Hi, D&I committee members and other lurkers,
With our annual conference coming into view on the horizon soon, as well
as various questions, trends, and issues moving into view across the
organization, I would like to kick off an idea for the fall and winter,
aptly named...IDEA.
IDEA is short for:
- Inclusion
- Diversity
- Equity
- Access
Within each of these four letters and terms lies a segment that I think
is vital to ensuring the continued growth, harmony, and general
well-being of our foundation and its many communities. I also happen to
think the abbreviation is a catchy mnemonic for us to work with.
The basic premise IDEA, as I envision it, is to tackle each of these
letters sequentially, building a formulaic understanding of why this
effort exists, what the scope is and isn't, and begin launching
community-led initiatives to help projects and the wider foundation
community as a whole.
It is my hope that having a formulated but still heuristic approach will
supply us with both some guard-rails to help us keep the course, while
still being loosely enough defined to allow us to go where inspiration
and feedback takes us.
Thus, I would like us to focus on inclusion first, initially defining
what we understand as inclusion within the context of the ASF and its
many communities, what we believe is within the scope of inclusion at
the ASF, as well as what we think is outside this scope.
As I have mentioned earlier, I want the initiatives that happen as a
result of our work to be community-driven. While we may have our own
personal and professional opinions on what inclusion means to us, the
very nature of the word compels us to ask the communities and work with
them in identifying which issues or trends may or may not exist within
the individual or global communities within the ASF, as well as working
with projects to solve issues or promote best practices in a manner that
respects the wishes and intents of both projects and the foundation as a
whole.
To that end, I think it logical that we will need some infrastructure
set up for handling the investigative/analytical parts of our future
work, such as tools for conducting surveys, outreach, and data analysis.
Seeing as we already have a VM set up from previous experiments within
D&I, I will propose we retrofit that to host these tools.
I have done some preliminary research into open source survey tools that
we could self-host, and found Formbricks[1] to be a good starting point,
as we can self-host their open source version with minimal setup.
If anyone on the committee (or in the wider audience) have experience
with this tool or similar options, I'd love to hear from you, whether
it's feedback/reviews of the solutions out there or experience with
managing them.
*This* email is mostly an introduction to the IDEA concept, as well as
these musings on bootstrapping the tooling we will need. I will start a
separate thread on inclusion once I have gathered my thoughts on the
matter some more, but do not let that stop you from replying with your
own ideas and thoughts on the matter. The more ideas we can accumulate
in advance, the better our chances of getting productive with something.
Looking forward to hearing from you all,
- Daniel
[1] https://formbricks.com/docs/self-hosting/overview
