How to Practice Inclusion and Benefit Django by Kojo Idrissa

Speaker 1: Thank you everyone and good morning. Um again, this is me. Lots of there's a as I look at the slide now, it's like there's a lot more information. That's a busy slide with all this stuff on me. So I I I need to make that better for the next time I present something. But I do talk about, I've given talks on a number of different topics. But today we're going to focus on practicing inclusion. And so If you go back here, look at the top bullet point here. I'm changing careers from accounting and finance and moving into software development. So If you want to hire me, you can hire me. So why do I focus on that bullet point not so much for the self-serving plug, but more for the motivation of the talk. So I am relatively new to software development. And when I sort of became active in both the Python and the Django communities, one of my early thoughts was

Speaker 1: how can I make some sort of a contribution to the community? And as someone who doesn't have a CS background, I knew that my primary mode for contribution wasn't going to be writing the wicked codes and that sort of thing. So I thought, well, what can I do? I can try to help grow the community. And I wanted to focus not just on getting more bodies in, but actually trying to make the most useful uh growth possible as far as bringing in people who would be new contributors would actually be able to benefit the community. So what are some of the challenges that run into that? One of the issues is that currently the community is sort of pulling from a small pond. Czech communities in general, as many of you know, are predominantly CS, gendered, heterosexual white men. And A community in general, any community, tends to optimize its culture

Speaker 1: to the benefit of the people who make up the largest percentage of that community. And the issue with that is a culture that optimizes itself in that way can be alienating to people who aren't from that specific demographic. So not that this isn't to say that there's a problem with heterosexual CS gendered white men, but having a culture that tends to optimize itself for that one particular group tends to alienate other groups. And so what does that look like? If we take a look at the US population , The big green chunk, and this is the US population uh broken up by ethnicity as defined by the Census Bureau. That's where the data comes from. The big green chunk is people who are identified as white. The light blue is uh Hispanics or Latinos, the dark blue is African Americans.

Speaker 1: And so you've got a big chunk there that falls into that category. But then if we separate this the white group by race, I'm sorry, by gender, you notice that the big green the dark green chunk gets a lot smaller. So if we have a community whose culture is being optimized for primarily heterosexual white men, what we're doing is we've got a culture that's optimized to pull from thirty one about thirty or so, thirty, thirty one percent of the population, which is a small pool. And so what that also means is we are sort of ignoring or overlooking two-thirds of the population. This is just US data. I know Django is uh is a global project, but there's only so much data I can get from around the world. And Definitions of what is ethnicity vary from country to country, that sort of thing.

Speaker 1: But the idea here being that we're pulling from a relatively small pool to begin with, or that the culture is optimized. to benefit a small pool and that's a problem as far as finding the largest number of high quality contributors. But it actually gets worse. So we take this small one-third slice And then it gets smaller. So of that small slice that the culture was optimized for, there's a certain percentage of people who aren't going to join a technical project like this because it's too hard or they think it's too difficult. And so what was a small slice gets smaller and then you look at people who might have joined it, but you know they're not going to do Django. They're going to do Rails or they're going to do PHP or something else, so that slice gets smaller again. And so now you have an even smaller pool of potential contributors to draw from, because the people who are gonna contribute

Speaker 1: to Django or to the Python community or to whatever your technical community might be are going to need to be members of that community. So how do we take that shrinking slice and make it bigger? The focus here is on inclusion. And you might have heard the term inclusion used sometimes to be synonymous with diversity. I make a distinction here in this way. Diversity in and of itself just means having lots of different types of people. And that's not really difficult to do if you want more women or more people of color or more LGBTQ people uh to show up at your event or function, there are different groups that focus on those demographics, you can go find women, you can go find LGBTQ people, you can go find people of color.

Speaker 1: And hey, come to our Django thing. But are they going to want to stay? Is when they come and they interact with your community, is the culture of your community such that they're going to be comfortable when they arrive? And they're going to want to stay and they're going to want to come back again and again and continue to make contributions. So that's the distinction between inclusion versus diversity. Diversity easy to do but hard to maintain. Inclusion more like sustainable diversity, self-sustaining diversity, really. So Now that we've talked about this, the focus of the talk is well how? How do you do this? Because yeah, I've told you, well, inclusion is good. You need to have it, it'll enhance your community. The focus is on how. So I've got some different steps here, and this is by no means uh an exhaustive list or or all the options, but these are just some basic thoughts I had on the topic as far as how can you actually try to make

Speaker 1: your individual local communities uh and the cultures they're in a little more inclusive. The idea being that while Django and Python are global projects, the community actually happens in your individual group. So you're it's like I see some people here in the room. I live in Houston, I'm part of the Python Houston meetup, Python Web Meetup, some people here are from Austin. The actual community happens in those local meetups or in those local user groups So how can you go about trying to make your individual community culture a little more inclusive? Step one is to be aware of your group culture. So step one is building awareness. If we look at the Zen of Python, if you're familiar with Python, hopefully you are because you're at a Django conference, um one of the things in the Zen of Python is that errors should never pass silently.

Speaker 1: And that's one of the things that actually happens If you don't have an inclusive culture. If someone comes to your event, to your meetup or your co-challenge or what have you, they arrive and they're like, uh I I I don't I'm not comfortable here. They're not gonna file a bug report. They're not gonna, you know, write you a nice letter. Um, you know, they're not gonna, you know, you you they'll just go away And you'll never see them again. And then you'll wonder, well, gee, you know, there aren't a lot of there aren't a lot of women who come to our events, or there aren't a lot of people of color who come to our events. I don't know why. Well, again, the error will pass silently. And so to keep that from happening, just like with writing code, you need to try to check for exceptions. So As a member of your community, you need to try to be a little more active as far as looking around for issues that are happening.

Speaker 1: Is there anyone who seems to be left out? or excluded, just in general. Is there anyone who seems uncomfortable by certain conversations or comments that are going on? Or are people Making jokes that might seem fine and dandy, but you know, to some people, but might be exclusive or offensive to other people. Um are there people who are being sort of boxed in. I've seen at a number of different technical events. So in addition to the Python and programming meetups, I'm also a member of TXRX Labs, which is a hackerspace in Houston. So I'm I participate in a number of different technical communities. And you know, you see a phenomenon of, oh, a woman shows up. And then all the men just sort of gather around the woman as if it's like they'd never seen one before.

Speaker 1: It's like, oh, uh a woman. Look at the woman, you know. And so trying to be aware of those sorts of things. in your community as opposed to just sort of chatting with your friends. So building awareness of how your community culture actually, you know, actually manifests itself is important. Because you can't try to enhance or improve something if you're not aware of it first. Next, check your assumptions. And uh Lynn Root in her excellent talk this morning talked about this a little bit. Uh there are certain assumptions that get made. Um what assumptions are you making in your community and about the people who attend it? If your group's you know, 95% of a certain way, do you just assume, oh, well, it's because these are the people who like programming and web development, and people who aren't here are people who don't like that.

Speaker 1: Uh is that really the case? Or is that just kind of the convenient answer? Um is there any reason that people, certain types of people might not want to come to your event? And if so, what can you do about that? Um and this last point, spend more than 30 seconds on it. I mean the 30-second answer is, oh, well, there aren't any women here, so women don't like code. Or oh without any people of color here, so I guess those people don't like to write code. Uh well that's one potential reason, but maybe not the actual problem. Left is an exercise for the reader. Um, is this sort of a homework assignment for you all. Wherever you are, and sort of work on this over the course of the week here at DjangoCon, but also when you go home. Whenever you're in a large group setting, flip the demographics. For yourself individually.

Speaker 1: So if you're in a situation where you're a man in a group of mostly other men, How would you feel if you were the only man in a group of mostly women? Or if you were if you're a white person in a group of full of other white people, how would you feel if you were suddenly the only white person or one of the very few white people in a room full of people of color? And so on and so forth. So just spin those around in your mind, flip those different accesses, and and kind of try to think about how you would feel to help you develop a little empathy for people who aren't in your group. And then start to think about, okay, well, if I were in that situation, what sort of culture would I feel comfortable with? How would I want people to interact with me? So these are all things to help you build awareness.

Speaker 1: This is step one for being more inclusive or developing a more inclusive culture. 102 is to then actually take action. So here processing your log files, talked earlier about being aware and not letting errors pass silently. In any sort of software situation you've got errors, there's some sort of log file that's created. You don't just keep track of those errors and just you don't just write them down. You actually have to do something about those errors. So If you become more aware of your group's culture and you start to notice that there are problems or issues, be prepared to talk to the people who are the organizers of your community and who are your community leaders. To bring those issues to their attention, but also be prepared to help them to work on these things.

Speaker 1: So I see one of our organiz Paul Belly's here, one of our he is the organizer for the Python web meetup. So, and also our our DjangoCon chairs here. If you are organizing a group or something along those lines, you've already got a certain amount of responsibility and pressure that you have to deal with. And so members of the community can help you deal with these issues if you become aware of them. So don't just leave it to the leadership. Don't just say, hey leadership, I found these problems. Here you go. Take care of that. You should be willing to contribute to that as well. Feedback mechanisms are also important. So if you're organizing a community or leading a community, Do you have some sort of feedback mechanism so that if someone runs into a problem or an issue of some sort, they can

Speaker 1: let you know that they've had this sort of problem. Also, if you have a feedback mechanism, is it clear? Is it obvious? Um is it easy for people to find? But also have you made it clear that you actually want feedback from people Even if it's feedback that might not be positive. This is also an issue. You know, uh they can leave me a message on Meetup or whatever. That's Not really a proper answer. Um anonymous by default is always a good thing because if someone does have a problem that they want to share with you or they've experienced some sort of a a negative issue, um, they might not feel comfortable having their name attached to it because nobody wants to have that tweeted out later. Oh, this person came to our meetup and they were terrible. And the reality is that when people do make comments or

Speaker 1: have complaints and that sort of thing, there it is not uncommon for that to that certainly be turned into a weapon against them. It's not uncommon for them to be blamed. for having a problem. Oh, you had a bad experience? It's your fault. Why are you such a terrible person? The only people who have terrible experiences are terrible people like you. Terrible person. So why are you here being terrible? So it's I mean it it's in it it sounds funny, but it's a reality for people and for most people not so much with the funny. Um so again be prepared for that. So this is step two taking action Step three, and here we get into what is one of the more uh one of the less developed portions of the talk because this is an idea that's relatively new to me that I'm still working on actually, but I thought I'd share it with you all here.

Speaker 1: This idea of understanding privilege. And I gave a version of this talk at Alterconf in April of this year here in Austin. And one of the speakers, just like Red on Twitter, made this comment about privilege. Privilege, it isn't welfare having it easy. It's what you don't have to deal with. And so when we talk about privilege, a lot of people imagine privilege as like you like reclining on a sofa, being fed grapes while somebody fans you. You know, and or you know, or someone you know coming to offer you your choice of champagnes. But you know, but no, that's that's not what privilege is. Privilege is this wide range of things that you can just go through your life without having to worry about. Having less privilege means that you have more things that you have to worry about day-to-day.

Speaker 1: Based on that, I've developed this idea of privilege arbitrage. And if you're familiar with financial arbitrage or arbitrage in general, it's a matter of, you know buying buying low selling high uh taking advantage of of differences um for your profit here you can use privilege arbitrage again. It's a term I made up. The I-A-N -A-S -S. I am not a social scientist. So uh I I'm not an actual sociologist. I'm sure you know there's there's perhaps a a better academic discussion of this But this is just the term I'm using. The idea here of privilege arbitrage is if you find yourself in a position of relatively higher privilege then try to use that privilege to be of benefit to people who might have a lower privilege than you in that situation.

Speaker 1: And again when we talk about these differences in privileges as far as things that you do and don't have to worry about. Um well let's see We'll just go on to the next slide. So here I'm sort of uh working on this sort of personal privilege profile. And this is so this is what I've setup is uh my visualization is my personal privilege profile. And so we've got a few axes. Can you all read the the terms? Um some of these different axes. So one being CIS gendered, it's a 10-point scale, heterosexuality, male, being white, educational background, wealth and income. And so if you see here, this is my personal privilege profile, as I've uh developed it, as a CIS gender person, I'm it, so I am a CIS gendered heterosexual black male.

Speaker 1: As a CIS gendered person, I'm pretty much maxed out on privilege. Like I don't have to worry about anything with regard to my gender identity. There's like there are no issues for me. I just go through my day-to-day life fine. As a heterosexual male No issues. Like there 's there's literally nothing I have to deal with. I don't have to if I'm dating someone and I would just want to walk down the street holding that person's hand. Okay. I don't think twice about it. But if I'm not heterosexual, then I do. As a man, I have There have been very few times where I've had to stop and think about my safety anywhere. Now some of it is also because I am 6'5 and well over 300 pounds and have martial arts training.

Speaker 1: So so that definitely helps. Um but the the enhanced melanin in my skin sometimes causes me to be concerned about my safety because I might be shot in the face because of the enhanced melanin in my skin. But for the most part, there are situations where not only am I entirely safe, but I don't even think about safety concerns because I'm a man. And that's just How things are. Unfortunately, the world that we live in is in many ways uh sexist and heteronormative, and as a man who is heterosexual That doesn't create any problems for me. And so those are areas where I have higher privilege and I can try to use that privilege to to benefit people who don't have as much privilege as I do in those areas.

Speaker 1: Now there's some of these other areas again on white, I've I give myself a one as opposed to a zero. I'm I'm I could be a little darker, you know, I'm I'm on the lighter side lighter skin side of things as far as African Americans go. And and that actually matters in some situations. There are some cases where that is of benefit to me. So again, this is still a work in progress, but this is Something I'm I'm doing just trying to help develop the idea of thinking about when and where and how do you have privilege and how can you use that privilege to benefit other people. and to make your community more inclusive to people who might not be as privileged as you are on those axes. If you want to develop your own personal privilege profile, There isn't uh there's no real scientific instrument so far as I know.

Speaker 1: Although BuzzFeed, the website BuzzFeed has a privilege quiz that's not a bad starting point as far as thinking about what areas might you be privileged in Um again I'm not a social scientist. So final thoughts here. One from our former benevolent dictator for life, Jasop uh Jacob Kaplan Moss. Just as a systems tend towards entropy. If you leave a community alone, it tends towards toxicity. Good communities require continual effort. So it's something that we have to work on continuously. My addendum to that is continual effort by as many community members as possible. So we can't just have Jacobian being the person who's handling it, or just the chairs of DjangoCon being the people who are working on this. The more of us that are working on enhancing the quality of our community culture, the easier it is for everyone.

Speaker 1: That's all I've got. So uh I am if you want to find me later on the internet I'm transition on Twitter. Um the slides are gonna be available here at my GitHub. Uh My I have a website, but it's not really functional because I'm not so great with Django and I'm ashamed about that, especially being at Django Con. Um but that's just how that is. So um we have but a few minutes left for questions and if anyone has questions And if you have questions after this, then I am on the internet and I'm also tall and my head is shiny, so I should be easy to find while we're here.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and and and this is great because I didn't know from talking to you last night that you were you know how how involved to the community you are and uh and to the extent. But um How what what would be your advice in a situation because you know I mean I I can only I can I can imagine that my privilege quotient is Pretty good to graph it out. But um in in in a scenario though where you have I mean like you witness that thing. Or maybe you don't witness that thing, but then that person that you're talking about that you would really like to come back, but then they're just gone. And you like you you know that person who is performing the toxic behavior.

Speaker 2: And you know, in some cases, I mean uh specifically in a in a Linux user group that I was involved with briefly back in the 90s I mean, there were, I mean, there was some of the organizers, and I mean, but they were kind of the the sacred cow of the organization, and I ended up leaving. Because you know I didn't want any part of it. But at the same time that didn't solve the problem. I mean how would how would you suggest you know moving forward, especially in in in local groups like that? Because um It, you know, I'm I'm not the most social person. I'm not the person who wants to go out and hang out with people all the time anyway, but I mean I want to be a part of the community. But you know and

Speaker 1: so so so uh it seems like what do you do if the community itself is just sort of toxic or the people who are leading the community are toxic. Uh actually at UltraCon f Something like that came up. I had a conversation with a few people and they were dealing with a technical community that seemed like it was just going to be inherently toxic because that's how the leadership was. And their response was similar to you as they left And that might be the thing to do. One, leave a toxic environment. Two, perhaps you start another community of your own with similar interests, but with a difference on cultural focus. So Fast slides. The third group that I'm a proud member of here is Girls Coding Club, which is a meetup that we have in Houston, and it is designed

Speaker 1: for women who are learning to code. Well, women who are coders. So some of the a lot of the people who attend are women who are learning to code and it's a comfortable environment for them to come in and work on code. But then some of them are women who are already professional coders and they do some mentoring and that sort of thing. So it is a space that is designed to be inclusive and comfortable for women who are coding. And so something like that might be necessary. So if you've got a Linux group Linux user group that is toxic, then maybe you need to start another Linux user group that isn't as toxic. You know, one that has a better culture. As they say, be the change you want to see in the world. And again, if it if like I said if th a lot of these things are ideas that I'm working on, so if anyone has any other questions or wants to talk to me about it, you can find me on the internet

Speaker 1: or wandering around the halls. So

Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Gojo.