Context: Interest in diversity in software development has significantly increased in recent years. Reporting on diversity in software projects can enhance user trust and assist regulators in evaluating adoption. Recent AI directives include clauses that mandate diversity information during development, highlighting the growing interest of public regulators. However, current documentation often neglects diversity in favor of technical features, partly due to a lack of tools for its description and annotation. Objectives: This work introduces the Software Diversity Card, a structured approach to document and share diversity-related aspects within software projects. It aims to profile the various teams involved in software development and governance, including user groups in testing and software adaptations for diverse social groups. Methods: We performed a literature review on diversity and inclusion in software development and an analysis of 1,000 top-starred Open Source Software (OSS) repositories in GitHub to identify diversity-related information. Moreover, we present a diversity modeling language, a toolkit for generating the cards using that language, and a study of its application in two real-world software projects. Results: Despite the growing awareness of diversity in the research community, our analysis found a notable lack of diversity reporting in OSS projects. Applying the card to real-world examples highlighted challenges like balancing anonymity with transparency, managing sensitive data, and ensuring authenticity. Conclusion: We believe that our proposal can enhance diversity practices in software development, support public administrations in software assessment, and help businesses promote diversity as a key asset.

Data is a critical resource for machine learning (ML), yet working with data remains a key friction point. This paper introduces Croissant, a metadata format for datasets that creates a shared representation across ML tools, frameworks, and platforms. Croissant makes datasets more discoverable, portable, and interoperable, thereby addressing significant challenges in ML data management. Croissant is already supported by several popular dataset repositories, spanning hundreds of thousands of datasets, enabling easy loading into the most commonly-used ML frameworks, regardless of where the data is stored. Our initial evaluation by human raters shows that Croissant metadata is readable, understandable, complete, yet concise.

Datasets are essential for training and evaluating machine learning models. However, they are also the root cause of many undesirable model behaviors, such as biased predictions. To address this issue, the machine learning community is proposing as a best practice the adoption of common guidelines for describing datasets. However, these guidelines are based on natural language descriptions of the dataset, hampering the automatic computation and analysis of such descriptions. To overcome this situation, we present DescribeML, a language engineering tool to precisely describe machine learning datasets in terms of their composition, provenance, and social concerns in a structured format. The tool is implemented as a Visual Studio Code extension.

Recent public regulatory initiatives and relevant voices in the ML community have identified the need to document datasets according to several dimensions to ensure the fairness and trustworthiness of machine learning systems. In this sense, the data-sharing practices in the scientific field have been quickly evolving in the last years, with more and more research works publishing technical documentation together with the data for replicability purposes. However, this documentation is written in natural language, and its structure, content focus, and composition vary, making them challenging to analyze.