Problem: I recently came across an article written by Angelyn Francis, a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, about Wikipedia’s diversity gap. As Angelyn described,
The most recent 2020 survey by Wikimedia — the site’s parent organization — found that 87 per cent of its editors are men. The survey did not ask about race, but almost half live in Europe and one fifth in North America.
Sarah Severson, a librarian at the University of Alberta and a member of the board for Wikimedia Foundation, said that the lack of diversity trickles to the content on the site, because it’s volunteer-based, so editors will work on pages that they are interested in.
“You see really long articles on Dungeons and Dragons characters, and you see an independent female artist having a small article,” Severson said.
“You don’t know what’s missing unless you have diversity within the editor forces,” she continued. “When you have an editorial community that’s all North American white men they’re just going to see different things.”
There is not, unfortunately, much diversity in the type of writers on Wikipedia. The same problem persisted in Stack Overflow’s 2020 Developer Survey: 68% of contributors were white or of European descent.
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Solution: This business would focus on diversifying the open-source community by ensuring that focusing site content on the types of voices and communities that often are not heard. This could come through giving awards to extremely prominent open-source contributors (thereby “rewarding” positive behavior, in 2015, Redhat started the Women in Open Source awards and spotlight two women per year); hosting “Edit-a-thons” (as described by The Star, “some of these have been organized by a number of interest groups around the world — the groups Black in Physics, 500 Women Scientists, Art + Feminism, for example — to create and edit entries for people who are overlooked”); or providing differently aligned incentives for those of diverse backgrounds to contribute to open-source projects (i.e. paying for diverse contributors to incentivize parity).
To illustrate the scope of the problem a bit more, I wanted to share a few more statistics:
Of 5,500 Open Source developers surveyed in 2017, the representation of immigrants, from and to anywhere in the world, was 26%. (Source, Open Source Survey)
While 37.8% of professional computer programmers in the U.S. workforce identified as ethnic or national minorities in 2017, only 16% did in Open Source.
A 2002 survey of 2,784 open-source-software developers found that 1.1% of them were women.
A 2013 survey of 2,183 open-source contributors found that 81.4% were men and 10.4% were women. This survey included both software contributors and non-software contributors and women were much more likely to be non-software contributors.
A 2017 survey of 5,500 contributors to projects on GitHub found that 95% of contributors were men and 3% were women.
Perhaps it’s a bit of beating a dead horse to belabor this point; but the statistics are shockingly low. As a result, it’s safe to assume that certain stories and perspectives are not being shared or discussed because of the lack of diversity on these platforms. Moreover by including more diverse perspectives, projects and initiatives will become more successful, multi-faceted, and robust. When people from different disciplines and backgrounds collaborate, as argued by Frans Johansson in their book The Medici Effect, innovation occurs. Some examples described in that book (and recreated by TheNextWeb),
Cross-discipline Diverse Creation: In quantum computing, physicists are partnering with software engineers to create a whole new field of computing. At IBM, for example, our open source Qiskit engineers worked with chemists to develop new chemistry modules that extend quantum computing into the chemistry realm.
Cross-specialty Diverse Creation: In AI, neuroscience researchers who study the brain are collaborating with data scientists and programmers to create more effective machine learning models, many of which are open sourced for future development.
Cross-expertise Diverse Creation: And even in space, developers in IBM’s Space Tech Hub are collaborating with astrophysicists and aerospace engineers to understand the anthropogenic space objects in lower earth orbit and using AI to predict orbits and conjunctions in orbit. The result is two open source projects that continue to engage developers, astrophysicists, and aerospace engineers in innovations for the final frontier.
The beauty of a diverse open-source is that the benefits (cross-language platforms, more accessible algorithms, geography-sensitive development) can all result from opening up the scope of who is seen as an “open-source contributor.”
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Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)