Diversity and inclusivity of life experiences in communities

John Mertic: I'm talking about diversity inclusivity of life experiences and communities, and and I think we've all talked about diversity inclusivity, especially as we looked at gender, racial lines, nationality, what have you, age. But the angle that I wanna talk about here today is is more on the life experiences side, and I believe it's something that really affects all of us. You know, some of us don't realize it, and it also affects people in our communities, and also folks don't realize it. A little bit of my background here, which which maybe hopefully helps of where I I like to be a subject matter expert on is, you know, I've been involved in twenty plus years in open source. You know, I've I've participated a lot in the PHP community.

I actually was a maintainer of the PHP Windows installer, which I just saw on Twitter the other day that it's been discontinued, which is an end of an era. Did a lot of community management in various communities, SugarCRM for a number of years. Worked with OpenSocial, actually helped in its wind down, a board member for two. And here in my role, I'm at the Linux Foundation. I've been fortunate to work across numerous different industries and projects in the big data motion picture world, mainframe space, data science.

And with those, also a number of communities that roll up into those as well. But where I really see the subject matter expertise coming from is is being a dad. And these are actually, not all of them are my kids. The the the young lady on the left is actually my niece, but she's with us kind of all the time. So she kind of rolls in and kind of more of a daughter.

But what what's really interesting and is what really has taught me a lot in not just my career, but just my life is looking at the backgrounds that all of them have had. You know, the oldest, my niece there on the left. And like I said, she's with us all the time because her mom really isn't involved in her life, her dad gave up, you know, her rights to her. My my daughter, you know, has struggled with dyslexia and it has been a huge challenge for her as she sort of went through life and some of the experiences there. My middle son is, you know, ASD, autism spectrum disorder, and also we adopted from Korea about a decade ago.

And so next to that, we adopted probably about five years ago from China. He was four and a half, and at that point, he had been severely malnourished, abused, really in a bad spot, and he has a ton of trauma that comes to that. We'll sort of talk about what trauma means here in a moment, but that's a huge part of his story and things that he's had to grapple you know, wrestle with. And the youngest, you know, on the far end there, we also adopted her from China. She had a a birth defect, a heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot, which is a very correctable one here in The United States, usually corrected a few months after birth.

But when she was adopted at age three in China, they didn't correct those at the time. And, you know, not only of just sort of the trauma, you know, from being abandoned from her birth family, but also the larger trauma here that we've interacted with as well. So You need to read the email from Laura. So sorry about that. I have some background.

My son's giving me a note here in the background. This is the fun of doing virtual presentations. Right? So let's say again, when I say trauma, what does that mean? We might be very familiar with this bottom term of post traumatic stress disorder, and that is really an anxiety disorder that when you are involved in a deep traumatic event such as folks that might have been in combat, they might have experienced a horrific death or horrific accident or something that has happened in front of you.

All of those sort of things is kind of almost considered a little bit of what's called a big T in trauma. But really, the psychological trauma, which is often referred to as a little t, is you had an experience in life that has shaped you in a way that has changed how you engage with others or the rest of the world. It could be just something as as simple as, you know, maybe in school that you had friends pick on you. You know, maybe you were if you were in a sport, maybe you were picked over by someone else. You know, maybe you had parents that yelled at you a lot.

Maybe you had you weren't the favorite of your siblings. You know, things of that nature. Maybe it it could be a number of things, and it can even scale up to larger things. This is, you know, physical or mental abuse, hunger, all of those pieces. If there's a scale of where trauma can fit into, but those experiences all build up to affect you in one way or another.

And they overwhelm the body and they overwhelm and you have different sort of responses to events which may not necessarily be a logical response. They may not be just the the normal response, but they're a response, it's and it's a result of something that has happened to you in the past that is built up to that. Facts about this, and this is a few years old stat, but I I think it's kind of very true, and and and so a lot of the research that I've even seen within COVID nineteen, actually, of this is even getting higher. Seventy percent of adults in The US have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their life. Running the numbers, that's, you know, well over two hundred million people.

Huge. Up to twenty percent of those people so if you look at that if you look at that number, up to twenty percent of those people will actually develop PTSD. And if you also wanted to kind of build what the numbers are out from that, you know, now that is, you know, almost, you know, forty five million people. Right? So p PTSD is that first experience that might have triggered you, that might have changed sort of your mental state of mind.

Now that's got to the point where it develops into a larger disorder, where it is affecting you in much larger ways. An estimated number of eight percent of Americans, roughly twenty five million people, have PTSD at any given time. You put that in perspective, that's Texas. Not that you can take your own drawings from that, but imagine the entire state of Texas is would be affected by PTSD. That that's how large of a number we're talking here.

Interestingly enough, if you would break this down by gender lines, one out of nine women developed PTSD actually making it twice as likely as men. And I think we've seen a lot of the Me Too movement and many of the activities that have happened within there. Many of things that have happened to young women and girls over time here, know, certainly you can see where that connection has that made within there and different life experiences that they might be more likely to have versus a male. You know, that that's that's not really that surprising of a statistic, really. So summing this up, for those of you who are working in developer communities, there is a fairly good chance that folks in your community are suffering from the effects of trauma in one way or another.

And that's a harsh thing to think about. That's a that's kind of a sad state to to think about, but it's a reality. How do you know when this is happening here? I mean, these are some of sort of the bigger pieces within here and and, you know, these signs and symptoms. Know, some of them are huge pieces like flashbacks and nightmares and and things of that nature.

But then there's also just some lower end things that you just don't think about, low energy. You know, people that are kind of avoiding, kind of checked out a little bit. You know, folks that have activities that are trying to get in control of a situation. You know, often, you know, I've even, you know, seen, you know, areas with this where people might have more leadership roles, this is, I guess, more specific to an open source community. They might have more leadership control roles in a community, and they struggle they they look to take on more and more and more, and they struggle to give things up.

You know, that that could be, you know, some sort of trauma that's sitting in the background. Impulsive self destructive behavior. You know, some of this can be physical, but then some of this also could be engaging within, you know, the community. You know, people that are, you know, really out there tackling things, you know, or really kind of, you know, pushing people away, attacking people. There there's a lot of these sort of things.

And and oftentimes, this has been looked at as these are bad behaviors. These are bad actors within the community, and certainly, they're causing that. Like, certainly, if you take that aspect and you reflect on that, that's certainly a big challenge. But I think really where a lot of the reality sometimes says is there's always something behind that, and that's an interesting it's a challenge one to sort of dig into. One of the things that I've learned a lot about in the last couple years and a lot of this really applies more to children and folks that are in sort of more of, you know, they're they're developing phases within their lives, is this concept of trust based relational intervention.

And I I mention it only out of the aspect of just sort of giving, you know, all of you sort of an idea of what this looks like, you know, from a, you know, from a development standpoint. The idea was created by a psychologist, you know, doctor Karen Purvis and doctor David Cross. They wrote even a book around this as well. A lot of the background was for models from children who really just come from very hard places and how to understand sort of what those re those risk factors were of, you know, things that just prenatal stressors, a traumatic birth experience, you know, early neglect, things like that. A lot of these are seen very often from, you know, children adopted who are institutionalized or foster care, but they could also be around children that may not have had the most nurturing or otherwise had sort of abusive or neglectful childhood and especially a lot of those early years.

What's really interesting about this, and and I think maybe has a little bit of a play here, is, you know, there's often been a thought of you correct this by the behaviors that they're having having a negative feedback to them such that they naturally find their way to the positive side of things. And the reality is is a lot of where the corrections and and and how really these things are changed here is actually from a deeper brain psychological perspective, but it's built on the idea of how do we connect and power in first, and then that comes around with the correcting as well. So there's other principles other than just the correcting. I encourage you really about this work. Again, it's not a one to one applicable situation, but I think there there could be this will, I think, really help a little bit where I'm coming from and and some of the ideas.

What really this connects with is the symptoms that, you know, we talked about or that I presented two slides ago around where the reactions to trauma and some of those negative behaviors are happening in the community, often those things aren't really even a choice. The brain, in many cases, is just rewired. And if you know a lot about brain psychology, you know, there are two areas within the brain, the hippocampus, which is a storage area for sort of the most reasons or your conscious memories, the amygdala that is sort of the emotional alarm. It kind of create you know, works with a lot of your emotions. When you're impacted by trauma and the interesting thing is your brain is very well wired, is is very well connected on a lot of different levels between a lot of these systems and is constantly in a wiring mode.

You know, this isn't something that you're wired once and you're stuck with. You're constantly building rebuilding those neurological paths over time. But when you have a traumatic event, the hippocampus is storing that memory, and all of a sudden, the amygdala is rewired to hit that fight or flight response. And often when the when when your body doesn't know how to do anything else, that's what kicks in, is that fight or flight response. And oftentimes, see this referred to as sort of a lower brain response, and and this is just for the physical side of the things, is the amygdala is very, you know, low in the head versus the prefrontal cortex and thalamus are very much on the higher level of thinking.

So here's sort of it's sort of an interesting thing here. Your your brain, when you're encountering some sort of an external stress on the body, it's a very natural thing, it's actually a very evolutionary thing that that's how you're responding. You're responding in that fight or flight. I need to keep myself safe. I need to can take control of the situation.

So when you're having someone that encounters something that has been a triggering event of their in their lifetime, their brain shoots there right away. The feeling of rejection, the feeling of not being included, the feeling of being challenged, the feelings of all these things. When when people have traumatic events that have shaped them, they're immediately kicking down into that lower brain. So thinking about this, what does it all mean? A a very well adjusted person who's thinking in that upper upper brain can have those secure, controlled value feelings.

But when you're in that lower brain, you're trying to keep yourself alive in your mind. Like, that's that's where your head completely goes. You feel that you're unsafe, so you're trying to create that safety. You know, you don't feel that value in the world, so you're you have that negative self view of yourself, and and you don't feel like you're a part of group. You feel like you're an outcast.

So the the trauma gets you not feeling in control of yourself. The lack of control, it creates destructive behavior, which is actually sort of an interesting thing that you would think that if you're not feeling included, you're not feeling secure, that you do activities to create that. Oftentimes, it's it's easier to control people from negative reactions versus positive ones. So in other words, if you don't think you can control a situation in a positive way, you'll do it in a negative way. Like, you know that you can trigger negative responses out of people and you know that's a predictable thing and you know how that's gonna go, that is giving you a sense of control.

Right? And when you're seeing that, it fill it feeds into these other I'm useless. I'm an outcast. I'm in your shelf self shaming yourselves, and it feeds into all of that. Like, you're you're triggering out that behavior out of people because you know how they're gonna respond.

And and it's really interesting. I think we've even seen that with with some of our children as well as they they they know if you can't control a situation in a positive way, they switch to a negative way. And you might have even seen that in the communities and groups that that you've worked with as well. So as a community and and I think one of the key things to think about here is are developer and open source communities a substitute for mental health health therapy? Absolutely not.

Do I encourage communities to try to feel like they they need to rehabilitate people completely? Absolutely not. That all said, there are ways that as a community and as the communities you're engaging with, you can become better engaging with those suffering from trauma. So I think the first the the first concept that has been coming of age here, and and we see this in a lot of school settings and a lot of other social settings, and I think this is starting to come up more to people more in adult, excuse adulthood, is the concept of being trauma informed. And really what this means here is as an organization or a group, you know, you recognize trauma's there.

You recognize what it looks like. You respond in a way understanding trauma, and you don't want to retraumatize the person and re go to send them a negative path. So paths to do this is making that community that you're working with a safe place. First and foremost, have a code of conduct and not just of the, you know, thou shalt nots, but also the thou shalt dos. I think that's a we we often sometimes rule from a legislative aspect, but not from a connective and and building relation aspect.

And when you're thinking about a code of conduct, whether it's been open source community or if you're even running a developer communities out outreach of your organization, having that code of conduct is it not only just dictates what bad behaviors are, but it's more importantly saying, what are the behaviors we need to see? Like, what are the things that we want to see happening in our community? And and really look to strike and enforce them. The way a code of conduct gets enforced is having people that know how to showcase that sort of model. You know, be the examples out there, both in a positive and also in a corrective way.

You know, one thing that I've often I I I've often, you know, see communities do is that they're often really good of kind of the grandstanding of, you know, look. I did this really well half of things. Right? I I, you know, I I don't know. I'm kinda struggling for an idea.

But you often don't see is people that recognize, like, hey. You know what? I screwed this up. Like, I I got angry at this person and lashed out in a negative way, and I shouldn't have done that. Right?

Creating sort of that thing because then, you know, another model that we sometimes see here is a number of these folks that do negative things and they wanna correct it. They don't feel the community is safe enough to do it because they feel it's such a legislative way to handle the issue. Where instead, if they feel comfortable enough to step up and say, you know what? I screwed up and I'm sorry, And I'm gonna make it better by doing this. You know, you're creating that healing process, and you're also messaging out to everybody.

This is a safe place that you could be that person with as opposed to feel like you have to be on guard and, you know, collected backwards. And I would say always, as you're getting any of these issues that pop up and and often they're a very sensitive, you know, way, handle it very you know, handle it privately. Don't don't, you know, air your dirty laundry out there in public. You know, don't you know, take this offline. Talk with the person one on one.

Help work with them one on one, but don't drag it out in the public space. Improve your way how you engage with people. Right? So one of the big things, and I'm really horrible at this, is listening more. I like to talk a lot, and I don't listen as much.

And when you listen, you need to hear people, but then you also folk you can also shift your focus to trying to solve the problem for them, but showing empathy. Right? You don't have to be the solution to all your problems, but you can show that, hey. I understand. I'm here for you.

I'm here just to listen. Right? And with that, even when you're engaging with somebody that you maybe don't have the most positive relationship or engagement with, shifting how you speak from an I statement to a you statement. And what we mean by that is, you know, let's say someone comes and yells at you. Right?

They they they start a flame war, you know, in an email. Right? And I a you statement is, well, you yelled at me in this email. Right? That's creating confrontation.

An I statement is, I felt really scared by that email. It changes the whole dynamic of how this comes together. Right? And it and it also creates that empathy because it disarms that other person where it's not of you're trying to attack their behavior, but you're saying this is how it made me feel. It lets them also get retrospective, and it lets them kinda drop out of that fight or flight where if somebody's saying that you did this, you automatically feel like I have to, you know, attack them.

Like, I have to defend myself. When somebody is saying this is how you made I I you know, when I heard this, I felt bad, it it changes that whole dynamic. Right? And, obviously, use good compromising skills. You know, there's you know, just like in anything in life here, the idea is not to win.

The idea is to drive together, you know, successfully together. Right? And we even do this with all of, you know, the open source projects that I work with. The one thing I stress with some of those communities is make decisions by consensus, and it's not in a sense, you're boiling things down, but you wanna listen to everybody. You wanna understand that people's voices are heard.

And maybe they have a very legitimate concern that that needs to come up here, but use that as a path to compromise to understand where that person's coming from of the decision making so you all can feel good about walking away from what happened. So there's a lot of resources in this. This I've I've really scratched the surface of of what this is. I mean, there's so much research out there. A lot of the things that I point to are very much focused on PTSD, trauma informed, and the part of child development.

And I know it's sort of a little bit of a different thing than a one to one with communities, but I think a lot of the concepts and a lot of the approaches, I think, have a really nice pattern here. I encourage you to check a lot of these things up or check a lot of these things out. And I wanna leave you all with a parting thought here, and then we're gonna kick into q and a here. And and I realize we're kind of real tight on time here. You know, for years and and this is from Bruce D.

Perry who's a senior fellow child trauma, the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, and an adjunct professor of psychology and behavior sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Accomplished author, really smart person. For years, mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that unless you love yourself, no one else will love you. The truth is you cannot love yourself until you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.

A way to think about this is isolating folks that are really struggling with this is not a path to rehabilitation. The fact that when you know someone out there cares for you and is there for you and and wants to see you succeed, that's building those neural pathways and that capacity to, you know, build reciprocity in that relationship. So with that, I'm at the end here. I know we are at the end of this here. I appreciate everybody's time and and interest in this.

I hope this has been helpful for you. I'm on Twitter and a lot of different channels. I'm really happy to always talk about this more. This is a real passion area of mine, and I'm hopeful that this has maybe added some insight to you as you engage folks in your community. And with that, I'll open the floor to any questions that might be out there.

Speaker 2: Hey, John. That was great. We actually do have some questions. And I also would encourage everyone, if they have questions, that they can ask in the Slack channel and on YouTube. So Josh Wolfe has the following question from YouTube.

And his question is, what's the one thing that we can take on as a practice from this either for ourselves or others? I think you kinda covered it, but, I mean, I guess if you had, like, the one thing, what would you what would you suggest?

John Mertic: Put yourself in the other person's shoes and try to understand where they're coming from. They're humans. They're human that that other person is a human just like you. They have the same struggles with you. They have the same they have all the components of what a human is like.

Put yourself in their shoes. Be don't be quick to respond, but put yourself in their shoes and try to understand who they are and where they're coming from. It's just it it's a great mental exercise and it really changes the dynamic of how you think about these interactions.

Speaker 2: I always used to think of I always love the the golden rule, but the platinum rule is the is the one that I love the most, which is treat others better than you treat yourself.

John Mertic: Exactly. Exactly. Now that's a that's a that's that's a that's a really good way to look at it. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Are there any examples of communities that you've seen that have done a really good job with this? There's maybe there's, you know, that have stuck out.

John Mertic: I had I have one sort of personal story in this area of a community I worked with, and they were they were with the Lynx Foundation, they were one that we were just getting ramped up. And there was a lot of antagonism that was happening between myself from a Linux Foundation staff perspective and some of the community leaders. And we were really bumping heads a lot. There was just a lot of, I mean, I wouldn't say gigantic issues, but there's just big bubbling there's bubbling percolating issues. And I got on the phone with this individual one time, and I know that we were sort of having some antagonism going back and forth.

And I said, here's what I'm gonna do. I want you to air all of the things you are frustrated about. I'm going to put myself on mute. You have ten minutes. I am gonna put myself on mute so I'm not tempted to cut you off.

I'm not tempted to dress. I'm just gonna sit here and listen, and I'm putting myself on mute specifically. Empty it out. Tell me everything. And he did that, and I think I came back to, like, a page and a half of notes of stuff.

And it was a really therapeutic thing. I think it was therapeutic for that individual because that person even told me after, he's like, I'm really glad we did that. That was that was really, really helpful for me. And for me also is, like, I I wasn't guessing. I wasn't trying to, like, guess what because of what they were doing of what they're thinking.

I actually got to hear, like, what they're really upset about. So that was that was one that and and since then, we actually built a a really good relationship working relationship from there as well and even do we have a personal relationship as well. But I I remember that as just a huge turning point and just one of the tactics I used there, and it was it was really good. And it it turned out even better results than I would have thought.

Speaker 2: Well, that's a fantastic way to go about it. Certainly, the ten minute, you know, letting them to have the space to speak. And, of course, I I always found it good too when you're taking all those notes to kind of presume how they're feeling to make sure that you got it correctly. Yes. You know, because sometimes you you may misunderstand, and it's always good to just, you know, open up that conversation.

John Mertic: Yeah. Almost like restating it back. It's like, I think I heard this. Did I did I did I get that right? I mean, are also even just good good exercises when you're in a conversation, you're trying to address issues with people is exactly that is.

I think I took this note. I think what I heard you said is this. Did I get that right? Am I understand eve even sometimes when I answer questions from people, I I always end the question with, did I did I answer the question you were going after? Did I hopefully, did I answer your question right?

Is this the answer you were looking for? Because it also just shares that you care about it. You're not just like, okay. Here's what it is. You know, beat sand if you don't like it.

It it shows that you just care that they're walking away with, you know, some sort of answer resolution.