[diversity-talk] Greetings, thoughts, references

Jo Walsh metazool at gmail.com
Wed Oct 8 04:49:31 UTC 2014


dear all @diversity-talk,

Good to see #osm4ada doing the rounds so quickly. Glad that's helping women
organising in OSM build confidence. Wondering about next steps. Here is a
collection of thoughts / references to related work. Sorry if i'm restating
the obvious here.

1) Code of conduct / diversity statement

QGIS has a new diversity statement to go with its code of conduct. It's a
good gesture.
http://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/codeofconduct/diversitystatement.html

OSM doesn't appear to have a code of conduct. This is a *problem* for OSM.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Community_Code_of_Conduct_%28Draft%29
HOT OSM appears to have its own, could potentially be backported.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lo7o9YuOCdH94XCFcK-HsH5Ja4fPnpVl7GioKg_4Ht8/edit

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Code_of_conduct talks about effective
codes of conduct.

2) Outreach and sponsorship at events

The Clojure community recognised they had serious balance problems and went
all out to address that and it is working. They've doubled women speakers
and attendees at events within a year. There's also the ClojureBridge
network offering workshops that are specifically limited to women and
genderqueer people.

https://thestrangeloop.com/attendees/diversity-scholarships
http://purelyfunctional.discoursehosting.net/t/clojure-conj-opportunity-grants/200

Diversity scholarships would be a good target for conference sponsorship, i
think FOSS4G will try this next year. It is worth doing for SoTM. I've only
been to one SoTM & didn't know how to talk to people & didn't find it very
welcoming.

http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference

In python world there is corporate sponsorship of women-specific events as
a futile gesture of expiation, looking at you GitHub.

http://djangogirls.org/
http://www.pyladies.com/

BUT this stuff all feels a bit retro to me though i'm doing some of it
anyway. But i've lived through a generation or two of failed women-in-X
FOSS initiatives and all i've taken away from that is that the focus on
women can be harmful, can make it seem like there is a problem with women.
"diversity" is the good keyword, yes.

3) Meetups and mapping parties with different communities

The local organisers in Edinburgh and Glasgow have done some good stuff
with green groups, transition town, etc. Draws in people with a wide
variety of interests and maps in their heads. We're doing a thing with the
Scottish hackerspaces in November, because hackerspaces <3 OSM (and also
have diversity issues in spades)

Opportunities to talk more to local mappers IRL = less conflict online.
More opportunities to get welcoming right. Learning how to be welcoming
with none of the normal social protocol available = a social development
experience for hackers.


"Ms 10%"
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