CC#3 Diversity and Inclusion in My PLN

Looking at my own PLN honestly, it’s just the same people. It’s almost entirely CS and ML people, classmates, developers I follow, GitHub as a whole. I guess that it’s just easier to build a network around people who already think the way you do. But I think easier doesn’t mean better, though.

The clearest example of this actually mattering was during my co-op at the National Research Council. I was building an ML pipeline for retrieving astronomical images, a technical problem from where I sat. But the people actually using it were astronomers, and the questions and the functionality they wanted and cared about were completely different from mine. I was aiming for the retrieval accuracy and speed. They cared about whether the tool actually fit their research workflow, and what a false positive actually cost them in wasted hours. I hadn’t built the wrong thing, but I’d been solving a narrower version of the problem than the one that actually existed, and that gap only became visible because people outside my field were in the room.

That is close to what Margaret Heffernan’s TED Talk, “Dare to Disagree”, is about, where she describes a researcher who deliberately worked with someone who actively challenged her conclusions, and how that friction led to a real breakthrough rather than slowing her down. Having a diverse PLN and having an inclusive one aren’t the same thing. I could follow people from completely different fields and still never learn anything from them if I don’t actually engage with what they’re saying, or if nobody in my network is actually willing to push back or give me a different perspective on how I think.

Right now my PLN is comfortable, mostly people who already validate the way I think about problems. That’s exactly the setup that could let me miss something obvious, the way I almost did on that co-op project.

I have a question for anyone who has actually diversified their PLN on purpose: what did that look like to you- direct conversations, working on something together, or something else, Excited to hear?