Systems reflect the people and organizations with the privilege to build
them. If our libraries and museums are not neutral, then the applications
and services we create and maintain cannot be neutral. Our values, our
biases, and our histories manifest in our open source projects. Both the
individuals with the power to make local technology decisions, as well as
the organizations with the resources to influence collaborative projects,
impact global users and shape communities in myriad ways. Embracing an
intentional and caring practice is as essential to the health of our
projects as functional codeāand without both, we put our digital cultural
heritage at risk. This presentation serves as a starting point for a
reflective and challenging dialogue spanning those who code and those who
care, and building shared understanding of the ways race, gender, and
wealth come to bear on our products and communities. With this common
knowledge, we can seek to build systems that truly deliver on the social
mission of libraries.