Diversity as survival strategy: we need to be deliberate about it, and create space for the coming wave of hackers and entrepreneurs
If the open source movement of 20 years ago was about “taking down big software”, it gave rise to “big Internet” and much of the hacker culture we still see today.
It’s important to think about who was able to participate in open source in this period: overwhelmingly white middle class men in their mid 20s with decent access to required technology and few other commitments. This had implications for the overall culture of the movement. To this day, diversity and inclusion are down.
We take two approaches to this problem: we need to be deliberate about community norms. You don’t have to concern yourself with the morality of diversity to think that managing communications to keep people engaged in your project is good business. A great example is the FOSS Heartbeat project. Secondly, we need to create spaces for the hackers of the future. They are not going to look like us, and they will reject rules imposed by us.
