Hyperledger created a Code of Conduct to help make sure that there are clear expectations about how to treat others when you are part of the community. The guidelines in the document are taken seriously, and people in the community are held responsible for their actions.
People are asked to communicate constructively and avoid demeaning or insulting behavior or language. If someone were to use insensitive comments on a mailing list or on a phone call, that would be a clear violation. But what if someone wrote code that included insensitive and hurtful language that followed programming conventions that have been followed for decades? And how would you feel as a programmer to come across insulting terms when trying to contribute?
The industry overall is changing how it views established programming conventions; wording that was once common is understood today to be a barrier for engagement. Take, for example, this story published in the article “Tech Confronts Its Use of the Labels ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’” in Wired:
‘A FEW YEARS ago, Karla Monterroso was at an airport when she noticed a glitch in a computer monitor that would normally display flight information. Instead, the screen showed the text “Master/Slave,” repeated at least 10 times from top to bottom.
“I remember freaking out about it and going to [people working in] the terminal and letting them know that I thought that’s really inappropriate,” says Monterroso, CEO of Code 2040, a nonprofit dedicated to racial equality and inclusion in tech. “And they’re like, ‘No, that’s just the technology. That’s what the technology says.’”’
Terminology that is charged is being reconsidered and replaced across a range of open source projects — GitHub has moved to the default branch being main instead of master, the Linux kernel has moved from blacklist and whitelist to blocklist and allowlist and in November of 2020, CNCF began working on replacing biased language with inclusive language. From Wikipedia:
“Inclusive language aims to avoid offense and fulfill the ideals of egalitarianism by avoiding expressions that express or imply ideas that are sexist, racist, or otherwise biased, prejudiced, or denigrating to any particular group of people (and sometimes animals as well).”
Last year the Hyperledger Diversity, Civility, and Inclusion Working Group highlighted a need for our community to use more inclusive language in the source code that it creates. In response, Hyperledger has been looking into how to move away from language that raises barriers to contribution. While these language changes are small in size, they are outsized in terms of impact. Each use of a non-inclusive term is a papercut – a daily insult to endure while you use a project. Enough of those, and a person will no longer contribute.
Finding Problematic Terms with DCI-Lint
To make it easier for the people to address this problem, Peter Somogyvari, a community member and a maintainer for Hyperledger Cactus, wrote dci-lint — a tool to help find non-inclusive language in any git repository based on terms you choose to look for.
This change is overdue on the part of open source in general, and Hyperledger specifically. At the time of writing, for instance, Hyperledger has 94 repos on GitHub that use master as the default branch, compared to 34 that use something else.
If you would like try DCI-lint, navigate to the webpage:
Put in a repo to check, as well as the terms to check for:
Click “lint it”:
Using tools such as dci-lint, we’re working with the community to find and remove these terms.
If you’re interested in learning more about how other open source projects and companies are creating resources and taking steps to remove harmful language from source code, check out the Inclusive Naming Initiative.
How you can help make the community more welcoming
This change alone won’t make Hyperledger a community where everyone feels included, although it is one example of how to remove barriers to contribution. There are certainly other things that can be done to make Hyperledger more inclusive and diverse and we welcome your input on what else we should be doing. Please feel free to post to the Diversity Civility and Inclusion mailing list, or join our regular DCI calls with your suggestions and ideas.
This Year Saintgits College of Engineering joined hands with Hyperledger India Chapter to organise “Women in Blockchain – a Panel Discussion,” with an objective to accelerate the powerful partnerships of women to lead in the education, development and promotion of blockchain technologies. There has always been a general conception that technology is hostile to women. There are people who believe technology is not feminine. There are people who question the ability of a woman to start a business. They believe women are too risk-averse to start a new business. It’s high time these age-old myths were busted. They need to be busted from their very roots. “Women in Blockchain” was the right platform to bring in amazing women from the field of blockchain technology who have placed their imprints in the technical arena. The event aimed to be a myth breaker demonstrating to the world how successful women have overcome their barriers to be world class leaders in blockchain technology, highlighting their accomplishments in the community and offering actionable tips for “How to start a successful career in Blockchain.“
Hyperledger turned five this year, a great milestone for Hyperledger and its community. I started this year by getting acquainted with Hyperledger India Chapter (HIRC) and its first event of the year, “HyperHack 2020.” I participated with my team and won the Hackathon as runner-up. It was a well executed event by the community and saw participation from across Asia Pacific. I had been working on various Hyperledger project implementations, but this event got me and many others like me to connect to the India community.
, and we see a much larger community of members sharing their thoughts and answering questions brought up by new learners.
, my interest grew deep. I realized that this technology can solve many social issues. I have chosen the area of blockchain for my academic project.
. The weekly meetings provide great insights into several Hyperledger projects and how newbies can join and contribute to them. The Blockchain Stories 2020 series and the Blockchain Techfest 2020 series provided an opportunity to share in depth about business use cases for enterprise blockchain and also knowledge around the Hyperledger ecosystem. These sessions also were great sources of the information on how to deploy/manage a production grade implementation. Julian and Brian gave us all volunteers a warm welcome to celebrate Hyperledger’s 5th Anniversary. They bring in so much energy/enthusiasm and manage to stay connected with members from different time zones round the clock. I am looking forward to connecting and contributing to the lab projects that the Hyperledger India Chapter has planned in the year 2021.
“Tough times never last, tough people do!” ~ Robert H Schuller
Action & Accounting 
and Trade Finance SIGs at Hyperledger.
sts has propelled us to do even more. This feeling of ours echoed through the feedback, emails, YouTube viewership and the number of times these events were spoken about across the globe.
We couldn’t be more proud of what the Hyperledger India Chapter accomplished in the year 2020. It is all possible because of the ever increasing enthusiasm we see in the community. All roads now lead to 2021. We are excited to have more community engagement in the coming year!
ting Hyperledger technologies, open source collaboration, sharing information and assisting the India blockchain community. 2020 has been a challenging year. It has been heartening to see the innovative ways the India Chapter has found to share information and support the blockchain community – in India, across Asia Pacific and globally.
