Data Set Failures and Intersectional Data

Nikki Stevens
2019 Journal of Cultural Analytics  
In 2016, a software developer named David 12 and I met to discuss creating a quantitative demographic survey of the open source software community to which we were both long-time contributors. David and I did not know each other well, but shared a belief that our open source community (OSC, hereafter) was an unsafe place for anyone who did not identify as white, cisgendered, heterosexual and male. That lack of safety was further complicated by any one individual's distance from privileged modes
more » ... of contribution. In OSC, developers who were on key Contribution Teams and regularly added code to the codebase were valued more highly than those who contributed documentation, user experience research, or quality assurance work. David asked "What if we made a survey that accounted for all of the ways that people make the web? Can we do it intersectionally? Can we do it the OSC way?" Over the following 18 months, David and I worked with a team of OSC community members on the creation, dissemination and analysis of a quantitative demographic survey of OSC. This survey was the first step in a project to create safer spaces within OSC for individuals from marginalized groups. Rather than this survey being an attempt to gather a representative sampling, it was part of a larger political project to increase diversity, inclusion and equity in our community. 1 1 We fell prey to what Theodore Porter calls the "insistent quantifrenia" of everything diversity 1
doi:10.22148/16.041 fatcat:p4q4dgidwbcnfbgrali27ocvnq