Currently the CWL community engages through weekly online meetings, discussions in the Gitter channel and discussions on this forum. The current engagement model has resulted in a small group of overwhelmingly white and male contributors.
In parallel with the meetings and chats there are at least two (1 and 2)) proposals that, while documentation focused, include a community building component. One part of these proposals is to develop some notion of personas and pathways for the CWL community and its various projects. While these proposals are currently focused on “core CWL” (that is the language) at the moment, it is worth considering how some (and hopefully, a growing proportion) of CWL users will engage with the language through CWL-implementing platforms (Seven Bridges, Arvados, Toil), something that needs to be addressed in this “personas and pathways” thinking.
In addition to the practical work of developing these personas and pathways (part of which will no doubt happen as part of the rebuilding of the CWL website) there is an urgent need to address diversity, equity and inclusion as part of the broader CWL project. I must apologise at this point for not having any great ideas of how to address this need, except to suggest that this needs to be prioritised in future outreach plans (as these come into existence and get resources attached).
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Hi there -
As you may or may not be aware - I am heading the work funding by the CZI EOSS grant. We are working on both #1 as part of #2 linked above, the work for the webpage is also part of #2. I am also working on the webpage rewrite and refactoring as part of that work. As I agree, there is a need to “address diversity, equity and inclusion as part of the broader CWL project”. Perhaps that is something we should brainstorm on as part of our work as part of #2 in some of the work outlined in that proposal. But, I don’t think it just a one and done effort. I think it is going to be a lot of different aspect of a lot of different projects, including bringing new blood into the CWL ecosystem and that includes less advanced users.
I don’t know is this is best served by a discord ticket and might be best served by a GitHub issue where larger discussion can take place, tickets can be assigned, and documents can be linked. As a note, I am attempting to fund more diverse contractors and staff through the CZI funds. I take these issues very seriously and so I think this is something we need need to work on and plan for and it is going to be a process. It isn’t going to be easy to accomplish or happen over night since this is an serious ongoing issue in both open software, open science, and computer science in general. So we should think of metrics or goal posts we want to hit, and aim for them - and reasonable timelines.
I have a list already of “To-Dos” as part of the CZI EOSS grant that can get us going and we can then get a larger list that expands from that. I am happy to start a GitHub Issue focused on diversity/inclusion related activities, or at least a tag so we can track those related activities.
Cheers,
Sarah
p.s. As I am am female, disabled and queer - I can help speak to representation for those in those communities in the project but I can not represent the viewpoints of POC. That is where I think we need to do really significant outreach to get those viewpoints.
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Also – I wanted to include this here for reference - we put our CZI EOSS grant application up online so people could see the activities planned and funded.
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