CouchDB • The Neighbourhoodie My name is Lena Reinhard or @ffffux on Twitter. I'm specializing in marketing, community care and project management in tech. I’m a committer to the Open Source Projects Hoodie and Apache CouchDB, and I’m a co-founder and CEO at The Neighbourhoodie, a software development and consulting company. picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/neuro74/6339990758/sizes/l/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/neuro74/ license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.de
southern Germany, close to the village where I grew up. And this is where this talk begins. –– This acre in southern Germany, this land – is cultivated land. –– This -- is culture. --- The English term “culture” evolved in the mid-15th century and originally meant “the tilling of land” and was about who cared for which parts of land, who did the work on it and who brought in the harvest. There’s also a figurative sense of “culture” which leads to the main case in which we use it today. -> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture#Etymology
“culture” is the expression of the way we act and refers to a group or community which shares common experiences that shape the way its members understand the world -- http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/culture/cultural-competence/culture-and-diversity/main http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulturphilosophie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
Source I work in the tech world, and I contribute to Open Source. And I love what I do there, because I found amazing people and great projects which have become near and dear to me. Still, the future of Open Source is in danger. This is why in this talk, I want us to take a look at culture in the world of Free, Libre and Open Source Software today (to make it easier for you and me, I’ll refer to “Open Source”, still meaning all of them). Even if you’re not contributing to Open Source projects yourself: most of these topics are applicable to general tech culture and human interaction in general today. ->
Powering Mobile, Social, Cloud, Big Data Technology-wise, Open Source is highly relevant - Mobile, Social Media, Cloud Services and Big Data, four very important technologies of our time, rely heavily on Open Source. Open Source is also relevant for business. It contributes 450 billion euros per year only to the European economy. -- So, things are going great in Open Source, right? Let me show you one thing first. more: 114 billion euro by saving the economy money, the results of reinvestments, productivity increase and efficiency are worth over 340 billion euros. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/contribution-open-source-europes-economy-450-billion-yea Mobile – Apple’s iOS libraries includes Open Source libraries – Apple even has their own Apple Public Source License. And, of course, Firefox OS. Social Media – Facebook creates and uses Open Source in their software. The same is with Twitter and Linkedin. Wordpress has given millions of people the opportunity to share their thoughts online. Cloud – Amazon WebServices are powered by Open Source technology like SugarCRM. Amazon RDS relies on MySQL, the Open Source database. Apache is still THE Web server, running large parts of the internet today. Big Data – Hadoop, CouchDB and MongoDB are powering BigData. Big companies rely on Open Source. Some industries rely in important sectors on it. F+O technologies power much of the infrastructure that makes the Internet possible. s.a. http://www.publicpolicy.telefonica.com/blogs/blog/2014/01/10/the-importance-of-free-software-is-not-limited-to-technology-the-open-source-movement-is-evolving-to-encompass-more-areas-of-our- lives/
Sexist Incidents in Geek Communities 0 15 30 45 60 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 Data: geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents The amazing people from “Geek Feminism Wiki” are collecting sexist incidents in geek communities including technology industry, open source software, gaming, and more. This is the number of sexist incidents per year, starting in the year 2000. Today, on september 14 2014, the number of sexist incidents this year only is 52. Although this graphics does not only display incidents in Open Source Software, it depicts one thing clearly: a lot of things are going wrong in our communities and their culture. And here’s why. ->
Diana Harrelson) Often when you talk about Open Source projects, people quickly refer to “THE COMMUNITY”. So, let’s take a closer look at it. Diana Harrelson, an anthropologist, did scientific research on the Fedora Project. 75% of the respondents to her questions agreed that they felt that the Fedora project really was a community, some adding answers like: “The community *is* the project. …” – and: “Without the Community we’re lost.” -- But when we’re talking about the community and appreciating it - there’s one essential point not to forget. As Joseph Raz, a philosopher, phrased it: -> source: http://www.cyber-anthro.com/beta-an-exploration-of-fedora%E2%80%99s-online-open-source-development-community/
open to a group’s members will shrink. (J. Raz) “If the culture is decaying, or if it is discriminated against, the options and opportunities open to its members will shrink.” –- Community is not just about building nice stuff and hanging around with nice people in chat rooms, on mailing lists or on conferences like this one today. -- Every troll, every sexist comment, every harrassment towards just one single ommunity member will directly harm this person, the entire community, the product that you’re building and finally Open Source in general - its values, its ideas and its existence. -- -> source: Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (1994), Clarendon Press. Entire quote: “It... [is] a brute fact that our world is organized in large measure around groups with pervasive cultures.... membership of such groups... greatly affects one's opportunities.... If the culture is decaying, or if it is persecuted or discriminated against, the options and opportunities open to its members will shrink.”
language. -- Mars Climate Orbiter was a robotic space probe launched by NASA in 1998 to study the climate, atmosphere and surface changes on Mars. This space probe finally got lost in space - it disintegrated due to atmospheric stresses. What was the reason for this robot’s death? It was caused by a human communication failure - four pieces of software producing and expecting data in different units. Two navigators from the teams involved had pointed out that four pieces of software those issues, but their concerns had been dismissed. -- What happened here, is briefly described by Conway’s Law. Introduced in 1968 by Melvin Conway, a computer programmer, it states that -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter pic source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Mars_Climate_Orbiter_2.jpg/1126px-Mars_Climate_Orbiter_2.jpg by NASA, public domain
(Conway’s Law) “organizations which design systems ... produce designs which are copies of their communication structures”. -- Open Source carries Conway’s Law to extremes. As a scientist phrased it: In Open Source, “there is a hybridism of dialogue and code, where the dialogue is directly embedded in the code’’. They called Open source a ”… network of people and things” that -> source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law http://www2.parc.com/csl/members/nicolas/documents/JCSCW-OSS.pdf
constructed through the materialization of language.” In other words: all communications in an Open Source project will have direct impact on the product (like the software) which is built. All communications, - no matter if there are any and if they are peaceful or violent. -- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law http://www2.parc.com/csl/members/nicolas/documents/JCSCW-OSS.pdf
languages Screenshot: endangeredlanguages.com I want to show you a part of the “Endangered Languages” project. Every dot you can see on this map excerpt stands for one of over 3,231 languages that are currently at risk of becoming extinct. Language loss is no new phenomenon, and even if a few of those languages got lost, large parts of the world population could still talk. - So why should we care if languages are lost? -- Let me ask you two things first: - who of you ever contributed to a FLOSS Project? … and: - who of you is a programmer or has ever done anything related to programming, like editing a bit of HTML or CSS? … … … As people who can deal with programming languages, you know one of their core functionalities is that: - > https://docs.google.com/document/d/19MvWf22roO_egGdcma1rSAplMrQitKskxL3xn0gBgSU/edit# (Screenshot: http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/#/3/-45.761/275.454/0/100000/0/low/mid/high/dormant/awakening/unknown )
expression in the source code of an application can affect everything. (Or break everything, you may have heard of that. :) ) Language is an essential part of our culture and shapes the way we express ourselves. And this is why when a language disappears into oblivion, we are all diminished. -- Thus, silencing people and their voices in Open Source destables and endangers each and every one of us. We in Open Source have to stop silencing people when they speak out about threats, mobbing, sexism or other topics that show our broken culture. -- source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/06/0627_020628_wadedavis.html
CULTURE Open Source is the materialization of language, and our community culture influences everything we do. This is why we have to take even more care of the culture in Open Source communities - because the future of Open Source will be mainly determined by its culture. -- -> Let’s see which other aspects we have to care for in our communities and start this with an excursion to biology. ---
As Charles Elton, an Ecologist, argued, "simple [non-diverse] communities [are] more easily upset than … richer ones; that is, [they’re] more vulnerable …". -- In biology, there’s a special research field for this topic, and part of it is the so-called “stability-diversity hypothesis”. In short, this hypothesis states that the more diverse a community is, the more stable and productive it is. A great example for a space which is diverse by default -> source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ecology/Community_succession_and_stability http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6783/full/405228a0.html#B8
Picture: N. Tackaberry, CC BY-ND 2.0 are rain forests. Typically, they possess a great deal of species diversity. Around 40-75% of all biotic species are native to the rainforests. -- Same is with data :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainforest picture: N. Tackaberry, https://www.flickr.com/photos/23629083@N03/6869912427 License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/deed.de
Picture: USFWS Pacific Region, CC BY 2.0 Coral Reefs – they occupy less than 0.1% of the world's ocean surface, which is around the size of France, yet they provide a home for 25% of all marine species. -- -> data, quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_reef picture: USFWS Pacific Region, https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwspacific/5565696408/sizes/l/in/photostream/ License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.de data, quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_reef picture: USFWS Pacific Region, https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwspacific/5565696408/sizes/l/in/photostream/ License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.de
Diversity means variety and dissimilarity. It is a state and process of involving people who are different from each other in a group, and it aims to create an inclusive culture. Diversity is in natural settings usually nothing we have to implement or fix – it’s the Default. In artificial settings, like Open Source communities are, we have to take care for diversity ourselves. First, diversity is just the right thing to do. As various studies show, diversity also enables us to solve complex problems better and faster, be more creative and stimulated through persistent exposure to minority perspectives, make better decisions and generate more innovation. This means: if a community is not diverse, it’s broken. -- ->
into a variety of different dimensions. Everyone of us has had different life experiences and perceives the world differently. Thus, we need to care as well about the intersections of these groups. Let’s take a look at some examples: ->
poll, 89 percent of contributors to Open Source are men, 11 percent are women – but this is not just about a binary gender system here. Currently, there is so little space for LGBTIQ* people in the Open Source culture of our times that there are not even numbers. And it’s worst for people who are marginalized twice or even more - because they are e.g. women of colour. -> sources http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-are-185-million-software-developers-in-the-world-but-which-country-has-the-most/ http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240676/India_to_overtake_U.S._on_number_of_developers_by_2017 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762181.html sex ratio: 1.07 (107 male : 100 females) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio female devs http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorikozlowski/2012/03/22/women-in-tech-female-developers-by-the-numbers/ female devs http://qz.com/143967/the-tech-industrys-woman-problem-statistics-show-its-worse-than-you-think/ females in tech http://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/2011-04-05_JHU.pdf females in OS http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/FLOSS FLOSS poll http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D16HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.htm
in ethnicity. White people are still forming the major mass of people in Open Source, and we urgently need to get people of all ethnicities into Open Source projects. ->
aim for diversity in skills and get non-coding people like designers, writers, people with organisation skills and many more. -- -> further reading: For details about attracting non-coders to OSS communities, see e.g. this talk I gave recently: https://speakerdeck.com/ffffux/confessions-of-an-alien-attracting-non-coding-experts-to-your-open-source- project-1 Apache quote: http://community.apache.org/contributors/
be for everybody. (A. Hartwig) Or, to phrase it like Aaron Hartwig recently did on Twitter: “When everybody is making technology, the technology they make will be for everybody.” -- Community means the appreciation of diversity and variety. Community culture is our daily answer to the question who (which people) and what (which kind of contributions) is being welcomed and valued in our projects. -- -> Quote: @aaron_hartwig https://twitter.com/aaron_hartwig/status/460887193826111489
are strong values and goals behind Open Source Software development which are the reason why it exists and is kept alive. Some of these values are e.g.: providing alternatives to closed- source software, enabling independence and driving innovation. But there is one more reason why Open Source Software is built. -- Software is built to perform useful work, run a computer system, solve problems, make things better. But -- make things better for whom? -->
Software is built for people. It’s built for users. Any software exists for being used by someone somewhere. -- Let me ask you a question, and for the answer, I’d ask you to shout some numbers at me. What would you estimate, how many percent of all people in the entire world are software developers? … … … ->
It’s 18 Million people in total. Which is a bit less than 0.26 percent of the entire world population, and this number already includes hobbyists. Which means: for every software developer out there, there are -> data sources: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-are-185-million-software-developers-in-the-world-but-which-country-has-the-most/ http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9240676/India_to_overtake_U.S._on_number_of_developers_by_2017 http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762181.html
we can’t have this conversation without talking about users. Software is built for them. And each of those 399 people have their very own, individual needs (and even our developer themselves who will also be a software user). -- This means that
an act of representation. Many of us, the people who are here today, are very privileged, and our realities are very far away from the reality of millions of people on this planet. -- The users of our software are a very diverse group, and representation means responsibility. As people who work on software, we have this representation role to act according to, and this is why -> pic: Flickr / vnysia (CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/vnysia/4598569232 License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ quote from: http://indietech.org/ Manifesto
on software can not be justified. Only moving beyond self-referential modes will enable us to develop infrastructure, processes, products and work that resonate with the broader population. -- Misrepresentation leads to serious issues, one of them illustrated here in a Tweet by Yehuda Katz: - ->
means "horribly broken except for my case" (Y. Katz) “The JavaScript community loves "good enough" solutions, where "good enough" means "horribly broken except for my case"”. We already have representation problems in the JavaScript community itself, and it’s not getting better for people outside this community. We have to fulfill our representation roles properly in our communities so we can finally enable people to really -> Quote: @aaron_hartwig https://twitter.com/aaron_hartwig/status/460887193826111489
–– I want to give you an example which depicts the trust issue we’re exposing our users to far too often. The “Queer Chorus”, a choir group in Austin, Texas, had a Facebook group for its choir’s members. The president of the chorus added two members of the choir to this Facebook group. What the president didn’t know: Facebook automatically told all their friends that they were now members of the Queer chorus Facebook Group. Thing is: they both had decided to not inform their friends and families about them being queer. It was Facebook that did that for them - by inadvertently exposing this information to their friends and families. Facebook made a choice, instead of leaving it up to them. -- Many more people have been stung by accidentally revealing secrets online that were easier kept in the past. We need to keep examples like this in mind and build software that respects its users. -- -> source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444165804578008740578200224
proper user representation is also linked with one of the core values and goal of Open Source: Freedom. Freedom is the idea of giving users choices, power and control over the tools they use. It’s often stated that users are enabled to see how the apps they’re using work, check if they’re secure and change them if they want to. -- So, let me ask you another question, and now I’d ask you to raise your hands again: who of you has at least once read the source code of your mail server that your email provider runs for you? ------ http://www.wired.com/2013/09/why-free-software-is-more-important-now-than-ever-before
to ask: how many people actually can do this? How many people have not only the interest, but also the resources and knowledge to check the source code of their software? How close to people’s actual realities can this idea of freedom practically be? The idea of long-term freedom for users through Open Source is a great goal which we have to perceive. But we have to take care to not make this a patronizing ideal that forgets about many people’s realities. Instead, we have to build products understanding people’s needs and their capabilities in diverse communities, so we can make this ideal of freedom a thing which is closer to people’s realities than it is now. --- Another danger we’re currently facing is shown by what happened to the Mayas. -> http://www.wired.com/2013/09/why-free-software-is-more-important-now-than-ever-before
civilization where highly-developed, it declined and suddenly disappeared around 800-900BC. Some archaeologists add that the Maya "collapse" was merely a collapse of the ruling elites. These theories can’t be proven 100%, but the Maya show us that it's neither change nor technology that threatens the integrity of a culture. It is -- –> http://archaeology.about.com/cs/latinamerica/a/copan.htm Picture: Sergio Somavilla, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/ssomavilla/2288193041/sizes/l/in/gallery-voyagevobe-72157625044039205/ License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
BECOME UNSTABLE power — the crude face of domination. If the needs of individuals in one culture are continually suppressed, social systems can become unstable. --- One person in the Fedora Project study said: “I used to believe that it was a community, but it seems more like a grouping of various anarchists and monarchists who think everyone else is like them.” We really have to take care to avoid cliques and elites which exclude community members and enforce those unhealthy power structures that destabilize our communities. We have to stop the marginalization of people, the worshipping of heroes, bro culture, “rock stars”, “code unicorns” and people who cannot be criticised anymore because of their status. -> Source / Diana Harrelson’s research: http://www.cyber-anthro.com/beta-an-exploration-of-fedora%E2%80%99s-online-open-source-development-community/
concepts and goals of Open Source which are decentralisation and democracy. Data shows that Open Source Software is not quite as democratic and decentralised as it often proclaims to be - analysis shows that of five billion bytes of Open Source code, 74% was written by the most active 10% authors.
and decentralisation in Open Source will both require more diverse communities to enable more stable democratic processes and achieving real decentralisation. -- -- -> --- data source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
to their “meritocracy”, the belief that those with merit float to the top - that they should be given more opportunities and higher rewards. Funnily and sadly at the same time, this term “meritocracy” was originally coined as a negative example for a system with highly critical approaches. Noah Slater recently described meritocracy as a sort of metastory which we repeat to each other and which we use to construct other stories that then explain e.g. why people are included or excluded from our project. Meritocracy is often celebrated as objective, whilst the homogeneity of Open Source and various studies show that it exacerbates the lack of diversity and institutionalises structural inequality. This also includes that ->
new models to value contribution. When we’re thinking about building the future of Open Source, we have to include those who have less opportunity, time and money that would allow them to freely contribute. We need to re-think what is being valued in Open Source projects, especially with the needs of marginalized people in our minds. ---- -> Quotes: Ashe Dryden, http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community
who do we care for – contributors who contribute? Or do we care for people? This question is an essential one and a topic that is near and dear to me. People in our communities experience not only good, but also bad times, burnouts, mental health issues like depression, and much more. These are serious issues which we can’t ignore, and some of them are even enforced through structural inequality, meritocracy and community-related issues.
of Open Source Communities have to implement a culture where mental health issues are not stigmatized, where we talk openly about them and lead have open discussions about how to avoid people from burning out through Open Source contributions, -- a culture in which people are heard and they know that there are people who care for them. We have to make sure to be there for the people in our projects – NOT because we want to keep them contributing, but because we care for the people. ---- ->
veins, both part of our circulatory system. Arteries are the blood vessels that carry blood away from the heart, mostly oxygenated blood. There is a special coronary artery which is located directly at our heart. Its job is to supply blood to the heart muscle and thus keep it working. -- Still, it sometimes happens that there is -> Pic source: http://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/entry_photo_images/7913847/heart_shutterstock_large_verge_medium_landscape.jpg
the inner walls of the arteries of the heart. This plaque narrows the arteries and reduces blood flow to the heart. It can progress without anyone noticing evidence for it for years and what happens there is called coronary artery disease. As it progresses, it leads to lack of oxygen in the body’s cells, can cause chest pain and finally lead to a heart attack and death. pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blausen_0259_CoronaryArteryDisease_02.png Wikimedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronary_artery_disease#Treatment
the entire body, our projects. Without our communities, Open Source is lost. Narrowing the communities by limiting and restricting their spaces leads to serious problems - for individuals, communities, the products we’re building and finally Open Source in general. -- There are already many initiatives and individuals in Open Source that are working hard on all of this. These people and their allies are spending a significant amount of time on improving the culture we have in Open Source today. Some of them are e.g. black girls code, Ashe Dryden, LGBTech, ModelViewCulture, Trans*H4ck and many more. The least we all should do, is: listen to them. Support their work. Share what they’re saying. And transfer this to the communities we’re all in. ----- All individuals & organizations: http://adainitiative.org/ - https://www.gittip.com/ashedryden/ - http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ - http://ethicalco.de/ - http://girlswhocode.com/ - https://www.gittip.com/juliepagano/ - http:// lesbianswhotech.org/ - https://www.lgbtech.org/ - http://modelviewculture.com/ - http://railsgirls.com/ - http://phpwomen.org/ - https://www.gittip.com/shanley/ - http://www.transhack.org/ - find more organizations here http://dayssincelasttechincident.com/
- to ensure our heart keeps beating. And to ensure that Open Source can have a future. Because “Open Source can only have a future if it does everything to be inclusive.” Thank you.
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