April 2018 - diversity - mailman.ripe.net

Increasing inclusion, not only diversity (an article)
by Vesna Manojlovic 29 Apr '18

29 Apr '18

Hi, I find this article interesting and relevant for our efforts: https://medium.com/samsung-internet-dev/help-someone-has-pointed-out-my-con… Of course, there are differences: she is writing mostly about _developers_ conferences, and smaller ones too, organised by volunteers -- but there is quite an overlap, and similarities are greater then the differences, IMO - so this is what I got as tips , that we can learn from: > Don’t ask people from underrepresented background to help you with > your diversity work for free, their work has value. > > People who are underrepresented in tech are often also underpaid in > tech. Being expected to work for free compounds these issues. Ensure > that the people working to diversify your community are fairly > compensated for their labor. I think that RIPE NCC/RIPE meetings are doing some good things in this respect: - we payed for the training of the "trusted contacts" - we subsidize RACI candidates (young, academic, from less wealthy countries) and fellows (newcomers to the community) - we are offering childcare We can think about what else can we do to improve in this area. Next, she identifies 4 different categories of important "actors" (organisers, speakers, volunteers, participants), and says : > By changing only one aspect, such as the speakers, the diversity > issues of the conference have not been solved, We are trying hard to improve the diversity of speakers and participants -- and to measure our progress -- and it's a good thing that we do; but, as Mirjam also pointed out -- we need to do better when it comes to "organisers" (Programme Committee) and "volunteers" (WG Chairs). Then there is a matter of general inequalities in the society, mirrored by the tech-industry, such as: > To have this time available is to be very privileged. We can not be expected to fix _all_ of the social problems, but we can consider doing this more often: > providing a speakers fee for any speaker you have asked to speak from > an underrepresented minority. I'm aware that this suggestion would spark a discussion, specially about "meritocracy" and "experts" and "quality", but personally I am not going to engage in this on the list - I am assuming we agree on the staring position that it is valuable to the RIPE Community if the diversity & inclusion are increased, and we are only talking about *how*, not _if_ we should aim at that goal. Vesna

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RIPE 76 Planning
by Brian Nisbet 25 Apr '18

25 Apr '18

Folks, How are we all? I was wondering what the thoughts were on things we want to plan for RIPE76. Currently we haven't submitted anything to the Plenary or BoFs and, while I'm fine with that, I just wanted to make sure everyone else was too. :) It may be worth trying to organise a TF meeting for Monday evening, or later in the week? Thanks, Brian Brian Nisbet Network Operations Manager HEAnet CLG, Ireland's National Education and Research Network 1st Floor, 5 George's Dock, IFSC, Dublin D01 X8N7, Ireland +35316609040 brian.nisbet(a)heanet.ie www.heanet.ie Registered in Ireland, No. 275301. CRA No. 20036270

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Latest RIPE diversity numbers
by Shane Kerr 17 Apr '18

17 Apr '18

Hello all, Vesna posted an interesting link to an article on the RIPE Labs article about diversity from a while back. Feeling inspired, I decided to look at the numbers a little bit more. Updated numbers --------------- I have extended the gender measurements to the current RIPE 76 registered attendees. Attached find a couple of graphs, as well as the spreadsheet used to make them. The first graph looks pretty grim, but the second one extracts out a more hopeful message. I also took the liberty of making a projection with the matching polynomial trend line... if that continues then we would expect to see gender parity at RIPE 99 or so. On the one hand needing 12 more years before we have equal attendees at the RIPE meeting seems really long. On the other hand it could be considered a hopeful trend. And of course, this is all just numerology, not based on actual underlying issues! The GitHub repository for this work was updated to include RIPE 76 and fix the usual broken data scraping caused by cosmic-ray induced changes to the RIPE web site. As far as the code, I've also started to look at the names that genderize.io is unable too guess, and manually add a few of these to our program. For earlier meetings this is somewhat effective, although it will be harder for later meetings as we have more attendees. So far every name added has been a man's name, so the estimated numbers will look less diverse after this correction; depressing but as scientists we must try to discover the truth not what we want to see. I'll publish new results when I get further along. RIPE DNS working group ---------------------- RIPE is not just about people showing up. The leadership as well as the presenters are very important. I decided to look through my own working group, the DNS working group, and see how we have done with presenters over the years. The RIPE web site lists presentations from working groups going back to around RIPE 55. I could probably troll through mailing list archives to find older agendas, but for now I decided to limit the research there. The highpoint for the DNS-wg was at RIPE 72, with 5 presentations by men and 2 by women. In the 19 other RIPE meetings since then, we have had 1 presentation by a woman in 4 other meetings... all other meetings had exclusively men on the stage. Total presentations: 192 Total presentations by women: 6 We also had 4 panels, of which 3 did not record the participants and 1 was an all-men panel, or "manel". It's not a good look for the DNS-wg, and I'll be talking to my co-chairs about what we can do to improve our diversity going forward. Cheers, -- Shane

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