About our guest:

Rynn Mancuso (they/them) is the developer community manager at Honeycomb.io, a contributor to OpenTelemetry, and a CNCF Ambassador. They led developer communities at Honeycomb, New Relic, Tidelift, Mozilla and Wikimedia. They're also an editor of Contributor Covenant 3 with the Organization for Ethical Source.

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Find us on:

All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

Transcript:

ADRIANA: Hey, fellow geeks, welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host Adriana Villela, coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Rynn Mancuso. Welcome, Rynn.

RYNN: Hi, glad to be here.

ADRIANA: Super excited to have you. And where are you calling from today?

RYNN: Oakland, California.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Okay, well, we shall start off first things first with our lightning round questions. Are you ready?

RYNN: Yes.

ADRIANA: All right, let's do this. First question, are you a lefty or a righty?

RYNN: Righty.

ADRIANA: Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

RYNN: Android.

ADRIANA: Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

RYNN: Mac.

ADRIANA: What's your favorite programming language?

RYNN: JavaScript.

ADRIANA: All right, do you prefer dev or ops?

RYNN: Ops.

ADRIANA: Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

RYNN: You know, I kind of hate them both, but my friend has cats named JSON and YAML. And so I'm going to say JSON is a shadow of a black cat who is very attractive, but YAML is extremely sweet. So I'm going to say YAML wins the day.

ADRIANA: All right, love it. Next question. Spaces or tabs?

RYNN: Spaces.

ADRIANA: And then do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

RYNN: Text.

ADRIANA: And finally, what is your superpower?

RYNN: Building relationships.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Congratulations for being the fastest responder to the lightning round questions. Well, I wanted to. One thing that I wanted to talk about today is accessibility in tech and the importance of accessibility in tech, because oftentimes it ends up coming as an afterthought, if that. So, I guess, first things first, do you have any, like what, what are your thoughts around the accessibility landscape in tech? What do you see that's been super awesomely done? And what would you see that's been very poorly done?

RYNN: Yeah, it's an interesting time in terms of accessibility in tech, because when many of us, and I'm included in this group of people, first built the current standards, the WCAG, other standards for web accessibility, the web was a much simpler place than it was today. And we, you know, we emphasize the importance of writing semantic HTML, of making every element needed for accessibility, from alt text to ARIA, elements that allow you to run more advanced controls, all just part of good semantic HTML. And if you're speaking semantic HTML, the thinking went, your content is going to be very easily made accessible. Right now, the web in general is burdened with many, many components that are coming from frameworks that are coming from a range of different tools. Often your front end has a very complicated tool chain supporting it. Lots of places, plugins, lots of things that you're sucking from other places, perhaps ads, if you're serving content. All of this is more complicated for screen readers to navigate because there's lots of components. It's more complicated for people with ADHD and other cognitive challenges because there's more things to distract them.

And it's more complicated for folks who might have mobility disabilities and not use standard pointer systems. And so there's some really neat innovation coming out to address framework accessibility. And folks are building accessible frameworks, but it's still a much bigger bridge for us to cross than we anticipated with the original. And also, I think if you extend that from the front end into developer tooling, the tools that we're looking at are more and more complicated. They're more and more visual, because it turns out that things that involve sorting and classifying and pattern recognition in text AI can do very well. But humans are very good at spotting visual anomalies. That would take AI a long time because they need to know the algorithm for the anomaly. And so using developer tools and using so many of them is really, I think, taking accessibility in a lot of new directions because it's tricky to provide an equivalent user experience for everybody.

ADRIANA: Have you seen like, are you. I know that it's been like slow moving, but are you happy with the direction in which things are going?

RYNN: I'm definitely seeing things getting better. I'm seeing more concern and awareness for accessibility within tech. There's really a movement that I think really got accelerated by the pandemic and people getting to sort of see how they were in different situations than what they were used to, of folks discovering that they experienced some form of neurodivergence, particularly like lots of developers, lots of ops people are realizing that part of what made them good at their job was some form of neurodivergence, which can be very different. When you're trapped inside the house, the impact that that can have on you can be very different. And so I'm seeing folks come out as having these identities and have more sympathy, more interest in providing accessible experiences. At the same time, I think lots of folks still don't know how to do it, and we could be doing a better job of teaching and I think a better job of incentivizing folks to make accessibility something that's built in from the start and expected as table stakes, rather than something you're retrofitting for, because retrofitting almost always results in inferior user experience because you just didn't design it. With this set of users in mind, yeah, yeah.

ADRIANA: It's basically you're saying, let's shift left on accessibility, because otherwise you're doing like a square peg into a round hole, which never ends well.

RYNN: Right. And the reality is that when you build things for accessibility, you are generally making them better for everyone. The Google crawlers that do SEO, for example, are an example of a headless browser, similar to a screen reader, that has a sort of, that might have a sort of different head than a standard browser or, you know, a text only browser. It renders content quite differently. And so what you do to improve accessibility for these alternative user agents is also improving accessibility for SEO. It, another part of accessibility, frankly, is good user experience, particularly when you get to accessibility for folks with cognitive challenges, because the reality is that many, some people have formal diagnosed ADHD and it's hard to focus, and different elements on the screen will make it more likely that their focus gets hijacked. But we all have things periodically that challenge our ability to stay focused. Whether we, we're under a lot of stress, whether we're checking into our systems because we've gotten a page while we were on the train and we're trying to do it from our mobile phone, whether, again, we've gotten a page and we're at a loud bar.

And so when you improve the experience to make logical elements, draw people's focus, to make it easier to find different elements in the user interface for users with cognitive disabilities, you're actually improving it for everyone.

ADRIANA: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it's interesting. I remember a couple years ago when I was still working at Tucows, and I remember publishing some, some blog posts on their blog, and I was talking to the person who was responsible for managing the blog, and they're like, oh, make sure you have alt text for all your images. And I'm like, oh, that, you know, like, that's something that, you know, folks take for granted, right? Like, I can see the image, why do I need the alt text? And ever since then, like, he, they got me in the habit of always, whenever I write my blog posts now and include images, I always make sure I not only have the caption, but I also have the alt text. So it's gotten me into that new habit, which I think is very cool.

RYNN: That's lovely.

ADRIANA: And then the other thing that I was thinking of as well is I remember when Hachyderm became a thing on Mastodon and folks were talking about, when you write out hashtags, make sure that you use camel case because it's easier. I think it's something to do with. It has some sort of accessibility consideration. I can't remember exactly what it is, but because of that, I also always try to keep that in mind when writing out hashtags, which is kind of annoying. It's annoying in the sense where I'm trying to do camel case, and then some platforms have the hashtag autocomplete, and then they'll autocomplete it with all lowercase. I'm like, damn it, you're ruining my perfecty...you're ruining my camel case work. I put so much effort into doing this, and then you've, like, obliterated it. But it's like, just these little things, even, that we can do to just help make things a little bit more accessible for folks.

RYNN: Right. Yeah. The accessibility concern there is that a screen reader will try to pronounce it all as one word if you have lowercase. But if it's camel case, then it understands to stop between words.

ADRIANA: Ah, gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then the other aspect that I always think of, too, is like, from the podcasting standpoint, I always make sure that I have, like, captions included with my podcast. And so I think most of the production in my podcast actually comes from editing the captions and providing a transcript, because I have an AI tool that generates the captions, and it does a half decent job of it. But there are things that it misses. So me having to go through all of the entire transcript of each show and making sure that it's conveying the correct information so that if folks are using closed captioning on YouTube or if they want to just read the transcript from the show notes, they have that opportunity, which, you know, again, it's not necessarily things that I would have thought of in the past, but I'm grateful to folks who have pointed me in that direction.

RYNN: Right.

ADRIANA: And then the other thing that I wanted to mention, too, is, you know, I always think about accessibility, like, you know, in terms of you and I got to spend some time together at the climbing gym at a couple of conferences, and you've opened my eyes to, like, the world of paraclimbing, which I think is really, really cool. I mean, paraclimbers are like next level awesomeness. Would you mind talking a little bit about paraclimbing and even, like, how you got into climbing?

RYNN: Sure. So I got into adaptive climbing shortly after the pandemic. I honestly, there was a group in my town, I saw them advertise on the a disability LISTSERV. I thought immediately, oh, this is something super exciting to me. I always thought of climbing as an extreme sport that sort of only people in really good shape could do. I'd never thought, oh, yeah, I, as a disabled person, could be a climber. It was definitely like, you know, there are certain stereotypes of climbing, especially from the outside, that you're like, I can't do this. But I was super excited to go try it.

And so I went down and it just became something I was really excited about, started to do, you know, a couple times a week. Paraclimbing, I think, is pretty unique. Obviously, there's lots of people with lots of different types of disabilities who climb, but many of the folks in paraclimbing, we have disabilities that actually impact our mobility, our ability to walk. Some folks might be missing part of a limb. We have consciously chosen a sport that we are bad at according to any conventional standard, like, by definition, right. This is a group of people who have, you know, failed walking so badly that we use devices to walk for us, like wheelchairs or crutches, and yet, like walking up a hundred feet or thousands of feet in the case of outdoor climbing, wall. Sounds like a great idea. Yeah.

So it's a very, it's a sport full of people who are trying really hard. It's a very tight knit community. Climbing in general can be very tight knit because your safety is always on the line with the person you are climbing with. But paraclimbing, I think especially so because people are having to actively figure out how to adapt climbing to make it work for them. There's no sort of bible for how you climb as an adaptive climber. It's so specific to your body. There are things that work for lots of people, but it's so personal. And so people are figuring it out together how to do it.

What's interesting, and I think at the end of the day, paraclimbing and disabled climbers challenge the idea that we have that climbing should be about getting to the top as fast as possible, that it should be fundamentally goal oriented. Lots of climbers with mobility disabilities particularly, I see folks climb very slowly because they have to move slowly. And it's, I think, adding something unique to climbing as a sport to start thinking about it. Less is about getting to the top, doing things as fast as possible, and more is about the experience of climbing, about building strength, about solving problems, and, you know, like the way we talk about climbing and especially competitive climbing. It doesn't emphasize that. It emphasizes getting to the top of the mountain. It emphasizes how fast can you speed climb, and paracliming is the opposite of that, and I think has a lot to teach the climbing community.

ADRIANA: Yeah, it's so true for me as a climber, especially because my family climbs. And so I'm constantly comparing myself to my husband and my daughter. And it's taken me a long time personally to just get over, like, oh, they're, you know, they're getting some bouldering problem that I can't. Getting over that and just focusing on, like, am I pushing myself? Am I improving as a climber? So it's not like the competition against others, it's the competition against self. What are you doing to challenge your mental limits, your physical limits within what you're comfortable doing? Because I think that's really, at the end of the day, is climbing is all about what you're, what you're comfortable doing and how far you're willing to push yourself to do it, really?

RYNN: Exactly. Exactly. It's about personally pushing yourself. And I think comparison is definitely the thief of joy within climbing, because everyone, not just disabled people, has a unique body. There are lots of things about your body that go into which moves are easy for you and which moves are hard for you. For example, I'm super tall, so any kind of sit start where you have to start very close to the ground is super painful for me. I hate it. I can barely get in those positions. Adriana is, you know, you're super short, and so big reachy moves are difficult for you.

ADRIANA: They are, yeah, they're, they're the crux for me. They. They make me angry, and in probably the same way that the sit starts make you angry.

RYNN: Right, right. But I have big, long arms, so I can often just reach up for that kind of hold.

ADRIANA: Yeah, totally, totally.

RYNN: Yeah.

ADRIANA: And I think that's. That's the thing. As you said, it's like knowing, like, working...what...working with your body and understanding how it works. And, and that's. That's one thing that I've personally, on my climbing journey, I've had to realize. Cause, like, my daughter is similar. Similar size. She's more slender than me, she's a little bit taller, but similar size.

So I'm like, oh, she does whatever move. I'm like, then this is the way that I'm gonna do it. And then I realize, oh, I don't have maybe the same level of flexibility or, like, I just don't have the courage to do as risky a move as she's doing. And so now I have to, like, rethink my strategy. Like, how can I do this within the confines of what I'm comfortable doing, knowing how my body's gonna function?

RYNN: Right, right. She's 20 years younger than you, and it's much less of a big deal for her if she gets injured because younger people bounce back quicker.

ADRIANA: Exactly, exactly. But I mean, generally, just like, you know, that is what I love about the climbing community, though, in general, is, like, it is a very, like, welcoming community, and folks are always cheering each other on. Even, like, going to new climbing gyms in different cities, there's, you can, like, hang out with a random group of people that you'll probably never see again for a session and just climb together and cheer each other on. And I think that's, you know, we need more welcoming moments like these. And then the fact that, like, it's nice to see, like, you know, after you and I met, like, I noticed, like, in the last year, my. My local gym has been doing some adaptive climbing. And, you know, and then I thought back to, like, you know, when. When we were climbing a couple of times in. At, like, KubeCon, Detroit, and Open Source Summit last year, and. And, you know, and you kind of opened my eyes to adaptive climbing. I'm like, oh, this is so nice that, like, my local gym is, like, really embracing adaptive climbing and, like, really bringing that, like, making it more inclusive for folks, because I think I feel like that is, like, the. The essence of. Of the climbing community and also, like, just the range, as you said, of, like, different types of adaptive climbing. Like, you and I were talking at one point where you were, you told me about, like, climbers who are blind and they have somebody who calls out, holds for them as they climb. Like, I would have never in a million years guessed that that is something that was possible. And so, like, it kind of warms my heart that it really is, like, a sport that's, like, really open for everybody.

RYNN: Exactly. And, man, like, as a mobility impaired climber, comparing yourself to a blind climber is definitely the theme of joy. They're so strong! Everything works.

ADRIANA: Absolutely. Well, I did want to switch gears for a sec and also talk about another thing, which is, like, you're a CNCF Ambassador and you just got renewed for another couple of years, so congrats. Yay.

RYNN: Excited to be an Ambassador with you.

ADRIANA: Yeah, definitely. And I was wondering if you could tell folks about your own CNCF Ambassadorship journey, like, what got you to apply in the first place and what got you to continue doing the work, like, make you want to continue being an Ambassador.

RYNN: Sure. So I became a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Ambassador because I was already doing a lot of community building work within OpenTelemetry. And the Ambassador program has lots of support for people who organize meetups. And, you know, I was super excited to get that support to be sort of better connected to CNCF. I also, at the time Adriana and I started, there weren't really many Ambassadors who had a focus outside Kubernetes. So it was an opportunity to bring more awareness of our project, OpenTelemetry, which is the second fastest growing and, I think, second largest project within the Cloud Native Computing foundation to the broader Cloud Native Computing Foundation community to really attempt to make it as ubiquitous as Kubernetes. I've stayed in the program and continued to meet the requirements, less because of that, because much of that has happened over the past couple years that Adriana and I have been working on the project and more because the people in the Ambassador program are really, truly wonderful. And I love getting the opportunity to connect with people who are passionate about cloud native from all over the world that I get in the Ambassador program.

ADRIANA: And I have to say, like, I think when we were first, like, newly minted Ambassadors last year in Amsterdam, there was, like, we attended our first CNCF Ambassador breakfast. And I, you know, hats off to you. Like, you are such a social butterfly. And I sometimes, like, I can be, like, sometimes in crowds, I can be very, like, I can shut down because of the introvert in me. And it was thanks to you that, you know, like, you went out and started introducing yourself and, like, to. To various folks and, and allowed me to tag along for the ride, and that way got to meet some, like, new Ambassadors that I, I probably would have been the person standing off in the corner because I'm like, oh, my God, this is too overwhelming for me.

So, anyway, I want to call that out. Like, hats off to you. You really are like a lovely community builder. You do such a great job of, of connecting people. So I can totally vouch for your superpower on that. And what I know that obviously, we're involved together in the OTel End User SIG. Are there other areas in CNCF that you're involved in that you're super passionate about?

RYNN: Definitely my biggest investment in CNCF is the OTel End User SIG. However, I've been involved in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing working group as an act of solidarity with other folks with disabilities. I spoke on a panel at KubeCon EU with a lot of folks from that community, and they have really I think some of the hardest time, you know, because my disability, when I sit down at my desk, it doesn't impact me all that much. Sure, I have ADHD, but so do half of the developers, but my mobility disability doesn't really have any impact. And in fact, once we started interviewing remotely, it was great because I didn't even have to disclose that I had a disability until after I was hired. And for the deaf and hard of hearing folks, it's very challenging because so much of the information about new technologies you get at conferences, you get by sort of watching videos and webinars. It's tough just to follow things in text. And people don't always make things captioned.

They don't always make things accessible. And in the case of some deaf people, in fact, their first language is sign language. Sign languages aren't related word by word to their parent, to any spoken language. They. For example, American Sign Language is called American Sign Language because it shares many of the cultural assumptions of American English. What it does not share is the grammatical assumptions and the ways of saying things, because there is a language called signing exact English, and that is not so much a language as spelling out written English letter by letter. That is extremely slow. It's not a good way to communicate.

So, for example, you may have three gestures to communicate an entire sentence in sign language because the grammar is set up to be economical in terms of movement. It uses facial expressions, etcetera. And so if folks' first language is written English, if folks first language is sign language, then when they learn written English, that is a second language. And they also don't have the advantage that the rest of us have of learning how to both write and speak at the same time and being able to move back and forth between the two modalities. It is strictly a visual modality. And so it can be more challenging for folks to get involved in the community, both because everyone is speaking English out loud and because written English is not the exact analog of their signed language. There's no written version of the sign language. So I have a lot of respect for folks in this community, and there's just amazing people becoming engineers with all sorts of situations, everything from a little bit hard of hearing to, you know, folks who are completely deaf and whose first language is sign language. And I've learned so much from the vibrancy and the energy that these folks bring to this very hard problem, because literally, like, the second they go on a phone interview, their disability is exposed.

ADRIANA: Right, right.

RYNN: That takes a lot. Besides that, I'm involved in the CNCF AI working group. I have mostly been involved in sort of community building exercises for them, like managing presences at events, doing user surveys. They're working on white papers on how AI is being used in cloud native, which is super exciting to sort of see this space grow and change. And I'm really stoked that that's happening outside the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. I work on contributor Covenant 3. I built an enforcement system and enforcement manual for contributor Covenant 2, and that's led to now I'm one of the lead editors on 3, which we have started on this year. We're at the 10th anniversary of this important code of conduct that was one of the first codes of conduct available for open source projects.

The CNCF uses a modified version of the contributor code of conduct across all of their projects. So do lots of other major projects. I believe Google's open source team used it, at least for a while. They may, I think, have transitioned to their own thing, Microsoft, lots of big companies, lots of big foundations that really took it on and made it their own. And I'm excited to be revisiting this ten years after the first code of conduct, because when we thought of the first one, we were a bunch of Americans who were frankly pissed off about things like sexual harassment at conferences. And now much of that has settled down. Conference culture has changed for the better, so that there's almost an expectation that there's a code of conduct. You don't see things like booth babes on the show floor much anymore.

The position that women and non binary people have and the relationship to sexuality has really changed in the industry. And now what we are taking on is how do we internationalize this? How do we genuinely consider developers from all over the world, how do we consider different concepts of justice, different concepts of what is right, and still continue to advocate for inclusion in a wide range of cultural contexts? And how do we make this code of conduct better for the wide range of people, things people are doing these days? Because when we designed it initially, we thought, well, there will be conferences and there will be contributing pull requests to open source conference, to open source things. And now it's way more than that. We're doing way more in tech, and it's super exciting to think about all these places in which a code of conduct can be used. And it's also super exciting to be able to evolve away from strictly sort of punitive measures like, no, don't harass people, because some of that groundwork has been taken care of and it's more expected that you're not going to do those things. Now we can start talking about desired behaviors and ways to contribute to a community positively, ways to maintain the tone of a community. And so I'm really excited about the cc three work this year.

ADRIANA: That's so cool. And, you know, it's interesting, too, because, like, these are the types of things that I think most of us just take for granted. Right? There is a code of conduct, but there is a group of humans behind that code of conduct that have put a lot of time and effort in crafting that out to make sure that, you know, you're covering all the bases as much as possible. And it's cool to bring awareness to that because, like I said, it's absolutely something that we take for granted in this area.

RYNN: Right. And what I would say is people who write codes of conduct get lots of hate mail. There is a group of folks who is highly invested in being able to behave badly.

ADRIANA: Oh, wow.

RYNN: Of course, they will claim that they really support free speech or that they think everyone is equal and they want to get past this identity nonsense when you have a thing that says, no, we shall not discriminate on the basis of ability, race, national origin, and they will hide behind those kinds of arguments, especially on the Internet. But the reality is they are invested in being able to continue behaving the way that they want to anyone, and not invested in being able to show up in a community and participate in a way that's inclusive and respectful. And so as a code of conduct author, we get lots of hate mail. Many of us have, like, elaborate personal security systems that make us hard to track down because folks have received threats to their home, etcetera. So it's really important for you to go to the authors of your favorite code of conduct and, you know, make the effort to put pull request to show that you're using that code of conduct. Write them a letter saying that you actually appreciate their work because they don't get those letters.

ADRIANA: Wow. That is. I had no idea it was, like, so, so brutal out there for code of conduct authors. And I appreciate you bringing this to light because I honestly, I would have never guessed that would be so, like, wow, just an awful experience.

RYNN: Yeah. Yeah. There's always a pool of people who are like, the status quo is fine because it is serving me, and I am highly invested in keeping that the same instead of being like, you know, how can we change text so that everyone feels welcome? So there's more text. So we're all supported, and it's sad to see.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah. And so in spite of all this, like, what keeps you continuing to work on the code of conduct? Cause, I mean, I'm sure the hate mail can be scary at times.

RYNN: It can be scary at times. And, you know, I didn't work on CC one, which is when we received, really the worst of it, but some of my co editors did. And I'm aware of those stories. And I think what keeps me doing it is that I genuinely believe that making tech, and especially cloud native, in our case, a more opening and welcoming place, makes better technology. It makes better user interfaces. When we think about the needs of a wide range of users, from folks who need accessibility to folks who might not speak the language of the interface as a first language, to sort of thinking about internationalization, all of these things are better thought about by a diversity of people. And so I feel that code of conduct work, and I also was involved in rolling out the code of conduct system across all of Mozilla's projects. I didn't write their code of conduct.

It was one of the first codes of conduct that did have desired behaviors, but sort of evangelized it into all the communities, did workshops on it. I believe that codes of conduct have the power to help us heal some divides within the tech community and bring people together. And I feel like having a safe environment should be table stakes for everyone. And I want to work to make that happen.

ADRIANA: That's great. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone deserves to be in a place where they feel included and safe. And it's nice to see that, like, there is work going on in the community to help make that happen. Even just going back to the work that you said that you were doing with the deaf and hard of hearing group, even, like, I noticed in, I think, the last KubeCon that they actually had, like, someone who was basically, as the keynotes were happening, actually, I think as the talks were happening, they had someone in sign language. Like, basically, I don't know if that's the appropriate term, but translating into sign language as people spoke, which, very cool. And again, until you see that, you're like, oh, my God, I've been taking for granted this entire time that I can hear people speak, and some people, like, they can't.

RYNN: And something you don't see at KubeCon is that they have a system behind the scenes that is AI based, that takes in audio and text and puts out captions or audio in a person's native language, and lots of people are listening to it. You get to see the sign language interpreters, because at least right now, that still can't be AI'd. The translation is too different. The translation is too different. It's visual material, but that's a tiny element of all the internationalization that is going on in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And we're also seeing, you know, in the last year, so they've launched KubeCon China, which is actually getting folks from behind the wall. They've launched Kube Day India. India is one of the largest places that contributes to open source, and they contribute in ways that are quite different than the way we think about contribution in the west, because they go to code clubs, which are like meetups.

They'll go to code club on Friday. Like, you'll go to code club on Friday night, and you'll work through a contribution together. And you might not necessarily be, like, super skilled or all working on the same project, but your folks are learning together. But then from a code of conduct and a behavior standpoint that poses lots of challenges that we don't experience when we think about, oh, what's the code of conduct for people in the US who are sitting at home typing on their computer on GitHub, their experience is very different. And similarly, you know, China has lots of very specific rules about information going in and out of China. India, there is caste based oppression that can happen. For example, when I was at Mozilla to manage these code clubs, we ended up hiring a contractor in India who had a very good knowledge of, like, western feminism, had sort of been to school for women's studies and also of Indian culture, who could be our translator when issues came up, because we were like, this person is writing to us that people from this particular neighborhood can't feel welcome at this code club. And we care about this, and we don't understand the dynamics.

And then it's like, oh, well, these people are actually low caste, quote unquote. And this other caste, you know, they're trained from birth to hate these people. And, like, we needed an explainer.

ADRIANA: Wow. Wow, that's so wild. Yeah. These things that you just take for granted, you know, doing, working in western culture and even just going back to, like, the internationalization thing, I think I saw recently somewhere that, you know, I think the OpenTelemetry website, like opentelemetry.io. I think there they're doing. They're translating it into more languages. And I'm part of this group of Brazilians on CNCF Slack, and someone was asking around, oh, anyinterest in doing a translation into Brazilian Portuguese for opentelemetry.io. Because again, it's like if your working language is English, you totally take it for granted. But that is not the case for everybody.

And there are some very smart people out there whose first language is not English. They don't feel comfortable speaking it, and why should they? And so, like, let's make it more inclusive for them by making things available in their native language or for them to be able to contribute in their native language and feel comfortable. And that's another aspect that we so easily forget about.

RYNN: Right. And I should put in a plug that Contributor Covenant 2 and Contributor Covenant 3 are managed through the Organization for Ethical Source. And if you speak more than one language, particularly if you were very fluent in the culture of the countries that speak a non english language, we could really use you. First of all, we want to, we're trying to make sure that we have translations into as many languages as possible of CC 2. And CC 2 is sort of a direct translation from CC from, from the English. But what we would like to do with CC 3 is get folks in who have already translated CC 2 and thought some about, like, what that would mean inside their culture so that we can create translations of the code that take into mind that folks have different concepts of what justice is. Folks have different ideas about enforcement in different cultures. And we weren't able to keep that. We weren't able to, like, figure that out when we were writing CC 2 because the pressure was so great just to reduce the amount of harassment that folks were experiencing in tech. And now that we're working on CC 3, we have an opportunity to create that.

ADRIANA: So it's not just a matter of doing a direct translation, but also, like, capturing the cultural nuances. And it is. What it sounds like?

RYNN: Yeah, yeah. Probably the easiest path is to work on or review a direct translation of CC 2, and then you have a starting point for thinking about, okay, what's different in my culture that I would like reflected in a version of CC 3 that takes, that really is culturally sensitive, because that's an important part of localization and globalization efforts, is it's not just like the English words showing up in the other language. It's, does this make sense? And for our code of conduct, I think it's especially important that people are able to internalize and grasp the precepts of the code of conduct. So going back to the caste example in India, for example, we would include caste based discrimination directly. And folks in that culture are aware of what that is and how to impact that, that sort of thing. Yeah, just lots of things around cultures, ideas of justice are really different, and we want the code of conduct to be something that is so simple that people can internalize it within their own framework of justice and inclusion.

ADRIANA: Gotcha. Gotcha. Wow. I have learned so much today. This has been such a great conversation, and thank you for enlightening me on so many different areas. We are coming up on time, but before we go, was wondering if there's any either a hot take or a piece of advice that you'd like to leave folks off with.

RYNN: You know, people and people's individual stories are a really important part of technology. I think we underrate that. We think that it's all about the best tech, but the reality is it's about the human relationships. It's about how tech supports our ability to be human. And I think, you know, my advice is don't lose sight of that.

ADRIANA: Oh, that's so great. I really love that. What a, what a what? Very lovely parting words. Well, thank you so much, Rynn, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check our show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

RYNN: Peace out and geek out.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking Out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who, incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.

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