diversity

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Poorer regions travel and so on...
by David Hilario 22 May '17

22 May '17

Hi, Since you are looking at diversity in general, and reason for why people do not participate more, some real life issues preventing from actually going to the meeting can be many. Those are just some examples that are concrete issues preventing people from attending. Basically: 1. Money 2. Papers 3. Legal discrimination This first one is about the simple case of money. Costs were not mentioned too much. The cost of a RIPE meeting ticket, is a monthly salary or more in many countries within the RIPE region and that is without factoring in travel and accommodation. So even if we were to have the meetings inside some of the poorer countries to save them the cost of travelling and accommodation, it would still set them back a lot in just the meeting costs. So the costs itself is a barrier to entry and physical participation regardless of location, just sometimes absurdly too expensive when the meeting ends up in London for example. Second point for the travel papers. Ease of visa requests (if any needed), some countries are easier than other on issuing visas, the Schengen block is actually not the most friendly place on earth to have international conference and receive people from all over the globe, visa applications can be very cumbersome for some countries, even for countries from within the RIPE Region requiring visas to come and visit Schengen block countries. Many will be discourage from applying when you have to hand over your passport for a couple of weeks or months to an embassy that sometimes happen to even be located in another country than your own with no guarantees of success on your application and a lot of humiliation in the process. This third one is the local laws. Some countries may actually not allowing you to be there at all, no visa to be rejected as you simply should not consider it, you are just not welcome just for who you are. Local laws are sometimes themselves prohibiting people from even considering any physical participation. UAE laws are a good example. They do not let people with HIV into the country, let alone let them take their medicines with them. You may be refused entry based on your country of origin or sexual orientation and identification. Those things are known in advance, and people should always read upon where they are going anyways. However, having physical meeting in the various regions even the ones with restrictions is needed to reach out and encompass as much people as possible and invite them to become active members of the community. I do like the dilemma it poses right there, reaching out to certain communities automatically shuts out people from other communities, nice conundrum with no real way out of it. Good luck! Good initiative, lots of headaches :D David Hilario IP Manager Larus Cloud Service Limited p: +852 29888918 m: +359 89 764 1784 f: +852 29888068 a: Flat B5, 11/F, TML Tower, No.3 Hoi Shing Road, Tsuen Wan, HKSAR w: laruscloudservice.net/uk e: d.hilario(a)laruscloudservice.net

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Re: [diversity] Meanwhile, in another technical community - 10 years of N2Women
by Katharine Jarmul 19 May '17

19 May '17

Thanks Vesna, that's a great article! I had dinner with the PyLadies Madrid founder Yamila (and several other PyLadies) last night. She mentioned her company's hiring process, which I found interesting. The full article is here: http://moduslaborandi.net/2016/05/a-postmorten-about-our-hiring-process/ But very cool transparency on numbers and gender breakdown. They had 65 applicants, 14 women. When they ended up at the final interview they had 6 women, 4 men. This is because they went through and rated talent based on the CV, github and so on. They also took into account that women tend to underestimate their abilities and men tend to apply to jobs even if they may not meet all requirements. She said they are tremendously happy with the new hires and hope to grow the team again soon. :) Thought you all might enjoy hearing about other folks' processes and example posts around sharing data and stories :) Cheers, kj ---- On Tue, 16 May 2017 09:54:00 +0200 Vesna Manojlovic <BECHA(a)ripe.net> wrote ---- I am on this other list, called "N2", and ACM GetMobile Magazine has published an article to celebrate 10 Years of "Networking Networking Women! "We even made the cover page for this edition." http://n2women.comsoc.org https://www.irit.fr/~Katia.Jaffres/Fichiers/10yearsN2Women.pdf Something to learn from ... Ciao, Vesna

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