clojurebridge / organizing Goto Github PK

@mtrimpe, in a recent post to the ClojureBridge Workshops mailing list:

What is the desired focus and approach of ClojureBridge with regards to different aspects of diversity? And whatever its; can we bring the messaging about that in line across the board?

The responses from @seancorfield and @yokolet suggest that the ClojureBridge mission is to increase diversity—including but not limited to gender diversity—in the Clojure community. Women are one of several underrepresented groups for which a workshop could be organized.

We should update the description on the website to reflect this position.

Current description:

ClojureBridge aims to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for women.

Proposed description:

ClojureBridge aims to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for women and for other underrepresented groups.

This could be accompanied by something along these lines:

Early workshops focused on the largest underrepresented group in the Clojure community: women. Organizers are free to choose a different underrepresented group when planning a workshop. A workshop's description should state the group or groups for which the workshop is to be held.

Please suggest improvements to these two paragraphs, or completely different ways to phrase this. :)

Post-Strange Loop, I've had a few people email me to mention that they'd have otherwise loved to go to the ClojureBridge event in San Francisco this week, but there's a big intro-to-hardware hackathon for women happening that weekend, too, and they've already signed up to lead a team, mentor, etc.

Any chance we could add a list of women-in-tech organizations--with local contact info, as well--so that ClojureBridge organizers could better target outreach, as well as double-check that two women-in-tech events aren't going to be scheduled simultaneously?

I'd be glad to submit a PR for SF!

There are a number of broken links in the Cookbook:

https://github.com/ClojureBridge/organizing/blob/master/README.md

Workshop planning timeline and Money things, at least, are broken. Looks like capitalization issue.

I was poking around with clojurebridge/curriculum#45 and started meandering into stuff that was more related to organizing a ClojureBridge than teaching/taing at a clojurebridge.

As I was about to move that into this repo, I realized that I would need to update the wiki, which has no peer-review process.

I much prefer to submit changes through a peer-review process, as it:

1. Exposes a signal to other collaborators that content has been changed, allowing them to stay abreast of informational changes
2. Allows people with more experience than I to provide feedback to improve the documentation, instead of me making changes that may run contrary to the experiences and principles of ClojureBridge staff.
3. Integrates nicely with Github's web-editor

Can we reorganize the "Workshop Planning Timeline" and "Finding space, sponsors, volunteers, and students" a bit?

As-is, the latter page says that organizers should

1. Identify existing communities to collaborate with;
2. Find a space;
3. Find a sponsor;
4. Set a date and time; and then
5. Recruit volunteers to teach, TA, and help you organize.

Based on this past ClojureBridge in SF, I'd suggest we reorder the timeline to

1. Identify existing communities to collaborate with;
2. Recruit volunteers to teach;
3. Find a space;
4. Find a sponsor;
5. Recruit volunteers to TA and help you organize; and then
6. Set a date and time.

Priorities-wise, I think it's far more important to find teachers early-on than to find a space. The curriculum should ideally be planned out and made reasonably stable a couple weeks prior to the workshop, itself, so that it can be clearly presented during T.A. training. That requires giving teachers a week or two of additional notice relative to T.A.'s--and having a space, sponsors, etc. is irrelevant if no one is around to teach the curriculum, anyway.

That said, the ordering of 5 and 6 depends on what we mean by "set a date and time, I think"; I've reordered them here because I think that setting the date and time of the TA training should be considered in that event. As in, it'd probably make sense to send out a survey to TA's about which day would be more convenient for TA training, to get maximum attendance--and that would require having already found TA's.

The link to "moving through a hierarchical system" by Amber Adams on Resources on Diversity appears to be dead. The domain appears to have lapsed. I do not see an alternate URL.

We need to pick a tool to use to help us organize ClojureBridge workshops "in the open." RailsBridge is using github and creating issues to track each workshop. What are other possibilities?

TODO:

• Make list of project mgmt criteria
• Rank list of project mgmt criteria
• Nominate possible project mgmt tools
• Narrow list of project mgmt tools
• Try out each tool
• Create list of pros and cons for each
• Present report to ClojureBridge team
• Vote on tool

A web site, a twitter account, an article in a local newspaper and/or a sponsor's newsletter, etc.

MN events have a photographer. Nametags are marked with stickers: green for authorizing photos and their publication, yellow for "ask me first", and red for "no pictures".

I don't have time to do a write-up at the moment, but maybe someone who has this experience can (hint: MN group did a great job on this front!), or it will have to wait until I can.

Some folks seemed unclear as to under what contexts they could or couldn't call their event a "ClojureBridge workshop." So far, the only thing we could point to was the line

A commitment by the organizers, teachers, and students to increasing diversity in tech.

on the "Minimum Viable Workshop" page.

That's true, but not very clear. However, it's hard to be more specific right now, so I've temporarily replaced that bullet point with the following:

A commitment by the organizers, teachers, and students to increasing diversity in tech. You can see what that looks like by reading our "Resources on Diversity" page, or by reading how we typically describe ClojureBridge workshops to attendees:

This workshop is for women interested in learning programming with Clojure, an expressive, general-purpose programming language. Men, you are welcome if you know a woman who would like to attend and come to learn Clojure together. ClojureBridge is emphatically queer and trans* friendly.

(The description was lifted from this Eventbrite page for a past San Francisco workshop.)

This probably isn't a long-term solution, though, and I'd want to make sure that people agree with this change to the wording, so I've opened an issue to draw people's attention to it.

Cheers!

I'd like to propose we add the photo release form to the organizing repo/wiki.

At other tech events, I have seen organizers and/or volunteers take photos of women, then post them to Twitter, Facebook, or the official event website--all without prior consent. I have then heard from the women in those photographs, who often feel deeply uncomfortable but do not want to seem ungrateful, especially if the events were free and/or helpful. So, rather than confront the organizers, these women will simply avoid recommending the events to other people, as well as avoid attending all events run by the same staff.

So, I think it's super-important that we make the photo release form available somewhere in this repo. Even if that isn't possible for legal reasons (or something), the photo release form should still be mentioned throughout the wiki, especially in the list of Installfest tasks for organizers. The photo release form should be presented to all ClojureBridge attendees as soon as they sign in at the installfest, and if photos will be taken of volunteers, the photo release form should be presented to all ClojureBridge volunteers at both the T.A. training and installfest.

Similarly, I think it's super-important that, at future T.A. trainings, volunteers be directed not to take photos of the event unless they know who, exactly, has opted into having their photos taken--because it's important to recognize that attendees do not "opt out" of having their photos taken; they opt in.

And, finally, I think that the photo release form should add options for which parts of the event attendees would feel comfortable being photographed at. If I were a public schoolteacher, for example, I would probably feel comfortable being photographed at the installfest and workshop, but may not feel comfortable being photographed at the bar afterwards.

Most of the organizing wiki focuses on the logistics of putting together a workshop: how to find a venue, who to ask for funding, where to find students, and when to email TAs.

I think there should also be a list of reading materials to serve as an "Intro to Diversity" and "Feminism 101" primer for organizers, who may not have experience facilitating welcoming spaces for people of diverse groups.

This would be a collection of links to pieces from Model View Culture, Ashe Dryden's blog, Liz Howard's blog, etc. that are specifically geared towards organizing inclusive events.

For example, I'm proposing pieces like this:
http://lizthedeveloper.com/how-to-have-an-awesomely-inclusive-and-radically-transparent-hackathon

I've been reading through the organizing wiki, and most pages that reference T.A. training just say this:

Set up a teacher training. This often happens during the week of the workshop. If you can't get a
separate evening, you can do it during the Installfest, but try to get extra volunteers if you do that. Don't want to leave the student high and dry while teachers discuss best practices.

Take a look at the teacher training slides, which live at
http://docs.railsbridge.org/workshop/more_teacher_training.

That RailsBridge presentation is great at what it does, which is explain how to act when T.A.ing classes that, in particular, serve diverse groups of people.

However, there are other logistical things that should probably be discussed at volunteer training, like deciding who's going to be checking people into the venue, making sure that all of the volunteers know where the women's and unisex bathrooms are, deciding on a "ringmistress," etc.

Some of these things are scattered around the wiki, but we should really have a page that just discusses T.A. training, specifically, to make these things clearer. I made a page here:

https://github.com/ClojureBridge/organizing/wiki/TA-Training

I'll add some stuff to it in a bit, but does anyone have specific suggestions for the T.A. training they'd like to add?