6  Consultant Insights

The insights offered from the community members we interviewed reflect both challenges and opportunities that Astropy leadership can learn from in improving the project climate around DEI issues. Below, we offer some interpretation of the community’s ideas alongside approaches we’ve seen work well for projects and organizations who have addressed similar issues. These recommendations are not exhaustive; indeed, our final recommendation suggests that further inquiry is needed that goes beyond the bounds of the Astropy community, ideally in consultation with DEI-specific experts. In other words, future DEI work at Astropy might aim to survey and interview those individuals who are not involved in the community, but were once involved or would be good fits for the project. Likewise, partnering with organizations in the Astropy’s broader overlapping environments (e.g., astronomy and open source software) could aid in addressing some of the ecosystem-oriented challenges such as the lack of diversity in scientific disciplines. This approach would be a good step in acting upon the first recommendation: View Astropy as a Catalyst for Change in the Broader Scientific and Computing Landscapes.

View Astropy as a Catalyst for Change in the Broader Scientific and Computing Landscapes

As discussed in the first section of this report, a significant portion of Astropy’s need to improve DEI conditions stems from its position at the center of overlapping communities. Each of the scientific (e.g., astronomy, physics) and computing fields it draws its community members from are among the worst performers in fostering diverse, equitable, and inclusive environments. But rather than wait for these fields to change, Astropy can (and is beginning to) take steps to be part of the solution. Below, we offer some concrete recommendations for becoming such a catalyst in the broader scientific and computing ecosystem.

Offer the project as a place for diversity to grow in astronomy AND computing, OR either of those things separately

Across every open source community we’ve worked in, consulted with, or observed, project leaders and community members are continuously looking for unicorns: Individuals who hold a very high level of expertise in both the scientific domain as well as software development. This orientation is true in recruiting for “core” positions (e.g., core contributors and maintainers), and in some sense is unavoidable once a project reaches a certain level of technical maturity. But there is substantial opportunity to reorient this unicorn-focused approach when growing and sustaining the broader community, such as in the project’s attempt to recruit new users and novice contributors. Calls for participation–whether in conference presentations, blog/website/social media posts, workshops, or announcements–can use language that welcomes “non-unicorns” into the project to explore and find a role for themselves. Project leaders who present about Astropy, for example, could welcome participation with statements like, “Are you an astronomer looking to improve your software development and use practices?” or “Are you a strong software developer looking for interesting astronomy problems?” With some work and ongoing reflection and revision, these types of statements can go a long way in making “non-unicorns” feel comfortable joining Astropy as a way to improve all of their scientific and computing skills while driving the project forward.

Getting involved in efforts that are already happening

Astropy participates in a number of programs with adjacent communities, including offering workshops at conferences and related activities. Leadership and the community could begin to curate lists of such opportunities for improving DEI and pursue a wider variety of these programs. The Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Summer Research Opportunity Program, for example, offers undergrads from underrepresented backgrounds the chance to get involved in high-level research efforts at an earlier stage than they otherwise might. Various related programs and travel funds go a long way in both demystifying academic research (and its core software) and providing resources and skill development for underrepresented students. Astropy benefits from many different university affiliations on its leadership team and within its community, so coordinating with academic programs on their DEI efforts is a viable and sustainable way to take these steps forward. Beyond this, Astropy is in a unique position to be a value-add to these programs: Often these programs focus on getting students into individual labs or departments to do bench science or use existing computational tools, and working with communities like Astropy would extend the opportunities available to students in learning open source methods at the frontiers of scientific reearch.

Across all these efforts, Astropy should strive to be a place where underrepresented individuals can learn new technical and collaborative skills while also growing a strong network. Indeed, DEI experts routinely point out that networking is one of the major challenges facing scientists from underrepresented backgrounds given that they often lack the resources and starting points that well-represented groups benefit from. Astropy is a home for some of the most influential scientists and developers in the field, a capability that could be used to advance the careers of underrepresented groups.

Embrace and Cultivate Intellectual Diversity

As discussed in the Community Recommendations section, open source scientific computing is growing in both size and scope: Practitioners interested in a wide variety of programming languages and computational techniques are looking for opportunities to contribute to projects while advancing their own expertise and careers. We are referring to this as “intellectual diversity” for simplicity and believe that it could be a key mechanism of increasing other forms of diversity within and outside of Astropy.

By “intellectual diversity,” we mean “a variety of educational backgrounds, skill profiles, career interests, and computing approaches.” Interviewees pointed out that the project is experiencing an increase in interest from practitioners who are students or experts in fields like machine learning and artificial intelligence (including one of the interviewees, who views himself as a machine learning practitioner first). While this could, at first glance, appear to be a threat to the cohesion and unified goals of the Astropy community, we believe it offers exciting opportunities to invite a wider, more diverse set of community members into the user, contributor, and maintainer groups.

This is certainly not to suggest that other fields have achieved desired results in the way of DEI; in fact, fields like machine learning and artificial intelligence suffer from many of the same DEI issues as the fields closest to the Astropy project. There are, however, key opportunities within this scenario:

  • Astropy could serve as a welcoming place for these practitioners who do not feel welcome in their home fields. This does not necessarily suggest that Astropy is competing with these fields or that the fields do not naturally overlap; however, it may feel easier (as one respondent mentioned) to join a community focused on solving specific scientific challenges than it does to join a community focused on beating the benchmarks of a previous algorithm.
  • Multiple respondents mentioned feeling encouraged by the progress astronomy has made in training and elevating women within the field. Astropy is a good example of this and has certainly contributed to the uptrend; it therefore may be well-positioned to have similar impacts in open source computing of all kinds.
  • Emerging computing fields (e.g., machine learning, AI) often include practitioners from countries that are not well-represented in astronomy. Giving these individuals an opportunity to work on problems within their computing domains, perhaps in teams with experienced astronomers and astronomy software developers, could offer an entrypoint for non-U.S. and non-European scientists and developers.
  • Fostering intellectual diversity within Astropy can also help the project attract more funds. In other words, widening the scope of computational and scientific approaches opens up new sources of funding that are supporting these fields and approaches. With diverse membership, Astropy would be in a position to apply for such funds.

Actively Learn from Adjacent Communities

In at least one interview, the respondent effusively praised the experience he had at a SciPy event based on both positive and negative experiences (see the Community Recommendations section). Continuously looking for these positive examples and experiences may help Astropy identify what works for its community and steps it can take to foster these positive experiences.

  • Query the community after they return from events (large, small, or both). Simply asking community members in short, structured survey questions such as “What was one positive experience you had interacting with others at ______? One negative?” is a lightweight way to curate these ideas. Likewise, a community channel for sharing these positive and negative experiences might also help leadership have visibility into what is working or not working in the broader community. These types of queries may also feel less threatening and easier to respond to than question about the Astropy community itself.
  • Engage in conversations with other communities about DEI issues. Astropy has already taken steps to do this with communities like pyOpenSci and via collectives like NumFOCUS, but the project could hold these conversations more regularly to share ideas. Ideally, these conversations would be happening at all levels of the organization, including leadership-to-leadership, community manager-to-community manager, maintainer-to-maintainer, and across these groups.
  • Take note when incidents–both positive and negative–become topics of discussion in the broader ecosystem. Whether through informal networks or in public places like forums, leaders in the OSS community often become aware of both good and bad social incidents. Taking time to debrief and discuss these incidents within project teams is a good way to ensure that steps are taken to avoid replicating these issues in your community.

Be Open to, But Critical of Shared Services

Astropy community members are already busy with considerable commitments in many areas: software development, day-jobs (e.g., professorships or industry positions), and career advancement and professional development. It can therefore be tempting or simply necessary to consider shared services models for some core community activities. One example of this is the idea of a fiscal sponsor (e.g., NumFOCUS) providing a range of administrative and community services. Astropy is currently experiencing this with its fiscal sponsor organizing and maintaining a Code of Conduct enforcement committee for all fiscally sponsored projects. To be sure, an organization like NumFOCUS convenes a range of projects that face challenges similar to Astropy, so results may be positive if they adequately crowdsource and member-check proposed solutions. But as we’ve seen in other domains, offshoring tasks that require ongoing commitment and attention over the life of a project can lead to the commnuity losing touch with its own needs and its own perspective on potential solutions. For instance, the root-causes of Code of Conduct violations may differ across projects, and enabling the community to be involved in Code of Conduct process formation may help to address blindspots at the cross-project level. Finding a balance where the community can collectively hold its enforcement, and have enabling infrastructure and guidance that makes it “lightweight” to do so, are what we’d recommend for a growing community like Astropy.

Consider Geography and Timezones

Both the communnity survey and the DEI interviews indicated that there is a dominant gravity for timezones in North America when scheduling events and workshops. This can lead the community to have conversations and make decisions during times that are difficult for those in other global timezones to participate in, leading to feelings of exclusion. Astropy is already a very asynchronous community, but in its synchronous moments, it could be useful to bring more consideration to those in minority timezone areas. Additonally, when key annual events are held in the USA, there can be very restrictive visitation visa restrictions for travel to the United States for people from some locales. It can be worthwhile to consider annual events taking place each year in countries with less restrictive visa requirements.

Develop Community-Driven Definitions and Metrics for Diversity

The Astropy community should work to collectively define its own targets and progress benchmarks for increasing and expanding diversity as a community. It is clear that the astronomy community at-large still has siginificant DEI issues, and it is also clear that many in the Astropy community aspire for the project to challenge those trends with a new model of working and including others.

For this to be successful, it will be important for the leadership of Astropy to be the ones driving the community to define what DEI looks like for Astropy. We encourage Astropy community members to continue to advocate for finding the time and space to have these conversations, and bring the conversations toward key measurable goals for the community. One way to do so is to issue an open call for ideas, centered around the question of “What do we want the Astropy community to look like in ten years? Who do we want to ensure feels comfortable participating in our spaces?”

These open prompts often lead to side discussions, and can be directed toward coworking events, workshops, and other synchronous activities aimed at developing solutions. It can be thought of as a “DEI Hackweek,” with the understanding that planning will require substantial consideration of guardrails and Code of Conduct enforcement.

Use Political Opportunity Structures to Drive Change

Given that Astropy operates at the intersection of various fields and institutions (e.g., academia, industry, and government or astronomy and computing), the project also has these fields’ political opportunity structures to draw from when crafting DEI strategies. This term refers to the available structures external to a movement (in this case Astropy) that help the movement accrue and mobilize resources. The most influential example is the role of Black churches in the United States Civil Rights Movement: Movement leaders and participants had pre-existing organizing capabilities and resources through their churches, enabling them to effectively mobilize for change.

Consider what structures exist within the fields of astronomy, computing, academia, and all other Astropy-adjacent communities. What other efforts are ongoing within the field that could lead to more diversity and inclusion? Where are others in adjacent fields already accruing resources and building communication structures to enact change, even if those changes are not directly DEI-related? Answering these questions as leaders and community members may help to put more power and efficiency behind DEI efforts.

Celebrate Progress

It is important when working on challenging topics like DEI to celebrate strides in the community and improvements as they occur. Interview participants, for example, universally lauded the progress astronomy has made in enabling women astronomers to thrive and some pointed directly to Astropy as an example of this positive trend. Continually assessing the state of Astropy’s DEI efforts and creating opportunities to celebrate success can be a motivating factor to push additional efforts forward.

Practically, Astropy could dedicate some form of communication to celebrating DEI successes. Quarterly newsletters, informal presentations, or Slack/forum announcements, for example, could routinely report on progress being made in advancing DEI. Furthermore, these announcements need not only be focused on Astropy: Drawing on the existing diversity of disciplines and sub-disciplines gives ample materials to work with, and celebrating the successes of other communities is a sustainable way to draw in new users and contributors in a welcoming, inclusive way.

Support the Community Manager in Developing DEI Expertise

Given that DEI is an issue in the community, Astropy should give support to the Community Manager in developing DEI expertise as a part of their work. [Note: It is vital that DEI is not viewed soley as a community manager problem or responsibility–DEI improvements require a community-wide effort). Trainings, consultations with DEI-specific experts, and reading materials are all low-cost options for beginning to equip the community manager with the skills to facilitate DEI improvements. Furthermore, encouraging the community manager to work with other scientific organizations that are struggling with the same challenges can provide a way of creating more astronomy-centered or general knowledge on the topic.

Develop Future-forward Plans for DEI Efforts

Similar to recommendation 6, Astropy should consider developing a formal and adaptable strategy for DEI improvements in the near and long terms. Thinking towards the future of DEI for Astropy would include prompting an ongoing discussion of what the community would like to see going forward and how to continue to make these efforts a community conversation. Futures Thinking Exercises and co-creation of this vision can promote buy-in among the community by bringing those interested in leading DEI efforts together.