Open source software communities have many choices when it comes to modes of communication. Among those choices, mailing lists have been a long standing common choice for connecting with other members of the community. Within mailing lists, the sentiment and communication style can give a good insight into the health of the community. The interactions can become a deciding factor for new and diverse members considering becoming active in the community.

As the focus of diversity and inclusion increases in OSS communities, I have taken on the task of using ML/AI strategies to detect hate speech and offensive language within community mailing lists. This project’s scope is starting with the Fedora devel and user mailing lists and will be transitioned into a service that will be applicable to all OSS mailing lists. In this three-part blog series, we will go through this process step by step. First, the cleaning process, second is model creation, and finishing up the series the creation of a service to be used by managers to be notified of concerning behaviors on their community’s mailing list. It is time to start using data science to help the efforts of D&I.