Hi everyone,
Diversity FAD proposal in Brno from Jan 26- Jan 30 2017 has been accepted
and we have about two months to go! We will be working on Diversity Survey
for Fedora community amongst other things and we have a few points to look
into before the FAD. It was decided in one of the previous meetings, that
we will look into two major points before FAD :
1. Talking to Fedora Infra team about getting the survey live on cloud for
testing.
2. Trying out the survey by test participants for suggesting and improving
it.
Here are a few things I think we should look into regarding the survey:
1. Right now we have questions related to capturing demographic information
of Fedora community, diversity and inclusion related experiences and
diversity and inclusion practices and how are they helping in Fedora. Any
other suggestions for topics we should questions on ?
2. The questions need to be directed and focused to elicit responses from
the community. A general question like 'Do you feel Fedora is committed to
supporting diversity and inclusion?' needs understanding of terms
'diversity' and 'inclusion' from survey participant. Instead, we can ask
questions like 'Do you feel included in Fedora community?' and 'Have you
seen any instances of discrimination against minorities in Fedora
community?'. I feel such questions are more likely to get experiences and
memories as responses and do not require prior information about what
diversity and inclusion means.
3. I feel if we could collaborate together on these survey questions it
would be of great help as what maybe obvious to me, may not be obvious to
someone else and we are more likely to learn pitfalls this way. It will
help reduce the vagueness and improve the way we can frame questions to get
better responses. Maybe we could have a session where we question every
question we are trying to propose in the diversity survey ? However, it
should be done before Fedora Infra puts up the live testing instance for
survey.
4. Many contributors are not aware of existence of an active Fedora
Diversity Team. I was thinking before we conduct the survey, we write an
introductory blog post about Fedora diversity team on Community Blog so
people become familiar with terms like diversity and inclusion, what they
mean in Fedora community, the team and what we are trying to do.
5. Can we also ask for suggestions about areas where should Fedora
Diversity Team look into in near future from survey participants ?
6. I understand that every question in the survey should be optional for
people to have a choice whether they want to share that information with
Fedora or not. However, instead of making all questions optional, maybe we
can instead add another option like 'I prefer not to disclose' for some
selective choice-based questions. This is better from a statistical point
of view. For example, for question regarding gender of a participant -
maybe along with other options 'Male', 'Female' , 'Trans', 'Other' etc we
also have another option 'I don't want to say'.
7. Can we also have other 'selected' participants (not limited to those
involved in Fedora Diversity team) to test and give feedback using live
version of survey before FAD ? I feel this would help bring to forefront
other problems which were really obvious to team members.
Looking to hear your thoughts on this and more on this later,
Best,
Bee