
The thing that originally swung it for PyCon was grabbing a chunk of sponsor money and allocating it specifically to increase women's attendance at the conference. Word got out, and women started to realise their attendance was actively sought. S Steve Holden On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 6:31 PM, Chris Calloway <cbc@unc.edu> wrote:
On 5/4/16 4:12 PM, Don Sheu wrote:
I'm in the process of instituting guidelines for handling Code of Conduct reports with my group in Seattle, PuPPy. First step is recruiting a diverse committee. Unfortunately, currently our organizing team is overwhelmingly male. Last thing I want is for a Code of Conduct procedure where a member who's not white or male is facing a process run entirely by white males.
Don,
The hardest part of diversity is attempting to diversify an already non-diverse group. I searched for a long time for how to do this. Finally, after watching the Code: Debugging the Gender Gap documentary, I got a clue, applied it, and it worked. The secret is pro-action. You must go out and specifically and specially invite people individually, and invite them not just to participate, but to lead. I did this for the PyData Carolinas conference coming up this fall and it worked so well that the majority of people on our board of organizers are female and twenty percent are non-white:
http://pydata.org/carolinas2016/about/organizers/
I went to PyLadies and other groups and asked for their help. They responded with several highly qualified Python data scientists. I didn't just ask for volunteers. I approached them each individually, told them each why their qualifications are needed, and invited them to come take the reigns of various conference committees. You can get diversity. You just have to work at it and not wait for it to come to you. You must reach out and reach out specifically to individuals, recruiting each with an offer of leadership.
-- Sincerely,
Chris Calloway, Applications Analyst UNC Renaissance Computing Institute 100 Europa Drive, Suite 540, Chapel Hill, NC 27517 (919) 599-3530
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