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

[Shaun McDonald]

On 28 Sep 2014, at 03:56, Kate Chapman <kate at maploser.com> wrote:

> Simon,
> 
> Diversity isn't purely a problem for the United States. Sure US culture is a dominant culture and Kathleen and myself certainly have a certain amount of privilege with our US passports. 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. Yes it is surprising to people that there are harassment issues in OSM, probably because a lot of the harassed do not speak up. 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.

I believe the gender balance in the tech industry in the US is more balanced in general. I remember going to a company wide event in the US for the company I previously worked for, and the whole tech team from the UK was surprised at the pretty much 50/50 split, whereas the London office was dominantly male in the tech team. This was noticeable in my Computer Science course too, where there was only about 3% women on my course. Going back further to school, after the basic computing courses that everyone had to do in the first 2 years of high/secondary school, the Standard Grade course had some balance of gender mix, however the Highers and Advance Highers were predominately male.

In Britain, there is a huge problem of a lack of women in computing based courses and jobs. Various bits of research point to the gender problem starting when a child is very young, hence the various campaigns to stop toy manufacturers and and toy shops from having gender specific sections or brands. It is a much bigger issue that just OSM.

When mapping, I try to add a wide range of detail. I’m thinking that we need more projects like Wheel Map which help and emphasis other things that are important to people. Would more specific project like this help?

It’s great to see some people going through the wiki and switching the odd words over to more gender neutral language.

> 
> 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. Unfortunately the method that funded that is no longer available as long as the OSMF continues to only seek to keep the servers running. 
> 
> This week I'm in Indonesia and I've had the honor of spending time with OSM contributors from every continent except Antarctica. The amount we are able to learn from each other and how things work in our different communities is very beneficial. In this case the sponsorship for the World Bank and the Australia Government is what is allowing this. Other open source projects manage to do this independently as part of the project. 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. 

Are they able to send a postcard or similar? There has been discussion of reintroducing that option again, or rather advertising it again.

Shaun

> 
> The OSMF can choose not to take action to improve diversity, though we will not be a free map of the entire world. We will just be one group's view. Continuing to take the attitude of doing as little as possible won't help. 
> 
> -Kate
> 
> On Sun, Sep 28, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Simon Poole <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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