Make room: Our voices are worth listening
Weeks ago, I read an opinion piece by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols on The Register titled "The graying open source community needs fresh blood". It starts by quoting a striking and timely comment from Ruth Ikegah at a Youth and Open source panel held at the United Nations Open Source Program Office for Good conference in Manhattan: "We need more young people here because I see a lot of old people here."
The debate sparked by her remark is well overdue, but I’d like to see it expanding it beyond the age of contributors — we seldom talk about power structures either left unseen or ignored by the established free and open source movement of the Global North.
I’d like to emphasize the Global North aspect of it as we have thriving free and open source projects, leaders, and communities in many countries of the Global South, but I rarely see that being acknowledged in the discourse about the free and open source movement as a whole — what I hear from prominent members on this subject usually takes into consideration only projects and communities started, established, and continued in the United States and Europe. Before diving into it, we need to recognize that’s a very narrow point of view. Let it be known we are as capable and creative as our counterparts of the Global North, and I’m proud to say I contributed to at least one big Brazilian free and open source project that today is taking the world of digital preservation by storm: Tainacan.
What follows is my personal experience navigating free and open source communities of the Global North; they represent struggles related to my particular intersection of identities. They’re in no way reflective of the experience of all contributors from the Global South, but I’m willing to bet some of the themes of this post are fairly universal.
Passive usage versus active participation #
I’m in my late 20s, and my involvement with the free and open source movement started in my late teens when I attended several editions of Flisol, or Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre[1]. For what felt like a really long time in the mind of a young adult, everything I’d hear about free and open source projects came solely from the perspective of a user; it would take me 3 years after my first Linux installation to make my first contribution to an open source project. The majority of FOSS activism I was involved with focused on switching from proprietary tools to libre alternatives, rarely talking about the work required to maintain such tools, or structures that sustain them.
I had no mentor, no one I'd look up to encouraging me to dream bigger and aim higher; I struggled to find the self-confidence to submit my first pull request, but I ultimately did it to thank a community that had welcomed me with open arms with no strings attached. The structure of governance and overall organization around free and open source software I used (and still use) felt particularly obscure to me[2]. In hindsight, my exposure to the free and open source movement seemed to encourage passive enjoyment rather than the message that I, too, belonged in places where decisions about every libre tool I use were made[3].
Gratefulness and appreciation guided me to a path as a free and open source contributor; my insatiable curiosity, and the determination to change the world I live in, made me follow that path to see where it would take me.
Anglophone by default #
Brazilian media loves to cite a British Council research that states only 1% of Brazilians are fluent English speakers, and only 5% of the Brazilian population speak some English — I have no reason to disagree with that diagnostics. English became one of my mandatory courses in school when I was about 10 years old, and I still remember my very first English teacher telling me I'd never be capable of learning the language[4]. The majority of my knowledge of the English language was self-taught — it started with translating Beatles song lyrics to Brazilian Portuguese, then reading books, watching movies and documentaries, and taking in anything and everything I could by browsing the internet. It would take me more than a decade as an English student to gather the courage to speak English in public forums[5].
The free and open source movement is anglophone by default, and I've witnessed (and have been the victim of) exclusion of ESL contributors for our "odd English". Oftentimes, being clocked as a non-native English speaker from the Global South meant being taken less seriously, or witnessing the quality or validity of my work be questioned altogether[6]. Digging a bit deeper, that form of exclusion feels particularly poignant when we acknowledge that Global South contributors put a lot of effort into trying to diminish communication barriers by learning a completely new language, whereas I rarely see Global North doing the same (particularly USians).
Distant, expensive, inaccessible #
The majority of free and open source communities of the Global North coordinate their activities remotely, but their social spaces feel impenetrable without meaningful in-person interactions. The recognition that comes with being seen in such places feels unobtainable without attending their conferences.
Over the last year, I had the privilege to attend two free and open source conferences in the Global North: FOSSY (July 2023) and FOSDEM (February 2024). I had to travel over 12,000 kilometers to reach Portland, Oregon, and almost 11,000 kilometers to arrive in Brussels, Belgium. Both trips involved a massive financial, emotional, and health undertakings; but since the United Nations' OSPOs for Good took place in the United States, let's talk about what it takes for someone from the Global South to be in that exact same room:
(1) A difficult, slow, and expensive process to obtain a U.S. B1/B2 visa: from start to finish, it took me 9 months to receive mine — at that time, visa appointments had massively increased wait times due to the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic[7]. Additionally, since this process involves two different appointments (a documentation pre-check and an interview at a United States embassy), it required planning and availability to travel to the nearest city with an embassy; finally, I had to disclose an eye-watering amount of sensitive information about my life to the government of the United States. Many contributors from the Global South have their visas denied, a lot of them for having no prior international travel history or "insufficient proof" of an established life in their country.
We have to acknowledge that such requirements are tied to a high level financial advantage and privilege. I was lucky I'd traveled to a foreign country years prior — I'd earned a scholarship to attend Mozilla Festival in 2018. Additionally, I was invited to a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative meeting in Argentina in early 2023. I'd have no prior travel history if my previous international trips weren't sponsored — that's why community recognition is key to guarantee our presence in such spaces.
(2) An outrageous amount of money: While Software Freedom Conservancy reimbursed my travel expenses to the United States, their travel policy works on a reimbursement basis — materially, it means I'm required to have a substantial amount of money to spend upfront, and then submit a reimbursement request later on. My plane ticket to Portland, Oregon, has cost me about R$10,000 in Economy class. That's about 7 times the current monthly minimum wage in Brazil, and about 15 times what I used to earn as a research assistant at the time I worked on Tainacan. In fact, the total cost of that trip has cost almost 3 times what I earned in 15 months of work in a Brazilian free and open source project. And although I'm decently and competitively compensated for my consultancy services when compared to my Brazilian peers, it still corresponded to 93% of my monthly earnings.
(3) An exhausting journey: I had to travel for 26 hours straight, which included taking three different planes, traveling with almost no comfort, and very little sleep. I was in a state of exhaustion the whole time; it was frankly difficult to interact and talk with as many people as I wanted. I can't describe how frustrating it feels when your body starts to fail you at the one thing you needed it to do — you're left feeling that all the effort you put into that trip was thrown in the trash[8].
So many of my peers from the Global North are surprised to learn about those invisible details — the majority of them only become aware of such requirements when they become conference organizers themselves.
Facing your discomfort is the road to improvement #
I could go on, really. I could talk about how a significant amount of Global South contributors have to join Global North organizations to be compensated for their work; or about how some contract and/or power structures may prevent Global South from participating in critical decision-making within such organizations, or may erase the value and the influence of their work on the material results of the execution of the organization's mission. It often feels we don't have a place at the table. It's one of the reasons why I believe it's pointless to defend software freedom without liberation — what kind of freedom are you defending? How good of a job is your job if you refuse to confront and dismantle the power structures within?
Our voices are worth listening; acknowledge our presence. Make room.
Footnotes #
My life story is so intertwined with the free and open source movement, my spouse and I stumbled upon each other at my first Flisol. As of 2024, we’ve been together for 10 years. ↩︎
My Outreachy internship with Wikimedia was key to help me understand the anatomy of well-established free and open source projects from the Global North. I can't overstate how important and impactful this opportunity was for my career — and that's exactly why I'm so proud of being one of the really cool people organizing Outreachy. ↩︎
In retrospect, I realize I had very little exposure to the extent of the free and open source movement within Brazil (i.e. echoes of their actions and their influence). That conversation seemed to be centralized in the Southern and South regions of Brazil, which feels odd when you take into consideration that all my life I lived so close to the capital city of Brazil. ↩︎
After almost 7 years working with international teams, and giving talks and keynotes in English, I beg to differ. ↩︎
That's part of the reason I'm so grateful Mastodon welcomed me with open arms — it was my first time communicating in English in public. ↩︎
That gets particularly vile when you're perceived as a young contributor, a woman, as a disabled person, or any other minoritized group. I've experienced different flavors of that, and some of them were traumatizing. ↩︎
I got my visa in time because someone cancelled their appointments and I happened to refresh the appointments date list at the right time. You can hire a service to handle that for you, but that's one more expense to add in an already very expensive process. ↩︎
Note that I know it wasn't, and I know my presence was very much enjoyed and appreciated by everyone who met me and heard me. But it's the bittersweet reality of traveling long distances. ↩︎