Dear Paul, thank you for your contribution and questions! I will only reply to one of the things you mentioned: On 30/05/17 02:08, Paul Ebersman wrote:
I've been going through the various slides and papers referenced in the RIPE blog article. I think one thing that everyone doing conferences would benefit from is a wider diversity of speakers. But doing that requires that we get folks who haven't necessarily been to RIPE.
There are a couple of folks collecting names of women available for technical talks and that's one place to start. I'll see who has something they are ready to share and post here.
Here are some links to the existing collections: http://speakerinnen.org/en For example, in category "Science and Technology" there are 674 speakers (speaker-innen) , on 100 topics: https://speakerinnen.org/en/categories/11 Then there is this collection from 2012: http://bit.ly/ITWomenSpeakers and, what started as not entirely serious conference by only women called KATIE --> https://katieconf.xyz/ .. turned out into a real conference with only female speakers. I Australia, thou, so more appropriate for APNIC, but we did want to share experiences with other RIRs... Also, I have personally made several lists: of organisations for women in tech, Twitter handles of collectives, and mailing lists: https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Organisations https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Twitter https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Mailing_Lists I often reach to these ones, when organising hackathons.
One concern I have is that we not only actively reach out to speakers beyond the usual suspects but how we'll make them comfortable. It's not fun being the only <NON-MAJORITY> speaker on a panel or program. Do folks here have concrete suggestions on how we can give potential speakers that comfort and support?
There are several ways - some of these things we are doing at RIPE meetings already... - having a Code of Conduct - have Meet & Greet personnel to help newcomers - provide funding (fellowship programme; academic cooperation funds) ... others we suggested to improve: - provide childcare facilities - introduce "mentorship" programme - increase support for Net-Grrls (women-only social support group) Here are more tips, that I collected over time: https://wiki.techinc.nl/index.php/Ladies_Night#Increasing_the_gender_diversi... I hope this helps! Regards, Vesna