Diversity as a Dependency Anna Martelli Ravenscroft 1 Im tech - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Diversity as a Dependency

Anna Martelli Ravenscroft

I’m tech support and logistical coordinator for Alex Martelli, my

• husband. I’m also a pythonista, co-editor of the 2nd ed PyCookbook,

and a recent graduate from Stanford, with a bachelors in Cog Neuro. I get to apply Python and OpenAfni to fMRI for research and product development.

What do you think of

when you hear the word

diversity

Show of hands - how many people here have attended some kind of diversity training in the past?

The Usual Framing

• Moral
• Legal
• Political/Social

All great reasons, I mean, who can really say they’re against tolerance and inclusion, or really *WANTS* to get sued! Unfortunately, all too

• ften, the rhetoric of diversity comes down to...

The Usual Framing

Guilt

All great reasons, I mean, who can really say they’re against tolerance and inclusion, or really *WANTS* to get sued! Unfortunately, all too

• ften, the rhetoric of diversity comes down to...

• Laying
• Threatening
• Avoiding

Guilt

The Great Motivator

Read a study recently, about how guilt acts as a self-punishment system to stop anti-social behavior and then as a motivator to induce pro-social, reparatory behavior. Usually, in the rhetoric of diversity, people are either... When people try to motivate me with guilt, it pisses me ofg. So...

Guilt

• Guilt-Free Zone
• Diversity is NOT

a club to beat people with

• No “diverser than thou” games
• No traps

Guilt

I’m declaring this a Guilt-Free Zone! There’s a lot of great talks going

• n right now - if people aren’t here, that’s why. Nobody should be

given a hard time for not being here. And if you need to leave for any reason, no one’s going to give you a hard time either.

W I I F M

Why diversity matters

So I’m going to talk about diversity a little difgerently. I’m going to try to answer the question everyone has but feels too guilty to say out loud: WIIFM. I’m gonna focus on an aspect of WIIFM - WIIFPython, or rather more generally, WIIFOS. And I’m going to explain why I think of diversity as a dependency. We all know about dependencies. I remember installing Linux back in the days before dependencies were automatically marked for installation or even documented... Even when something isn’t absolutely necessary for something to limp along, for things to work really well, you need to pay attention to your dependencies.

Agenda

• Review some studies
• Diversity model
• Final thoughts
• Q&A

the rest of the talk: please hold questions until after.

Small town

• Study of a small town
• magazine/newspaper subscriptions
• who were the most influential in town

Robert K Merton (pub. 1957): the ones with the most “cosmopolitan” rather than “provincial” view, the ones who had the most influence from *outside* the town, had the most influence *in* the town.

Big corporation

• network analysis
• in-groups
• structural holes
• creativity study

Ronald S Burt did this huge network analysis of this corporation with thousands of employees. See James? and Robert? James only has connections inside his in-group. Robert has connections in his group, but ALSO across the structural holes to people in other groups. Once he had this network - Burt ran a creativity study.

• Solving difficult problems
• Unexpected results
• Analogies
• Conceptual Changes
• Different pools of knowledge

Science Lab

• J. E. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of insight (pp. 365-395). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka” but “That's funny...” —Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) Scientists solve hard problems - often in lab meetings. Dunbar wanted to study this process. Best advances were from unexpected results - BUT individuals tend to explain them away, lab groups explored why. Often used analogies to explain and to achieve conceptual changes. Benzene: Kekule’. difference in group problem-solving abilities: diff pools of knowledge.

Universal Design

• curb cuts
• text-to-speech
• voice control

How many have used curb cuts strollers, bicycles, wheeled luggage! Of course, it wasn’t designed with that in mind - it was something designed for handicapped, benefits everyone

Review

Interactions among individuals with different perspectives, skill-sets, needs and motivations, generates innovation and creativity

These are just a small sampling of studies that all point to the same conclusion - ...not just beyond what the individuals can accomplish on their own, but often with benefits that extend beyond the individuals. Let’s unpack that a bit...

Kinds of diversity

• needs/motivations
• skill sets
• perspectives

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned things like gender, race, identity, all the usual “diversity” stufg... we’ll get to that, but I want us to keep in mind what it is about diversity that matters! particularly when we’re talking about WIIFM, and even more when we’re talking about WIIFPy

Contributing to Open Source

• patches
• modules
• recipes
• bug reports
• beta testing
• documentation
• sprints
• PEPs
• giving talks
• organizing events
• translation
• internationalization

How many of you have contributed to Open Source? In what ways? Let’s think about why.

Scratching an itch

What do all these things have in common? Individuals scratching an itch.

Different itches

• Each person has a different itch to scratch -

different needs/wants/motivations

• We need Linus Torvalds to create Linux. We need

Tim O’Reilly to publish books and organize conferences, but we also need Eric Raymond to help us understand what it means to be Open Source, and Kathy Sierra to create the Head First series, ...

Different skills

• We all have different skill-sets that we bring

to Open Source

• Not everyone can give a talk like Damien Conway, or wade through legalese

like Lawrence Lessig, or explain human factors of Open Source like Fitz and Collins-Sussman, or create Pynie (python on parrot) like Alison Randal, but we need these different skillsets, the different pools of experience of Dunbar’s creativity study

Perspectives

• We all come to Open Source with unique

backgrounds and experiences

Here’s where identity and gender and race and all those

• ther things you usually think of as “diversity” come into

play - those identity diversities are the why and how of differing perspectives. So how do these things apply to Open Source? Problem solving: example.

Problem-solving

• We all approach problems in different ways
• and may even see different problems

performance, internationalization, testing, ponies,...

• and different solutions

Hadoop, ICU, Selenium, Django, ...

I remember when I started learning Python - Alex said that programming is for people who love problem-solving, because there’s always so many problems to solve! We all approach problems in difgerent ways, with difgerent perspectives, and difgerent skills to bring to bear on the problem.

Diversity matters

• Not just for the moral or political reasons
• but also for very pragmatic reasons

Remember all the different ways people contribute to Open Source?

How does diversity matter?

• different needs/motivations + skill-sets +

perspectives...

• generate innovation and creative problem

solving,

• which leads to...

Better Software

• Open Source already lets us create the best

software

• but it isn’t the best software it can be...

yet.

For Open Source to be the best...

• Diversity is necessary

• We *need* all those different itches, the

different skillsets and perspectives. We *need* the creativity and innovation that diversity generates.

• So, diversity is necessary.

Necessary

• but not sufficient

Why? Because...

Diversity is hard...

• All those differences cause friction
• problems communicating
• different goals and priorities
• valuing other perspectives and skill sets

You can’t just grab a bunch of random people and expect miracles. You can’t even expect them to just get along.

Harnessing Diversity

• Education
• Facilitating communication
• Clear process and goal-setting
• Clear decision-making
• Willingness to Work

So, how do you take a bunch of diverse people and actually get that great innovation and creativity stufg I’ve been talking about?

People are hard

• and we don’t

come with docs

Thought experiment: creating a web-app to work in multiple browsers

• works in firefox and safari and opera and lynx, and then you’ve got

netbooks and iphones and other mobile phones ... it’s a pain in the

• backside. and that’s even when you’ve GOT SDKs and APIs and docs

and specs and help-forums and books and design patterns. every person in this room, and every person you will ever meet - has a difgerent OS, a difgerent chipset, and a difgerent browser. And *none* of us come with docs. When you hear about people getting together to create a diversity statement or just trying to discuss diversity issues, it might help to think of it as just trying to create “docs for people”.

Diversity rocks!

So yeah, diversity is hard. Hopefully, I’ve at least helped you understand why diversity matters to Open Source, and why some of us consider it worth trying to increase.