A few volunteers at the ASF have been working on some new educational materials around diversity and inclusion (D&I) , so I was inspired to keep working on my FOSS foundations and major projects listing, to see what FOSS organizations have formal (or informal, but visible) programs in this area.
While there are plenty of research and resources for D&I programs in traditional corporate settings, most of us working in major FOSS foundations and projects live in a very different world. While the concepts and ideas for programs are a great inspiration, putting them in language and re-useable pieces that are practical to implement in a distributed, all-volunteer group is much harder.
To get started, here’s a brief (and incomplete) list of D&I related homepages at some of the major FOSS foundations or projects I’ve found so far. Please – if you have better links or links to other notable FOSS projects, send them along.
- Apache Software Foundation has a Mailing list
- Eclipse has a Mailing list
- Linux Foundation has a Resources and organization overview
- Software Freedom Conservancy has some Blog postings
- Debian Project has a Statement supporting diversity
- Django has a Statement supporting diversity
- Drupal has Program and Initiatives
- Fedora has Projects and Events
- Mozilla has an Initiative
- OpenStack Foundation has a Working group
- Plone has a Statement supporting diversity
- Python has a Statement supporting diversity
- ubuntu has a Statement supporting diversity
- WordPress has some Blog postings
Notes on inclusion (in list entries, so far): I’m primarily researching FOSS software non-profit foundations, or independent (non-incorporated) major FOSS projects that have well-defined and stable governance. Since D&I programs are reasonably new in the FOSS space, I included links above where there was an obvious landing page that both provided useful information (statement, resources, program office), and was explicitly welcoming and otherwise discussed D&I issues directly.
It’s great to see some passionate people with real progress and materials for their various organizations. But it’s making much slower progress than the speed at which the traditional high-tech corporate world has been rolling out programs in the past 2 years.
Note that I’m not making any evaluations of the efficiency or quality of any of these pages. For many organizations, it’s still a process of having a specific landing page, program office, or other focused and publicly visible effort to explicitly help with better inclusion for newcomers everywhere.
