[UbuntuWomen] Diversity and Encouraging More Women To Attend UDS

[Jono Bacon]

On Fri, 2011-01-14 at 09:28 -0800, Elizabeth Krumbach wrote:
> 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!

I forgot to mention, the policy will be online soon - currently there is
a bug in the site which is preventing me from logging in - when IS
resolve that, I will get it online.

> > 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?

I was thinking it could be cool to have an outreach campaign on Planet,
the Fridge etc, to encourage more women to participate, and maybe
provide feedback and re-assurances from women who have attended UDS
about how it works and answering any questions. Do you think this could
be useful?

> >      * 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.

Yeah, I love this idea. We discussed this a little this week about maybe
trying to find some community folks who are local to each UDS to
encourage them to help with things like finding alternative
accommodation, helping with travel, and other useful administrative
needs.

	Jono

-- 
Jono Bacon
Ubuntu Community Manager
jono(at)ubuntu(dot)com
www.ubuntu.com : www.jonobacon.org
www.twitter.com/jonobacon : www.identi.ca/jonobacon