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The first bit is useful information. It means you had a ton of minority talent to draw on instead of one location and company. The second means you all talked a

The first bit is useful information. It means you had a ton of minority talent to draw on instead of one location and company. The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much. That was the point of the critique. I'll throw out some suggestions, though, instead of just critiquing as my own principles are about helping a project that's doing important good work. Regardless of diversity issues, I still congratulate you people on that and hope you continue to improve across the board. :) There's two easy ones that you can do on the team side and maybe in some form on the community side. You and the others are simply more knowledgeable at working with communities so I leave it to you to find what applies. Here they are: 1. Supply side. Talk to people doing these bootcamps, conferences, and so on focusing on minorities in general or specific minority groups. They probably know people in the demographic who can code well. Send people there to talk about Rust like you seem to do in general at conferences and such. Also, invite all in these groups to send in references or Githubs relevant to specific jobs. Give them resources to learn it. Get those that want to get a job or place in the community to get on the forums for help learning and/or submitting code/docs. Encourage, but don't require, them to do it blind under an alias with no info on race/age/gender. Without biases limiting them and with increasing supply, the percentage of minority talent should increase naturally. 2. Quota side. Do something like that plus ads for talent in general. Get a supply of people from many backgrounds with some way to evaluate whether they are capable of performing the role. They all "earned" their place rather than just token hires since each seems to be a decent or good hire. The "best" of all programmers is pretty subjective concept with strong possibility of bias anyway. Then, do quotas for the hiring slots with those brought in chosen randomly with right spread or best rated of each group. A lot of the local businesses out here are, despite the South's racial issues, quote diverse even up to a layer or two of management by just (a) hiring anyone who might be able to do the job, (b) giving them some training/coaching, and (c) keeping those that perform well. Works wonders but I mention other things first since there's few jobs to go around at high cost on your end. Have fun with those. EDIT: Fix two deficiencies at top I saw.

steveklabnik 9y ago
> The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much. This is extremely not true. We have actively cared about this for a long time, and we've been doing work towards it basically forever, with some progress. This is the latest effort. There is no silver bullet.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  All you'd have to do is get a large list of people in minorities who did work similar to each of the jobs you'd need to do. At least a handful for each one but preferably more if you had time. Then, send them detailed offers with follow-up interviews to see if they could perform. You'd have more of them on your team afterward. Did you all do that? And do you have any data on it so interested outsiders can see what caused the failures and how to prevent that in the future?
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    > All you'd have to do Again, there's no silver bullet here :) The approach we're taking here is basically the opposite of what you're advocating; I am not aware of any open source projects that email people asking them to contribute. I would find it extremely odd if someone did that to me. Putting out a call for contributors, on the other hand, is pretty usual.
    - nickpsecurity 9y ago
      "The approach we're taking here is basically the opposite of what you're advocating; I am not aware of any open source projects that email people asking them to contribute." I'm not saying it common or anything haha. I'm just offering sending messages to people about a project that fits their expertise as a way to boost number of people that know about it and might contribute. This is with assumption that whatever qualified minorities candidates aren't seeing the opportunity or nobody has nudged them to act on it. If for other reasons, this might have no effect. Of course, one must balance against overdoing it or we get posts about "Rust zealots" blasting messages at everyone. Very selective based on talent with personalized messages with no commitment required. I've gotten a few people interested in experimenting with approaches to automated testing and coding in SPARK Ada just sending occasional emails or messages. Although, most come to me after I post in different places with different types of people/projects that might find them useful. Also, I speculate maybe on web forum side looking for forums with higher percentage of minority programmers or just experimenters/makers where you do your normal thing sharing interesting posts about Rust or its ecosystem. Just some extra brainstorming. I agree there's no silver bullet. It will require lots of experimentation, measurement, listening, and time above all.

steveklabnik 9y ago

> The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much. This is extremely not true. We have actively cared about this for a long time, and we've been doing work towards it basically forever, with some progress. This is the latest effort. There is no silver bullet.

nickpsecurity 9y ago
All you'd have to do is get a large list of people in minorities who did work similar to each of the jobs you'd need to do. At least a handful for each one but preferably more if you had time. Then, send them detailed offers with follow-up interviews to see if they could perform. You'd have more of them on your team afterward. Did you all do that? And do you have any data on it so interested outsiders can see what caused the failures and how to prevent that in the future?
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  > All you'd have to do Again, there's no silver bullet here :) The approach we're taking here is basically the opposite of what you're advocating; I am not aware of any open source projects that email people asking them to contribute. I would find it extremely odd if someone did that to me. Putting out a call for contributors, on the other hand, is pretty usual.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    "The approach we're taking here is basically the opposite of what you're advocating; I am not aware of any open source projects that email people asking them to contribute." I'm not saying it common or anything haha. I'm just offering sending messages to people about a project that fits their expertise as a way to boost number of people that know about it and might contribute. This is with assumption that whatever qualified minorities candidates aren't seeing the opportunity or nobody has nudged them to act on it. If for other reasons, this might have no effect. Of course, one must balance against overdoing it or we get posts about "Rust zealots" blasting messages at everyone. Very selective based on talent with personalized messages with no commitment required. I've gotten a few people interested in experimenting with approaches to automated testing and coding in SPARK Ada just sending occasional emails or messages. Although, most come to me after I post in different places with different types of people/projects that might find them useful. Also, I speculate maybe on web forum side looking for forums with higher percentage of minority programmers or just experimenters/makers where you do your normal thing sharing interesting posts about Rust or its ecosystem. Just some extra brainstorming. I agree there's no silver bullet. It will require lots of experimentation, measurement, listening, and time above all.