[OSCTC-planning] Getting the diversity language right, on the new campus.openhatch.org

[Asheesh Laroia]

There's a new campus.openhatch.org, and I wanted to make sure that when we 
talk about diversity in it, we explain why we care about diversity, so 
readers know where we're coming from and feel comfortable.

To that end, here are the kind of things I want people to know:

* We have some success running gender-divers events. The first time we did 
an event, it had >30% women. This trend has continued generally, that our 
events have somewhat reasonably healthy gender diversity.

* Crucially, that 30% at Penn was more diversity than the CS program.

* We think lots of people are excited about open source, and want to find 
their way in, and that the true demographics of that are close to the 
demographics of the planet.

* We think that a key aspect of the reason open source is not as even, 
demographically, as the planet right now is that knowledge and interest in 
it typically spreads along friend network lines, and the starting-point is 
very white and male and rich.

* We think women-in-CS organizations are neat. We like working with them 
as a way to actively move toward the more-even demographics that we 
believe match the underlying interest on the planet in open source.

* A lot of the reason we get reasonable gender diversity is the 
newcomer-welcoming nature of our publicity for the events.

* Another thing is that it's not just the publicity, but the event itself, 
that (intends to be|is) newcomer-friendly. Certainly parts of it are, and 
we're committed to improving that iteratively over time. Like the 
Practicing_Git section.

* We've been caring about newcomers in general since 2009, and we still 
do, so if you don't particularly care about diversity, but you do care 
about people being nice, we're still your pal.

I wrote some sample text for this here:

https://etherpad.mozilla.org/diverse-osctc

The idea is that my text would live above "Sponsors" but below "Friendly 
and knowledgeable volunteers", in the same style as "Friendly and 
knowledgeable volunteers".

I'm only sending this because I wanted to make sure that, as Shauna and I 
both run out of steam and go to sleep, I serialized enough if the 
conversation to disk so we can try to pick it up tomorrow. Happy to have 
more voices here.

I realize that whatever we say here runs the risk of sounding like 
tokenism <http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tokenism> and doubly so for 
carelessly-phrased things like the above. I'm hoping the conversation here 
can occur in good faith. I'm happy to have people raise issue with word 
choice or actions of ours and express how they feel; that's all part of a 
good-faith conversation.

-- Asheesh.