Drupal Voices 100: Jack Aponte on Diversity, Power and Privilege in Open Source Communities

Neville Park is a queer mixie nerd in Toronto. This post originally appeared at Wild Unicorn Herd.

An interview with Palante Tech’s Jack Aponte (a. k. a. Angry Brown Butch) on, well, diversity in Drupal.

Background: Drupal is a kind of CMS (content management system); it’s a particularly powerful and versatile platform for building and managing websites. It is free and open source, which means that you don’t have to pay to use it, and anyone can help work on it. There’s a very large and international community of people who use and work on Drupal, and like the wider tech community, it’s dominated by white straight cis men. Open Source people, and Drupal people in particular, pride themselves on having a “doacracy”—a community that values getting stuff done above traditional authority. This could create a beginner-friendly, non-hierarchical environment of subversion and experimentation. In practice we just have white straight cis men getting SUPER DEFENSIVE at the suggestion that maybe they got where they are not only by the sweat of their brow, and shouting down any mention of patriarchy, racism, or any other systemic oppression when people run the numbers and get to wondering why there’s so little minority representation in Open Source.

There is a nice summary of the podcast at the link, and my transcript is below the fold. I’ve added links to give context to some of the references Jack and the interviewer make.

Drupal Voices is short daily podcast interviews with people doing work in the Drupal community. Brought to you by the Do It With Drupal seminar! The video archive is now available with over 40 hours of high-quality video from Drupal’s top developers and thinkers. For more information and free full-length sample videos, go to doitwithdrupal.com.

[music]

JA: My name is Jack Aponte. I am a Drupal site builder, I guess, live in Brooklyn, work primarily with non-profit community-based organizations, to build them Drupal sites that help them fulfil their missions.

So I think that it kind of goes hand-in-hand that working with these organizations that largely organize communities of colour, that organize around issues of gender and sexuality, general issues not just specifically connected to identity but issues of social justice, um, that diversity is important to me, and it’s directly related to my work when I work with them, so coming to places like DrupalCon and participating in the Drupal community in general, that stuff is on my mind there too.

“That stuff”—diversity. Diversity is one of those really funny words. It means lots of different things to different people and people take it to different places. So for some people it just means having more faces that look different in the room, kinda having different identities come together, having more inclusivity in whatever organization or community or what have you. For some people it gets a bit more active than that and it goes beyond just having bodies in a room, to thinking about systems of privileges, systems of power, systems of who gets paid attention to, who gets credibility and how issues of identity mix into that.

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