10  Bias and Lack of Diversity

Open source software production lacks diversity.

In fact, open source is less diverse than the software industry in general.

Open source shares this perhaps surprising characteristic with other open collaborative projects, including Wikipedia.

In class today we will undertake shared note-taking in groups on this topic, preparing for a discussion.

10.1 Readings for each group:

• Coraline Ada Ehmke’s Contributor’s Covenant

• Linus Torvalds’ Code of Conflict and commentary.

• Frluckaj, H., Dabbish, L., Widder, D. G., Qiu, H. S., & Herbsleb, J. D. (2022). Gender and Participation in Open Source Software Development. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), 299:1-299:31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555190

• “Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors”

• Examine these “developer surveys” to add data (agreeing or disagreeing) with the opening statement of this page:

  • https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/
  • https://octoverse.github.com/

10.2 Additional readings (will be assigned to groups):

Albusays, K., Bjorn, P., Dabbish, L., Ford, D., Murphy-Hill, E., Serebrenik, A., & Storey, M.-A. (2021). The Diversity Crisis in Software Development. IEEE Software, 38(2), 19–25. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2020.3045817

Qiu, H. S., Zhao, Z. H., Yu, T. K., Wang, J., Ma, A., Fang, H., Dabbish, L., & Vasilescu, B. (2023). Gender Representation Among Contributors to Open-Source Infrastructure: An Analysis of 20 Package Manager Ecosystems. 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS), 180–187. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEIS58686.2023.00025

Padala, H. S., Mendez, C., Fronchetti, F., Steinmacher, I., Steine-Hanson, Z., Hilderbrand, C., Horvath, A., Hill, C., Simpson, L., Burnett, M., Gerosa, M., & Sarma, A. (2022). How Gender-Biased Tools Shape Newcomer Experiences in OSS Projects. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 48(1), 241–259. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2020.2984173

Antin, J., Yee, R., Cheshire, C., & Nov, O. (2011). Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (pp. 11–14). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2038558.2038561

Wikipedia page on gender bias in Wikipedia (so meta) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia

10.3 Questions for discussion:

1. What types of diversity does the literature discuss? How does open source compare to: a) the world, b) software industry as a whole.

2. What causes are discussed?

3. What possible approaches to improving the situation are discussed in the sources? How might approaches used in Wikipedia adapt?

4. What authority or legitimacy does work to improve diversity draw on in these sources?

• What arguments support the idea that a lack of diversity means that open source is failing to live up to its own ideals?
• What arguments are presented by those unconcerned about lack of diversity in open source? What values do they discuss?