Value of outreach and diversity to Debian
A question came up in private conversations, but the answer IMHO is useful generally, so this is a repost. The question was generally on the topic of divercity and outreach - if it does really help underpriviledged people to give them some handout and hope that that somehow turns them into priviledged people? IMHO this is an important question in current world environment in general and to Debian in particular.
IMHO It's not about making unprivileged people more privileged than current contributors or about giving some kind of handouts.
Just talking from my personal perspective, it is more about analysing where past decisions (even perfectly reasonable ones) inadvertently created biases and trying to figure out ways to balance them out over time so that we don't end up missing good contributors just because they were, for example, unlucky with the country of their birth.
A simple example - think back a couple decades - where was the best place in the world to learn how to develop free software in general and Debian in particular? Where you had the largest chances of meeting an experienced developer in person with enough free time who could show you the ropes and explain to you things that are hard to put into documentation? I'd say those would be the campuses of a bunch of technical universities in the USA, UK and the rest of Western Europe.
If you were not attending a university, you were out of luck. If you were rural in a smaller campus, you were out of luck. If you were on a different continent - guess what? Still out of luck. Even Eastern Europe - so close, and yet - out of luck.
This made perfect sense and was a perfectly reasonable way to operate back then - Western universities had the highest density of people who had both the skill and the free time to contribute to free software. It was a no-brainer to start there. It was not a mistake to do so. But it had side-effects.
I was very lucky and persistent to overcome this out-of-luck situation, despite the closest developers being 500-600 km away and across a sea and me operating on actual dial-up Internet with barely enough money for a bus ticket, never mind a sea ferry or a plane ticket. Or a laptop to take on such a plane. Thousands of others around me, including many very competent software developers, did not have that kind of luck and persistence and thus are not contributing to free software or Debian at all.
If we look back at the past, we can recognise that past decisions left whole continents and also whole classes of people that were not given the opportunity to learn how and why to contribute to free software and Debian. That is in the end a realisation that there are many fine future developers out there who we have not reached out to yet. At this point that is a great untapped source of new developers for the project. Opportunities in western universities will still be there, noone wants to or can tear them down, but they also do not really need investment of attention, time and money to keep being effective. But other places do need that investment to start being effective. To start adding new developers to the community.
Outreach to diverse communities is in our, selfish interests. Naturally we still need to figure out how much effort is actually spent on that and evaluate efficiency of different approaches. But in principle it is what we want to do.
(And also our knowledge might make their lives better, but that's a minor side effect. /s)