Episode 124: Practitioner Guides: #7 Diverse Leadership  ## Metadata - Author: [[CHAOSS]] - Full Title: Episode 124: Practitioner Guides: #7 Diverse Leadership - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[7]] [[governance]] [[implementation]] [[monitoring]] - Summary: Thank you to the folks at Sustain (https://sustainoss.org/) for providing the hosting account for CHAOSSCast! CHAOSScast – Episode 124 This episode of CHAOSScast kicks off a new Practitioner Guide series focused on “Building Diverse Leadership” in open source communities. Harmony Elendu hosts with co-host Georg Link and guests Dawn Foster and Peculiar Umeh, exploring why diverse leadership matters, how CHAOSS’ practitioner guides turn “walls of metrics” into practical action, and how three specific metrics: Board/Council Diversity, Sponsorship, and Inclusive Leadership, can help projects become more welcoming, representative, and sustainable. Hit download now to hear more! [00:00:35] Dawn, Peculiar, Georg, and Harmony share their backgrounds. [00:02:57] Dawn gives us an overview of the Practitioner Guide series and emphasizes that the guides focus on how to improve projects using metrics, not just on measuring. [00:05:13] Georg asks Peculiar what inspired her to write the “Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership” guide. She describes working on CHAOSS metrics templates and wanting to help non-data science people use them. [00:08:09] Harmony connects the topic to broader industry conversations on diversity and inclusion. Peculiar explains that diverse leadership brings different perspectives, experiences, and voices into decision making and uses CHAOSS as an example. [00:10:30] Dawn expands on how seeing leaders “who look like you” motivates people to participate and aspire to leadership. [00:11:28] Georg talks about diversity as social justice and explains benefits for the projects: resilience, innovation, and better products for diverse users. [00:14:25] Peculiar shares the three metrics and why there were chosen. Dawn adds that guides are designed to change projects, not just describe them. [00:18:09] Georg notes Board/Council Diversity is the most intuitive to measure and Dawn cautions that many aspects... - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maB5b8t1cDQ [music] Welcome back to chaos cast [music] the chaos community podcast where we share use cases and experiences that measures open source community health. On the panel today we have Don Foster, we have Piculia and my co-host Gail Glink. we will be having conversation about the diverse leadership practitioner guides and before we get started. Hi Don, welcome to the podcast today. >> Yeah, thank you Harmony. Thanks for organizing this. I'm Don Foster. I am the director of data science within the chaos community. I'm also an open source strategy consultant. I've been working in open source for I don't know about 30 years. I've been doing this a very long time and various different types of roles but I'm excited to be here today to talk about the practitioner guide. >> Hi everybody. I'm Pila Sume. I'm a open source advocate project manager for curios education project working with super bra project um from Nigeria and I'm so glad to be here talking about this awesome professional guide that I've contributed a lot to diverse leadership. Thank you. >> Hi, I'm G. Welcome back to Chaos Cast. I'm super happy to be here with you and thank you Harmony for inviting me on as your co-host today, Don and Peculiar. I'm so excited to talk with you about our new practitioner guide, getting started with building diverse leadership. It's a topic near and dear to my heart, and I'm looking forward to diving into the metrics and how we can use them to make open-source communities better. on my background. I know I'm on the podcast a lot, but maybe there are new listeners. I'm a open-source strategist and director of sales at Peturgia and I co-founded the chaos community. So, I've been around for a while and these metrics that we are talking about today. I actually helped write those initially. So, this is really a good topic today and I'm ready to dive in. Thank you so much, G, for joining me today to host this podcast. As always, I'm excited to host this podcast and also be part of the host for the practitioner guide series. My name is Harmony Elendo. I'm a technical product and project manager. And in open source, I lead the chaos technical writers focus group and at my core, I focus more on documentation and program management. It's a pleasure once again to be your host for today while I co-host with Gag. Hi Don. Can you give us a background knowledge on the practitioner guide series so that our new listeners will be able to like have something to get started with? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we've realized over time within the chaos community is that people sometimes struggle when they're presented with what we affectionately call a tsunami of data or a wall of metrics because we have dashboards that have so much information that we've found that people tend to get overwhelmed in how to actually use them to make their open source projects better. So, one of the things we decided to do when we created the data science working group within the chaos project, we decided to start a chaos practitioner guide series. And the idea behind this was to focus on a single topic. And rather than just focusing on the metrics, which is what we've historically done within the chaos project, the focus of all of these guides is how to take what you've learned from the metrics and make things better. So, how do you improve your project based on what you've learned from certain things? And so, we actually have nine of these guides now. I discounted them. We have guides on contributor sustainability, responsiveness, organizational participation, security, suns setting an open source project, building diverse leadership, which is what we're here to talk about today. And then we also have two that are not getting started guides. One's about demonstrating organizational value and one is about assessing viability. So we have a whole range of these practitioner guides and I think we've done podcasts on most of them. And so now we're here today to talk about the building diverse leadership guide. >> I will make sure to drop the link to all those guides that we already recorded into the show notes. So anyone who wants to check them out. They're really fantastic ways of getting started with metrics because they're so focused and they guide you through how to do it. Peculiar, I'm curious to hear from you. What inspired you to write this particular guide on getting started with building diverse leadership? >> I'm inspired to write this practitional guide. First, I was part of a team that redesigned the chaos matrix into a new template. After the resigning of the curios metrics into a new template, I got curious because I read through a lot of metrics and I was like, "Wow, these are so amazing if communities can apply them in their communities and in their project." And out of curiosity, I wanted to learn more how do different metrics come together like when I was going through the practitioner guide to be a practitioner guide. How can we take practitioner guide like I mean matrices to help others who are not from data science background to [clears throat] actually help them improve their project health and with this in mind I started looking into data science uh working group uh project on GitHub. I came across this topic and I was like wow this is actually interesting when it comes to leadership. How to be part of a leadership in opensource and being that I was then aspiring to be a leader in open source and ensuring that my career path in open source is what I wanted to be. So I wanted to learn more how to be a leader and lead opensource project. How leadership in opensource project work. I was inspired to also see that there is a gap in diverse leadership across many opensource community because I've tried different opensource community and I come across that I saw this gap because some communities I didn't see like diverse leaders in that community. So why I know that opensource comm open source tribe on contributions from people in different world leadership also I thought to myself often doesn't reflect that diversity as I saw in some community. So I decided it's better and good for me to write on something that can help people see the need to have diverse leaders in their opensource community and to give room for others to come in and learn from the existing leaders that are already there. So this guide was created to provide this practical steps and metrics that communities can use to make leadership more inclusive and sustainable and also representative. So that's what actually inspired me. Thank you. >> Thank you very much Piccolia. And I know that we've been having a lot of conversations in the industry and also technology as a whole on diversity and inclusion and this has been something that's very important not just in open communities but also in other forms of communities and also contributions right so yes I agree with you diversity should matter especially knowing that people should be able to participate in everything from leadership to the ground floor basically contributing from ground floor upwards. So but then I would want you to elaborate on why diverse leadership is important especially in the open source industry. Yeah, in all sorts industry and ecosystem I can say diverse leadership matters because one it brings different perspectives, experiences and voices into decision making very important. So when leadership reflect the diversity of contributors and users right you see project becomes more innovative and is also become inclusive and resilient also it improves usability and then transense communities trust and ensure under represented group feel seen and empowered to contribute I'm going to use chaos as example for my explanation. I'm staying in chaos and contributing to chaos because I came in and saw a leader in chaos leadership position that is from my environment and I felt if I say something she could kind of understand me better. So that diversity I saw made me to stay and also is what is giving me the quality strength to also be a leader in Kos community. So diversity matters because of what it brings into the opensource community. Yeah, and I think what Peculiar just said is really important because the way I look at diverse leadership is I think that it helps drive a more diverse and inclusive community. Because if people can actually see someone in a leadership position that is like them in some different ways, it makes them feel more included and feel more like participating. just like Peculiar mentioned, seeing leaders who were, you know, from areas in the world where she is and who were like her in certain ways. And so I think having people, a wide variety of people in leadership positions from various backgrounds, I think really does help other people see themselves and see that they could eventually become a leader in the community. And I think it makes people more motivated to participate. >> Yeah, I agree with you on that. That's true. >> In a way, we could even say it's about social justice. When we look at open source, the statistics, the surveys that have been done, a majority of open source is done or the people involved are white men, middle-aged who are living in some comfort in terms of economics [snorts] and opensource has that potential of bringing more in. There are several challenges of course involved and there's [clears throat] a reason why we have those discrepancies of who's engaged right now. But the potential is there because we can work in the open because we can be transparent. We need to make communities as welcoming as possible and bring people in. I like that you've touched on both aspects of how focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion helps projects themselves be more resilient because it has a wider base of contributors to draw from. It's not just dependent on just a few. It makes it more innovative because we have more points of view, more people looking at it and bringing their experiences. We can make the open-source software that we develop more inclusive for different users because sometimes use cases get forgotten when people are not in the community themselves who have this particular use case. So if only men are developing software then women get sometimes forgotten and we have seen examples of this unfortunately. So there are these benefits to the project themselves, but there are also benefits to the individual contributors. And particularly I appreciate that you shared your own story of how engaging in open source helped you build your leadership skills and helps you advance your personal development. So this is something that is benefiting everyone all around. I think it's good for pointing the option. >> So this topic of diversity, equity, inclusion is very broad. There are many aspects to it. It's about the people that are involved about how to engage them. It's about setting up the governance in the project. It's about looking at our documentation. There are so many things that we can do to make an open-source project more welcoming and inviting and bring people in and allow them to work with us. I'm curious, how did you decide for this practitioner guide on the three metrics to focus on? >> Okay. So we selected these three metrics that that's the board and council diversity because and then sponsorship and inclusive leadership because they are dressed different but like complementaryary aspect of leadership diversity that was the main reason why we selected them. If you look at board council diversity, you see that it just top decision making body right represent varied background you know helping contributors see themselves in leadership. Then when you think about sponsorship, you see that sponsorship focus on leaders actively advocating for and also elevating new voices or other voices. This strengthen is strengthens their retention and like reduce bias when that's sponsorship, right? I mean sponsorship we talk about here it's not about like it's not about funding people is about advocating for people supporting them guiding them to get to a certain role or do certain things or achieve their goal in opensource uh community or project. So then the other one is inclusive leadership. We chose that because it builds governance structure that create a pathway for diverse contributors to step into leadership roles ensure sustainability over time. So with this we look at and we decided to choose this because these three board council diversity sponsorship and inclusive leadership they address this different aspect of leadership diversity that complement themselves. So this was major reason why we choose this. I think Don [laughter] might have something to say about that. Yeah, just to add to that, I really like Peculiar's take on why we chose these particular metrics, but I also think that in the spirit of the way that we've designed these guides because the goal of the guides is to get people to improve on this topic. So, in this case, to improve the diversity of the leadership within their project. So I think in particular metrics like sponsorship is really important because we want people to think about if they're in a leadership position how they can help bring that next wave of leaders into the project and how they can help other people become successful. So I think in the spirit of making things better I think the sponsorship metric is particularly important along with inclusive leadership. So that's more about having good governance processes and procedures and having a way for people to move into leadership positions which is incredibly important because otherwise you know the same people can continue to lead in the project forever and not give new people opportunities. So I think that you know in particular these last two sponsorship and inclusive leadership are really about how you can make things better within your project and make your leadership more diverse. One of the observations that I have about I'll just stick to the first one, the board council diversity of the three metrics, the one that seems most clear to me because we can count how many people are on the board and we can look at the specific diversity and like count how many men, how many women, how many from different regions. So the board council diversity seems somewhat intuitive to me. Is that also the experience you have with this? And in a way the reason I like this here is because it's like a north star. If we have at the highest level of leadership in a project, those voices represented. The board council diversity metric helps us identify. Yes, we've been able to at the highest level of our governance at the board or council level achieve this. >> So I do think that's absolutely true. So looking at these three metrics, the board and council diversity is certainly the probably easiest to measure. But I also think that when you're looking at diverse leadership, there are so many things about us that people might not necessarily know that might not be obvious when you're trying to count people in different ways because, you know, there are invisible disabilities, there are, you know, people with different ways of thinking. You might not necessarily know where someone's originally from, for example. So, one of the things that I like in the guide is that rather than just sort of counting things, the guide encourages projects to run surveys where you ask people, do they feel represented by the board or the council? Do they feel like the board or the council represents the diversity of the overall project committee? do they feel like the board or the council considers diverse experiences and backgrounds when they're making decisions? So, I think there are also in addition to, you know, looking at people and what you know about them, but I think it's also really important to ask the community how they feel about it and whether they feel represented. >> I completely missed that point. Of course, when we talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, it's a very personal experience of people. So, I really like how you are encouraging to get to that experience. How do the community members experience this in the community? That is such an interesting take on this and so needed, so important. So talking about the sponsorship metric, this one I know when we wrote the metric and afterwards when we talk about it, people often think about money, sponsorship, they think money and this is not what this metric is. It's not about giving money to people. It's not about giving money to project. It's not about money at all. Sponsorship is about helping others and it's different from mentorship. Mentorship is where someone the mentor helps develop a certain skill or shows someone around the project the tools and mentorship projects like Google s of code or outreachy they're time bound there might even be paid component during the mentorship program again this sponsorship is different from this sponsorship ship is an experienced person in the community advocating for someone new. They share their network. They give them opportunities. They vouch for them. Put their own reputation on the line. Say, "Hey, I believe this person can do this within the community. Let's give them a chance." And so sponsorship is a way of opening doors. It's bringing people in and letting them develop into the community. So, I just wanted to touch on sponsorship and really make clear what this means in the context of an open source community. >> I agree with you on that. um about sponsorship. Initially when I came in contact with that matrix I already thought of the first part of your explanation thinking about money but when I went through it I saw that oh this is not actually what it is and this is what it is and that helped me to be able to write on this guide because honestly I've seen this type of sponsorship in action. I've been part I've experienced it and seeing someone in the community a leader standing for you advocating and getting people listening to you and bringing people your way in open source is really amazing I've been part of it and I love that in open source we could found people like that leaders in the leadership chief position who are doing that and encourages newcomers when A lot of it have been seen in the community encourages people to stay because they can look up to people they can count on and ask question and get direction and guide. In fact, I agree with you on what you said on that. >> Yeah. And just to add to that, I would say that this has been a big part of my success personally in open source. So when I when I started working in open source, most of my work was more internal. So doing open source strategy within companies. So in particular within Intel and so I was working mostly in internal facing open source activities and we hired Denise Cooper quite well known within open source and she actually just kind of started bringing me along with her. She's like hey I'm doing this panel at Ocon. I want you to be on it to talk about open source with me. And so she sort of brought me into some of the communities that she was part of and she encouraged me to blog. She encouraged me to get out and speak at conferences. And I don't think I would have been as successful as I am now had it not been for Denise sort of acting in this sponsor role for me. >> Oh, that's amazing. >> Yeah, really concrete story about how sponsorship works. Thank you for sharing that. So we've covered the board council diversity where we see the result of our efforts. We see sponsorship what works at the individual level bringing people in and giving them opportunities. And now we have the third metric inclusive leadership. And you'd mentioned earlier this is about setting up the governance the procedures in the project and having pathways to leadership, having election cycles, having term limits, having the structure. I think of inclusive leadership metric that we wrote in the chaos project as setting up the structure for all these other things to occur and to happen. And that is how I think these three metrics really complement each other in my mind when we started developing this metric. This is why I think having the different focus and the last one being what do we need to do and change in the project itself so that we have the fertile ground for people to grow into leadership to become involved. what do we need to do there? So, I really like this selection of metrics. Do you have any last words on all of these metrics or inclusive leadership specifically? >> I think I'm good. I think we covered them. And like Garrick said, I really do like this combination of metrics because I feel like each one of them hits at a different area and so I think all three of them are pretty important. purpose of leadership. It shapes the culture, the governance and sustainability of project. These guys add to the offering of concrete metrics and practices that communities can adopt to evaluate and improve leadership diversity. So it doesn't just highlight the problem. It provide actionable steps to build pathways for not just one aspect of it but for inclusive leadership, sponsorship and then also accountability. So this guide is actually like good for communities to adopt. Thank you for bringing that up because I was about to talk around it. I love the choice of the metrics especially. Thank you so much peculiar and done. But leadership is about the people the contributors and the community is made of the contributors. The projects are built by the contributors. So it surrounds around the people. Now I know the guide has covered everything but I would want us to talk about implementation because there could be communities or projects or even programs that has not or that have not factored in diverse leadership and when they listen to podcasts like this or read through the guides they would want to implement them. So I would want us to talk about how implementation can be done and how leadership or the leadership or the community or the project itself will get to like monitor through the steps that the guide has actually provided. So I'd want us to elaborate on that. >> When you talk about implementation, you can it's just simple. You start by like creating communicating a clear pathways for contributors to grow into leadership roles can create like opportunity for sponsorship and let people in your community know yes we have leaders who are willing to sponsor them because if they're not aware there's no way they can know who to talk to or how to go about it. You let them know. So you create and communicate and let people know okay these are available they're like the pathways to get into a leadership position is actually like open for everybody. So when people or community members are aware of things they exist in the community and encouraged to take part or to take be part of it I'm sure they will like take part of it. So this way you can also like find a ways to make sure that as they get into these roles as time goes on that you have a way to like check on them what do they do since you're advocating for diverse leadership. Are they actually like advocating for that really? and you find a way measure what they're doing and find other suggestions to you can give to them to help them as you're doing so you're also like supporting them as in what they're doing. So it's not just like showing people how to do it and then you lead them to themselves but you as a leader also who is creating pathway for people to get into leadership and who is ensuring that others you have a diverse leadership in your community or your project you also have a means to like check on them and also make suggestion for with them to make more progress in what they're doing also monitor them that's actually what I'm saying and make adjustments if there's a need and suggestion if there's a need. So you ensure that this d leadership you have in your community actually like achieving the goal of it. Okay. So and then implementing this will also help your commit and project be more diverse in their leadership structure also and everybody coming into your community or project can also see it and you're not just leaving them like I said you're also going to be checking on what they're doing you know that's where the caution is necessary see the results they're producing and also check on what they're doing you know making improvement are monitoring their results. Also remember open source community is a global and encompass different people from different background. So we have to like you avoid that these people are not just taking a one size fit approach to what they're doing but they are open to adopt different strategies from different people different perspective different background no matter the they also adopting that to support everyone in the community so that's what I can say about implementation implement consider it and then you check the result also what are they actually doing? Are they accountable? Are they like achieving the goal for this we set for it? And also be cautious so that they're not like focusing on a certain area but they are like achieving the whole goal of having a diverse leadership in your open source community. And like we said earlier, uh bringing them together, bringing diverse leadership in will bring in a lot of different perspective in running your project and all that you're doing in your community. >> Yeah. And just to build on that a little bit, one of the things that we've included in this guide is some sample survey questions because surveys are a really good way to also help monitor the results of your diverse leadership because you can run them every 6 months, every year, whatever is appropriate for your community. and keep track of whether people feel like they're being represented by the leadership within the project and feel like they're being supported and feel like they understand the processes to move into leadership. And so by also using surveys in addition to what peculiars just mentioned, you can, you know, help track it over time and see if things are improving and getting better. >> Thank you so much, Don, for that addition, especially with the survey. I think it's going to help a lot of communities and also facilitate their step much more faster. [snorts] I also noticed that guide had factored in certain consideration and cautious that would aid monitoring of the results. I don't know if you want to comment on that before we go to our value ads. >> I would just maybe add that. So, one of the things that we do include the cautions and considerations in all of the practitioner guides, and I think in this one, it's particularly important because when you're talking about diversity, you really do need to be careful about how you collect data, how you use the data, and things can get a little bit tricky. So, the cautions and considerations section does have a few tips for how to do this in a way that makes your community feel supported and helps build trust and just being a little bit careful about how you handle this type of data and what you do with it. Can I just add real quick? One of the things when it comes to building healthy communities is also the interpersonal relationships that community members form. And so doing the surveys, looking at these metrics are great ways to scale it. As a community member, talking to people, you also get a good feel for how things are going. And so that I think is also an important part to have your ear on the ground and personal relationships. >> Thank you very much Gail for adding to that. I don't know particular do you have any comments on this as well. >> Good. Thank you. >> Okay. Thank you very much Piccul and G for today's podcast. Yeah. So it's about time for value ads and I will begin. So so far the past few weeks and days I have been trying my hand out on automations right trying to like get more involved with the artificial intelligence as well. So I found an open source tool called N8N that has been helping me on that regards and I think it's something that people should try out especially when they want to go into automations with AI. The good thing is it has a lot of stuff from triggers to third party application and even our everyday mobile application and tools that we use for our work and also personal life. So I think that would add value to like the audience for those listening. >> Hi, this is Gayog. My value ad that is bring me a lot of value join meaning right now is looking forward to the holidays. We have a big family holiday with Christmas celebration. My siblings are coming across the ocean to be with us. the house is going to be full. I also have a former foster youth that reached out and said, "Hey, I want to spend Christmas with you." And so we having a big family gathering and then it spread out over multiple days with different parts of the family where one day we host with a certain part of the family. Christmas day, it's us and our in-laws and so immediate family and we just have a really relaxed day opening presents from under the tree and then the grandparents are hosting another day uh for another part of the family. So it's one of my favorite seasons of the years. I'm really looking forward to all the gatherings and traditions. So for example, we have a tradition of renting a van and then going out altogether drinking hot chocolate looking at Christmas lights because there are some people who are so creative in decorating their houses with Christmas lights and then we have pajamas where we get matching pajamas for everyone in the family and it just creates a really cozy family environment and I really look forward to it this year again. Oh, that sounds like so much fun, Gayorg. That sounds great. So, mine is a little more immediate. So, within the UK, we have just had a bumper crop of acorns this year. So, there are so many nuts lying on the ground. And our squirrels, who we also feed peanuts out of a feeder in the backyard, they've gotten super chunky as they put on a whole bunch of weight to get them through the winter. And so they're absolutely adorable because we've got these little fat squirrels that are playing outside of my office window in my back garden. And so it's just been super adorable and they've been really cute today. >> My very add is rest. Taking time to rest. Um I can't wait for next month when I can have that time to rest. So no matter how you have work hard and do a whole lot of things and you need that rest. So that's my very rest. Sometimes there a lot of work to do but rest is very very important. So um I'm waiting for it. I can't wait for um December one to come and December 2nd. Please just leave me alone because I'm going to be resting. So ah you have work from January to November December. Please rest because it's very important. is help you to build back back again, get strengthened to move ahead. Rest is important. That's >> Thank you everyone. I know we all agree with Piccolia. We should find some time to rest. And that's the end of today's podcast. If you have a topic that you'd like us to cover on the podcast, whether it's questions you want answers to, suggestions for guests or panels, or even feedback for what we've done [music] so far, we'd love to hear from you. Please do well to email us at podcast at chaos.com community with your messages. [music] And as always, you can find that email address at the show notes. Thank you for joining us today. We hope you enjoyed this episode. [music] Until next time, your chaos community., Episode 124: Practitioner Guides: #7 Diverse Leadership, CHAOSS, 01kb31y3wefcqffajk2mk67qve.