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Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Open source projects are by their nature intended to be welcoming, pulling in contributions from many different volunteers. But in reality, open source and the tech industry in general often lack diversity. Speaking at the Open Source Leadership Summit in February, Mozilla's Chief Innovation Officer Katharina Borchert told the crowd that working to bring ethnic, gender, and skill diversity to open source projects isn't just the right thing to do because of moral grounds, it's the right thing to do to make projects more successful.
Me, I beg to differ. Pretty sure success has to do with the diversity of thought/ideas rather than genetic diversity.
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Diversity Makes Projects More Successful
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday March 31 2017, @09:51AM
If, say, gender diversity was the bee's knees we'd see a lot less male dominated silicon valley companies succeeding.
That doesn't really follow, unless your input set is a mixture of diverse and non-diverse companies. In reality, almost all funded startups in the valley are male dominated and have around a 90% failure rate. Perhaps they'd have an 85% failure rate if they were more diverse, perhaps they'd have a 95% failure rate, but we don't have the information to extrapolate.
Diversity in thought can be useful, yeah. But diversity in gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, whatever? IMHO, if you push your viewpoint based on these criteria then the organization is doomed to failure.
I see one as a route to the other. Society places a lot of pressures on people growing up that shape their adult worldview and these pressures are different depending on socioeconomic background, gender, and ethnicity. The goal is a diversity of ideas and viewpoints, but that's far easier to accomplish with people from different backgrounds. The companies that are annoying in this regard are the ones that add men and women of different ethnicities from wealthy backgrounds in the same few areas and say 'look, we're super diverse!' - it's only true if 'super' is short for 'superficially'.
sudo mod me up