[hackerspaces] [Open Manufacturing] Problems with Open Source Ecology. A Perspective

[Lisha Sterling]

On 20 July 2013 21:33, Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have never seen definitive proof that any of that reasoning is right.
> "Diversity of people" just means "get a lot of people together, and hope
> that they are all equitable to each other", which has very little to do
> with engineering.... sorry.
>
>
     Oh, wow, seriously? That's what you think "Diversity of people" means?
No.

      "Diversity of people" means to look beyond your small group of
friends, your in circle, and find opinions that do not match your own to
critique your ideas and add their own. Diversity of people is how we get
things like accessibility built into products the first time around,
instead of as an afterthought. It's how we get internationalization built
into the basic underpinnings of what we do. It's how we, as engineers,
discover that there are issues that we never thought to plan for when we
started designing this thing, whatever this current thing happens to be.

       I remember a time when Amazon's code was built for the US market
only and had to be beaten into submission to work in Europe and Japan. Not
building internationalization into the system from the get go cost Amazon a
ton of money. There are still startups making that same mistake today, but
those with someone from somewhere other than the US who the management
actually pay any attention to are far less likely to make that error. Even
other English speaking countries need internationalization to deal with
different date formats, different currency formats, etc.

        I remember a time when  almost no corporate website was navigable
by speech browser. Here's this great moment in which the world is getting
smaller and smaller every day, people can buy nearly everything online,
check books out of their library online, visit museums virtually online,
even interact with their government online, but all the people with sight
impairments are frustratingly shut out of the adventure. Because the voices
of people with various needs were heard during the specifications process,
there were tools available to developers to make everything accessible, but
almost no one considered it important in the 90's or even the early 00's.
Even now, most sites out there miss something in the translation from
sighted browser to speech browser -- the layout is not the same, navigation
is a mess, the alt tags are nonexistent or completely useless. It's as if
people decided to built ramps over part of their stairway for accessibility
and then dropped nails and tar in random parts of the ramps as they were
heading up to patch the roof! If you have a "diversity of people" giving
feedback, you find this out and can fix it.

       So, this question of bringing a diversity of people to the table to
discuss issues around open source ecology makes perfect sense. If you are
building tools just for yourself and your friends, then the only people you
need to speak to are people just like you that you know you will get along
with. If you are building tools for a wider audience, then you'd better get
wider feedback along the way or you're gonna have a lot of work to fix your
mistakes later on.

- Lisha
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