9  Bias and Lack of Diversity

Open source software production lacks diversity. In fact open source is even 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.

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/

Odd numbered groups will read:

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

Even numbered groups will read:

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

Both will read:

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

And all of these articles:

“Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors” https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation,

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

Inside Wikipedia’s Attempt to Use Artificial Intelligence to Combat Harassment https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aeyvxz/wikipedia-jigsaw-google-artificial-intelligence

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? How might approaches used in Wikipedia help?

  4. What authority of legitimacy does work to improve diversity draw on?

  5. In what ways does a lack of diversity mean that open source is failing to live up to its own ideals?