Learning about blockchain and DLT is difficult. Overwhelming amounts of unstructured information lies scattered across the web. Plenty of efforts are wasted in isolated searches for golden nuggets. However, with proper guidance and cooperation, we can hone our skills faster and build a collective body of knowledge.
What and where to learn? Where to gather dispersed data? What structure to add to understand the content? How to expose it for public benefit? What learning paths to follow? How to align our skills with labor markets? How to support our entrepreneurial spirit? At what cost? Is financing available and inclusive? Are there scholarships?
Mass collaboration can answer these questions faster. Paraphrasing Linus Law, given enough eyes, the ocean of educational opportunities is shallow.
We want to engage and energize an active community of learners who are self-selected by their interest to understand the field and assisted by a communication mechanism and an open-source toolkit. Their collective intelligence can explore, gather, understand, structure, and share previously unorganized data, fueled by their satisfaction to contribute and build a reputation as knowledge miners.
We envision five core activities that shall repeat in iterative cycles:
– Community to mine knowledge.
– Surveys to gather human feedback.
– Automation to enumerate digital resources.
– Ontology and Taxonomy for cognitive search.
– Knowledge Graph for navigating the taxonomy.
At the end of this mentorship, we will have the first version of our Global Directory, a small but geographically extended working community, a basic set of tools to support collaboration, a knowledge graph to navigate the taxonomy, and a final report.
Our Call to Action starts with your answer to our survey, which is available in 10 languages. It will gather your initial feedback to get the cycles going.
Leaders from Trade Finance, Capital Markets, Climate Action and Accounting, Media and Entertainment, Public Sector, Social Impact, Supply Chain and Telecom Special Interest Groups; Identity, Learning Materials and Development, Performance & Scale and Learning Materials Development Working Groups; and the Italian, Latin America and India Chapters agree:
“We are unearthing ways in which we can better collaborate to overcome today’s and future cross industry challenges by identifying and contributing heterogeneous expertise, leveraging technology for the betterment of society, unifying open communities under Hyperledger.”
Signatories:
Why?
The Hyperledger Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were initially focused on specific business areas such as Trade Finance (TF), Supply Chain (SC), Healthcare (H), Telecom (T), and Capital Markets (CM). These groups evolved separately and went through their own independent cycles of growth. These SIGs regularly hosted presentations about ways their industries and business domains leveraged open source protocols and software to deliver solutions that overcame their respective challenges.
Gradually, some individual SIGs came together organically and dynamically. In 2020, the Capital Markets SIG and Trade Finance SIG produced an exhaustive and comprehensive picture of the Chinese blockchain infrastructure for Trade and Trade Finance.
In March 2021, Trade Finance SIG and Capital Markets SIG met formally for the very first time to plan collaboration in earnest. That meeting sparked an inner debate within the Trade Finance SIG about how different SIGs in the Hyperledger ecosystem could further collaborate. Perhaps it is natural that large-scale collaboration started with trade finance as, thanks to its hybrid nature, it is intimately connected with many other branches of human activity.
Observations emerged from these initial meetings within the Trade Finance SIG and from initial collaboration with other Hyperledger SIGs that could serve as a role model for future and further open engagement throughout the Hyperledger SIGs.
It became clear that we cannot promote decentralization while locking ourselves in silos. We cannot promote decentralization while imposing singular perspectives on the world. We need collaboration, open communication, and strong connections among Hyperledger communities as we look for solutions to enable interoperability and standards at business and technical levels.
The Hyperledger communities should focus on finding new opportunities that support global adoption of blockchain. Intra WGs, SIGs and Chapters collaboration is a natural step forward identifying opportunities to accelerate that adoption. The goal is to discuss, create or adopt technical, business, legal and regulatory standards that may redefine common global practices for a harmonized worldwide adoption and come up with a set of shared, mutually accepted regulatory framework for the industries to innovate.
Blockchain-based ecosystems are virtual places where members come together to be part of an evolution or indeed a revolution in business practices. Hyperledger has always strived to be a neutral reference point that leverages the expertise of their participants.
We face global events that stimulate or accelerate technological advancements and the need for solutions to resolve some of the world’s most urgent problems—from climate change and sustainability, green initiatives including green trade and logistics, healthcare, provenance, security and privacy. We are uniquely positioned to break the silos and combine our thoughts, ideas and effort in a concerted way to solve these problems.
The creation of a Hyperledger Collaboration Working Group will break the silos through intentional collaboration starting a convergence of the Hyperledger ecosystem addressing large-scale real world problems. This new Working Group echoes the goal of the Linux Foundation itself: “Unlocking the value of shared technology.” Representatives from these groups will meet on a quarterly basis to achieve the goal of open collaboration.
Our Call to Action is for you to participate, get involved, contribute where you can and help us achieve our goal. We encourage the community to roll up its collective sleeves and take on this challenge. A good place to start is the event named “Breaking the silos” that will take place on June 15th.
Since Hyperledger Fabric was first introduced in 2017, it has been embraced by the open source community, including both Fabric developers and Fabric contributors, from around the world. Today, Fabric networks are currently running in numerous countries. But 80% of the world’s population are non-English speakers. English-only Fabric documentation represents a barrier to adoption by the broader global community. What if the Fabric documentation was available in native languages to these non-English speakers? Blockchain networks could be deployed and shared more easily as the pool of Fabric users broadens to non-English speaking developers around the world.
Therefore, to spearhead further project adoption in the global community, Anthony O’Dowd launched an initiative in 2019 to begin translating the Fabric documentation into other languages to empower non-English speakers to use Fabric. It started with a small group of Chinese translators and spread to an academic institution in India where the Malayalam translation followed.
Anthony created a repeatable process to translate the documentation that allows translators from other languages to quickly on-board and get started. The process was published in the Fabric documentation Contributing Guide and includes resources and examples for how to start a new translation in GitHub as well as instructions for which topics to translate first and how to collaborate with other translators.
Today, Fabric is being translated today into six languages (Chinese, Japanese, Malayalam, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish), and we are excited to see what other languages people are interested in contributing to. See the existing translated content on the documentation home page, by clicking on the Introduction. Switch between languages by clicking on the version in the table of contents to view the other languages that are available and their translated content.
Translation of the Fabric documentation has benefited the broader community in many ways. Translators have acknowledged that the translation effort itself has been a great way to learn Fabric and,as they become familiar with the contributing process overall, provides the experience to not only contribute translations but also code or bug fixes. Translations now not only allowFabric developers to take advantage of the technology but also enable the general public to learn about the benefits of blockchain technology in their native language. When content is available in your native language, it encourages engagement, enables a stronger connection to the technology, and opens the door for even more companies to adopt Fabric technologies.
Get Involved with a New or Existing Translation Effort
But translation requires collaboration, so the Linux Foundation is launching the Fabric Documentation Translation Campaign to recruit and encourage new translators to join an existing effort or start a new language translation. To get involved with a translation, check out the available working groups or start your own. And you’re welcome to translate any of the material in the Hyperledger community that you would find useful to have in your own language.
Everyone has limited time, and the volume of content available for translation is large. However, the more people who step in to help just proof-read or contribute a small amount of translation, the greater the benefit for the entire community. Appreciation goes out to the following translators for their help in getting this community driven translation effort started: Satomi Tsujita, Yang Cheng, Junjie Zhou, Aneena Alexander, Renato Teixeira, Claudio Paz, and Oumar Fall. And we’d like to acknowledge other open source projects with active translation efforts such as Mozilla, Kubernetes, and Apache for a model of how to provide documentation in multiple languages. To get started visit www.hyperledger.org/translate or join a workgroup that has already started translations in your language. See International groups on the Wiki for a list of available groups or start your own.
Over the last few years, Hyperledger has sponsored the annual Anita Borg Grace Hopper Celebration (GCH) supporting our existing member companies as well as leaders and future women technologists in our global community. In 2021, as part of our Diversity, Civility and Inclusion WG objectives, we will continue to form partnerships with women-led initiatives centered around recruitment and engagement like Anita Borg.
For those of you who have not attended, the Grace Hopper Celebration is an experience like no other. In normal years, the event centers around the grand hall, full of hundreds and hundreds of booths, wholly focused on recruiting women technologists. There is an audible buzz in the air as the thousands and thousands of young women walk the floor, dash to their next scheduled interview or head to the another thought-provoking session. For women in technology, the feeling that GHC evokes is hard to beat elsewhere.
GHC brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront and highlights the contributions of women to the tech world. The event results in collaborative proposals, networking, and mentoring for all attendees. And, for many of us senior executives, walking alongside the next generation of women leaders in technology in the halls, in the lunches and events and collaboration sessions creates a renewed sense of optimism. We feel and see hope in these young, aspiring technologists.
As was the case for most global events in 2020, GHC, which took place in September, was virtual this year. Although you can never replicate an in-person event, especially one that is so focused on networking and building lifelong relationships with your fellow female technologists, the Linux Foundation workshop on “Cool Careers in Open Source” certainly had some of that feeling when the session began. It was clear from the start that something special was going to take place when over 500 attendees joined the session. And, when prompted to say hello as they came in, shared in chat their names and where they were joining from in a fast and furious stream of chats that sparked a few minutes of joy that you can see the speakers react to as the video starts.
The goal of the session was to help attendees learn how open source software is used by major motion picture studios like Netflix and Industrial Light & Magic for visual effects and by major retailers like Walmart in industry shaping blockchain-based networks.
So a large and eager attendee base mingled with a very cool list of speakers that spanned across four different parts of the Linux Foundation for a lively discussion about how open source software is everywhere. As a result, chances are high that young women entering the tech workforce will be writing, deploying, or administering open source and that candidates with experience in open source will stand out to hiring managers. Speakers and attendees all shared background, tips and resources and responded to a lot of great questions. The video below captures the discussion of how to get involved in open source at the start of one’s career:
Representing Hyperledger Archana Sristy, Sr. Director- Blockchain Platforms, Walmart Global Tech and Hyperledger Governing Board Member
Representing Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) Carol Payne, Imaging Specialist Netflix Rachel Rose, R&D Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic, Co-Chair ASWF Diversity & Inclusion Working Group
Representing Linux Foundation Training Mary Campbell, Sr. Manager of Corporate Training at the Linux Foundation
The message was clear: open source software has the potential to level the playing field when it comes to diversity and inclusion – communities are open to everyone, it’s a meritocracy, and there are ample opportunities to build your resume and network while working alongside developers and engineers from forward-thinking companies that are part of the Linux Foundation like Walmart, Netflix, Disney, Microsoft, AT&T, Toyota, Uber, and more. There are thousands of communities out there where you can get started, learn new skills, develop/refine those skills, and gain experience that can lead to careers in tech, retail, motion pictures, banking, automotive, and more.
Here are just some of the resources available to anyone interested in getting involved in open source in the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger community:
Training – Gain marketable open source skills with the Linux Foundation
Training is an on-ramp to opportunity in the software development industry, especially in open source. 93% of hiring managers are unable to find enough individuals with the open source skills they require. Take advantage by gaining in-demand skills and set yourself up for a successful long-term career.
Mentorship – Make personal connections that drive success
Mentorship plays an important role in advancing everyone’s career. Sharing experiences, connections and ideas flattens learning curves and, especially in open source, drives innovation and success on the individual and community level. Mentorship is a particularly powerful way to help grow and shape individual careers through personal relationships.
To make the power of mentorship more widely accessible, the Linux Foundation has many programs that all have diversity-specific opportunities:
Below are excerpts from the online Q+A with guidance our cool panelists offered during the panel. Listen in on the video to hear the full discussion!!
“I would say explore as much as you can, expand your network. Don’t be afraid to take classes and try things not directly in your major – you never know what you’ll enjoy. Don’t stress too much about specializing if you don’t want to.”
“Great question! Early in my schooling and my career, being involved in open source really helped me understand what it is like working in a larger code base. I learned a lot from other developers about engineering design and became more confident about having others review my code. These are skills that are directly applicable to my day-to-day work. The networking that comes from contributing to open source also can’t be overemphasized!”
“I believe anyone can pick up the skills! The job I have now I didn’t have any training on in school. Use the skills and what you learned in CS and jump in if you’re passionate – don’t be afraid to start entry level – you learn so much that way! “
“Open source is open source! Contributions are always welcome – jump in and get involved! All projects have contribution guidelines that are there to make sure the project rules are followed. As you start to contribute more, most projects have opportunities to get involved in the leadership / core contributions of the project.”
“Open source contributions always look good on a resume, provide new skills, and help you network! However, there’s not a direct way to apply to work in open source. My job at Netflix just happens to rely heavily on open source software which means I get the opportunity to contribute as a part of my job!”
How you can help make the community more welcoming
Participation and sponsorship of events alone won’t make Hyperledger a community where everyone feels included, although it is one way we can support diversity. 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.
PS. Big shout out to Ramona “Spielberg,” an 11-year-old future something, with some impressive video editing skills for helping her mom (VP World Wide Alliances at the Linux Foundation) with editing the zoom recording for sharing.
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, wrotedci-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.
Edit, June 1: In just the few days that elapsed between when this was penned and when it was posted so much has happened.
Today in discussing everything that is transpiring, someone pointed out that the roots of Pride Month are not just in the historic riot at Stonewall, but also riots at Cooper Do-nuts, Compton’s Cafeteria, and others.
As we think about what we do to build a diverse, civil, and inclusive community, we look for ways to show that everyone is welcome here and that their lives matter, that black lives matter.
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Happy Pride Month from the Hyperledger open source community! We are proud to have an inclusive community here at Hyperledger. This year has some new challenges for all of us. While the pandemic impacts each of us differently, many of us involved in Hyperledger are fortunate to have jobs that we can do virtually. In fact, one of the reasons it is natural to be inclusive in open source is that it just takes an internet connection to get involved. Of course, it takes an active effort to be a contributor and an active effort from the community to make sure that everyone feels included.
We have a couple new initiatives to announce in Pride Month. First off, we are starting a new guest speaker series. Hyperledger is supported by large and small companies alike, and we are inviting leaders from these companies to come and talk about what Diversity, Civility, and Inclusion mean within their companies and how participating in open source helps. Our first speaker is Jim Gordon from Intel on June 10th: https://wiki.hyperledger.org/x/kw7cAQ
We were also looking forward to joining our member companies at Pride Month events. The plan was to show our support at festivals and other activities and encourage their participation in this open source project. It is perhaps bittersweet that we were able to run Hyperledger Global Forum replete with our “All Are Welcome Here” message, but that might have been the last in-person event for many of us this year. As we looked towards Pride Month events, our nascent on-site plans have had to be curtailed. Fortunately, we are discovering that more and more events are finding a way to continue through virtual means. And as a do-ocracy YOU are welcome to help us be present and connect at those events.
Out and Equal is hosting a couple of virtual events including a June 1st kickoff for pride month and a June 15th virtual brunch: https://outandequal.org/virtual-offerings/
You are welcome to show up and represent the Hyperledger community at these events.
At Hyperledger, “All are welcome here!” That is a message that we want all current and prospective open source contributors to hear. As open source software (OSS) becomes more prominent, the communities that surround it become more important. Having a community that has a culture of encouraging people to voice their diverse opinions is crucial for the long term success of the project. With the motivation of creating an ecosystem that enables many diverse views, the Hyperledger community with the support of the Hyperledger staff has started the Diversity, Civility and Inclusion (DCI) Working Group (WG).
The journey to creating this WG started at the Hyperledger Member Summit in 2018 in Montreal. Hyperledger is the fastest growing project in the Linux Foundation’s history. Despite that, discussions at the Montreal event raised issues about obstacles to participation. Current processes could make it difficult for newcomers to integrate and participate, and some of the processes do not always promote inclusiveness. Newcomers do not always know where to go to find information or ask questions, and conversely active members have difficulty monitoring all the avenues people can participate (e.g., mailing lists, channels on rocket chat, wiki). Geography sometimes also presents a barrier as meetings and correspondence are optimized for certain time zones over others.
Motivated by the observations at the summit, community members along with Hyperledger staff began discussing how to improve the inclusiveness and in turn increase diversity. They wanted DCI initiatives to be community driven and tracked openly. The DCI WG was created to give interested community members an open forum to investigate, collaborate on solutions, and provide visibility to the DCI issues found in the community. The charter for the DCI WG includes collecting data on various metrics, suggesting possible improvements based on those metrics to the TSC or projects, and, if actions are taken, measuring the impact of them.
Diversity, Civility and Inclusiveness can cover many different community health issues. In order to be the most impactful, the DCI WG decided to focus our efforts and tackle a subset of issues first. One of our first goals will be to collect metrics across as much of that breadth as we reasonably can. We are launching a survey to help baseline the current community. Without that data, it is difficult to know where we need to place our emphasis. One of the small pieces of data we do have today suggests a gap in gender representation. After much discussion, the working group has chosen to make that an initial focus and use what we learn through that process and the survey to expand into other aspects of DCI.
Within the Hyperledger ecosystem, the DCI WG is looking to collaborate with other working groups, SIGs, and projects to analyze and measure diversity. We are also looking to work with groups such as CHAOSS. We encourage everyone to participate, give their feedback, and voice their opinions! One of the ways to participate right now is taking our survey. Regardless of your background, the projects or WGs you work on, we want to hear your ideas and feedback. The DCI WG meets bi-weekly and can be found on Hyperledger Community Meeting Calendar. We also have a mailing list and a chat forum. We welcome all contributors!
