I've been thinking about diversity in open source communities for a while now. I believe diversity of participants is a real benefit to an open source project, and I think the one community that I'm heavily involved with, Habari, is pretty open and welcoming. For example, you don't have to be a coder to have your contributions recognised in the Habari meritocracy1.

Right now, we're in the middle of a vote as to whether Habari should adopt a community and diversity statement. Here's the statement in full.

The Habari project is built on the idea that community is more important than code. As such, we, the Habari community, are committed to making you feel welcome.

We welcome people of any ability level, age, gender, race, ethnicity, religious belief, nationality, and sexual orientation. And we welcome ponies.

Members of the community should always treat others with respect, whatever their background or involvement with the project. Everyone is expected to help maintain a welcoming environment. This means not only policing your own actions, but taking responsibility to point out and take action to stop behavior that could be harmful to the community.

Of course, you are free to disagree with opinions and beliefs held by others, but not to be disrespectful towards them because of those opinions and beliefs.

In general, people are in favour, however there have been a couple of dissenters, the gist of the dissent being that such a statement is beyond the scope of an open source project. Several people have responded that when someone does something bad, this sort of statement is a good thing to point to. Rich Bowen has recently written about how open source projects should deal with bad behaviour, and that's worth reading.

But responding to people doing bad things wasn't what prompted me to start (or at least formalise) Habari's discussion on diversity. Rather, I was acting on a feeling that a project that talks about diversity is more likely to attract diverse participants. I don't know of any formal research that supports that feeling, or even much that's informal. If you do know of any, please let me know.2

I'd like to conduct some informal research of my own.

If you're a member of a minority group or a woman (as a minority in IT and FLOSS), are you more likely to become involved in an open source project if there is an upfront statement of diversity?

  1. This isn't meant to imply that people in minorities aren't coders, it's just a comparison to some other open source communities that value coding above all else. ↩
  2. There has been some investigation of women in IT and FLOSS, but I haven't found anything that measures the outcomes of various approaches to encouraging diversity. ↩