[Osmf-talk] Reaching out and diversity

Michael Collinson mike at ayeltd.biz
Mon Oct 27 17:19:27 UTC 2014


I am very late to the party on this one, just been catching up on my 
mailing list mail, but this one is of timely importance:

There is a truly excellent (free) Coursera course starting again on Nov 
3rd. You can sign up now:

*Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence**
**https://www.coursera.org/course/lead-ei* (English with English, 
Chinese (Simplified), Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian subtitles).

Background:  I have recently completed the previous run of this course 
as part of some research another OSMF member and I are doing on how to 
help OSMF board members become more effective and productive.  The 
concepts introduced in the course are much more fundamental than the 
title suggests.  The presentation is slick, but based on serious 
academic research and practise.   I consider myself to be very well 
educated academically and in life (I am in my 50s) and in treating other 
people generally.  But I learnt a lot, especially from the very first 
and the very last video lectures. There are a lot cerebral insights to 
be gained in building and effective organisations *as an individual 
participant*: running the board and the working groups, conduct in 
discussion fora and conferences and more.

As an example, to answer the question below Jaak and a few another men 
asked, (Jaak, I am picking on you because I know you and like you): A 
large number of us folks in OSM and are active in conferences, mailing 
lists etc are folks with high Cognitive intelligence.  I.e we are good 
at seeing patterns and dealing with the world using logic.  However, 
modern research demonstrates that there is also Emotional Intelligence 
and Social Intelligence, (both defined in the early course lectures) and 
a lot of us make the mistake that because we have developed our personal 
cognitive intelligence we automatically have the other two.  Not.  
Asking for physical evidence of sexism within OSM, (which to be fair is 
not exactly the question Jaak asks), is a cognitively intelligent way to 
go about things but not socially intelligent and hence we do not get 
anywhere.  I won't amplify further than that because I hope some of you 
will at least dip into the course so that we collectively increase our 
capabilies to build an effective global organisation: more fun and 
relevancy for more individuals, more contributors, more map.


Mike





On 27/09/2014 11:35, Jaak Laineste (Nutiteq) wrote:
>
> On 27 Sep 2014, at 02:16, Steve Doerr <doerr.stephen at gmail.com 
> <mailto:doerr.stephen at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>> On 26/09/2014 23:33, Emilie Laffray wrote:
>>
>>> First of all, I want to say I agree with you and I could probably 
>>> cite a few occasions where some comments or behaviors have been 
>>> inappropriate. I am going to refrain from naming and shaming because 
>>> it won't help and it will only stir more conversations.
>>
>> It *will* help, and stirring more conversations is precisely what we 
>> need, if there is indeed a problem. You don't actually need to 'name 
>> and shame': at least in the first instance you can present anonymized 
>> anecdotes.
>
> I honestly have the same problem. I try to read this thread and I 
> still have little idea what it is talking about. Probably I’m naive, 
> stupid, having different cultural background from the soviet 
> chauvinist education, do not read posts carefully enough, blind to 
> something. I’m afraid that I can be even accidental sexist, with 
> nobody mentioning. There might be others like me. I tried to skim 
> through some articles pointed before, but could not really link them 
> to OSM as I know it. I understand that some of us are too tired of it, 
> are afraid of it etc, but maybe some others who also do know well the 
> issue would please add a few specific examples of diversity issues in 
> OSM? These could be be even made up, just realistic enough in OSM context.
>
> Jaak
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> osmf-talk mailing list
> osmf-talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/osmf-talk

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20141027/51469dd4/attachment.html>


More information about the osmf-talk mailing list