Empowering diversity is one pillar of Motif’s mission (see also Accelerate Invention).

Diversity means many things to many people. This is about what it means to Motif.

Diversity of access

“Software is eating the world”, wrote Marc Andreessen almost a decade ago. By now the world is well into software’s lower intestine. Software is power. Software engineering is among the most sought-after and lucrative professional skills, and one of the few that is unlikely to be hurt by the coming wave of automation — it will likely even benefit.

It’s great work… if you can get it.

At the same time, the software industry is among the least diverse, dominated by young white/Asian straight cisgender males. Now, it’s not obvious that the demographics of software development should necessarily mirror those of society. However it’s uncontroversial to suggest that everyone should have equal opportunity to participate. And today that’s clearly not the case.

> Motif opens the front door to software development by allowing an idea to be realised without requiring up-front expertise in the implementation details.

Diversity of thought

By opening the doors to a broader population of creative minds, we will naturally generate a richer tapestry of ideas. As is the case today, most of those ideas will be garbage, but there will still be those occasional diamonds in the rough.

If anything, those whose voices have been quieter in the past will have more to offer now.

Diversity is good for a creative business. There is plenty of research showing correlation between diversity and profitability. It’s not hard to see why: given a problem, a homogeneous team will have similar thoughts, systematically overlook certain concerns, and produce more fragile solutions.

And of course diversity is good for the individuals that experience it. Just as travel opens your mind to the rest of the world, working alongside people with diverse experiences encourages a greater breadth of thought in each, even if — perhaps because — it can sometimes feel uncomfortable.

> Motif measures its success in part by the variety of products and developers created that would otherwise not have been.

Diversity of choice

With more people having more diverse ideas, a broader menu of tools will be needed to allow all of those ideas to be expressed. No one should be excluded by their current circumstances, whether chosen or inherited.

There are certainly some benefits when everyone uses the same software for a particular purpose. For example, investment and further development can be centralised, and individuals can share experience and training. However homogeneity shouldn’t be mandated so long as multiple tools can agree on a single source of truth. Everyone should be free to work in the way that works for them.

Just as designing for accessibility helps everyone, new software is likely to find applications beyond its original purpose and create unanticipated value. It will definitely run into new, unanticipated requirements. So new software should also be open to extension, free to be led by its users, to evolve into something even newer.

> Motif offers choice with an open-source menu of simple concepts and a marketplace of implementation providers, and extension by remaining vendor-agnostic.