[diversity] Increasing inclusion, not only diversity (an article)

Hello Vesna,

Thanks for sharing this article, it makes a lot of good points in an 
accessible way. More comments inline:

On 24 Apr 2018, at 15:51, Vesna Manojlovic <BECHA at ripe.net> wrote:
> - we payed for the training of the "trusted contacts”

Out of curiosity, what exact training did they get, and from who?

Personally, 80% of my decision making on “will I report this issue to
the CoC team” is whether I trust the CoC contacts, in aspects like 
confidentiality, taking my report seriously, and believing me.

Proper training for CoC contacts significantly would increase my trust
in these issues, so I would suggest to mention this to the trusted contacts 
page - I don’t see it there now.

> We are trying hard to improve the diversity of speakers and participants
> -- and to measure our progress -- and it's a good thing that we do;
> but, as Mirjam also pointed out -- we need to do better when it comes to
> "organisers" (Programme Committee) and "volunteers" (WG Chairs).
> 
> Then there is a matter of general inequalities in the society, mirrored
> by the tech-industry, such as:
> 
>> To have this time available is to be very privileged.

I suppose this directly affects volunteer tasks like WG Chairs and Programme
Committees. As far as I understand WG Chairs are sort of expected to attend
most meetings also, so in that case being a WG Chair is only realistic if you
can afford all that time plus € 2000 per year from your or your employer’s
budget for conference costs. That inherently creates a strong bias towards
privileged groups.

>> providing a speakers fee for any speaker you have asked to speak from
>> an underrepresented minority.
> 
> I'm aware that this suggestion would spark a discussion, specially about
> "meritocracy" and "experts" and "quality", but personally I am not going
> to engage in this on the list - I am assuming we agree on the staring
> position that it is valuable to the RIPE Community if the diversity &
> inclusion are increased, and we are only talking about *how*, not _if_
> we should aim at that goal.

With actually paying someone a fee to speak, immigration can become
a lot more complicated also, as lots of visa’s would consider that paid 
work. There may be ways around this though - I’m not an immigration
lawyer. I’ve never dealt with this personally.

However, simply covering travel, accommodation and conference ticket
costs already helps a lot and is much easier tax and visa-wise. Unless
I’m mistaken, that's currently also not an option for RIPE meeting speakers.

Personally I very rarely speak at conferences that don’t cover costs,
especially because the cumulative cost is rather high - I do quite a bit of
public speaking. It is definitely one of the main reasons why submitting
to a RIPE meeting currently is not even on my radar.
(Although to be fair, I’m not sure whether I have suitable talks anyways.)

In my experience as an organiser of conferences where speaker almost
always get costs covered when asks, it can pretty much double the number
of talks we can accept from women - and that’s just quickly counting one
axis of diversity. I think we’d find even more impact in other areas.

Sasha