We often think about our Free and Libre Open Source communities as being built on egalitarian principles of meritocracy and do-ocracy: anyone with the will and the skills can be involved and have their work recognized.

However, without awareness of how power is distributed and how social interactions take place, those communities are very likely to reproduce patterns leading to excluding people. Even when we are aware of the need and benefits of building better and safer spaces for everyone, implementations are not that easy and one might despair of not being successful.

In this talk, I will present some key principles learned from my experience to show how, by working on the root causes of the issues we face, we can be successful in creating better spaces for everyone to participate: what power patterns are involved in our social interactions; what can go wrong with the politics of “Inclusion and Diversity”; how we can concretely improve our personal and collective practices for a better good.