claremacrae / include

A diversity group for C++ developers.

#include

A diversity group for C++ developers.

(Markdown is new to me so please excuse the formatting)

This started as a play on words, but it seems to have caught on with a few members of the community. Diversity has concerned me for a while now, and I originally considered under-representation of women and ethnic minorities in the development industry. A slack group was created and I realised that there is more to it than that: who we think our clients are is also an issue.

I'm a software developer, not a politician, nor a diversity specialist or academic, so I need some help here. If such a group that concerns itself with these matters is going to exist, it needs to have a charter: a purpose, expectations and so on. Here are some items to start with. I'm open for pull requests: bear in mind that, as I said, I'm a working developer, so don't expect speedy turnaround.

1. Software development is a problem-solving discipline, the pursuit of which is not suited towards any particular gender or ethnicity, demanding only intellectual acuity, rigour and stamina.
2. Lack of gender and ethnic diversity diminishes the discipline by reducing the pool of talent available to solve pressing software development problems.
3. Lack of awareness of gender and ethnic diversity diminishes the discipline by considering only a small portion of potential users in the solution domain.
4. The appeal of software development, and the horizons of existing developers, must be broadened, such that ALL may be included in the talent pool and ALL may be included in the user domain.

As you can see, it's a work in progress. All help welcomed by me and, ultimately, the rest of the discipline.