This is just a quick overview post on what’s happening with Drupal.org (owned by the Drupal Association) collecting demographic information on it’s members. The current proposal is that the user profile form will have fields at least for gender and “ideally” for other demographic categories (race, sexual orientation, etc)
An incomplete history
around 2010, there was an issue to expand Drupal’s gender field, which at the time had options for only male or female. This issue is long (154 comments) and notoriously full of vitriol and some of the best and worst of the Drupal community. The resolution was to lock the thread and leave the field as is.
That issue spawned (or was filed in parallel) with another issue to include pronouns on a user’s profile. In November 2011, the drupal.org gender field had the following options: male, female, transgender, other.
There was a related issue for adding an “about me” field to the profile. If you’re going through the comments of these issues, you’ll see some familiar names in all threads - some still active and known for their social justice work, and other still active and known for their active misogyny.
other things have happened here in the middle (still looking to fill this in - I was not active in the community for a few years)
around Feb 2017, there was an issue filed to Improve / “fix” the gender field.
In May 2017, I created Open Demographics - an open source project designed to crowd source the demographic fields.
In cooperation with the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Contrib Team (disclosure: I founded DD&I, but Tara King and others have lead this initiative) took over Jesse Beachgender module and have been working to make it compatible with Open Demographics.
On May 9, Dries (the founder of Drupal) wrote a blog post announcing that Drupal.org was going to use the Open Demographics project to power the demographic portion of the user profile fields on Drupal.org.
Current Status
There is an open issue for this integration
There are conversations about why this data is necessary and what will be done with it (including how it will be stored, who will have access) when it is collected.
A pronoun field has been added
Other Information
(mostly for my reference)
Sage Sharp’s tweets on why D.o needs to collect gender as a barrier to registration (this was before the field was removed)