Call for Interest: Global Open Source Diversity Summit

šŸŒ¼ Open Source Diversity meta
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Sent you a private message with the info! :+1:

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Thanks everyone who participated today. :heart: This was great.

@eriolfox is going to add a summary of todayā€™s call here, and I am working to get the recording uploaded to YouTube. Stay tuned.

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Sorry I could not join today, I can join the next call next week.

Yes please upload to YouTube so I can catch up on what was missed.

Thanks @jwf

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Hello folks! hereā€™s my summary/tl;dr of the call that took place this week on Friday 14th August.

  • We introā€™d ourselves and discussed any specific wants/needs/goals we had personally for an OSS D&I summit

  • We discussed online/in-person + COVID

  • We discussed formats e.g. topics then guided by conversations and working groups vs. talks/delivered sessions and/or a mixture of the two

  • We narrowed down some summit goals

  • Spoke a lot about sharing knowledge within our own communities and inviting other orgs/communities to share

  • How to be inclusive of the under represented majority that donā€™t get focus when speaking on D&I subject e.g. Neurodiveristy

  • Also what we could individually commit to offering time/skills/resources

  • Actions from the meeting at the bottom of the pad!

You can see full notes on the Etherpad here: https://etherpad.gnome.org/p/osd-summit-notes

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Thanks for your help with notes @eriolfox! :heart:

Here is the recording of our call last week. It ran approximately 50 minutes!

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Thank you @jwf ! I look forward to the call on Friday.

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:slightly_smiling_face:

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Fantastic idea. Lots of progress already, many things are already underway! Missed the organizing meetup calls. Hope to find ways where I can contribute to the summit. Definitely will attend.

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Hi Justin, Can you please share the password for todayā€™s meeting ?

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Hi all! Our second call is in about 20 minutes. A few quick notes.

Updated agenda

I proposed a slightly modified agenda based on last weekā€™s discussion:

  • [ 3m ] Welcome / helloā€™s
  • [ 15-20m ] What do you want to get out of a Global Open Source Diversity Summit?
    • This conversation might shift the agenda some.
  • [ 10m ] Recap of last weekā€™s call and discussion notes
  • [ ?m ] Open discussion and brainstorming for remainder of time

Meeting details

I shared the video conference room and password via the calendar invite email. If you did not receive it or are looking for it, please send me a direct message on Discourse!

Looking forward to seeing folks soon!

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Something I forgot to mention in the call and just remembered:

We do have our donation account on Open Collective which we normally use for stickers and the website costs, but not much more. If we need any funding for a summit, maybe it makes sense to do some sort of donation drive (organizations sometimes donate there too).

This would especially make sense for the digital event, as we are not at the level of donations yet where funding travel expenses would be feasible.

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Hi all! Here is a recap of our last meeting on Friday, August 21st. (I forgot to record the meeting, oops!) This also includes a high-level recap for both times we met.

2020-08-21 meeting notes

Getting to know each other

Some fun facts offered up by our group!

  • Languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, Swedish, English, German, Tamil, Danish
  • Locations: Germany, Denmark, England/UK, Costa Rica, Mexico, U.S. (Texas, Georgia, Chicago)
  • Skill sets: Streaming / video production, design, open science, data science

What do you want to get out of a global D&I summit?

Also inclusive of what people are interested in or learning more about.

  • Interest in open source diversity as growing topic
  • Learn more about and/or better represent low- and middle-income countries/people into open data work
  • Accessible and adaptable software tools
  • Connections with wider communities
  • Increasing diversity in science work
  • Low-bandwidth diversity (i.e. bad network connections)
  • Gather insights to activities
  • Working together with other communities
  • GeoChicas
  • Need help / guidance for more online events post-COVID
  • Connecting with universities / students and academic connections/backing
  • Open Source Design community participants
  • Increasing diversity in production of tools for data science
  • D&I @ Red Hat
  • Outreachy coordination
  • Global effort about D&I; we are no longer at square one and we have accumulated knowledge across many communities
  • How to get message across to people with old stereotypes?

Live notes

A reorganized and categorized version of the longer Etherpad notes.

Organizing in the new virtual-first world

  • Travel was a thing, environment friendliness was not much a thing
  • Being virtual is helpful to apply context
  • How to make it more participatory
  • Especially with D&I, does not need to be keynote but go deeper than keynote
    • More actions, less words! :slight_smile:
  • Splitting up an event between virtual / in-person is hard; better to do it all virtual or all in-person
    • Trying to do both just leaves out the people who arenā€™t there physically
    • In-person events (and the people attending in person) have a whole other set of concerns
  • Long-term: Start virtual, learn how to do this, maybe hold in-person
  • Different rooms and a lobby for new folks to join and take part
    • If they are not in a session / meeting, they can participate and hang out with the community
  • Grouping / mixers
    • What is something you are working on right now?
    • What is something you need help with?
  • Diversity grants: Connectivity funds, data packs, headphones
  • Workshops are cool / important for the event and getting engagement from more people (not just another talk)

Language diversity

I donā€™t have notes, but many people in this call were Spanish speakers. It would be great to explore sessions in non-English languages.

Tracks

  • Possible 3 tracks/audiences at the conference
    1. Newcomers, people from marginalized groups who want to learn more
    2. People who are already contributors to projects, but not connected or working on diversity & inclusion yet
    3. People like us who do more diversity & inclusion work
  • Maybe we could also add an academic track? Some folks are also producing really interesting discussions from the academia in these matters.
  • #idea survey to collect topics and ideas (more on this in a following reply)

Shared learnings

  • How do communities with strong D&I efforts work???
    • Use these initiatives to ā€œturbo-chargeā€ being a part of the community
    • @SantiagoTorres: Perdue could be a host for this platform
  • What types of actions can we put into our toolbox?
    • For our company, community, project
    • Turning words into actions ā€“ how do we do it?
  • What kinds of challenges have other communities faced?
    • What restricts their contributions / engagement?
    • Be aware of blind spots and make it easy
  • Added values: Why is diversity is a model for growth and not just a $TREND that is going to come and go? Why do we need to reflect - Diversity is a moral imperative towards inclusion.
  • For Geochicas, having pre-events only for women to get to know each other before diving in to the main conference has helped a lot for more women to feel comfortable participating.

Audience

  • Insular or external?
    • Approach new people, or approach the existing people?
  • Who are we appealing to and who do we want to connect to?
    • People who are inside this space alreadyā€¦
    • Or people who are open to it but not involved in it yet
  • @marinaz: Dividing tracks by experience levels
    • New contributors: Track for new contributors or beginner-friendly who want to do more for D&I in their projects
    • Established open source contributors, who want to learn how to bring D&I to their projects
    • Practitioners: People already work on D&I in open source
  • Some people will need to know how to make a case for D&I in their community/company, some are ready and will want to learn what to do

Open Source Diversity meta

Highlights from Jitsi Chat

  • @eddiejaoude: I saw an event that had sign language as well as closed captions, could there be multiple audio for different languages
  • @SantiagoTorres: the academic track stuff also sounds interesting!
  • @cmaureir: I believe the different language talks is also a cool approach. I didnā€™t believe there was so much need to Spanish content, for example. We started doing the translation of the Python documentation, and itā€™s really encouraging to see so many people being thankful that they can read everything in their native language, so I guess the option of many languages is certainly valid.
    • @marimeireles: I donā€™t think the language thing is so good, tbh. I think itā€™d be more exclusive than inclusive as a talk in french for example would exclude everyone that doesnā€™t speak french since english is the ā€œuniversalā€ language specially in the tech industry, I think it makes sense to have a 100% english speaking conference
      • @lorenanicole: I find that language inclusivity can even be just captioning.
  • @spotz: One thing I do like about Fedoraā€™s governance is there is a seat on the board from D&I
  • @eddiejaoude: a list of ā€œjobsā€ you need help with would be good, then people can more easily get involved in helping - great work!!
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I forked the ā€œnext stepsā€ conversation to a new thread, since this one is getting long: