Beyond borders: Building inclusive technology communities

We built a blueprint for global, inclusive communities and wanted to share a few wins.

Diversity? It’s beautiful. It’s complex. It’s essential. It’s a third rail.

We hit a live wire in the WordPress community over a lack of a black voices in the speaker lineup at WordCamp Europe in 2022. Vocal advocates in our black community in the United States expressed frustration with Europe’s lack of speaker diversity. European organizers expressed frustration with the accusation of discrimination from the United States.

I saw huge hearts on both sides of the Atlantic, miscommunication, and hurt feelings. Looking on at the twitterstorm, I felt for Europe. As someone who has always known she didn’t quite belong, I saw a side that other black community members didn’t.

This was an apples to oranges conversation. Wanting more black voices represented is different from diversity in an international context.

In Europe, underrepresentation looks different. Born in Freetown, Sierra Leone and raised in the United States since the age of 6, I knew the diversity we had yet to achieve here at home was not their fight abroad.

By 2022, I had years of community organizing experience, an advanced degree in community planning and regional development, and close to a decade of experience as a community and core contributor to the WordPress open source project.

Read more: Using metrics to improve open source communities

I believe it is where I was born, my experience, and my contribution that allowed my faith to use me in that difficult period.

My immigrant status fills me with fear. It makes me an outsider. But it gave me the insight to support inclusion in technology in a way that increased black voices and sent underrepresented speakers from five continents to WordCamps through partnerships.

Before Support Inclusion in Tech, WordPress community members fundraised without implementing programming to distribute the funds raised. This created confusion among donors and speakers.

Our success is possible because programming came first. It includes two crucial steps.

The first step is embedding policies and procedures into the platform that receives our applications. The only criteria to complete our application form is that you are underrepresented and are accepted to speak. 

We don’t require essays or recommendations. The impact on our sponsors and applicants is they understand we don’t play favorites. All speakers have an equal opportunity at support.

The second crucial step is to remove fear that could arise when stepping forward for support.

I’ll go into more details about what we do to remove fear, my strategies for program design, and soft skills like curiosity during my talk at All Things Open 2024. I believe you can increase global connection and inclusivity with intention and design.

Together, with these tools, we can reshape belonging in our open source communities.

More from We Love Open Source

• The power of mentorship in open source: Bridging the gap for computer science students
• From data to action: Using metrics to improve open source communities 
• 8 ways non-technical contributors can add value to an open source project

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