The Inclusivity Working Group was formed on 13 June 2015, at NodeConf Adventure and ratified by the TSC on 14 January 2016.
NodeConf Adventure is "a conference in the woods for Node.js developers" that is held every year at Walker Creek Ranch in the hills north of San Francisco. This event is an "unconference," meaning that there is no set schedule or speakers. Discussions are decided on and planned the day of, allowing them to build on previous discussions.
At the 2015 event, there was a discussion on the first day about hostile culture in open source and Node.js. This first discussion was unfocused and and kept getting derailed, with the topic and purpose of the discussion being largely ignored.
A few of us had some private discussions later and decided to try scheduling a diversity session again. This time, however, we were determined to make it productive. Fortunately, one of the other attendees at the conference, Jacob Groundwater, had gone through facilitation training. We tapped Jacob to facilitate two diversity sessions on the second day of the conference.
These two sessions proved to be extremely productive, thanks in large part to Jacob's facilitation strategies. In these sessions, we shared often heart-breaking stories of marginalization and strife within the Node.js and broader tech community. We then identified what we felt were the key issues preventing people from contributing to Node.js. We finished by discussing what sort of values we want the Node.js community to have.
At the end of the second session, we decided that this work should continue, and that the best way was to form a Node.js Working Group. So, C J Silverio created a Slack team, and invited everyone who was at these two sessions to join.
And thus the Node.js Inclusivity Working Group was founded.
Sadly the momentum generated at NodeConf didn't last. There was some initial work on getting the group up and running, but that work pretty much stopped for a variety of reasons.
The group lay dormant for several months until one fateful day in early November 2015 when Myles Borins filed issue #3721 (content warning: discussions of suicide). This thread refocused the conversation back to inclusivity after having been dormant for some time.
The discussion of this issue, on GitHub, Twitter, and elsewhere attracted the attention of several new members. The new members and remaining initial members were able to get the group started again.
This time the momentum stuck, culminating in the Inclusivity Working Group getting ratified by the TSC on 14 January 2016.
- 2015/06/13 - @nebrius (Bryan Hughes)
- 2015/06/13 - @othiym23 (Forrest L Norvell)
- 2015/06/13 - @Trott (Rich Trott)
- 2015/06/13 - @zkat (Kat Marchán)
- 2015/06/13 - @nathan7 (Nathan Zadoks)
- 2015/06/13 - @beaugunderson (Beau Gunderson)
- 2015/10/10 - @ashleygwilliams (Ashley Williams, ag_dubs)
- 2015/10/10 - @juliepagano (Julie Pagano)
- 2015/10/17 - @sup (Jona Hugger)
- 2015/10/17 - @thefourtheye (Sakthipriyan Vairamani)
- 2016/03/17 - @scottgonzalez (Scott González)
- 2016/04/18 - @charlotteis (Charlotte Spencer)
- 2016/04/18 - @julianduque (Julián Duque)
- 2015/6/13 - Working Group formed at NodeConf Adventure 2015
- 2015/6/16 - First Working Group meeting
- 2015/11/9 - Issue #3721 filed, leading to the revival of the group
- 2016/1/7 - Consulted with Microsoft's ChakraCore team on their Code of Conduct
- 2016/1/14 - Working Group ratified by the TSC