Hi Daniel,
It is all very well to talk about the Code of Conduct and negative situations, but what about approaching things from the other direction, creating positive situations?
I like your idea of pushing from the positive side at the same time.
Does FOSDEM have any policies, resources or budget to actively encourage participation from people who are not white males, for example, to pay travel grants for female speakers?
If funding is available or can be found, I believe it makes sense to publicize those opportunities here.
Does anybody keep track of any third-party sources of funding that could be helpful for bringing speakers and participants from groups that are under-represented? I've heard that Google offers some funding for example[1] and it would be good to encourage women to apply for this.
Some other ideas that come to mind: - Offering some sort of public speaking seminar, aimed mainly at people from such groups who haven't had a lot of experience, on the Friday before FOSDEM. - Pairing first time speakers with an experienced mentor some time ahead of the event. - Offering some kind of reward to the dev-room that does the most to encourage diversity (e.g. giving the dev-room a guaranteed place or bigger room for 2017 or giving the dev-room managers input on a main-track selection in the following year)
A low-cost way that each dev room could consider to make sure that first time speakers 1) know they are welcome and 2) receive a bit of support is to run IRC office hours to help people with their submissions. We did this at SeaGL (http://seagl.org/news/2015/07/15/IRC.html) and it helped us attract new speakers and get more submissions that were better suited for our event. All you need is an IRC channel, a shared email address and a few volunteers who can help potential speakers with their submissions. Thanks, Deb
Regards,
Daniel
1.
https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/edu/scholarships/google-travel-and-confere...
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