----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin W. Flory" <jflory7(a)gmail.com>
To: diversity(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2016 11:03:41 PM
Subject: [diversity] Re: Fedora Diversity Survey
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.
Hi Bee,
Thank you for getting us organized for the FAD :)!
I reviewed questions in the FLOSS Survey 2013 and Apache Software Foundation Committer
Diversity Survey for applicability. I also asked Brian and Matthew what questions they
were interested in having in the survey, and they've contributed a couple of ideas for
questions, primarily about the usage of Fedora. I then polished off some questions we had
around and added a new set of possible questions at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Diversity/Survey , along with the links to the above
surveys and some notes.
I think we should call the survey "Fedora Contributor Survey" rather than
"Fedora Diversity Survey" because we'd like everyone to participate in it,
and calling it "Fedora Diversity Survey" could affect who chooses to
participate.
More inline 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.
I've added a couple possible questions related to inclusion to the survey, e.g. asking
people to rate how they feel about the following statements on a "strongly
agree" to "strongly disagree" scale: "I feel comfortable contributing
my ideas (in meetings or online forums), even when my views differ from other
contributors.", "I feel respected when I share my ideas and opinions in the
Fedora community." and "I’m appreciated for the contributions I make."
I don't think we should be trying to find out about any possible instances of
discrimination via a survey, and should instead improve our process for reporting and
handling code of conduct related complaints to be able to give any such issues the
attention they require.
> 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…
See my comment in the beginning about how we should be sure that the survey is not
perceived as something you fill out if you are from an underrepresented background. We
definitely want to understand the breadth of diversity in the Fedora community and
encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to participate, but it should be a
mainstream community survey because it's an opportunity for Fedora to learn more about
its contributors in general and it will also enable us to compare experiences of the
contributors in a majority group compared to contributors from underrepresented groups.
Here is one example of such comparison: FLOSS 2013 survey found that, among its
respondents, number of men with children (34%) was proportionally twice as high as the
number of women with children (19%). (From
http://flosshub.org/content/women-freelibreopen-source-software-situation... )
> 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.
We can ask people to provide feedback on the questions, but once we have the survey set
up, we should be careful to preserve the anonymity of people trying it out. Perhaps we can
explicitly agree that they would fill out random answers, while considering whether the
questions make sense, and that we'll discard these answers right away.
> 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.
"Prefer not to say" was an option on all Apache survey questions, and I added
that option to all the questions.
> 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,
Hope you have a great start to the FAD and I look forward to joining you in the afternoons
your time :).
>
> Best,
> Bee
Best,
Marina
> >
>
> 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
>
>
>
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