Why Isn't Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?

Post by knowitall » Sun, Dec 08, 2013, 3:06 PM UTC

michalu wrote: post #23

goggles99 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree there are systemic issues of racism keeping blacks and latinos away from open source, but those issues have nothing to do with open-source per se. The free time issue is a big one. Access to computers at home in early childhood is probably even bigger. You have been watching too much MSNBC. Young Blacks and Latinos watch 3-4 hours of television per day and play 2+ hours of video games. There goes your free…

I am white, but my father watched TV most of his time and never worked on anything and growing up in such environment so did I. If you grow up in an short-term gratification environment it's much harder to stay with problems long enough to solve them and thus you end up giving up on many hobbies sooner. My father was probably just lazy or resigned due to constant worrying about economic situation but I can imagine th…

Post by steveklabnik » Sun, Dec 08, 2013, 3:10 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #38

steveklabnik wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier in the thread knowtheory describes a specific situation that happens over and over and over again.

Are you talking about: "It's a sad joke Rubyconf attendees yearly confuse @bryanl and @daksis with each other, but it's happened at every Rubyconf i've been too (which is granted 3 but it's there)."? I don't think there's anything racist about that if it's an honest mistake the audience makes. Or did you mean to say the actual presenters announce them by the wrong name?

Post by theorique » Sun, Dec 08, 2013, 3:13 PM UTC

ceras wrote: post #30

theorique wrote: post #27

It's not clear to me that there's overt racism in any FOSS communities (e.g. racial slurs on email lists, active rejection of visible minorities at conferences). Perhaps I miss that kind of thing because I'm white, but I've certainly never met any overt bigots. Or maybe the bigots save that kind of thing for one-on-one so as to have plausible deniability? (For what it's worth, no one confided in me, as a white man, a…

> But the relative abundance of Asian (Indo/Pakistani and/or Oriental) members in IT and FOSS software suggest that there's not an obvious or passive "White Power" conspiracy going on there. This is a common argument but I think it's kind of irrelevant. It's not untrue, but it doesn't suggest that there is no bias against other groups (women, blacks, hispanics, etc.). I think it's fair to say Americans by and large a…

Post by Irishsteve » Sun, Dec 08, 2013, 3:27 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #29

theorique wrote: post #27

It's not clear to me that there's overt racism in any FOSS communities (e.g. racial slurs on email lists, active rejection of visible minorities at conferences). Perhaps I miss that kind of thing because I'm white, but I've certainly never met any overt bigots. Or maybe the bigots save that kind of thing for one-on-one so as to have plausible deniability? (For what it's worth, no one confided in me, as a white man, a…

If you type slurs into GitHub code search, you'll get over 10,000 results for many of them. Some of these are bad word filters, of course, but many are not.

Post by NAFV_P » Sun, Dec 08, 2013, 3:31 PM UTC

knowitall wrote: post #26

salemh wrote: post #20

You can jump right in and start writing some code. Will it be deployed? I don't imagine the pay-off to be immediate, or self-correcting (teaching/mentoring). I can't imagine how open source is somehow a teaching/development code base for beginners.

I've read somewhere that most open source contributors started their own projects, rather than joining existing ones.