On 16/09/2019 18:24, Christian Imhorst wrote:
Hi Florian,
sorry for my late reply.
Am 28.05.19 um 07:26 schrieb Florian Snow:
Christian Imhorst christian.imhorst@fsfe.org writes:
We need more diversity in the Free Software movement, because it means respecting people as they are, without prejudice. Diversity brings solutions to complex problems of the present and the future we can not handle with solutions from the past. This requires people who see the world with different eyes. People have to be able to contribute to the Free Software movement with their whole personality as they are.
I completely agree! We are actively taking steps to make our staff and teams more diverse. It is by no means an easy task because the pool of active contributors that we usually draw from for our teams, is not very diverse. If you have any ideas in this regard or just generally want to help, please let me know.
If you want more diversity, the first question must be: Why doesn't it work? The answer, that there are simply no woman, for example, just white cis man is imho something made easy.
As I wrote on Mastodon: We need diversity in the FSFE to move forward our work on Free Software and freedom. Diversity is an indicator of and is indispensable for freedom. But how can we achieve that? We have to remove any and all barriers for speakers and activists to share their expertise and knowledge with the community. That means encouragement, financial support, childcare offers, a culture of being welcome. We have to bring voices not normally heard to our community. We need more mentors and supporters, not heroes.
Our goals at the FSFE is inclusion not separation. And this is a really important thing for me and fundamental for my support. And I hope that we'll not stop at what we've achieved and that we will continue and become better -- and I know we will.
These are my ideas in this regard and generally I want to help. :-)
Best, Christian
There are programmes such as Outreachy which is designed to try and address this in terms of offering paid internships to under represented groups.
I am in Torbay, tried to promote this, and I get no engagement. The one diversity group in Torbay, the leader has e-mail but never seems to reply, I don't think a lot of the adults are that computer literate, while children and young people are, so it makes it very hard to reach them via those who are not very computer literate.
Granted a lot of people just use facebook, which apparently many young people don't use as it is for 'old people' or that is the impression I get. I have heard that mastodon is quite popular with young people but I have no data to back that up.
Perhaps we should try some of the aid agencies which work with children in say Africa to provide education to girls, I think one of the agencies that sponsors girls advertises on UK tv.
Another thing is what skills do we need from people?, it is all very well saying we need help but help people to help us. So:
If we need say ruby developers where can I go to learn these skills, codecademy spring to mind, which is great for step by step learning, sites such as repl.it allow people to experiment and share their own code, so perhaps we could do that, as in come up with a sort of programme / framework of learning / support via existing platforms, to help them get to where we need them to contribute.
if we also set this up so there is a specific start date and some sort of low entry criteria, then we should be able to take someone and perhaps give them some useful skills, once completed and they start to contribute, we should endorse people on LinkedIn etc for those skills.
I am typing this from my own viewpoint in that I have some skills but don't know how to take those to the next level. There are lots of initiatives to help people learn the very basics of IT and computers but then very little in the way of a pathway beyond that, unless you sign up to a local brick college or like me know about the online courses that are available via Open University, edx, codecademy and many many others.
I think the learning machine has created resources for teaching the basic ITQ qualification but with open tools such as libreoffice and encourages the use of free software and even contributions to this.
Just a thought
Paul Sutton