As open source software (OSS) becomes more prominent, the communities that surround it become more important. Having a community that has a culture of encouraging people to voice their diverse opinions is crucial for the long term success of the project. With the motivation of creating an ecosystem that enables many diverse views, the Hyperledger community with the support of the Hyperledger staff has started the Diversity, Civility and Inclusion (DCI) Working Group (WG).
The journey to creating this WG started at the Hyperledger Member Summit in 2018 in Montreal. The event showed that participation in the community was low and limited to leaders and that current processes were making it difficult for newcomers to integrate and participate. A deeper look into this issue revealed that some of the current processes do not always promote inclusiveness. Newcomers do not always know where to go to find information or ask questions and conversely active members have difficulty monitoring all the avenues people can participate, e.g. mailing lists, channels on rocket chat, wiki. Geography sometimes also presents a barrier as meetings and correspondence are optimized for certain time zones over others.
Motivated by the observations at the summit, community members along with Hyperledger Staff began discussing how to improve the inclusiveness and in turn increase diversity. They wanted DCI initiatives to be community driven, and tracked openly. The DCI WG was created to give interested community members an open forum to investigate, collaborate on solutions and provide visibility to the DCI issues found in the community. The charter for the DCI WG includes collecting data on various metrics, suggesting possible improvements based on those metrics to the TSC or projects, and if actions are taken, measure the impact of them.
Diversity, Civility and Inclusiveness can cover many different community health issues. In order to be the most impactful, the DCI WG decided to focus our efforts and tackle a subset of issues that revolve around gender diversity first. Choosing gender was partially motivated by the last TSC election where only men were nominated. One of first tasks the DCI WG will work on is a new survey to assess the current state.
Within the Hyperledger ecosystem, the DCI WG is looking to collaborate with other working groups, SIGs, and projects to analyze and measure diversity. We are also looking to work with groups such as CHAOSS. We welcome all contributors! The DCI WG meets bi-weekly and can be found on Hyperledger Community Meeting Calendar and also have a mailing list.