OTel D&I: better periodic measurement of OTel community diversity and inclusion

[bhs]

In #367 an OTel community member brought up the uncomfortable truth that the diversity of participants in OTel SIGs is – what's the word? – "minimal". (I.e., nearly or actually 100% white males)

The OTel governance committee would like to kick off two parallel efforts: one to periodically measure OTel community D&I, and another to actually improve those measurements over time.

This issue is about the measurement.

So, a concrete process proposal:

• Until June 18, let's generate ideas (via this issue) for "metrics we should track," and also "ways to accurately estimate those metrics." Note that of course personal right-to-privacy – as well as regulations like GDPR – are relevant constraints; for this first phase, though, all well-intentioned ideas are welcome.
• From June 18-July 2, we can debate those ideas
• ... Then the GC will figure out how we will move forward with D&I metrics and measurement.

The idea is to converge on an actual practice for D&I measurement within about a month.

[bhs]

For diversity, I would like it if we could capture the following, if possible (while respecting personal privacy / "making it opt-in", and also remaining in compliance with regulations, of course):

• Gender identity
• Ethnicity
• Years of industry experience (or other proxies for seniority)
• OTel activity stats (when were they added? how often do they contribute or participate?)
• Role in OTel (GC? Approver? Maintainer? Committer? Something else?)

As for "how" we capture this information: I'm not well-versed in the various regulations, but I think it's safe to make this an opt-in form or form subsection. We could perhaps include it as an optional subsection of a larger "OTel Community Pulse Survey" or similar, perhaps issued quarterly, to get a sense for general zeitgeist as well as diversity stats.

PS: I am having more trouble coming up with reasonable, quantitative ways to measure "inclusion" – especially curious for thoughts from the community on that front.

[lizthegrey]

Also potentially relevant, especially the nature of what we do: whether someone self-identifies as being disabled or having a disability... because if telemetry and resulting data isn't accessible, then it excludes people from being systems operators & developers.

[tedsuo]

@lizthegrey to that extent, we should also ensure the OTel website is ARIA friendly.

[bhs]

For anybody watching this issue, per the initial issue description, we are entering the following phase:

From June 18-July 2, we can debate [the ideas proposed above]

So, consider this message a reminder to start that process.

[bhs]

Per ^^^, I'd like to close this issue once #461 has resulted in our first successfully-executed annual survey (with opt-in D&I reporting).

[bhs]

In last week's GC meeting, we decided to integrate the survey component here with our 2020Q4 election process, just to minimize the amount of survey-nagging we have to do with our community.

In the meantime, I wanted to get some feedback going on the set of questions we'll use for the annual contributor survey (both demographic and otherwise). Here's an editable doc link:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dFFHNMv_hKrjWr9VBRRGBCfKtI-CBa3IWAS2zFGi9kc/edit#heading=h.fnq9bh66jdl

[bhs]

So, with #488 in the past, we have 162 responses to our OpenTelemetry community annual survey. There were a few (optional) demographic questions at the top of the form, and here are the aggregated results (I won't share the individual results since that can reveal personal info):

There are a number of other fields in the form that aren't related to demographics, but I thought I'd share the above as a start. And let me be the first to say that I know we can do better with both the "D" and the "I" here in OTel, though I'm glad that we at least have a baseline to work with.