• <THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. UPDATES DUE JULY 8, 2020.>
• <Second round revisions due July 15>
• <Plan to present to TSC July 23, 2020>

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

After about 1 year of activity the DCI working group offers this list of recommendations, observations, and artifacts.

Survey

One of our first chartered deliverables was to quantify the diversity of our open source community. We learned two things in this process.

Surveys are not effective

We compared process and results with Cloud Foundry and found that both organizations saw about 10% response rate to community surveys.  Based on feedback from Swarna Podila about her experience with Cloud Foundry and on recommendations from Jim Gordon's presentation to the group, there are alternatives to surveys that could be more effective.  One is to focus on allowing community members to self-report information in community profiles and the other is to focus on unstructured conversations with new and existing contributors.  For reference, we've seen other communities create processes for having informational interviews with community members that have generated very useful insights about the inclusiveness of those communities and how to improve them.

Our contributor population is not diverse 

A proper statistical review of our survey could not be conducted and so it is hard to say much with certainty. However, reviewing the raw numbers, and even considering the limited response rate, it is hard to reach a conclusion that Hyperledger represents a diverse contributor body.

Raw results are available here: 

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

Report:

<attach> Leila Yosef

Some selected data:

Recommendations

• 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:
  • 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.
• Update the CoC
  • W3C is updating. Not finalized as of this date. Include community in revision process.
• Training
  • https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/inclusive-speaker-orientation/
• Top-Down
  • Engage contributing companies to 
• Add other recommendations here...

Accomplishments?

TSC composition?

DCI messaging/visibility at events?

Questions to the TSC

Why hasn't there been more traction?

Who owns x, y, z?

Does the TSC want to be more involved in DCI activities?