[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G North America Announcements

[David William Bitner]

Dave,

As indicated by Jeff and Doug, this has not been an issue at any previous
FOSS4G event. What has been an issue has been the diversity that we have
been able to bring into both our community and our events. We are still a
predominantly White European/US/Canadian male community. There has been a
lot of work done by many tech conferences to try to make sure that
conferences are more welcoming to a more broad array of folks (the rotation
of NA/Europe/Elsewhere is one thing FOSS4G has done). The
anti-harassment policy follows the lead of others and pulls from the
template provided by Geek Feminism
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/index.php?title=Conference_anti-harassment_policy.
Additionally following advice from other events as well as many members of
our community, we are making the community review process for presentation
submission author anonymous as a concern with how we have done this in the
past has been the fear that many folks have of feeling publicly shamed with
critique and voting of their proposals. These are only two small steps that
we are taking to addressing an environment in the overall open source world
that by the numbers is very unwelcome to women and other groups (while
there have not been any overt issues that I know of as part of any FOSS4G,
if you look at the percentage of female conference goers or developers in
our community, we do have a long ways to go).

Hope this helps understand the rationale,

David


On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 7:51 AM, Jeff McKenna <jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com
> wrote:

> DaveP,
>
> There have been no specific problems at FOSS4G events but I support the
> FOSS4G-NA's initiative for diversity and harassment-free policies.
>
> -jeff
>
>
>
> On 13-01-16 12:56 AM, Dave Patton wrote:
> >
> > David et al:
> >
> > I have no issue with the Harassment Policy, but I am curious
> > as to it's origin. Is it a result of specific problems at
> > other FOSS4G-related events?
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>



-- 
************************************
David William Bitner
dbSpatial LLC
612-424-9932
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