[OSGeo-Discuss] [Call out] Diversity team volunteering

[María Arias de Reyna]

Dear all,

We haven't had much movement around this subject since the call-out.
And this is bad. Very bad. This means one or more of the following:
 * Our community is too heterogeneous, we have no diverse members.
 * Diverse members of our community feel too disconected to participate.
 * Diverse members of our community are too overworked to volunteer on this.

So now I want to mobilize the not-diverse members of our community to
reach our members from diversity target groups. Please, talk to them,
make sure they feel comfortable and included and make sure they are
not overworking to be with us.

I think I don't need to explain to you why an heterogenous community
is bad in the long term sustainability. We have barriers we are
possibly not even aware of and it is difficult to get rid of them if
we don't have input from people suffering from those barriers (like, I
didn't realize how difficult it is to get to a conference on a
wheelchair until I saw it with my own eyes). We are losing a lot of
talent by not taking care of this.

Kind Regards,
María.


On Sun, Apr 1, 2018 at 2:08 PM, María Arias de Reyna <delawen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear fellow members,
>
> We have had some discussions running in the last months regarding how
> to improve diversity and inclusivity inside OSGeo. If you feel part of
> a target group for diversity and inclusiveness, I would like to ask
> for your help and volunteer to help us improving our guidelines and
> conducts. Even if you haven't been a very visible or active member of
> OSGeo until now, this is important because your point of view is
> difficult to reach from a privileged perspective.
>
> What is a target group for diversity?
> We don't want to have a strict list here, our goal is to have a
> diverse and wide range pool of points of views that can watch and
> review OSGeo to make sure we don't leave anyone behind.
>
> Some examples: POC, WIT, LGBT+, economic diversity. But we don't want
> to stop there. If you are blind, neurodiverse, on a wheelchair, or
> anything you think that we should take into consideration, please,
> volunteer too.
>
> What are we calling out for? Well, at least we have two starting points here:
>  * Review CoC for FOSS4G and help organization in making it as more
> diverse as possible.
>  * Review CoC for OSGeo.
>
> What do I ask you right now? If you want to help, please, do the following:
>  * Join the CoC mailint list and say hi:
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/coc-discuss
>  * Help here: https://github.com/foss4g2018/foss4g2018/issues/65
>
> This is all volunteer work and we won't ask you to do anything more
> than you can give. But remember that without your point of view, we
> can't make OSGeo easier to reach for people with your profile. And we
> want to welcome everybody as much as possible.
>
> Thank you very much,
> María.
> OSGeo, President.