started.
• Raise the profile of the diversity and inclusion focused efforts in the community:
  • DCI Messaging has been very visible at hyperledger events. The best practices established here should continue.
  • Incorporate DCI agenda directly into TSC Meetings (noted similarly above). After running the DCI Work Group for a year we have found that attendance is low and it is difficult to bring people into these discussions.  People are busy, so it is understandable that asking people to add one more meeting to their schedule can be a barrier.  Feedback from Swarna Podila about Cloud Foundry suggests that pigeonholing DCI discussions to side channels is not effective, so we recommend regularly bringing topics, speakers and other DCI-related discussions to the TSC calls, the main established cross-community call with a critical mass of people already joining.  The exact format needs to be sorted out, but could involve a standing 30 minute item every other week or every other month.  That would give space for guest speakers and in depth discussions.  A separate DCI Work Group call would still make sense in order to coordinate the Speaker's Series and to identify other relevant topics to bring to the larger group.
• Continue the Speaker's Series to drive engagement and bring in good ideas:
  
• As mentioned above, attendance at the regular DCI Work Group calls has been low and activity on the group's mailing list has been low as well.  We have seen increased participation with the first two guest speakers we have invited to the group and we recommend continuing that.  Guest speakers will raise the profile of the group, help us recruit more people to these discussions and will bring in good ideas from other open source projects and from other organizations.  We need help finding speakers, so we will likely reach out to TSC members to check their networks for people who could present on DCI-related topics.
• Add other recommendations here...

Accomplishments?

TSC composition?

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• • Various working groups have seen success with guest speakers in reinvigorating their communities. Similarly we see opportunity bringing in guest speakers to better engage the community. In particular recruiting diverse speakers to present on open source and technical topics should be of general interest to the community.
• Update the CoC
  • The DCI-WG does not yet recommend updating the Code of Conduct. Discussion of this issue is here: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/x/yiHcAQ