Diversity on the governance teams

[skade]

@lambda

The team did respond in the original Twitter thread, and there have been people in both the core and moderation teams responding in this thread.

The team felt like mentioning my group as an explicit example for diversity work. This was the first time the team spoke to us in any team capacity. Do you see my point about neglect there?

@lambda

I understand that you don't think the response has been sufficient, but I really don't know what possible response their could be in such short time short of simply pulling the announcement of the subteams, and as I described, I think that would a step back, not forwards.

I appreciate that sentiment. What is your opinion on a concrete way forward? What time frames does it have? What is the commitment? When do you consider it successful or failed?

@lambda

Of course, I think that part of the issue is that no one anticipated this announcement would be controversial. And I don't think that any of the individual choices are controversial either, it's only the aggregate result that gives you pause.

That pretty much sums up the problem. It hasn't been seen as a problem. A joint announcement instead of a link on twitter would have fixed a lot of things.

@lambda

I just want to make sure I understand you. The suggestion you have is to roll back the change, moving from a structure with a core team and subteams back to one with just the core team, and go back to the drawing board on the subteams?

My current suggestions is to move back on commitment of to the teams and make them clearly temporary with explicit goals.

@lambda

Well, that talk already happened at the 1.0 release party/meetup. But I do hope to be able to do more; there's only so much ground you can cover in a one-hour long talk, there's much more to teach.

Why haven't you considered that before the party? That would have been the moment for a show of force. We're far to focused on "and now we finish this milestone and then we finally do the outreach work".

@lambda

I have found a few local groups for teaching women in software development; I have not found any for any other under-represented groups. Most of the groups for women appear to be focused on web development, and are only open to women, so I don't know if they would be interested in having me give a talk, but I will reach out to see, or to see if they'd be interested in advertising future Rust Boston meetups to their membership.

We did most of our outreach through Rails Girls. Ask those groups to propagate your invitation and put it into their channels. Make sure you get good standing with those groups and they will reflect you message. Also: yes, they only focus on web, but maybe not everyone is interested in web after a while? The Berlin clojure community for example is run by a Rails Girls training group. (Which makes local Clojurists rants about Ruby very funny)