O.S.D. Summit: Charting next steps for September 2020

🌼 Open Source Diversity meta
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Hi folks! Thanks everyone who participated in the Global Open Source Diversity Summit discussions this month. The energy people are bringing to this is invigorating and we are getting momentum on this!

This post is a quick summary of important next steps and future ways to get involved with organizing:

  1. Vision for O.S.D. Summit
  2. :exclamation: :arrow_right: Take the Topic survey! :arrow_left: :exclamation:
  3. Working Group ideas (your feedback wanted)

Vision for O.S.D. Summit

In both calls, we rallied around @GeorgLink’s proposal for event vision and goals:

  1. Get together as a group who is interested in and working on D&I
  2. Distill best practices and discuss how we can apply them in our own contexts
  3. Interactive sessions as a way to get the conversation going

:exclamation: :arrow_right: Take the Topic survey! :arrow_left: :exclamation:

Help identify topics of interest for our event and take the survey by Wednesday, September 2nd!

We briefly discussed other tools than a Google Form for this, but in the end, I went with what I was most comfortable with. The form does require authentication with Google – I did this in order to avoid abuse and gaming the form.

If you would like to submit responses a different way, send me a Discourse message and we will figure something out.

I will share out the responses sometime after Wednesday, September 2nd.

Working Group ideas (your feedback wanted)

In both calls, we briefly discussed different roles, skills, and capacities people could contribute. This event will necessarily require decentralized organizing.

I think Working Groups are one informal way of doing this. Each Working Group would need a “bottom liner”, or someone who takes responsibility for organizing recurring meetings and being a project manager, in a way. Here are some initial ideas:

  • Event Moderation
  • Sponsorship & Outreach
  • Talks & CFPs
  • Tech Support

My questions for you are…

  1. Are you interested in participating in a Working Group listed above?
  2. Are you interested in bottom-lining a Working Group listed above?
  3. Are there important topics you think are missing?
  4. Do you have ideas to how we can organize more effectively?

You can answer them all, answer some, or pose your own questions to the group too.

That’s all for now!

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Hi Justin,

Thanks fore putting this together! I’m super interested in helping with the following workgroups:

-Talks & CFPs

  • Event moderation
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Hi Justin, Thank you for moving this forward. I have a couple of questions. Would you like us to share the Topic Survey within our respective organizations? Also, I don’t know what “bottom-lining” a Working Group means. Would you mind clarifying?

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Hi @ncaidin_lf, welcome! :wave: These are good questions.

Please share the Topic Survey with anyone you think would be interested in participating in a Global D&I Summit. I suggest sending a link individually to specific people or a small group though, versus posting to a large internal mailing list.

Sure. I am using the Sustain OSS Working Groups as a model for this:

The bottom-liner(s) is/are the people who take responsibility for moving work forward. This doesn’t mean it is a solo effort, but the bottom-liner acts as a project manager for any of the different Working Groups. They help facilitate the action.

For example, the Talks & CFPs Working Group bottom-liner might work with a group to determine a final list of tracks, suggested topics, and publishing a CFP on the Open Source Diversity website. After the CFP closes, that group might identify a panel of folks to review the submissions. (It would also be great to do blind reviews if possible.) This is just my thinking though, and whoever bottom-lines a Working Group can take their own style and approach to it.

Before we jump right into organization, I will organize an initial meeting with folks who volunteer to bottom-line a Working Group for the Summit.

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Thanks @jwf!

The vision came from the conversation we had. I was just lucky enough to be the first to write them down :wink:

Yes, I can volunteer to bottom-line either Event Moderation or Talks & CFPs, whichever we need more help with. I can participate in the other.

Best, Georg

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Hi all, just voicing support and appreciation. I work with the Public Lab code community in welcoming and belonging, and diversity and inclusion. (Shout out to Abadesi Osunsade for the framing of “community and belonging”)

I don’t have the capacity to do a lot of organizing up front but am very excited to participate and will fill out the Topic Survey. Thanks!

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Hi @jwf,

  1. +1 to the vision
  2. I filled the survey :slight_smile:
  3. I recently organized Nest with Fedora, so I have some resources to share and things are pretty fresh in my mind. These are the categories I used in my overarching event outline:
  • Focus
  • Format
  • Theme
  • Dates
  • Platform
  • Organizers
  • Sponsors
  • Call for Papers
  • Registration
  • Keynotes
  • Attendee Swag
  • Marketing
  • Moderation & CoC
  • Branding & Assets
  • Social Events
  • Polls (should be included if we were to use HopIn)
  • Post-Event Survey & Wrap Up

I can help where ever I am most needed, or I could bottom line an effort as well.

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Thanks for getting everyone started @jwf. I am interested in participating in:

  • Talks and CFPs
  • Tech Support
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Hi folks. Some time has passed but this is still an active focus!

Some ideas of what to expect next:

  1. Summary of survey findings
  2. A new Discourse category specifically for discussing the Summit
  3. Folks who volunteered to bottom-line will get a forum message from me with more info on connecting with organizers / other bottom liners!

I anticipate all three of these things to be done over the next week. Stay tuned! :grinning:

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Hello folks :wave:

@jwf I volunteer to help/bottom line any of the working groups - I see that sponsorship & outreach might need some help :sweat_smile:

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Sorry I’m late to this, I’d love to help out. I was recently on the task-force for carpentrycon@home so I can help out with logistics and I’m interested in participating in D&I with particular focus on Low middle income countries and restricted resources areas and bottom-lining wherever needed :slight_smile:

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Hi folks! Here is a report-back on the Topic Survey results. 15 people filled out the topic survey. More to come soon.

Top topics

Five topics received more 10 or more affirmative “yes!” responses. The top five are listed below in order of most votes to least:

  1. Race & ethnicity in open source (13 votes)
  2. Community showcase (i.e. presenting work from different communities) (12 votes)
  3. Gender & sex in open source (11 votes)
  4. Mental health (11 votes)
  5. Open source in developing nations (10 votes)

Suggested topics

Three respondents suggested four other topics that were not listed:

3 responses with 4 topics: empowering communities and decolonizing open source; religion/absence of religion; a web of care: moving beyond just managing toxicity; "belonging" in open source: BIPOC majority communities

Demographic summary

About half of respondents were based in North America. A third were based in Europe and Central Asia. Some responses were recorded from East and Southern Africa, and Latin/South America and the Caribbean.

There was a majority of non-parents (64.3%) to parents (35.6%).

About half of respondents identified as LGBTQ+.

A third of respondents were 25 to 34. A third of respondents were 35 to 44. The remaining third includes 18 to 24, 45 to 54, and 55 to 64.

Respondents are comfortable speakers of a mix of languages, including Arabic, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

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