Hi says a lurker, I very much like the idea/approach but have a question. Taking each pillar in turn is likely the only tractable route but it does seem to mean that inclusion becomes the primary goal and that the work on that pillar will naturally place constraints and/or requirements on the others when they get their time in the limelight.
My perspective is as someone who is blind and hence my interests may appear to lean more into the access pillar but to me that's more the means, the actual goal is the inclusion. So for me the inclusion framing likely works but that may not be universal. So if inclusion comes first it may be useful to clarify (possibly as part of the work, we don't need it in advance) if its just an artifact of sequencing across the acronym where each pillar will affect the others or if the ordering is more meaningful than that. Regards Garry -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Gruno <humbed...@apache.org> Sent: Monday, August 11, 2025 1:54 PM To: dev@diversity.apache.org Subject: IDEA - Preamble 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
