npm npmCamp Presentations (2016), 30 Aug 2016

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From YouTube: npmCamp 2016 - Lightning Talk - Educating Your Community to grow from ... by February Keeney

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Lightning Talk - Educating Your Community to grow from Safe to Inclusive by February Keeney

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I'm presuming I am coming through hi I'm februari on the internet, I have no tea and I. I work at github on the community and safety team and what what we do is largely trying to figure out how to make the open source communities on github, more safe, more inclusive and more diverse.

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So a lot of that is, you know pure safety issues like can you block somebody who's harassing? You? Are there escalation systems in place when there's a safety issue or you've been doxed or something like that? But then there's also a lot around how we help communities become both more diverse and more inclusive, and you know at a lot of that, too, is being very focused on the fact that diversity about itself is great, but it will end up with people leaving because it's not a very welcoming environment, it's not a very friendly environment.

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It might be safe at the minimalistic level, but it may not be very inclusive, and so we do a lot in terms of figuring out what we can do to build better tools to allow communities to better enforce codes of conduct to communicate better and a lot of these things like there's been some awesome talks today, like I, really liked Sharon's, is about exactly what we're trying to empower is better more empathic understanding of other people that are involved in your community, and so I want to talk a little bit today about some of the interesting things we've found, especially since tools themselves.

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Don't give you inclusivity tools themselves, don't give you safety, they don't give you diversity, they're, just a means to make it simpler and a lot of this you can do even with the existing tooling and existing systems, because it's about the people and it's about your attitude and how you approach the problems.

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This crowd, I feel like you've, had a lot today already about why inclusivity is important, but I like to re-emphasize these things, because they are useful when you get in those fights with the people which the open source world right now, sadly, has some very big voices that are saying like this is stupid. Why are we wasting time on this and I? Think it's really important to point out that the data the science around this you actually do social analysis around companies that become more inclusive, around communities that are more inclusive.

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They end up having better ideas. It translates into more revenue if it's a for-profit type thing, it translates into a larger growth for open source projects, and it translates also into more recruitment of more people and a healthier, more vibrant community. These are things that aren't just made up. There actually are some really great studies on this. If you need them hit me up on Twitter and I will forward new links to all that stuff.

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So I want to talk a little bit about two different types of harassment that we see and harassment is a fascinating thing in that it intent never matters, it's all about the impact and the effect that you're, actually one person's actions have on another person and the way you deal with different types of harassment really has to do with what the impact looks like and whether there is a chance of redemption here and so I want to talk about two different types here, that's so in one case, let's say we have somebody submits a pull request and somebody comes out and just starts making blatant racist remarks attacking the Arthur of the pull request.

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This is blatant racism. So that's one case another case we have somebody submits a pull request for a you, know, new feature and it just gets like really picked over and every last complaint is legitimate, but it's like really getting just attacked and picked on, and the response to each of these situations can be very, very different or should be very, very different, because they're they're both forms of harassment but they're coming from different places.

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From different intents, and in the first case, with the person who's just determined to be a terrible nasty human being to others, there's really little. We want to do other than just to block that person get out the ban hammer and their involvement in the community and just be like.

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We don't want that here and most codes of conduct give you really good at least framework for having that conversation, making sure that that's what happens to somebody who's jumping into your community and trying to destroy it, using be it by being a bigot or being sexist or whatever it happens to be.

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But in the case of like the micro aggression thing, what we found much more effective is actually coaching and helping people to understand the impact of their actions, and this the impact of actions is like where we try really really hard to always talk about the action. What was done and not the person, because what has once again there's some great studies that have found is when you attack the person directly, like you say, hey I've noticed that you know you're you're kind of being sexist.

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You only give these deep dive reviews two, ladies, that are contributing. Why do you do that? That's kind of sexist that person is going to immediately like dig in because you've just attacked them and accused them of being sexist or racist, and the studies have shown that like, even if you point out with evidence why this is the case.

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If it's an attack on somebody's identity, they tend to dig in deeper and be like no I'm, not like that you're just being sensitive, and so what we found is that you can foster you have a greater chance of getting somebody to change their behavior in their actions if you instead focus on the impact of that their actions and how the action affected other people, one of the best opening phrases for this, is something along the lines of hey.

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Did you think about how so your actions may have come across to so-and-so? You know she might have noticed that you've did this deep dive, review and I'm sure she appreciates it, but she might feel bad, given that the last three pull requests that came in from these you know, male developers you just gave like, looks good thumbs up. You know that might come across.

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How do you think it feels for her to come across and so change changing the story around to the person that it impacts instead of being directly accusatory, makes a huge difference in this. A very simple offline example is you know if somebody tells a racist joke and you say: hey dude, that wasn't cool you're being racist almost always, they will defend it immediately.

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In that case, you've probably all seen this happen where somebody tells a racist joke and you try to call them out on it and if you say, especially, if you say you're, being racist, they'll, almost always laugh it off or dismiss it and essentially be like I'm, not racist, that's not what's going on if instead you're able to point out an example of like how it's hurting some other person and you're able to do that. Most often that has a larger long-term impact, so apparently I'm behind a slide so address the address.

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The actions address the impact that they have not the person. If we avoid these identity attacks, we have a much better chance of actually redeeming people who don't don't intend to be racist. They don't intend to be sexist, but it's deeply. We have these internalized biases from our culture from our upbringing. We all have them once again, there's a really wish.

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I had more URLs in my slide deck because there's a great there's, a great online test, you can actually go take that will show you your some of your own internal biases, and it's really eye-opening. You see because you'll. We all want to believe that we're really.

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We look at everything black and white, and this likes like sort of like just how things are, but it turns out that the way we've been culture, our cultural highs, growing up, really impacts the way we look at different things in the world around us, and so it work takes a lot of work and a lot of effort to actually start to become aware of those things and do better.

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So my encouragement to all of you is, if you publish and contribute to open source projects on NPM, is to build beautiful communities around these projects and in doing that, build beautiful software. Thank you.