Symfony News

Making SensioLabs Connect more inclusive

An important part of our diversity initiative is to make the Symfony project and its ecosystem more inclusive. Inclusion is about promoting and sustaining a sense of belonging.

SensioLabs Connect is Symfony's social network where you can collect badges for the tasks that you complete in the Symfony community (contributing some code, attending some conference, becoming a certified developer, etc.)

While reviewing SensioLabs Connect contents and assets, it was obvious to us that some things needed change to be more inclusive. For example, the default user avatar for those who don't upload a photo represented a middle-aged white man. There's nothing wrong with being a man, being middle-aged or being white. But it's not inclusive for other age ranges, other genders and other races and ethnicities. So we removed the default user avatar and instead enabled the random generation of pixelated avatars:

The next step was the Welcome badge, which is granted as the first badge of anyone joining SensioLabs Connect. The badge said "Hey dude!". Again, there's nothing wrong with being "a dude", but how would you feel if you were a woman and the site you just joined welcomed you as a man? That's why we updated it to say "Hey you!":

Finally, we reviewed the Symfony Community Awards badges. Some of those badges assumed that winners will always be men. It's true that so far all past winners have been men; but how can you encourage women to take part in these awards if even the badges assume that the winners will be men? So, we redesigned the badges to be neutral:

No doubt all these changes are baby steps towards more important diversity goals. But we believe that you can do great things by doing lots of nice little things. If you want to join us in this initiative, step up and help us with any of the proposed tasks to improve the diversity of the Symfony project.