Cultures of inclusivity
Inclusivity comes in many forms, and is especially shaped by the pre-existing culture of the communities that adopt it.
Communities that open their doors after having run as a tightly-knit group of individuals will often retain the value system that they developed over the years, and even decades. For them, inclusivity is to make these values accessible to a greater number of participants, overcoming the barriers and handicaps these participants have.
As an example, the Haskell and Elixir communities both run on value systems that have existed for decades. Haskell has a culture of excellence in the domains it favours (research, and thus curiosity, applied mathematics, domain modelling). Elixir inherits the culture of ergonomics and of “putting the human first” of Ruby, and being intimate with systems architecture inherited from Erlang.
As such, by opening themselves and welcoming more people, these values are put forward for more people to benefit from them.
Some other communities are built on a different mechanism, where it is primordial to include as many people as possible, at all cost. This is the community version of viral marketing: we need bodies.
It certainly becomes cheaper to onboard newcomers if nothing is asked of them.
Not even the humility that is healthy to have when one arrives in a new community with a new value system,
and a culture that was not made for a tech giant to recruit fresh university graduates to be sent to the code mines.
Sometimes, one gets told that doing something a certain way is a known anti-pattern that was documented for years. Any junior database administrator can be told such a thing, because performance and maintainability are primordial for most projects. The culture asks of them to follow the database engine’s lead, not to force their opinions on it. Don’t disable autovacuum.
Writing a Monad Tutorial™ 2 minutes after having developed your own intuition for monads does not make one qualified for teaching anything. Intuition is something that is very personal, built by a person’s practice of a subject. Trust us, we know.
If you ask nothing of the people who join you, not the humility to be a beginner or the sense of duty to help those who start, once they are themselves more experienced, you create a culture of blind consumerism and transactional relationships.
The punchline is: There is a difference between “inclusivity to make excellence accessible” and “inclusivity of mediocrity”.