Hi Richard, Thanks so much for sharing this piece. I'm actually friends with the author and she's gotten really great feedback. I'm pleased to see it showing up in our community.
I definitely think this is something we can be better about. As someone who has helped organize SOTM-US in the past I think it's absolutely something where we have room to improve. As an event organizer, I am 100% a part of the problem, so I want to personally apologize to anyone who has felt uncomfortable or less welcome at an event because of alcohol, and a lack of ample non-alcoholic choices. We can do better. That piece makes these points far better than I could, so I won't repeat what we've read, but I think that the tech community (which OSM frequently mirrors, in social respects), is slowly becoming more aware of the need to make events more inclusive, and lessening the reliance on alcohol is one important way to do that. As an aside, since I am an American I cannot say whether this is just an American problem. I will say that I also find many tech events in Berlin are focused around alcohol, but perhaps the events I've attended have been anomalies. Best, Kathleen On Sat, Nov 1, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Richard Weait <rich...@weait.com> wrote: > I read this article recently and It got me thinking. Do we devalue > community members, or potential community members who don't drink? > > A quote from the article, "When alcohol is currency, non-alcoholic > drinks are considered valueless, and the interests and needs of people > who don’t drink alcohol are easily forgotten." > > Give it a read and let's talk. Can we do better in the ways that the > article suggests? > > > https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/alcohol-and-inclusivity-planning-tech-events-with-non-alcoholic-options > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk >
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