Working to Bring More Women and People of Color Into the API Specification Conversation

[kinlane]

I wanted to start a conversation around the troubling fact that there are too few women and people of color involved at all levels of this community. AsyncAPI’s Senior Technical Writer Alejandra Quetzall brought it up in the SIG call today, but it is something that continues to get brought up, yet continues to be a problem for us—that the API specification conversation is largely dominated by white men. I know that many of us dread having this conversation, but trust me, it is no fun being the person to bring it up (or be affected by it), and I’d rather do the work than require women and people of color to keep doing the hard work here. So I wanted to kick off this conversation around what we can do to address this issue—I am looking for discussion around two things:

• What obstacles currently keep women from participating in conversations within this community?
• What can we do to attract more women to these communities and empower them to participate?

If you aren’t comfortable having this discussion here on the forum, feel free to email your ideas at kinlane@gmail.com, but I would prefer that we have this conversation out in the open, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. I’d also like to make sure we keep this conversation friendly, inclusive, and supportive, but also make sure it is an honest and straightforward one. I look forward to hear your ideas and thoughts, and if you are someone from any of the underrepresented communities that are regularly absent from technology and the world of APIs, feel free to ping me directly for help learning about how you can get more involved.

[derberg]

Recording of the meeting mentioned by Kin above -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNMdqXIxr-s

Let me share a bit of context here for others joining discussion and not knowing AsyncAPI Initiative well but wanting to help:

Technicalities

• AsyncAPI initiative is governed in open model by following this charter
• Technical Steering Committee members are folks that are CODEWONERS/Maintainers of at least one AsyncAPI repository. To become a CODEOWNER you either have to regularly contribute to a given repo or bring your existing project into AsyncAPI org and obviously continue being its maintainer.
• Our code of conduct

What we tried so far

I'm referring here in this section purely to onboarding women. I'm not yet sure we should have single discussion about women and people of color because I think these topics are different. AsyncAPI is an open community with members from different parts of the world. Discrimination of women is a global issue that any community member can easily refer to. People of color is something that many people faced with only in theory, or from news, like me for example - a guy from white Poland. It requires more explanation and better definition as I honestly do not fully understand the topic, especially that to me the term itself seems to be offensive.

We do not have a dedicated program to change how things are atm. We do not have any women in TSC either.

• we tried engage and encourage women to join when we organized first AsyncAPI conference in 2010. We partnered with Women Who Code and had an amazing support of @lifewingmate
• we are also engaging with every possible initiative to bring new people to open source. We had, I think, a good representation of women in the Hacktoberfest. We had zero proposals from woman for the Google Summer of Code.

I agree we should do more, but I do not know what.

Complexity of the subject in open source

We can differentiate 2 types of maintainers in AsyncAPI.

• Individuals that contribute during their spare time, for free
• People hired by a company that wants to contribute to the project, they are payed for they work by hiring company

Onboarding more women as individual contributors is complex and concerns open source in general. I once attended a Linux Foundation webinar about this subject. It basically is not just a problem with AsyncAPI but general presence of women in open source. I definitely do not mean here that because it is general problem, it is not our problem. Just wanted to bring more context into discussion.

Onboarding of people hired by other companies is different subject. We do not have many companies supporting their employees to work on open source project. AsyncAPI struggles with it and we are constantly, together with @fmvilas, trying to change that. We do not have any influence on companies that use AsyncAPI or benefit from AsyncAPI, and fighting for better representation of women in here will also be a challenge. This complexity of course do not block us from mentioning the subject when talking to companies. I'm just again sharing more context for the discussion.

Final words

At AsyncAPI Initiative we like pushing boundaries and changing trends:

• We have an open governance model that puts lots of effort on equality of all types of contributors, individual and corporate-sponsored
• We formed a project without funding members, companies that by contribution get a steering seat in the project

I truly hope we can make a difference in women representation in open source too!

[kinlane]

Thank you for this @derberg. Definitely want to re-enforce what Lukasz said, and that this is not anything new, and something the AsyncAPI team has bee working on for some time. This discussion is just a continuation of this work.

[Barbanio]

Thanks Alejandra and Kin for opening the debate ❤️.

In the most optimistic study, I have found female representation makes up only 7% within open source so the problem our community has is something common in the sector.

AsyncAPI is a project created by men, driven by men, and therefore, it is mainly aimed at men. It's uncomfortable to think this, it's uncomfortable to write it but the important thing is that we are willing to change it.

Tools I can think of to reverse this situation:

• Create a guide of good practices in gender diversity and cultural diversity.

• Create a feminist and inclusive communication plan. A plan that helps us to communicate in an inclusive way, using neutral pronouns... (It is also important to take into account non-binary people).

• Create feminist and racialized hiring policies. For this, I think it is essential to allude to positive discrimination. This does not mean hiring someone simply because of their skin color or gender, but looking for people who represent underrepresented groups among the best candidates. I am sure that the search for such people will be more difficult, but it is achievable if we move in the right circuits. As Harry A. Blackmun said: "To overcome sexism we must first and foremost take sex into account" and likewise with race or ethnicity.

• Posting AsyncAPI events and vacancies on feminist developer platforms, especially anything that requires participation.

• Donating money to projects of underrepresented groups is other option. In my opinion, it should be the last, after having created and carried out internal feminist and inclusive policies. The underrepresented groups do not want money from privileged groups, we want real equality of opportunity and equal representation in positions of power.

In some other areas, like culture, there are a lot of very interesting discussions and research on the fact that there are a lot of underrepresented communities that don't feel included, not because there is no possibility of entry (doors are hypothetically open), but because they don't feel comfortable on it. I mean, museums and libraries, among other spaces. Maybe we could take a look at the case studies coming from there and see how they are fighting against this problem. After all, some of their achievements could be incorporated into our field.

[derberg]

Create feminist and racialized hiring policies. For this, I think it is essential to allude to positive discrimination

We are not hiring here too much. It is definitely good to provide guidelines for other companies involved in AsyncAPI though.
Tbh positive discrimination is not my favorite term. I'm more into embracing equity, what we discuss here in the thread. So not really punishing others that had more at the start, but strongly support those that had much less and help them reach the level that others have.

someone simply because of their skin color or gender, but looking for people who represent underrepresented groups

Once we work on guidelines for others, we need to definitely go into details here. So far most guidelines in this area come from the perspective of people living in the US and thus affected by local problems. We must try to think globally here. There are many underrepresented groups. We are missing the point that atm in TSC we have people from Nigeria and Afghanistan that are highly underrepresented too IMHO because for the majority of the western world they come from 3rd world countries thus what impact they can do on tech. We have a person from Russia that is also affected by global politics, in individuals from this country are also discriminated (the whole hate against IntelliJ from last year and hate on the product just because it was funded by Russian citizens).

My point is, we need to focus on defining well who is discriminated and underrepresented looking at the world globally.

[Barbanio]

We are not hiring here too much. It is definitely good to provide guidelines for other companies involved in AsyncAPI though.

Yes, I think it's a great idea 🎉

[quetzalliwrites]

I would love for us to discuss ways we could promote this in our social media channels for AsyncAPI. Maybe I can team w/ @Barbanio and @derberg for tweets/linkedin posts to schedule that target women specifically. Marketing more in social media that we desperately want more women contributors could help bring visibility to the project + encourage women to DM us.

[derberg]

I think we can setup automation in the community repo, not sure it makes sense to setup a separate repo for it. Thoughts?

Best is to help now adopt LF guidelines. Open PR to community repo and go ahead.

[derberg]

@alequetzalli it is a good moment to experiment with twitter. Hacktoberfest starts on 1.10 and we will have issues ready as we did last year. We could try some "women" dedicated tweets/linkedin, to see if we are able to attract more women to the project.

[quetzalliwrites]

oh yes! should we plan in our 1:1 this week?! I can tell you my ideas and you can give me feedback + your own thoughts? 😀

[derberg]

@alequetzalli sounds like a plan

[derberg]

ok, now we can tweet together with the community https://github.com/asyncapi/community/blob/master/TWEET_TOGETHER.md

[doc-jones]

Thank you @alequetzalli for adding this topic to the discussion and thank you @kinlane and the AsyncAPI team for being willing to openly discuss and seek solutions to ensuring diversity and inclusion across these projects. I would like to share my experience and the insights I've gained from being involved with groups and organizations that provide the prior art on which AsyncAPI can build a diverse community.

For anyone getting started with open source contribution can be intimidating and overwhelming. The two projects I've worked with closely have done a stellar job of creating communities that are welcoming to women and provide cultures that are accessible and supportive of women contributors and oddly enough when communities make space for women everyone benefits. Both the Python Software Foundation and the Rust Language have created just such communities. They establish values and goals that are amenable to attracting diverse community involvement and they act out those values in concrete ways. AsyncAPI is a young project , by comparison, and getting these type of values in place so early will have far reaching benefits to this community.

My path into open source was made possible by the program run by Mentored Sprints and PyCon. Mentored Sprints has been running their matching service for maintainers and contributors for years, it continues to improve, and spread to other conferences. Basically, it's is a one day "sprint" where the Mentored Sprints team provides know-how, sprint infrastructure and support to help maintainers on board new contributors and help contributors land their first open source PR. My experience with the program was incredibly positive and launched me into open source contributions to other projects. Having someone demystify the process of joining an open source project was confidence building and delivered the reassurance I needed to step into additional projects.

The Rust community is beloved because they adopted a strong set of values that are reinforced by what they do in every venue and on every platform. As a new contributor I was welcomed, encouraged, supported and accepted as full member of the organization when I could barely spell Rust. There is an emphasis on mentorship at every level of the Rust org. There is an expectation of empathy and personal maturity in all community engagements and a guiding principle even for the behavior of the Rust compiler. Much has been written about the role of empathy in the creation of compiler error messages. The leadership of Rust is intentional in a culture that rejects male dominated and competitive tropes like hazing "noobs" or limiting contributions of new members to lowly tasks to pay one's dues. Creating an environment insistent on empathy that rewards collaboration and not competition is the reason that there are so many women in leadership within Rust.

Some example leadership positions held by the women of Rust.

• Director of the Rust Foundation
• 3 of 11 Board Directors
• Rust 2021 Edition Team Lead
• Error wg Lead
• 2 of 5 Library Team - stdlib
• 4 (including me) in the Async Foundations wg

In this video that introduces the Rust Foundation, 2 of the 3 leaders quoted are women. What Rust illustrated to me is that inclusion of women in the organization is something you do more than something you say.

To further demonstrate the difference between a tenet versus pure messaging this article from Fortune magazine lists "The Best Workplaces for Women" in the US. Silicon Valley and the FAANGs in particular devote considerable messaging resources to championing their diversity and inclusion programs, yet not one of them appear in this list. They message this topic heavily, but apparently that doesn't make those messages actionable.

AsyncAPI or any other group that wants to improve participation by women must take actionable steps to recruit women from industry, to promote women into its leadership and to ensure a culture of empathy where all feel welcome and valued.

@derberg Was on target mentioning Women Who Code. AsyncAPI can build awareness by delivering talks at the plethora of monthly meetups that WWC holds across the US. I'm less familiar with their international meetups, but it wouldn't be too difficult to research those. There are other monthly meetup groups that could be targeted and approached by members of the AsyncAPI team to deliver talks that would build awareness of the many contributions opportunities offered by the project.

There are other mentorship programs that could be implemented, but I'll pause here as I fear this post may become tl;dr, if it hasn't already. Some of these solutions could be their own discussion topic, but let me leave you with this thought. There already exist many solutions to this problem. Increasing participation by women is solvable with a menu of existing options. It can be done.

[derberg]

I'm powered by engagement, if I see @Barbanio , @alequetzalli, and @doc-jones so positively proactive here, I'm all yours and happy to improve whatever we can and add this subject to main goals for community-building activities.

From the very beginning, we are pushing here for the community that is opened to people new in open source, mentoring people through different programs. Maybe we should reach further than just Google Summer of Code or Hacktoberfest. During the weekend I "bumped into" https://www.outreachy.org/. The best way imho is to "partner" with those different programs (maybe there are others) because they already have a position and network, and we can offer mentorship and support.

Was on target mentioning Women Who Code

yeah, my experience was not the best. Mixed feelings about the organization. My first impression is: it is a for-profit organization, and therefore loses its focus. I'm happy to try again though. Might be that I just did something wrong. I just personally think that AsyncAPI Initiative that is not focused on revenue will work better with programs like Outreachy that are also focused on helping others rather than gaining profit.

Important is to enable diversity, and best doing it through diverse approach, trying all possible paths and then just asses which one works best and invest there even more 💪🏼

[doc-jones]

Women Who Code is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. I would love to hear more about your experience. As a member and beneficiary of the programs and volunteer mentors and leaders at Women Who Code, I'm surprised that you had a negative experience.

[derberg]

Yeah, it was simply an expectation vs reality. I somehow envisioned engagement from the other side, especially that I did not come alone but was supported by @lifewingmate to prove we have good intentions. As a result, I felt I'm cooperating with a "company", formalized email exchange, quite often had to follow up to get some answers. Thus, had a feeling that it is a business-oriented organization.

Of course, I assume it is a huge org, not all people are the same, especially when it goes deeper in the organization, local WWC communities around local meetups. This is why imho we should definitely try again.

[quetzalliwrites]

I am not surprised to hear about having so-so experience with Women Who Code or any other women coding groups. Having founded one myself and having teamed with pretty much every girl/coding group out there, I too had many bad experiences with the women I attempted to work with.

There is a lot of politics within these groups as well, and I don't miss no longer running meetups and events with these folks. :)

[doc-jones]

Just one more thing....

The Collaboration Guidelines from this project called Optopodi in the rustlang repo is an excellent example of how the organization sets expectations for the community and provides the signals that empathy and kindness are valued. Just as rustlang adapted these guidelines from other organizations, AsyncAPI can find examples of fostering an environment and culture that is woman positive and steal those - with attribution, of course. 😄

FYI: The project is a WIP and gathers data on from github issues and PRs across the rustlang org in order to provide insights on areas that may be struggling as evidenced by slow issue close times and orphaned PRs.

[derberg]

I think it is kind of overlapping with what we already have in code of conduct, or?

[doc-jones]

Now that I've read the AsyncAPI Code of Conduct, the first section on "dos and don'ts" are identical. 😄 I find the explicit kindness expressed for those of us who may make a mistake from time to time and the acceptance that making a mistake isn't a fatal breach of the community's standards to be unique as stated in the Optopodi guidelines.

I, also, find the example dialogue to be clear and helpful to those who might be new to the community, and to those who might not understand the exchanges they've used in other communities are harmful and should be avoided. Even pointing out that by using the phrase "you guys" which reinforces the idea that male is the default as undesirable, sends a signal that equality is a core value of that community.

So yes. They are similar to a point. The examples take the next step by providing specific behaviors that are actionable by leadership and moderators.

[derberg]

Looking at all the different ideas we have here in this Discussion might be that we need to start writing them down as part of the execution plan. For example, looks like one of the steps to take further should be a discussion around the current CoC and how to improve it or enrich by additional guidelines. I think I'm biased thinking that it is obvious for others they should not use guys these days, or write users can see "this", so they can do "that" rather than user can see "this", so he can do "that

[renishya]

I was going through the discussion here. Pretty interesting. Is there any mentorship available to guide people who are looking for mentorship and guidance? I'm a Technical Writer and pretty new to the scene of API. I would like to explore how I can advance in this area. ( Going by the mantra ...There's no such thing as a stupid question.) Thanks in advance.

[quetzalliwrites]

Hello @renishya, great question! ❤️ Yes, we are very big on mentorship and being available to the community to help them get started in contributing, even if it's a new area for the contributor.

A great way to start is to join our Slack workspace and visit the 11_how-to-contribute 🙂 channel. This channel is specifically designed for supporting all community questions on getting started as a contributor.

Introduce yourself and let us help you get started! 😀👍🏽

[renishya]

Thanks @alequetzalli ❤️

[Barbanio]

Hi, I'm doing some work on this thread.

Context:
In the last few months, there has been an increase in women joining the AsyncAPI Community. Seeing this, I started to analyze why this was happening and if it was occurring in similar initiatives.

Action plan:
To do this, I contacted women working in Open Source and interviewed them. Several people helped me contact other women who might be interested (special thanks to @derberg, @potiuk and @vinitshahdeo), so the butterfly effect did its work. Right now, I have almost 50 testimonies of women explaining their experience, how they understand the open source environment concerning gender, what policies could be implemented and what things they don't like.

So, I'm analyzing the data on the issue. The idea is to write an article about this topic, using the real testimonies I have gathered and also more information coming from the academic and scientific realms.

Future lines:
My first idea was to do something simple. I could not imagine that the participation would be so numerous and that people would be willing to continue collaborating. Because of this, as soon as the article is published, I will create an organization in GitHub where I will dump all the data and collect all the information that may be relevant to this topic. It will serve as a meeting point for people interested in this topic, and it will allow us to continue building something bigger together. If the organization works well, we will have a web page.

I will publish the article in this thread as soon as I have it. I will be giving news about the progress of the process.

And, of course, any suggestions are welcome 🙂

[potiuk]

Looking forward to see it !

[Bowrna]

I am looking forward to seeing the data you have gathered @Barbanio
As a women contributor, I would like to understand the data and see how I can help in getting more women into the Open Source community.

[Barbanio]

Hello! Here is the first article of the research: https://thenewstack.io/why-women-are-underrepresented-in-open-source/. Thanks to all who made it possible 💜
Right now, I am working on a scientific paper on the subject in which I will present the data more exhaustively. I will keep you informed! 🙂