Lessons learned leading an open source diversity team

Open source communities bring together people from various backgrounds and disciplines. As we work to make these communities more inclusive, a large part should be empowering underrepresented and marginalized individuals to become community leaders.

In 2018, I was fortunate to have been passed the leadership of Drupal's volunteer-led diversity initiative, the Drupal Diversity & Inclusion working group by its former leader and founder, Nikki Stevens.

What came afterwards was a whirlwind of learning to adapt, adjust, and the set the vision for what I wanted my leadership to look like. DD&I hopes to build a better, more inclusive Drupal community and that work can take many forms. As a young Muslim woman, I found leading this effort to be an arduous task. From defining my vision for the team, to creating shared goals, communicating with power structures in the community, and trying to enact real, impactful work that could support the marginalized in our communities - I found myself challenged in all sorts of ways.

In this session, I'd like to share the lessons learned and strategies for aspiring community leaders - who like me, identify as members of an underrepresented community - and how their peers can better support them to succeed.