Core team member here.
First, I wanted to thank everyone for the open and honest discussion on this thread already. I was away with family during the weekend, and haven’t been able to respond until now.
Second, it’s clear that the recent team announcement has caused pain to people organizing outreach efforts, possibly damaged those efforts, and is sending a poor signal to those in underrepresented groups. As a member of Rust’s leadership, I am deeply saddened by those effects, and I’m sorry.
A bit of context. The newly-introduced subteams are part of a larger scaling up of Rust’s governance, which has several aims, including moving Rust to a greater degree of community ownership, and stepping up and formalizing our commitment to the community code of conduct. I believe both of these aspects are necessary, but certainly not sufficient steps in ensuring the health and diversity of Rust and its community in the long term. (Note also, with respect to explicit goals for the subteams: that’s laid out in a fair amount of detail in the RFC itself, and additional details about subteam operation were laid out in the subteam announcement.)
That said, as the original post points out: we are sorely lacking in diversity right now. This is true of the Rust community in general, but it is even more troubling at the leadership level. It would be easy for a person in an underrepresented group to get the impression: this project is not for you.
Looking backward, I see at least two mistakes:
-
By far most importantly, the core team (of which I am a member) has failed to make diversity a visible, front-and-center priority. While we all want more diversity, and we have done work to foster a reputation as a friendly, safe, and approachable community, we haven’t been sufficiently outspoken about addressing the lack of diversity, nor have we invested heavily enough in doing and supporting outreach to underrepresented groups, or to removing obstacles in their way.
-
Specifically, in making the subteam announcement we failed to acknowledge the lack of diversity and highlight concrete plans to improve it.
As to the makeup of the teams: I absolutely think our leadership should be more diverse than the community, for many reasons, and along many axes. But, like others in this thread and elsewhere, I have thought long and hard about whether there are members of underrepresented groups in the community who would fit these roles but were overlooked, and I am struggling to find them. In other words, I think that the makeup of the subteams is a symptom of a deeper problem: our failure to attract attract a more diverse community in the first place, and in particular to foster leadership among underrepresented groups.
I do not think the answer is to roll back the subteams. We need to scale up Rust and its community involvement in this way (as the RFC argues in detail), and have already gone through a community process to establish this new structure. We need to move forward, in some way that begins to address the more fundamental problems.
Here are a few ideas for immediate steps we might take (in addition to others that have already been discussed):
-
Form a community subteam, as many have suggested. Such a team has been in mind since we first discussed subteams, but we had intended to wait until the initial teams were fully running before bringing more online. We should fast-track the discussion of this team, and consider an explicit element of its charter to be leading the effort, and making policy decisions, related to diversity within the Rust community. That is, while diversity is a problem all of us should be aware of and working on, this team would be tasked in part with leading our efforts, including raising awareness within our community.
Ideally, this team would be led by a member of the groups we wish to better serve – which would mean inclusion on the core team as well – but as @mbrubeck and others have said, we need to do this in a way that doesn’t ask people to “do disproportionate or unpaid work to fix problems they didn’t create”. In any case, the first step is to get the ball rolling on the creation of the team itself.
-
Seek to expand the moderation team with representation from additional groups that it is trying to protect; doing so will help the team to better achieve its goals, and will send a more clear signal to those groups that we care about the safety of our spaces for them. Again, though, we need to find a way to do this that does not ask for disproportionate or unpaid work.
-
Publicly address our diversity issues. This should start with a blog post on http://blog.rust-lang.org/, a very visible platform, that draws explicit attention to the lack of diversity on the teams and within the community, and outlines the steps we are taking to address it (i.e., the action items that come out of this and other discussions). In addition, we should look for more permanent places to put this information. For example, a similar acknowledgement might go on the “teams” page, to make clear our dissatisfaction with the status quo, our strong desire to find leaders from underrepresented groups, and links to our ongoing efforts to do so.
We also need to identify additional avenues for long-term investment in diversity, and I hope this thread can start moving in that direction once we have some agreement about steps to take for the immediate situation.