Project Demographics
Question: What are the demographics within a project?
Description
Project demographics help indicate the potential for different viewpoints and broader perspectives and representation in the context of a project community. Because everyone has a different perspective, investigating the responses for each group of demographics can indicate whether people from various demographics feel more or less included than the average.
Objectives
- Determine the [diversity] (https://github.com/drnikki/open-demographics) of project members. This can include gender, identity, age, first language, and dis/ability.
- Help retain community members from diverse backgrounds within the project.
- Determine if community members are diverse when grouped by board membership, maintainers, conference organizers, and contributors.
- Determine if new community members are from diverse backgrounds.
- Share non-sensitive community demographic information with others.
- Create a statement of privacy management of demographic information.
- Discover less-visible stories with regard to intersectionality of the demographic data.
- Identify potential areas of improvement for inclusivity based on demographic data.
Implementation
Filters
- Demographics as described in the CHAOSS repository of demographic data.
- Demographics of different types of contributors. Contribution types may include:
- Writing Code
- Reviewing Code
- Bug Triaging
- Quality Assurance and Testing
- Security-Related Activities
- Localization/L10N and Translation
- Event Organization
- Documentation Authorship
- Community Building and Management
- Teaching and Tutorial Building
- Troubleshooting and Support
- Creative Work and Design
- User Interface, User Experience, and Accessibility
- Social Media Management
- User Support and Answering Questions
- Writing Articles
- Public Relations - Interviews with Technical Press
- Speaking at Events
- Marketing and Campaign Advocacy
- Website Development
- Legal Council
- Financial Management
Data Collection Strategies
- Use a survey to gather project demographics. (For example, using the Open Demographics questions)
- Survey all community members via project communication channels
- Survey new community members as identified through such ways as attending newcomer office hours, recent introductions, and first time issues and merge requests.
- Survey project maintainers.
- Survey that is activated by certain types of contributions (i.e., commits, issues, merge requests).
References
- Thanks to Nikki Stevens and Marie Nordin for sharing experiences and resources that informed the creation of this metric.
Contributors
- Elizabeth Barron
- Matt Germonprez
To edit this metric please submit a Change Request here: https://github.com/chaoss/wg-dei/blob/main/focus-areas/project-and-community/project-demographics.md
To reference this metric in software or publications please use this stable URL: https://chaoss.community/?p=4889
The usage and dissemination of health metrics may lead to privacy violations. Organizations may be exposed to risks. These risks may flow from compliance with the GDPR in the EU, with state law in the US, or with other laws. There may also be contractual risks flowing from terms of service for data providers such as GitHub and GitLab. The usage of metrics must be examined for risk and potential data ethics problems. Please see CHAOSS Data Ethics document for additional guidance.