[Osmf-talk] Reaching out and diversity (Was: Re: AGM and board elections)

[Simon Poole]

Am 28.09.2014 04:56, schrieb Kate Chapman:
> Simon,
> 
> Diversity isn't purely a problem for the United States. 

I can't remember even remotely suggesting such a thing, in general as
you point out, the US, particularly in the tech industry tends to have a
better record than lots of other countries at least with respect to
female participation.

>                                                        Sure US culture
> is a dominant culture and Kathleen and myself certainly have a certain
> amount of privilege with our US passports. 

I wasn't referring to US dominance in general, just to our specific US
based rabble drowning out any even the slightest different way of
viewing things and showing an incredible lack of cultural sensitivity.

>                                               The fact that you make
> assumptions about Kathleen as an individual because of our citizen is
> exactly the type of problems that do not contribute to diversity within
> the project. 

I wasn't and am not making any assumptions about Kathleen. However
Kathleen has explicitly asked for us to force US based behavioural norms
on other societies, and I have to take that at face value.

Now in the concrete case of Germany at least we do share lots of common
values, example at hand: equal rights for women*. Once the organizers of
SOTM-EU had acknowledged and confirmed that they are aware of potential
issues, it isn't clear to me what the value of imposing specific
US-style rules on the organizers should provide, outside of adding
cultural irritations to the mix.

Back to the larger OSM project, we are likely to avoid conflict and
would not schedule an event in a country which doesn't share at least
respect for basic human rights. However we have user communities in such
countries, contributing to our data, should we exclude them? How far
should we crusade for change outside of the scope of the OSM specific
goals there? It is a very slippery slope.


>              Yes it is surprising to people that there are harassment
> issues in OSM, probably because a lot of the harassed do not speak up.

The people questioning your statement on widespread harassment were
asking an honest question, and knowing them it was because they have a
desire to help.

> Frankly it is exhausting. I think it is important to look at what
> OpenStreetMap US has done to help with gender diversity. Their board has
> multiple women on it and they are able to provide scholarships to
> SotM-US and SotM. There hasn't been an official study but based on the
> time I've spent in different OSM communities, I believe the gender
> imbalance is at least a bit better in the US.

As I pointed out right at the beginning, one of the issues is that we
simply don't really know and in particular don't know if any of our
actions has any effect. Alas the only way to measure this directly and
with high confidence (to ask for a gender declaration) is likely to have
a negative effect.

> 
> As for other types of diversity. The OSMF actually does less now than it
> did previously to help with diversity. There are no longer scholarships
> to State of the Map. Bringing people together from other view points and
> backgrounds in person is healthy for the project. 

The times are long long gone when a substantial part of the OSM
community gathered at SOTMs. Clearly improving diversity in the inner
circle has value in itself, and I would be supportive of making it
easier to attend the events, just as I'm in supportive of helping
individual developers. The SOTM scholarship programme is simply one of
many things that dropped out of focus during the licence change, I don't
believe there was ever a concious decision to not follow up on it.

I'm just not kidding myself that the effects on the overall composition
of our community are going to be large. Akin to expecting more female
guests at McDonalds if they have have more women on their board.

>          One thing to think about is that out of all these people
> attending only two of us are members of the OSMF. Why is the OSMF not
> relevant? In the case of the Indonesians I've spoken to they can't pay
> the membership fee because most of them don't have credit cards so
> therefore can't use Paypal.

As you know, it has been specifically me that raised and re-raised the
issue of making it easier to join the OSMF and since our last meeting a
couple of further ideas have turned up how we could resolve some of the
issue that dropping membership fees in such cases could be handled with
the result that I'm moderately optimistic that we might be able to
present a solution soon.

> 
> The OSMF can choose not to take action to improve diversity, though we
> will not be a free map of the entire world. 

Given that everybody in this discussion has been supportive of improving
diversity the question is only what -meaningful- actions are.

> 
> -Kate

Simon

* I'm using share in a rather loose way, as in both recognized in a
constitutional way and as generally accepted and supported by the populace.
> 
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch
> <mailto:simon at poole.ch>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     Kathleen,
> 
>     it would be preferable if you removed quotes from your posts if you are
>     not directly responding to them.
> 
>     There is a general talk list and a specific diversity mailing list that
>     are available to non-OSMF members and there have been numerous diversity
>     related discussions that have been open to everybody. The current
>     discussion here simply evolved from a pure internal matter to one of
>     more general interest.
> 
>     If you go back through the two threads you will not find a single
>     statement from anybody that OSM doesn't have a diversity issue, not
>     only, but particularly with female participation. It is a well
>     recognized issue and the reason we are having this debate in the first
>     place.
> 
>     One of the most disturbing things about this discussion is that one
>     aspect, namely cultural diversity is being completely ignored. OSM is
>     not just an English-US dominated undertaking like so many of the OSS and
>     FLOSS projects that have been pointed to. OSM is a collection of many
>     nearly completely self-contained and independent national, regional and
>     local communities and projects that have one common goal, to produce the
>     best map of the world.
> 
>     That we, for practical reasons, use English as our lingua franca should
>     not lead to the very mistaken assumption that we are all part of the
>     same cultural group, particularly not that we are all well versed in  US
>     subculture and required behaviour. Wit the incident in the parallel
>     thread where the two sole non-Anglo-US persons to speak up, obviously
>     not knowing what they were getting in to in a US dominated back patting
>     thread, quickly got put in their proper place.
> 
>     Now we all tend to feel nice and comfy somehow assuming that our values
>     are universally shared, but unluckily that is somewhat at odds with
>     reality. We've never seen a study on which common values outside of map
>     making are held throughout the OSM communities but I expect that there
>     could be some nasty surprises for all of us.
> 
>     This doesn't mean that anything goes, we can and have set behavioural
>     norms that we hope all can follow so that we can achieve our common
>     goal, and generally get on reasonably well which each other. Clearly
>     some of those are rooted in the cultural origins of OSM in the UK. But
>     we should not fall in to the trap of trying to impose our norms far
>     outside the scope of what is required for our actual project. Please
>     don't forget that even though it might seem different on this list, the
>     core English speaking community of OSM is 15, perhaps at best 20% of our
>     active contributors. We cannot and are not in the business of crusading
>     for US cultural rule of the world.
> 
>     The other thing I wanted to touch on was some obvious misconceptions on
>     the nature of OSM. While it is clear that some parts of OSM resemble
>     some of the OSS/FLOSS projects and that a lot of the people in the inner
>     OSM circles are there because what they do is administrative or
>     technical and required to keep our infrastructure running, OSM is
>     clearly not a tech project. If at all there are perhaps 1000 people
>     engaged in that aspect of OSM, tiny compared to the 50'000 or so core
>     contributors, minuscule compared to everybody that has done at least
>     something.
> 
>     For essentially everybody outside of the inner circle, OSM is a fun
>     project where you can go outside, add stuff from your neighbourhood and
>     see it shortly afterwards on an on line map, and if you are lucky you
>     might even have an app on your phone that you can use with OSM data. If
>     you are in a less privileged region of the world it might even be the
>     only reasonable map you have access to and help you with your daily
>     life. It is neither a meritocracy not particularly technical.
> 
>     For OSM it is core that we achieve more diversity in our contributors
>     and not in the, to use your lingo, the already extremely privileged
>     group in the inner circle. The people that can afford to go to
>     conferences and travel the first place. So pardon me when their
>     (perceived) needs are not always on the top of my priority list.
> 
>     The paradoxical thing about female participation in OSM is, even though
>     we don't have a long track record of incidents, there are really no
>     gender specific requirements, as Emilie says, with some exceptions, the
>     environment is at least not particularly unfriendly, we are not really a
>     tech project, we have far less potential conflict areas where gender
>     might play a role than wikipedia and casual contribution does not
>     require a large commitment, in the end we have less female participation
>     than activities that are outright hostile to women and died in the wool
>     sexist. I'm actually fairly sure we have even less relative
>     participation than the archetypical male dominated motor sports.
> 
>     Now if any body could offer (well founded) insight on that, it would be
>     really helpful.
> 
>     To further muddy the waters none of the studies carried out by the
>     university of Vienna showed any strong gender dependent cause of not (or
>     rather stopping to) contributing to OSM. There was iirc a hint that
>     certain multipliers might not work as well, but that is about it.
> 
> 
>     Simon
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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