Hi Bee, thanks for getting the ball rolling on this, and sorry for the
delay in giving you a response. More feedback is in-line below.
On 11/23/2016 06:21 AM, Bhagyashree Uday wrote:
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 ?
To put it simply, I think the main focus for this survey should be to
"paint a picture of Fedora's contributor community". Getting a better
feel for the demographics of our users is a good place to start. The
only link I have for the questions was the Etherpad that we lost all the
data on. Here's some key areas that I think we should try to focus on
(if there are already questions recreated, feel free to link them and
I'll give more specific feedback on what's already there):
* Culture
* Origin, nationality, ethnicity
* Gender
* Language
* Native language?
* Number of languages spoken (and level of knowledge)?
* Feedback on ease / difficulty of contributing to Fedora because of
language?
* Religion
* Religious views?
* Role of religion in contributing to open source? Has it ever been a
barrier? Helpful?
* Family
* Relationship status?
* Parent? If yes, experiences contributing to Fedora?
* Primary/secondary caretaker of a family member or loved one?
I'm sure there's more things I can think of given time and some more
space to spread out. If this is helpful, I can provide example questions
or better explanations.
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.
Not sure if this one is a question, but yes, I agree. It will be best to
assume that someone taking the survey has not read anything on the subject.
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.
This sounds good to me. We could have an Etherpad and an hour-long hack
session or something similar? We don't have to get *all* of them done in
that hour, but if we use a Hangouts or BlueJeans instance and an
Etherpad, I'm pretty sure we can get off to a good start before the FAD
in January.
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.
Closer to the FAD, I think it would be a good idea for us to do an
update on the Fedora Magazine. We'll get a lot more exposure that way
beyond just the contributor community. There's a lot of people from
other open source projects who also work on D&I efforts in their
communities. These people might be good to help target in our outreach
efforts in addition to currently active Fedora contributors.
This is something I could put my name down for, but probably not until
late December or early January…
5. Can we also ask for suggestions about areas where should Fedora
Diversity Team look into in near future from survey participants ?
Yes, some sort of open-ended field about things a survey taker wished we
had asked or feedback related to this would be helpful. I really do like
the idea of having a "sample group" take the survey before we push it
out to the public.
We could consider reaching out to members of other D&I groups in open
source (e.g. ArchLinux Women or Ubuntu Women) for their feedback. The
advantage of reaching out to these groups is to avoid tiring Fedorans
out with having to take the same survey two or three times (assuming the
first couple times are "test" runs). However, we also lose the
perspective that is specific to Fedora. Perhaps there is a better
middle-ground solution, where we mix a few willing volunteers from other
communities and Fedora.
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'.
I also agree with this point.
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.
Heh, I didn't read this before my response for #5, but yes, a "test
group" for us to get feedback on the survey would be most helpful in
case there's things we missed (since we're all a little biased working
this closely on the survey).
Looking to hear your thoughts on this and more on this later,
Best,
Bee
I definitely think a hack session of sorts would be helpful. For anyone
not familiar with a hack session:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Hack_session
--
Cheers,
Justin W. Flory
jflory7(a)gmail.com