Exploring privilege in open source communities

While it's not easy to talk about, exploring privilege is necessary if we want to make sure open source is truly open for everyone. Taylor Barnett explores a number of sources of privilege, including axes of identity like race and gender and factors such as family responsibilities, financial resources, and the luxury of free time, and considers how they can affect participation in open source.

Behind most open source software projects, there’s an open source community that supports it. In many of these communities, privilege is rarely discussed. While it’s not an easy topic to talk about, exploring privilege is necessary if we want to make sure open source is truly open for everyone. Taylor Barnett explores a number of sources of privilege, including axes of identity like race and gender and factors such as family responsibilities, financial resources, and the luxury of free time, and considers how they can affect our own and others’ participation in open source—particularly focusing on how privilege can be a barrier to collaboration. Taylor also discusses what we can do to build and support larger, more inclusive, and healthier open source communities through strategies like finding ways to lend privilege, modifying community power structures, redefining what a contributor is, making sure everyone (interface and experience designers, community managers, documentation writers, project managers, bug reporters, code reviewers, etc.) is a first-class open source citizen, and supporting beginners, those with only small amounts of contribution time available, or others who lack certain privileges. Join Taylor to unpack and understand our privileges together and create change within our communities.