Blind Code Reviews: Debiasing the Open Source Contribution Process

[mozfest-bot]

[ UUID ] 6445738f-4186-4df4-aae8-d8ff17a426d8

[ Session Name ] Blind Code Reviews: Debiasing the Open Source Contribution Process
[ Primary Space ] Digital Inclusion
[ Secondary Space ] Openness

[ Submitter's Name ] Tomislav Jovanovic
[ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] Mozilla Open Source Experiments
[ Submitter's GitHub ] @zombie

What will happen in your session?

Even when we are trying to be fair, most of us still have unconscious biases that influence code reviews based on the author's perceived gender, race, and/or authority. Blind Code Reviews is a Mozilla experiment that hides the identity of pull request author on Github, letting reviewers focus on judging code on its own merits.

Following an introduction and a brief show-and-tell installing and using the browser extension, participants will be invited to install it themselves, browse some repositories in blind mode, and report on how it changes their perception of PRs.

This will spark a discussion about bias, and how separating contributions from the author/authority may influence our judgement of code quality.

https://github.com/zombie/blind-reviews
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/03/08/gender-bias-code-reviews/

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

The goal is to introduce open source maintainers who are motivated to increase the diversity of our community to the idea of blind reviews, starting with the original inspiration: blind audition process used by symphony orchestras to curb gender bias.

The secondary goal is to learn from the honest discussion about different biases in open source, peer/contributor authority, impostor syndrome and other issues related to inclusion in open source.

If your session requires additional materials or electronic equipment, please outline your needs.

A digital projector and wifi for attendees.

Time needed

less than 60 mins

[jontutcher]

This sounds like a great idea! Some questions:

• Are you expecting attendees to bring laptops to do the code reviews on, or are you providing devices? There's a possibility Mozfest could provide some but we'd have to sort out early on...
• Do you require participants to be software developers, or will the design of the session take non-techies into account?

[zombie]

The primary target audience are people already involved with open source as contributors or maintainers, though not exclusively in technical roles. All the same inclusion principles apply to Documentation, Community and other areas.

With that in mind, I'm expecting at least some, if not most of the interested attendees to have laptops with them, but it's not a requirement, as we will not be doing full code reviews, just brief browsing in "blind mode" and reporting/discussing the experience.

From my previous talks about Blind Reviews, I find it only takes a couple of engaged participants to bring up their (diverse) experience/point of view to spark a deep discussion (each of those topics I listed were first brought up by someone else and not me).