1_Diversity.md

Metric: Diversity

Background: At the Open Source Summit North America, a group of around 8-12 people each agreed on the metrics important in the following scenarios. For now, we will focus our conversation around these outcomes to further the conversation. The two-hour session sparked great conversations but could not address all aspects. We thank everyone who participated.

Below is the metric->signal->action chain for Diversity.

How to contribute:

• To advance the document, fork the rep, make your changes, create a pull request see CONTRIBUTING.md
• To ask questions or make comments, post to our mailing list, join our weekly Hangout call, or open an issue on GitHub.

Diversity: Metric -> Signal -> Action

Case Characteristics

• How accessible is the project to join, contribute, and remain engaged? Informs a contributor’s ability to engage with a project.

Contributor Demographics

• New contributors versus maintainers. Are new contributors different from existing community - Gender, company, age, location, skills, etc…
• Why: Determine whether a project is dominated by a single company or demographic group
• Signals:
  • Low diversity signals that it is hard to contribute to the project if you are not a member of the majority demographic.
  • High diversity signals that new members are welcome.
• Informs activity:
  • (not discussed at OSSNA)
• Potential positive or negative outcomes:
  • (not discussed at OSSNA)

Onboarding

• Percentage of accepted Pull Requests from new contributors. Percentage of new contributor code versus total code.
• Why: 
  • Determine how easy it is to commit code (drive-bys)
  • Determine how easy it is to join a community and contribute.
• Signals:
  • That the community welcomes new contributions.
• Informs activity:
• (not discussed at OSSNA)
• Potential positive or negative outcomes:
• (not discussed at OSSNA)

Retention

• Is the path to maintainer communicated? When was the last time they added a maintainer?
• Why: 
  • Determine if the community is merit based.
  • How are you treated once you are in the community?
  • Length of time to normalize in the community.
• Signals
  • (not discussed at OSSNA)
• Informs activity:
  • (not discussed at OSSNA)
• Potential positive or negative outcomes:
  • (not discussed at OSSNA)

Images from workshop

We thank everyone who participated in the workshop at the Open Source Summit North America. The below pictures are the flip chart figures that came out of the Diversity group.