[FOSS4G-Oceania] Forum on Diversity

Wed Sep 5 13:27:40 PDT 2018

Hi Sarah,

Some great ideas of yours here. As it appears you have an interest in 
this, maybe you'd be the right person to lead this forum? Would have the 
added benefit of increasing the number of female presenters by one.

Adam,

A word of caution on excessively overriding the community vote (to 
increase our goals of diversity). When I chaired the 2009 conference we 
selected a few lower voted presentations - mainly to increase local 
representation, as we noticed that most attendees were local. During the 
conference I looked in on some of these low voted talks and found they 
were very poorly attended. Lets be mindful of that situation for our 
conference.

There is research which suggests that lack of women in STEM is not only 
due to lower opportunity and role models, but possibly due to other 
reasons, such as while women appear to be just as capable in STEM 
subjects (possibly more capable), they are maybe less interested.

There was an email thread "Diversity in FOSS4G" discussing some of these 
points: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2018-August/thread.html
Highlights from the thread:

Reference to this research: 
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617741719
https://researchtheheadlines.org/2018/04/20/the-stem-gender-equality-paradox-from-fallacies-to-facts/
/In recent years, STEM has become a huge buzzword among teachers, 
researchers and policy makers. Promoting STEM education in girls has 
been a national priority for many western nations including the UK, USA, 
Australia, Finland, Switzerland and Norway. Yet, with international 
women’s day not too far behind us, these nations have found themselves 
ambushed by rather discouraging headlines like: “Fewer women want to be 
scientists in wealthy, equal, countries”, “The West is way behind Iran 
and Saudi Arabia when it comes to women in science”, and “More gender 
equality leads to less women in STEM”./

And counter arguments presented by Maria:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5S7QD9dryI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrYx7HaUlMY

On 5/9/18 11:06 am, Sarah Goodwin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I also thought that a panel session for discussing 'Diversity in 
> Geospatial' is needed and it would be good to bring everyone into this 
> discussion. Not only is it difficult to ensure diversity of a 
> conference, but it is in general for companies and in academia 
> too.Perhaps a suggestion here would be to invite the keynote speakers 
> onto this panel, there is nice mix, it might be a good place to start.
>
> Also, maybe we can have an ideas for diversity and inclusion 
> initiatives wall so people can write down ideas and suggestions for 
> what we as a community could do?
>
> I also had a suggestion for running a panel for how to get more FOSS4G 
> in Academia, but I didn't think to submit this in as a proposal as it 
> is not really a presentation (!) but I see by this email that probably 
> I should have done that? I hope we can still suggest it as a topic 
> from the academic committee and add that in for voting?
>
> Sarah
>
>
> On Wed, 5 Sep 2018 at 06:24, Cameron Shorter 
> <cameron.shorter at gmail.com <mailto:cameron.shorter at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Alex, yes, I'd be happy to update the diversity discussion - and
>     it doesn't need to be me up on the stage.
>
>     I realise we are susceptible to having a stage full of rich white
>     educated city-dwelling males debating this topic.
>
>
>     On 5/9/18 3:43 am, Alex Leith wrote:
>>     The diversity and inclusion discussion is still the one I'd like
>>     to have as the plenary panel session at the end of the first day.
>>
>>     The second last keynote at FOSS4G was about this topic, and while
>>     I was exhausted and didn't take great notes, here are my dot points:
>>
>>      *
>>
>>         Be mindful of diversity and inclusion and unconscious bias
>>
>>      *
>>
>>         Negative interactions are infrequent but highly visible, with
>>         consequences for project activity.
>>
>>     Maybe we should work on this, Cameron, and we can put it forward
>>     for a vote amongst our committee as the topic for that panel session?
>>
>>     On Tue, 4 Sep 2018 at 02:30 John Bryant <johnwbryant at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:johnwbryant at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         I love it! I really like how it aims to create a dialogue
>>         with the attendees, rather than just us setting targets and
>>         trying to achieve them, behind the scenes. I'm hopeful that
>>         our conference is successful in building a strong community,
>>         this feels like it would be a step in the right direction.
>>
>>         Looking forward to working on the program over the next few
>>         weeks (joiners welcome, as Alex has already said) :)
>>         _______________________________________________
>>         FOSS4G-Oceania mailing list
>>         FOSS4G-Oceania at lists.osgeo.org
>>         <mailto:FOSS4G-Oceania at lists.osgeo.org>
>>         https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/foss4g-oceania
>>
>>     -- 
>>
>>     Alex Leith
>>     0419 189 050
>>
>>
>>     _______________________________________________
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>>     https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/foss4g-oceania
>
>     -- 
>     Cameron Shorter
>     Technology Demystifier
>     Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant
>
>     M +61 (0) 419 142 254
>
>     _______________________________________________
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>

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Technology Demystifier
Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant

M +61 (0) 419 142 254

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