[UbuntuWomen] Diversity and Encouraging More Women To Attend UDS

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Jono Bacon <jono at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> The next UDS is taking place in May in Budapest and we have been
> thinking about the diversity of the event. One part of this work is
> producing a anti-harassment policy that we will be adding to
> uds.ubuntu.com soon (Valerie Aurora has reviewed it and provided
> valuable feedback).

Great!

> Secondly, I would like to brainstorm some ideas to encourage more women
> to participate in two areas:
>
>      * Apply For Sponsorship - the way in which we determine the
>        sponsorship of travel and accommodation of community members is
>        by asking community members to apply for sponsorship.

We always try do encourage this, I think we could take it a bit
further by making our own confirmations there a bit more public
(perhaps creating a wiki page showing all the members who are
attending so we lessen the feeling of how intimidating going when you
have never met anyone is). Anyone have other ideas?

>      * General Attendance - of course not everyone can be sponsored
>        (due to limited funds) and not everyone needs sponsorship (e.g.
>        local residents), so encourage sponsorship outside of
>        sponsorship is a valuable message too.

With this in mind, I was really inspired by Martin Owens' "Other
Accommodation" initiative for Natty:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-N/OtherAccommodation

If he's willing to help with this again, AND if it could be more
widely pushed by the community after sponsorship letters go out I
think it could be even more successful this time around. I seem to
recall he even ended up accepting donations from the community to help
out some non-sponsored folks who their communities felt were important
as attendees.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com