On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 12:30:13PM -0400, Derrick Stolee wrote: > During the Virtual Git Contributors' Summit, Dscho brought up the topic of > "Inclusion & Diversity". We discussed ideas for how to make the community > more welcoming to new contributors of all kinds. Let's discuss some of > the ideas we talked about, and some that have been growing since. > > Feel free to pick apart all of the claims I make below. This is based > on my own experience and opinions. It should be a good baseline > for us to all arrive with valuable action items. > > I have CC'd some of the people who were part of that discussion. Sorry > if I accidentally left someone out. > > I. Goals and Perceived Problems > > As a community, our number one goal is for Git to continue to be the best > distributed version control system. At minimum, it should continue to be > the most widely-used DVCS. Towards that goal, we need to make sure Git is > the best solution for every kind of developer in every industry. The > community cannot do this without including developers of all kinds. This > means having a diverse community, for all senses of the word: Diverse in > physical location, gender, professional status, age, and others. > > In addition, the community must continue to grow, but members leave the > community on a regular basis for multiple reasons. New contributors must > join and mature within the community or the community will dwindle. Without > dedicating effort and attention to this, natural forces may result in the > community being represented only by contributors working at large tech > companies focused on the engineering systems of very large groups. > > It is worth noting that this community growth must never be at the cost > of code quality. We must continue to hold all contributors to a high > standard so Git stays a stable product. > > Here are some problems that may exist within the Git community and may > form a barrier to new contributors entering: > > 1. Discovering how to contribute to Git is non-obvious. > > 2. Submitting to a mailing list is a new experience for most developers. > This includes the full review and discussion process. > > 3. The high standards for patch quality are intimidating to new contributors. > > 4. Some people do not feel comfortable engaging in a community without > a clear Code of Conduct. This discomfort is significant and based on real > experiences throughout society. > > 5. Since Git development happens in a different place than where users > acquire the end product, some are not aware that they can contribute. 6. Newcomers don't really have any idea /what/ they could contribute. They either have to come with their own itch to scratch, or read the code to figure out if there's something to fix. Mike
