SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Open Source Summit
Europe - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization
enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the
Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion (SDDI) project. SDDI
will explore, evaluate, and promote best practices from research
and industry to increase diversity and inclusion in software
engineering. Founding contributors include Comcast, Facebook,
GitHub, Intel and VMware and research professors from Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunications, Eindhoven University of Technology,
Oregon State University, University of
Auckland and University of Victoria.
According to StackOverflow's 2020 survey of more than 65,000
developers, 91.7 percent identify as male and 70.7 percent as white
or of European descent. There is a tremendous amount of work to be
done to create inclusive environments that can lead to a more
diverse community building the software that is the foundation for
our digital society. Research indicates that racially diverse
groups make better decisions, diverse open source projects are more
productive and that working on gender diverse teams improves
attitudes towards women.1
"While there are a variety of important diversity and inclusion
initiatives in the technology industry, none are focused on
increasing diversity across categories - race, gender, age and
cognitive ability - in software engineering and informed by
science and research," said Kate
Stewart, senior director of strategic programs at Linux
Foundation. "We have optimism about the future of the open source
community and our collective ability to increase diversity and
inclusion. The work we do today can influence the vibrancy of the
community and effectiveness of our technologies tomorrow."
SDDI will include a steering committee and working groups that
explore, evaluate and promote best practices from research and
industry to increase diversity and inclusion in software
engineering. The steering committee will be responsible for
prioritizing the initial working groups, which could address
research methods, ethics, resources and data, as well as diversity
in the areas of gender, age, cognitive ability and education.
Open source projects are encouraged to participate in SDDI to
inform best practices and to benefit from the findings of the
Project. Existing Linux Foundation projects - TODO, which focuses
on open source program office best practices, and the CHAOSS
Project, which identifies tooling and metrics for diversity and
inclusion - will also work closely with the new SDDI Project.
Supporting Comments
"The Software Developer Diversity
and Inclusion Project (SDDI) is an excellent initiative that
complements the work of the CHAOSS Project. Through collaboration,
we can accelerate progress towards building a better virtual
workplace for all developers," said Nicole
Huesman, Governing Board Co-Chair, the CHAOSS Project.
"We're looking forward to the research and best practices that
surface from this work, so we can implement it in our work on
metrics and tooling."
"Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of building long
term sustainable open source communities and programs," said
Chris Aniszczyk, co-founder of the
TODO Group and CTO, CNCF. "The TODO Group looks forward to
collaborating with the SDDI to share lessons and best practices
from corporate open source programs."
"Inclusive Open Source is of vital importance to industry and
academia. The Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion (SDDI)
project is a great initiative to bring inclusivity to OSS projects
and products. For example, gender biases are embedded in the very
tools that OSS projects use and the way information is structured.
I look forward to working with SDDI to bring down these barriers,
one feature at a time," said Dr. Anita
Sarma, Associate Professor, Computer Science, School of
EECS, Oregon State University.
"Software systems are responsible for all aspects of modern
life. They help humans make critical short-term and long-term
societal and personal decisions, and yet the diversity and values
of the people designing software systems do not remotely represent
the diversity and values of people on our planet. The SDDI
initiative, an active collaboration between industry and academia,
will drive essential and rigorous research towards understanding
barriers to diversity and inclusion while also discovering and
promoting best practices," said Margaret-Anne Storey, University of Victoria, Canada.
"Despite significant efforts over recent years to increase
diversity and inclusion in many software companies, little traction
has been made. This signals that new ways of thinking are needed to
better understand the barriers and best practices. This initiative
can help to stimulate new understanding and develop improved
diversity and inclusion practices, which will lead to more
innovative and useful software products," said Kelly Blincoe, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
"Diversity is essential not only to create products that address
needs of diverse groups of users but also to create sustainable and
vibrant development teams. SDDI has the power and the promise to
combine best industrial practices, insights from open source
software developments and findings of the academic research to
bring change in the ways teams are are organised and work together,
and ultimately both in more comfortable and sustainable working
environment, and better software products," said Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of
Technology, The Netherlands.
"Diversity and inclusion in software development have broad
impact beyond our industry, particularly for those who are living
in low and medium HDI countries. For them, being included in the
software development profession is often a life-changing
opportunity. I believe SDDI, a strong collaboration between
academia and industry, would benefit the disadvantaged groups
around the world," said Yi Wang,
Professor, Beijing University of
Posts and Telecommunications.
"Diversity of thought is a vital component for building
sustainable and healthy open source communities. Individuals from
diverse backgrounds injecting new and innovative ideas advances an
inclusive and welcoming ecosystem for all. SDDI with its focus on
best practices in increasing D&I will be instrumental in
providing the right direction for all committed to increasing
diversity," said Shuah Khan, Kernel Maintainer & Fellow, the
Linux Foundation.
"Without an intentional and coordinated effort like the SDDI, it
will be hard to move the needle on more diversity in software
engineering. There are many great practices across open
source, companies and universities that we need to aggregate, make
easier to discover and put into action. The Linux Foundation
is at the center of all of these communities and can get us
together to improve the state of diversity in tech," said
Nithya Ruff, Head of Comcast Open
Source Program Office, Chair, Linux Foundation Board.
"At Intel, we believe diverse and inclusive teams are more
creative and innovative. We continue to raise the bar in areas such
as representation, pay equity, and inclusion initiatives. This
year, we announced our 2030 goals, global challenges and RISE
strategy to create a more responsible, inclusive, and sustainable
world, enabled through technology and our collective actions. We
welcome the Linux Foundation's new SDDI initiative to focus on
improving inclusion and representation in the Open Source community
and look forward to furthering this effort," said Melissa Evers-Hood, Vice President, General
Manager of Software Business Strategy, Intel Architecture, Graphics
and Software, Intel Corporation.
"Open source lifts all boats -- creating innovation and
opportunity for developers around the world. For Facebook,
investing in open source is a way to empower developers as well as
broader communities of individuals and businesses. To that end,
we're thrilled to support Linux Foundation's SDDI effort which will
not only help us invest in the next generation of open source
developers but also promote increasing diversity in tech," said
Kathy Kam, Head of Open Source,
Facebook.
"As home to most of the world's open source software, GitHub
believes deeply in the potential of a passionate, diverse open
source community to move our world forward and accelerate human
progress. GitHub is thrilled to collaborate on this project, which
will allow us to "open source diversity and inclusion" for the
benefit of us all. By making software development more accessible,
inclusive, and sustainable, we can support the growth of a
community where all developers — no matter who or where they are in
the world — can learn, contribute, grow, and feel like they
belong," said Demetris Cheatham,
Senior Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, GitHub.
"Innovation is a core tenet of VMware. We know that to make
faster progress around Diversity and Inclusion we need to apply
innovation and research the same way we do to technology problems.
Supporting initiatives like this aligns with our values and is
critical to the long term success of the technology industry as a
whole," said Shanis Windland, vice
president, Diversity and Inclusion, VMware.
"SDDI will be an important initiative," said Daniel Izquierdo, cofounder of Bitergia. "We at
Bitergia do D&I research for customers and we look forward to
sharing our experience and learning from others through SDDI."
For more information about SDDI and to contribute, please visit:
https://sddiproject.org/
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux
Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the
world's leading home for collaboration on open source software,
open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's
projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including
Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's
methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the
needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create
sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information,
please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks
and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux
Foundation, please see its trademark usage page:
www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a
registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
503-867-2304
pr@linuxfoundation.org
1 Sommers, Samuel R. "On racial diversity and group
decision making: identifying multiple effects of racial composition
on jury deliberations." Journal of personality and social
psychology 90.4 (2006): 597. Vasilescu, Bogdan, et al. "Gender
and tenure diversity in GitHub teams." Proceedings of the 33rd
annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems.
2015. Wang, Oliver and Zhang, Min. "Reducing Implicit Gender Biases
in Software Development: Does Intergroup Contact Theory Work?"
Proceedings of Foundations of Software Engineering.
2020.
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