Here at Umbraco, we have a diversity committee. Their goal is to increase the diversity of our community.
Except, there's a challenge. Well, okay, there's a lot of challenges, but one of them is the fact that diversity isn't just one thing. There isn't a well-defined set of bugs, already prioritized, that we can just pick up and solve.
Instead, there's a whole bunch of messy human interactions that need to be turned into use cases and stories so we can find ways to improve them.
And - to make it even more challenging - these are different stories, to help make our community more welcoming and supportive of different people who are marginalized in different ways and have different needs.
Never mind doing the work, the first challenge is simply figuring out where to begin!
There isn't a single right answer. No one piece of this work is more important than any other. But, even when there isn't a clear priority, it's better to make progress on one issue than to look at ten of them and not get anywhere.
So, the diversity committee has decided to try framing their work like it's a series of releases, each with a theme and an attempt to make progress in that particular sub-space of the broader topic of diversity.
This quarter's diversity release is focused on neurodiversity. It's our starting point, the current focus of where we're putting our diversity work.
I suspect, however, that there are some people with the small, nagging question:
Oh, there's a vague sense that it's something to do with... brains, right? How people think? And there's that 'diversity' part, so we're talking about the different ways in which people think.
And... doesn't it have something or other to do with autism?
We recognize it as a form of inclusion, and so we want to support it, but that awareness can actually make it difficult for us to learn more.
We don't want to say something insensitive! We want people to feel welcome in our community, not like it's their job to educate us.
We can try to type our questions into a search engine, but if we do that, how do we know we're getting good answers? Especially when half the results seem to consist of people arguing with each other!
So, let's talk about people.
We, as people, have incredible - and hugely complicated - brains. No two of them are quite identical.
There are some common patterns. Scientists who study the brain can point to clusters of nerves they call language centers, or visual centers, but there are exceptions even there.
Your language center is patterned differently than mine, but they work in similar ways. They must, because we can still communicate through these words!
I think of it a bit like building a page. Two different components to display an image could be coded very differently, yet still show similar results.
Of course, just because those two components sometimes display the same result, that doesn't mean they always will. Perhaps one of them has code to scale images, while the other doesn't. Maybe one of them can accept a list of images to rotate through, while the other only takes a single image.
If we asked ten people to each make a component for displaying images, we'd end up with ten different implementations. They'd have differences in their behavior, but we'd probably find some common patterns.
Maybe we'll find that nine out of ten of them support resizing the image. We could say that resizing is typical for an image display component.
That doesn't mean it's always what we want. Resizing can end up with a blurry or distorted image. It can be inefficient, running the same code for every request.
Still, in this scenario, resizing is typical. It's a common behavior that many of our components converge on.
Components that don't resize are divergent. They do something less usual. Depending on the situation, that behavior might be a problem, or it might be exactly what we need.
Of course, these components are going to do more than just resize or not. There are dozens of ways they might diverge, any of which might or might not matter for what we want to do.
When we consider all these divergences, we realize we have a diversity of components, each of them more suited to particular use cases.
So, let's get back to talking about people.
When we look at how people think and feel, we find that many of them respond in similar ways. People who fit in the most common cluster of behavior are what we call neurotypical.
Of course, there isn't a brain factory stamping out perfect clones. Neurotypical people don't all think exactly alike, but the various ways their brains work are similar enough to be compatible.
When someone is neurodivergent, it means that the way their brain works is far enough from the neurotypical pattern that there are compatibility issues.
Maybe they have trouble recognizing facial expressions, or can't focus while sitting still.
There are groups of neurodivergent people who differ from neurotypical in similar ways. We can talk about people with autism, or ADHD, because those describe clusters of experience and behavior that some people have.
We call those categories neurotypes, and each of them is still made up of individuals. They won't all have the same experience, or think the same way. They may diverge in some ways, while seeming more typical in others.
Neurodiversity means the entire range of how human brains work, and what that means about how people think, feel, and behave in the world.
To improve it, we want to build compatibility layers.
We want to increase the ability for people of all neurotypes to communicate with each other. We want them to feel comfortable and capable of sharing ideas and bringing the strengths of their different ways of thinking to the problems we have to solve together.
So how do we do that?
There isn't a single answer. There are many ways in which people can be neurodivergent, and they need different things to feel welcome and able to contribute.
In fact, changes to the environment that make it better for one person may make it more challenging for another. Some people focus better with music in the background, or are energized by a busy social space; others need quiet and small groups to avoid being overwhelmed.
We can't give both of these people their ideal situation at the same time. What we can do is work to become more aware of their needs, and find ways to compromise or provide situations where both can thrive. Maybe it's having a quiet space for a sensory retreat; maybe it's having our meetup alternate between a social hour at the pub and a structured round-table discussion.
Once we're aware of neurodiversity, we can start having the conversation about what the people in our community need and want. The way someone else thinks may be very different than we do. It might not make sense to us, but if we trust them to speak to their own experience, we can work together to make things better for a diverse group of people.
Once we open that conversation about how people think and interact, we can also discover more about our own neurotypes.
What does your brain need to do its best? Do you need quiet, or stimulus? Do you want to be around people, or have alone time? Do you move between multiple tasks, or focus on one until it's done?
We don't tend to notice how our brains work unless something makes us stop and think about it. It's the default for us, the 'obvious' way to be.
When someone brings up their own experience, there are two opportunities there.
We have the chance to figure out how to make that person - and people like them - more included, but we also have the chance to ask ourselves how we think. Does their experience match with our own? We could be one of the people we're helping to include - though, if that's the case, we should make sure to include people of other neurotypes as well.
The goal isn't to come up with a perfectly inclusive space that suits everyone equally. That just isn't possible.
What we can do is take some time to think about how we think and the situations that help and hinder us in working and interacting with others. We can have a conversation about them, paying attention to both where we have things in common with others and where we differ.
We can recognize that there are many types of neurodivergence, and find ways to help include people instead of just assuming the neurotypical defaults are the only way to be.