Dear Chris, Thank you for bringing this into limelight.
I recently attended KubeCon + Cloud Native Con in Austin, where we had a diversity lunch, the idea behind this event was to meet new people and talk about a common topic in groups for example, how they started contributing to open source. Althought, the discussion doesn't have to revolve around this topic exclusively. I connected at a personal level with ~6 other attendees from different parts of the world in around 30 minutes. I felt that this was a great idea to know one another and make each other feel included at the conference. I also attended DebConf in Montreal which was my first DebConf! Despite being a newcomer, I felt welcoming when I interacted with a few Debian contributors :) Having significant amount of mentor - mentee sessions and beginner level talks at the conferences could also be a great way to start with. I believe, there is scope and need for more inclusion. For that, thank you for talking about it. Cheers! Urvika On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 12:38 PM, Bill Blough <[email protected]> wrote: > Montreal was my first ever DebConf, so maybe I should chime in here. > > On the whole, I found everyone to be pretty welcoming and friendly. But > as a socially-awkward, shy, introvert (as I'm sure at least a few others > are, > too), it didn't stop me from feeling like an outsider sometimes. But I > also know that's just how I am, and so I place no blame on DebConf or > its attendees. > > That said, I agree that extra steps to make newcomers feel welcome could > be helpful for any conference or community. > > > On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 12:23:31PM -0700, Bdale Garbee wrote: > > Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[email protected]> writes: > > > > > At the IETF (another technical conference, quite different from debconf > > > but with some similarities), there are "newcomer meet-and-greet" events > > > at the start of the conference. > > > > Linux Conf Australia also has a long tradition of a session for > > newcomers the evening before the conference starts that is usually well > > attended, with multiple long-timers providing advice on how to not be > > overwhelmed and how to feel good about joining and/or starting > > conversations. > > At some point I was watching old videos from past DebConfs. Didn't there > used > to be a DebConf 101 (or something like that) for newcomers? I didn't > see it on the schedule for Montreal, otherwise I likely would have > attended. Perhaps that could be resurrected/morphed into something like > DKG and Bdale mention above. > > > Bill > >
