[Events] economic diversity

[Sumana Harihareswara]

>> On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 4:26 AM, Catherine Devlin
>> <catherine.devlin at gmail.com> wrote:

Congratulations on your work!  I especially applaud the planning -- you
had food, you had a fallback exercise platform when your first didn't
work, and you got cool demonstrations.

To get more students for the next round, don't forget to ask your first
round to evangelize to their friends and social groups!

>>> At and after the Columbus Python Workshop, some of the students and I talked
>>> about how we could use workshops for not just gender diversity, but economic
>>> diversity.  They had great suggestions for organizations and agencies I
>>> could partner with - job agencies, women's shelters, and so forth.  Lots of
>>> possibilities there....

Thank you for bringing this up and for being interested in broadening
the scope of your work to class diversity as well as gender diversity.
Here's my take.

Just like the "pipeline" that brings women into open source, the
"pipeline" that brings socioeconomically disadvantaged people into tech
and specifically into open source has lots of leaks along the way.  All
failures are cascade failures.  As OpenHatch, we can help patch up some
parts of the pipeline and won't be as effective at others.  So let's
concentrate on the parts where we can, and (when possible) place
secondary or tertiary importance on lending support to people and
institutions working on other parts of the pipeline.

So: with all of OpenHatch's strengths, we are not going to be able to
help much if someone is currently absolutely homeless and jobless, and
does not have regular access to the web via a device with a real
keyboard.  But we would still improve the economic diversity of our
contributor base by reaching out to pink-collar women who have clerical
jobs, and poor students at community colleges.

We might do best to define a few opportunities and demographics that
would be easy to start with -- like targeting community colleges for
some OpenHatch Comes to Campus events.

I do agree that the questions "what hardware & software?" and "what
would make this appealing to the demographics we're interested in?" and
"but what if they can't practice at home?" would be pretty important to
this kind of attempt.

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation