LAUSR

” Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures ” is a study of the efforts of open technology communities to “hack” the issues around the lack of diversity that pervades not only their volunteer communities, but also their related disciplines at large. Open technology communities are loosely organized, volunteer, online groups, focused on development and distribution of open or free software and hardware. Examples include The Document Foundation (home of LibreOffice), Drupal Association, Linux Foundation, and Mozilla Foundation. The author of this book is Christina Dunbar-Hester, a sociologist by training, who peers into this world not only as a female, but also as a nontech professional and thus is an outsider in this field. Her conclusion is that the hacking approaches that these communities have tried to adapt, in an effort to address the problems around diversity, are not really effective. Why? Because diversity issues stem from cultural issues. The underlying unequal distribution of social power that accompanies those allowed to “play” in these open technology spaces cannot be fixed by adding more individuals from diverse groups. The lack of diversity is a consequence of the unequal cultural distribution of social power. Focusing on representation—making these open technology spaces more diverse—is not a mechanism that can be used to fix these pervasive and entrenched cultural issues. It is the root problems themselves that need to be hacked, not the lack of representation.