I wanted to come back to what’s already becoming an old theme for this group: what is this group all about? A few thoughts, followed by a proposal to try to create a community funded scholarship to DrupalCon London with the goal of encouraging diversity and inclusive leadership.
Like Jack Aponte said in a brilliant Drupal Voices podcast, talking about the power structure in a community is really important. For me, this group’s conversational function should be to discuss, analyze, and criticize Drupal’s power structure. Should we have a benevolent dictator for life? What are good examples of healthy community practice? What are examples of bad practice? How should this whole core initiative leader thing work, anyway? What are the problems in a “do-ocracy”? How should we pick our leaders? How do we enforce the code of conduct, and what does it mean to violate it? Who does our community privilege, and how are they rewarded?
There have been several discussions (with a significant focus on mental health) about alienating Drupal community practices. (Don’t worry Jeff! I loathe IRC too!) I dig it, and want us to go further in discussing how to change these patterns in the community. Mental health is a significant question for our diversity group, as are issues like race, class, gender, sexual orientation, language, disability, developer skills, urban and rural... the list can go on and on.
We can focus these questions by asking who holds power and who is marginalized, and what does our community lose or gain because of that structure? What perspectives are we missing? We’re already a unique community in the frighteningly homogeneous world of open source (which is why we’re having this conversation in the first place) but I think we could stand to talk a little more about who gets to the call the shots and who is getting left out.
I believe there’s a couple things we could do to make the group a little stronger, more active, and more focused:
Old fashioned outreach
We could all stand to ping a couple of friends who know their stuff about diversity and outreach to promote this group. I recently met with Myrna of Community Change in Boston who I met at the very BoF that spawned this group to talk about a FreeGeek in Boston. Myrna, you’re awesome, where are you?! I know you have some great ideas! And a very practical, important application of Drupal!
The organizers of this group, as a whole, are super busy... So how do we encourage a little more discourse and participation? I’m sure talking to a few friends, relatives, or frenemies and encouraging them to jump into a conversation or two wouldn’t hurt.
Proposed initiative: Send someone to DrupalCon London!
To steal an idea from Ryan Price: Could we set up an online campaign and figure out some way to provide a scholarship for someone to go to DrupalCon London? I think this could be way cool: Create a tiny scholarship (funded by we, the diversity group) to support a community member who can make important contributions to Drupal but who faces significant, structural barriers to entry.
Why let Google and the Drupal Association have all the fun? Surely, within the community of people who give a shit about these issues, we have the financial resources to create a small, independent (and possibly prestigious) scholarship, with the explicit goal of promoting diversity, inclusive leadership, and good governance in the Drupal community. We could ask the lucky person to tweet/blog/podcast/share about the event, and work to get them access to professional development sessions, books, and other resources.
Sending one person to DrupalCon London would be a real challenge, yet it is eminently do-able and would focus our efforts and give our group some visibility. It’s a small, practical step towards making Drupal a more inviting community. But if we pursue this plan, how will we decide who gets to go?