Emma Irwin joins us on the podcast from Mozilla Corporation. She is an Open Source and Community Strategist there and heads up diversity and inclusion strategy development for their open source projects and their communities. Prior to her role at Mozilla, she worked at Benetech as a Developer Community Manager. On today’s episode, we discuss Emma’s strategies for maintaining diversity and inclusion in the open source community and specifically why it’s so important in the tech industry.
Emma Irwin joins us on the podcast from Mozilla Corporation. She is an Open Source and Community Strategist there and heads up diversity and inclusion strategy development for their open source projects and their communities. Prior to her role at Mozilla, she worked at Benetech as a Developer Community Manager. On today’s episode, we discuss Emma’s strategies for maintaining diversity and inclusion in the open source community and specifically why it’s so important in the tech industry.
Who is this episode great for?
Virtual communities, Tech community leaders, Community strategists
What’s the biggest takeaway?
Emma shares her experience with building community in the tech industry, specifically within the area of open source. Her strategy is to start with reaching out and listening to members of your community to understand their experiences while making sure you are asking questions in a way that feels inclusive. Secondly, your community needs to be a safe place where your members feel comfortable providing anonymous feedback. Lastly, devise a way to make changes and progress using the feedback you receive from your community.
Speaker 1: (00:03)
In 2010, I co founded a company called startup grind with one goal, inspiring, educating and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet today. Startup grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members along the way. I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time, customer to customer marketing, C to C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wish we'd had. When we start building our community. A decade ago, each episode, we talked to the brightest minds and companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Anderson. And this is the CDC podcast. I'm excited to have our next guest Emma Irwin, who is an open source and community strategist at Mozilla corporation. Previously, she worked at banana tech as the developer community manager. Now at Mozilla Emma heads up diversity and inclusion strategy development for Mozilla's open source projects and their communities take a listen.
Speaker 2: (01:06)
Emma, describe to us what the Mozilla corporation is and what you do in your role. There.
Speaker 3: (01:11)
Mozilla is probably best known as the developer, the Mozilla Firefox browser, which historically, um, has had a lot of leadership in open source. So inviting people in, into the opportunity to innovate with company and with products that really is where a Firefox came from and the open source ecosystem right now. I think we've been a leader in, we develop of course a lot more than just Firefox right now. One of our key projects has a common voice, which is a nonproprietary open solution for voice technology and voice data set. So there's a lot of other cool technology we're building right now. My role on the open innovation team at Mozilla is specifically focused with a few other folks on community development. And that has like a wide variety of meanings, especially as Mozilla is itself, a community of communities versus there being one.
Speaker 2: (02:01)
I know your work revolves a lot around strategy for inclusion diversity within the open source community. So could you tell us about your various initiatives there and why it's so important in the technology industry?
Speaker 3: (02:14)
Yeah, definitely a central part of the work that I've done and continuing to do, um, at Mozilla is to define and work on a diversity and inclusion strategy. Although I, I hesitate these days and actually even discourage people from thinking of inclusion as being separate from open. Um, really like the, the lore or the, the idea of open is it, anyone can participate, anyone can turn up and participate in the innovation with, um, with projects and products, but actually if we're not intentional about everyone feeling invited that with those obstacles, um, that are various, especially more present for those who are underrepresented or, um, in, in ways, including gender and race, but also like access to technology, bandwidth, those sorts of things. And then we're not, we don't have open projects. So, um, some of the initiatives that I work on, um, in inclusion are around data and metrics and also with the Linux foundation project called chaos, which is a community health metrics program.
Speaker 3: (03:13)
We, um, we set up metrics to try and understand what that means internally for Mozilla. That means ensuring that our leadership programs are open and accessible to everyone are structured in such a way where people feel invited where there's terms of renewal things like making sure that our governance structures have representation from different groups and so on. There's, there's really a lot there. Um, but primarily, or not primarily, but essentially to all of that is our code of conduct enforcement. So, um, that's something that we had built up and are quite proud of, um, that keeps our communities healthy and safe.
Speaker 2: (03:45)
I wonder with, with all of the protests and a recent sort of spotlight on racial equality, inequality inside of the black community, especially within, uh, our community of the tech industry, what do you recommend to community leaders who are trying to create a more inclusive space for the black community and, and also in technology and in open source in a, we work with a lot of companies specifically in those exact same areas. So what you have any suggestions or recommendations to them to open up more broadly to that subset of people.
Speaker 3: (04:18)
First of all, remembering that open source is less diverse than tech overall, just speaking from gender diversity. And I think that's even more true of race racial diversity, although we don't have a lot of data around that because, um, that's something that as an industry, we haven't been very good at tracking. I think probably that the first step is always about listening, right? It's um, it's really about reaching out to people in your communities who are there already to understand their experiences. And not only just counting people isn't enough, like you can be there, you can count someone, you know, person of color just because they're in your community. Doesn't mean they're having a very good time, right? It might be that they're determined to like make things better or there, they believe in the community and they can see the potential, but they're working on it.
Speaker 3: (05:04)
So, um, which is unfair. And we know that people who are underrepresented often have the burden of work of trying to fix the community. So listening is number one and also allowing for anonymous feedback. So, you know, people want to feel safe when they're giving that feedback. So listening is number one. And then from that, identifying those things that you can make, make changes for. So there's no universal, um, thing that you can do, definitely checking with the chaos project around the metrics. We already have to make sure like to understand that the most inclusive ways of asking questions. So there's, you know, there's wrong ways of asking questions too. Um, and then some of the small things that you can do that we know work, um, on a broad scale to start making those changes, but definitely listening because it's different for everyone and for every community. Uh, so I guess that's where I'd say you should start.
Speaker 2: (08:59)
What programs have been most effective for you all at Mozilla for just growing the community overall?
Speaker 3: (09:06)
Yeah. So again, we're a community of communities and I can speak on behalf of some of those. Some of the ways that we have been successful in growing communities is to help people who want to contribute to our projects and software connect, that opportunity with the things that they care about in their life already. So I run a leadership program or readily ship program last year to bring in already technical women into leadership roles, like maintain our roles in open source projects, generally speaking, there's sort of the old Mer meritocracy rule where you start at the beginning and you earn your creds and you like prove yourself. And, and, and really that that's not beneficial for people who are, you know, have the skills that are more advanced. And, um, I work with those women to map the opportunity of say reviewing pull requests or, you know, um, testing issues with the things they were trying to do in their career, which is, you know, get into a senior leadership role or apply for a job with a company they really wanted.
Speaker 3: (10:03)
So I think more Metta to something specific is making sure that that contributors and community members understand how, what they're doing with, for your company, for your community, connects with things they care about, and they can grow and evolve more tactically. The things like, um, we run campaigns for contributors to get involved. So there might be a thing that, um, Firefox needs or common voice needs people to record their voices or validate voices. We run tied down campaigns around those, and again, like list of skill sets and people, people seem to really, um, rally around those as an opportunity. And that's definitely grown a specific type of community which responds to, and likes to be a part of campaigns, including in person events that people get together, um, and like record their voices. Um, that sort of thing, generally speaking from a diversity perspective, making sure your code of conduct is real and enforced and people know that helps make sure that it's just not the people that are really good at promoting themselves that are like the majority represented.
Speaker 2: (11:04)
How has your community work broken out from being in real life or event driven now, maybe virtual event driven versus being all online?
Speaker 3: (11:12)
So we have a program at Mozilla called Mozilla reps, which is basically an official leadership program where people can apply for a budget. And, um, for things like getting a pizza, getting people together, um, for getting swag and that leadership program is very much based on, um, bringing people together in communities all over the world. So we have like regional communities located in many, many countries and that in person event thing has been really important and kind of central to that program. Um, and also bringing people into our mission and manifesto. So again, to people being able to connect to the thing that they're doing with things to care about, and Mozilla has a mission and a, that a lot of people can connect to, especially around privacy, especially around security and the in person events allow people to connect with their community around the things that they care about, including privacy, and especially, especially recently,
Speaker 2: (12:06)
Do you have any sort of stories or particular people that have been successful through your community that you, that you all point to sort of the examples of things you hope other people will have success with? What is the best case scenario for me, if I'm part of the Mozilla Firefox community, like what can that do for me in my life?
Speaker 3: (12:26)
I'll just actually use my self as a, instead of using someone's name. So I wouldn't be mindful that I haven't gotten anyone's permission. And again, around privacy, I like to be get people's permission. So I was a software engineer for 10, 15 years, and I really, um, cared about the cause of digital literacy, which I felt that because I knew how to write code that I was able to achieve more things in my life and in my world, and I would have been otherwise. And so ms. Ella had a program at the time called web maker, which was all about digital literacy, helping people understand how to read, write and participate in the web. And I started to kind of teach and run online events, uh, and in person events in my community with youth and like teaching teachers who were experiencing, like trying to teach code in their schools.
Speaker 3: (13:09)
And I really found that rewarding and that actually introduced me to the, to the world of, um, like helping projects design better for open for volunteers. It helped me figure out how to talk to volunteers about the opportunity of open source and graduating my career became this, this thing, which was like helping people learn about technology, how their skills can lend to something bigger in the world. Uh, I eventually worked for Benetech matching contributors with projects like Wikipedia and, um, Mesilla, [inaudible] who work in disaster relief. Uh, you should Hedy which you're mapping crisis, like really meaningful open source projects. I was like helping them. And that made me feel like, you know, I was doing something in the world other than just like writing code for money, which is nothing wrong with that, but it was something that I evolved to and eventually, you know, um, got my role at Mesilla, which is something that I could never have imagined for myself. So I think that I'm like a story of how, you know, contributing to an open source project can take you places that you would not otherwise have had the experience in that that started for me with Missoula, even though it'd be a part of other open source projects. And so my career that I have now, and really talking to you today comes from all of that. So that's a personal story, but it probably means more than me talking about someone else.
Speaker 2: (14:21)
Oh, that's great. I, I wonder, um, it Mozilla's, we talked to a lot of new or accompanies, uh, on this podcast. A lot of newer tech companies, specifically Mozilla and Firefox are like sort of one of these foundational things of the internet. And I wonder how you've seen, you've been there for many years and I wonder what, how have you seen your community evolve over time and, and how have you seen Mozilla's community, uh, evolving, uh, as things have changed outside inside the company?
Speaker 3: (14:52)
I mean, I think definitely the causes that were that, you know, we have our manifesto that the internet would be open and accessible for all. I think what that has meant has changed over the time or become more severe. So for example, the Mozilla foundation is working very much on, you know, trustworthy AI, you know, we're looking at things like addressing fake news and we have fellowships of people doing really amazing things to help make the internet a much healthier place. I think over time, we've seen it become, um, very much advocacy, um, and slightly like fighting the dystopia of technology. I think that's like how it's evolved in our communities have therefore change and evolve with that. You know, people move on with their lives or they might follow other interests. And so, uh, I think right now our communities are definitely understand that all that's at stake, um, on the internet.
Speaker 3: (15:40)
And so our communities are made up of individual contributors. They're made up of fellows, they're made up of, uh, teachers and technologists and all kind of working on this common. Cause I think that we're even more sure than ever about like the things that we want to change structurally that has changed as well. Like how engaged people, campaigns. I mentioned content and training. I think for somebody that's just start starting out. Like if I was a, you know, a new business starting out, I think the cause is really important. Right? I know that people rally around technology. They love, I think that that can be like a motivator, but that people feel connected to the cause that you're solving for is, is critical and, and will change over time as well. I'm not sure if that's entirely answered it, but
Speaker 2: (16:24)
Absolutely that was great. As we kind of wrap up, I would love to hear about a community that you personally love and what you love about it and tell us about it.
Speaker 3: (16:34)
So I love the Missoula community. Um, but I already told story about that. A I participated into other communities that I would say I love, I started my open source journey really started as part of the Drupal community, which you may or may not be familiar with. It's an open source CMS. So when I was a developer, that was a community that I connected to early on. It was really my first introduction to open communities. And the thing I was most struck by was, uh, that people were there to just help, you know, I could have a problem or I was trying to solve something and there's just people turning up to help, which was amazing. And that community is quite large. And I think very, still very active. I'm less active over there now, as I no longer develop her. But I think that they, for me were various operational, especially as a woman in technology, which back when I was starting off was about 1% of, of open source developers were women. And there's one woman called Angie Byron, who is also known as web shit on the Twitters, uh, who really inspired me, uh, to get involved with that community. So that's one of the, of course with Wikipedia Wikimedia that some of the, um, not just the editing, but there was, I forget the name of the woman who led like edited us on adding women scientists to, uh, to the Wiki, those sorts of things like communities where
Speaker 1: (17:49)
People can be activists as well as technologists are my favorite pies. Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevy lamps.com/pod that's B E V Y L a B s.com/pod.