Fri, 18 Dec 2009
Diversity in Free Software: South Asians as an example
As someone born in India, I sometimes look around and wonder, Where are the Indians (and other South Asians) in Free Software?
(I don't mean to exclude South Asians from other countries, so I will lump us together. I believe that we are more similar than we are different, although I know more about India than about the rest of South Asia.)
There is no shortage of Indians performing information technology jobs in the United States. The same is true in academia; the Computing Research Association uses National Science Foundation data to show about 15% of computer science bacholor's degrees are awarded to "Asians or Pacific Islanders." These are not precise numbers targeted at South Asians in particular, but they confirm a general feeling that plenty of technologists in the United States are from that part of the world.
South Asia is quite a populous region, coming in at over one billion people. It, too, has plenty of technology workers. So much FLOSS conversation happens in English, and India is well-suited to handle this; English is an "official language". Indian academia reports that there are 350 million English users and about 90 million English speakers.
So let's visually compare the Debian developers map for South Asia (over one billion people) and that of New Zealand, a country of four million.
India:
New Zealand:
These two countries have about the same number of Debian developers (at least, who have marked their location in the Debian LDAP database). About four.
South Asians comprise about one sixth of the world's population. There are about one thousand Debian developers; we represent at best 1% of that. These numbers are comparable to the under-representation of women in Free Software, especially when you compare the figure to South Asians' over-representation in the rest of information technology.
That makes me sad.
Take a look at the Debian developer map again. You'll see that Debian is certainly not an Americans-only project, or even an English-speakers-only project. South America has a respectable dotting of developers, and Western- to Central-Europe are packed.
I have strong feelings about Free Software. It emerges from an ethos of personal empowerment, and with open source it has become a dominant force in computing. Yet there are plenty of sharp people -- at least women and South Asians -- who, somehow, become culturally excluded from participating.
Why care about diversity?
Consider the diversity of contributors we already have. Some contribute to Free Software because of particular business needs, such as what caused Avi Kivity to write KVM, the new leader in Linux-based virtualization. Everaldo's art background gave us the "Crystal" icon set that set the standard for sharp-looking icons on the Free Desktop for years. Josh Coalson knew about compressing sound, and his Free Lossless Audio Codec is now the standard in high quality audio.
We already have a great deal of diversity. We should be celebrating!
Back in 2001, FLAC's users were celebrating. In that year, I decided to ditch proprietary operating systems because I felt I could achieve all my computing needs in the Free world. A happy user of FLAC myself, I lurked on the mailing list as I watched grateful people thank Josh for the great software he wrote.
Different contributions will excite different sorts of users. The more different people we have improving FLOSS, the more happy users we can make. Happy users of FLOSS are Free users. Happy users can become contributors, putting forth code, documentation, translations, and word-of-mouth marketing.
The first reason to improve diversity in FLOSS is to better suit our users' needs. The more diversity we have in our contributors, the more chance we have of tickling our users in the ways that please them the most. I wish to see an end to software that restricts users' freedom, so I want to see us build the tools that users want.
One thing that pleases me is when I see other people contributing who seem similar to me. When I went to Debconf, I was thrilled to be surrounded by people who cared about software freedom and technical excellence. I had even more fun being social, chatting about rainforests, mutual friends, websites, and music. I might have had the most fun playing the card game Mao.
A second reason, then, to improve diversity in FLOSS is to increase contributor retention by increasing joy. Mao was an example of a cultural bond I happened to share with a handful of Debianites. The more diversity we have, the more frequent these sorts of coincidences will be.
The final, most obvious, reason to reach out to groups of people who do not typically contribute is that we can increase our numbers. That by itself is so valuable. Ubuntu sees 100 new bugs per week, even after the bug squad's efforts. If we can do a better job of recruiting new contributors, the raw numbers give us more strength in creating and maintaining world-class software as well as letting the world know about it.
Changing the balance
I believe that there are plenty of South Asians quite capable of contributing to FLOSS. I believe the same of women. I believe the same of men.
Back to the topic at hand. Why do the South Asians vanish when we look at Free Software, not tech in general?
There are plenty of reasons I can dream up, based on my experience with Indians.
- Plenty of South Asian parents urge their children to make low-risk career choices.
- My mother reports that schools in India focus on memorization instead of creativity. This can leave little room for extracurricular pursuits.
It's tough for FLOSS advocates to work directly on these distant issues. But I think we can focus some problems we can help solve. Crucially, awareness of Free Software spreads best by social circles. I learned about Linux from a friend at a summer camp. I'll repeat that:
- Awareness of Free Software spreads best by social networks.
So if you want to spread that awareness, try to be a bridge.
If you meet someone from an unusual background for open source who needs support or mentorship, try to help. That is an investment in the diversity and growth of Free Software. Those people can now unlock more "open source minorities."
What success looks like
Google Summer of Code helps some new contributors get started and provides that mentorship. Rachel McCreary was invited to the SciPy conference after a successful summer. Her father left a comment explaining how her sisters participated in FLOSS via Google's Highly Open Participation (GHOP) Contest:
Rachel was inspired and motivated by BOTH of her little sisters, each completing six GHOP tasks (if memory serves).
GHOP and GSOC has been a game-changer for these girls. Rachel's younger sister is applying to schools such as MIT with an interest in a science major. The youngest daughter now has a Caltech poster on her wall with the intent to eventually attend.
Their proud Dad
Soon, these stories will be commonplace. Until then, we have work to do.
(I'm still researching these topics. If you can help me find any sort of data to help me learn more about diversity in FLOSS, even if it seems like I wouldn't like it, leave a comment.)
Posted by Karthik at Fri Dec 18 17:18:06 2009
I've spent some time thinking about the lack of women both in engineering/computer science overall and FLOSS in particular and have only concluded that the divergence starts young (i.e., trying to get women into CS at the university level is probably too late). I just sent you a paper (alas, no link) about women and hacking/free software that I think you might enjoy.
Posted by Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock at Fri Dec 18 17:29:47 2009
Posted by Kumar Appaiah at Fri Dec 18 17:53:35 2009
Posted by Shahbaz at Fri Dec 18 21:13:00 2009
But at the same time it seems a wrong statistic to take only Debian as a measurement. The recent foss.in saw a lot of contributors to various projects. We have OLPC guys, lots of fedora guys, and around 15 people from KDE ( who had a great dinner BTW :) )
Posted by Nikhil at Fri Dec 18 23:21:27 2009
Also, the standard (de-facto) books which everyone uses also use conio.h and the like everywhere meaning that a secondary school student will be unable to compile code he requires for class. This is only a problem because replicating the code provided in class is necessary if you don't want to lose the easy 50 marks in your practicals.
Posted by Roshan at Sat Dec 19 00:02:38 2009
Posted by Kartik Mistry at Sat Dec 19 00:28:12 2009
Posted by Pramode at Sat Dec 19 00:35:57 2009
Posted by niq at Sat Dec 19 00:50:00 2009
Where is the Indian Apple or Cisco?
I have lived in South Asia for 5 years and I have found developers here to be less entrepreneurial than some other developing markets, such as Eastern Europe and Israel.
Israel's entrepreneurial output is 10x that of India despite that it has a fraction of the people.
Posted by B at Sat Dec 19 05:03:53 2009
I spent about two years of my life in India and my opinion is that part of the problem may be that the Indian culture does not encourage a "collective" sense of contributing to a whole. Rather one works for family, caste, friends, or God, than an anonymous public. Neither is public contribution valued, or even appreciated; people would rather think of one as odd when contributing for free, so there's neither fame nor reputation to gain. The government may mandate "Unity in diversity", but social reality is not so. From what I have seen of the rest of Asia I reckon it's about the same.
That is not to say Asian folks are not generous, or that they are selfish; they are definitely not more so than other people. It's kind of a value that "Western" societies have developed more: the idea of contributing to the whole for the benefit of all (plus individual recognition of one's contribution) that I find missing in Indian culture today (it doesn't only show in the lack of taking part in FOSS).
Again, it's not to offend Asians or praise so-called Western achievements; I hope you get my point, it's just a feeling I have.
Regards, Leo
Posted by Leo at Sat Dec 19 12:05:40 2009
So we need to add donation boxes at temples and mosques where people can drop off printed-out commit logs, as indications that their charitable contributions included writing free software!
takes tongue out of cheek
I'm sadly not in the mood to make caste jokes.
Some resources & notes you might already know about:
Kirrily Robert's OSCON keynote
FOSSKriti, which I learned of via Arun Raghavan
FLOSS in Egypt and parts of the Middle East
Stuff like this often percolates to Geek Feminism, in case you don't know of it already.
Posted by Sumana Harihareswara at Sat Dec 19 19:25:30 2009
Speaking from India, I would say that we have a worse case of "Somebody Else's Problem" (SEP) than most other societies. It is not uncommon to find people criticising how something or the other is working (or not) --- and yet be unwilling to lift a finger to fix it.
For FOSS, the principle of "if it is broken, then try to fix it" is the first step in joining the development process. So SEP and FOSS development are at opposite ends of the spectrum.
There are a lot of "hacks" that people all over India have made in order to improve their lives. I have heard that someone at IIM is making a compendium of such hacks. However, such "hacks" are mostly made by poorer people (necessity being the mother of ...). Educated Indians, by and large, regardless of which caste they originally belonged to, tend to behave like ivory tower brahmins.
(Apologies for the pessimistic sounds. I am actually an optimist!)
Posted by Kapil Paranjape at Sat Dec 19 21:21:43 2009
Kumar and others, I agree that South Asia has a bright outlook. I want to accelerate it!
Shahbaz, I think your point about "the lure of good jobs" is a good one, but I think most of the rest of the programmers in the world also came for that lure. So I think there's something more specific we should be able to find, environmentally or culturally.
Indian education focuses on rote memorization rather than creative learning, as I touched on in the post. I appreciate Roshan's point about code in education not compiling on Free compilers. Doing my high school programming assignments in Emacs with GNU C++ was how I really got started with GNU/Linux in the first place. Pramode's comment speaks to this, too. You guys might want to look into the Teaching Open Source <http://teachingopensource.org> initiative.
I'm very interested in nig's comment. WS02 is a consulting company that specializes in Java middleware on the Apache platforms, and I take it that their office in Sri Lanka makes a huge difference. When I talk about connecting people to Free Software via social networks, jobs totally count.
Leo's point about the lack of a culture of "collective" is very interesting, and it's particularly interesting that it nullifies the fame benefits from contributing.
Kartik Mistry, nice that you met Dean! And nice that you were already thinking along these lines.
My friend Chris Chan suggested this: Contract software developers stuck in that world might not feel invested in the software they use. All the software they've written was throw-away university projects or for a multi-national corporation. My summary of that is, "Their perspective prevents them from feeling that they might contribute to community-owned code."
Sumana, thanks for the links! I already know and love Geek Feminism and will check out the rest.
One last point: Kapil Paranjape, you wrote about all these non-software hacks put forth by Indians. One problem with software is that most of it comes without source code, making it pretty unhackable. Even then, the source code is something separate from the binary, so the instinct to "take something apart" doesn't necessarily apply in the obvious way to someone who wants to change something.
Posted by Asheesh Laroia at Sun Dec 20 14:18:02 2009
I've also found striking similarities amongst the majority of institutionally instructed developers and the more sage among us (age 55+).
I believe there is a strong correlation between foundational education and what I call "the force". "The force" is a combination of: awareness of open source in general; ability to find information - quickly without trying to recall some book somewhere; willingness or even desire to "break the rules"*; passion for software; self confidence.
These factors, especially when combined with a friend who is of like mind, makes fertile ground for a FOSS contributor (or hell, even an adopter). Community with others makes a huge difference - having someone you can share the experience with generally keeps people engaged, motivated, and passionate.
Many that I see come through the formal education system seem to be stripped of these characteristics, "the force" is very weak ;) And it is not always possible to overcome. Even after education in FOSS many seem resistent or uncomfortable with the quality of code in the community and don't even seem to acknowledge that they can actually participate in the community.
A common trait is that these folks don't seem interested in extra-curricular development. As with school (and homework) the job is the job. They show up to write some code, and then they leave. They're not really super excited about the idea of working when they get home.
I find that these developers also don't know a whole lot about their computer beyond the actual code they write. It's actually pretty amazing. I've seen this with both win32 and *nix developers - even embedded folks! They have no clue how the operating system is structured, no idea how to perform basic system maintenance, add or remove users, and so many other simple tasks.
By learning to recognize those within whom "the force" is strong, I've learned that I can seed FOSS amongst teams with those most likely to infect those around them. Social networking is absolutely critical to fostering this growth (new arrivals to the FOSS community love to tell you about all the cool software and projects their finding - and they love to hear of more)
Now, if only we could get the education system to encourage students to explore - submit proof solutions in any language - extra points for usage of design patterns - extra points for innovation. The memorization system is, as previously stated, very good at producing automatons, but not so great at producing passionate, creative, ambitious developers.
Now if only we could get some money to hire a ton of automatons to do all the legwork on our awesome FOSS ideas! - which is, I think, a contributor to Google's success with their engineers. Google works very hard to foster a creative environment and encourages developers to explore and engage in the FOSS world.
Posted by Sean Penn (no relation) at Mon Dec 21 01:14:44 2009
Posted by Asheesh Laroia at Mon Dec 21 23:00:29 2009
Now coming to my contributions -
I am working as an executive in an Engineering college in India. My aim is to expose students(and faculty) to latest open source software. We are using Linux on desktop, Eclipse(used along with C, C++ and Java compilers) and MySQL to teach in the labs. Instead of using outdated and often irrelevant proprietary technologies, I made sure students get exposure to latest tools and technologies. Scaling up Linux adoption in our college is a slow process. Not due to any technology related reasons, but due to a desire to migrate gradually in a phased manner so that faculty members will have time to adjust/modernize. I think "catching them young" is important when it comes to introducing free software.
I think adoption of open source software(on a wider scale) has to happen first. Then contributions will happen. My 2 cents/paisa.
Posted by Linux User at Tue Dec 22 00:10:05 2009
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Contributors_In_India
Posted by Rahul Sundaram at Tue Dec 22 01:55:23 2009
As Linus Torvalds himself has said, "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
You want to be part of Debian/Fedora/Linux/GCC/FreeBSD/Whatever? Great! SHOW THEM SOME CODE.
--SYG
Posted by Sum Yung Gai at Tue Dec 22 17:27:29 2009
Sum Yung Gai, I agree. More contributions from South Asians is what I'm aiming for!
I'm a South Asian-born Debian developer, and I participate in community activities to encourage more people to contribute. As you say, who I am isn't important; it's what I (and others) do!
I'm not looking to "whine," but instead find constructive strategies by which we can get more people involved. That's why I wrote the "Why care about diversity?" section.
Posted by Asheesh Laroia at Tue Dec 22 17:41:04 2009
Sure, I'm all for anybody who has the desire and the ability getting involved in FOSS development/evangelism. Indeed, as one who uses Debian and Ubuntu pretty frequently, I thank you for your work.
The reason I initially viewed it as "whining" is that the article reads to me like it's just stating "I see a problem." However, I'm not seeing any real solutions presented about what to do about said problem. It even reads to me like it's somehow "the big, bad Western cultural rejection of South Asians", because too many other articles that have made similar claims (e. g. about women) do in fact take that kind of attitude. If you're going for a different message--and it sounds like you are--then perhaps a bit more clarification in the article might help with this. Maybe an addendum?
As to additional ideas on how to "fix" it, you might look to how both Microsoft and Red Hat do just that in their respective companies. Yep, I'll give even Microsoft credit when it's due. They've got a ton of developers from India and have for many years. And Red Hat employs quite a few Indians as well; I met several at their headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina (USA). Might it be worth your getting in contact with some folks at both firms to see how they do it? Ravindra Maurya at Red Hat might be a good person for this.
--SYG
Posted by Sum Yung Gai at Tue Dec 22 19:57:03 2009
I think the second section clearly says the biggest thing I know that we can do: Mentoring people. I wrote, "Try to be a bridge."
I talk to experienced software developers about contributing. A fellow born and raised in the American midwest, a hacker experienced enough to have founded a few startups, told me that he never got the impression that outsiders were welcome. As I wrote, Free Software could always use more good contributors. So I think potential contributors are turning themselves away due to perceived attitude problems. It's not just limited to Indians and women.
I think things like git (especially combined with Github) make a world of a difference. I appreciate how it creates a fully-functional sandbox to work in -- more functional than a Subversion checkout, because commit works.
For insecure people like me, it was a double-edged sword that (as a teenager) I learned that Free Software was "cool." It meant that I wanted to hang around near it, but that I was too scared to feel like I could contribute. Eventually, I found people in the community who seemed like me, which made me feel more capable of joining.
This is a purely psychological barrier, a "problem" with insecure people like me, but it has real consequences for FLOSS. I tried to explain those in the "Why care about diversity?" section.
The best solution is purely human: that is, being friendly and supportive. It sounds like a cliche from a seventh-grade self-esteem poster, but it actually works. The story of Dreamwidth shows us that. So that's the solution I'm going to focus on.
Posted by Asheesh Laroia at Tue Dec 22 22:46:14 2009
so if we can set some goals discuss about it and have clear paths to achieve those goals it will be better than just talking more about not achieving
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