Open Stack

All,

I had an action to set up a meeting with Valerie Aurora and anyone from the Women of OpenStack who wanted to attend.  Jessica Murillo and I had this meeting last week. Here is her advice and feedback on creating a male allies program.  Lots of generally good advice on the women's programs as well.  I will be using this to structure the male allies program for Austin. Your feedback and comments welcome.

Happy Holidays and See you Jan 11th.

Nithya Ruff
SanDisk

Jessica Murillo from IBM and Nithya Ruff from SanDisk met with Valerie Aurora of Frameshift Consulting on how to best implement our objectives for the women of OpenStack.  We shared our objectives as:

Women of OpenStack Objectives:

*         Engage broad support for the women of OpenStack and diversity among the majority group at OpenStack which are men.   This could include a Male Allies program for 2016.

*         Investigate and work with diversity experts like Valarie Aurora to structure the program.
Valerie's Recommendations on Best Practices:

*         Creating a women's support group and engaging broad support are 2 different objectives and both need to be done with different tactics.  Treat these 2 objectives as separate but complimentary.

*         To support the Women of OpenStack, best to continue to provide their own space, own events and it is not necessarily good to invite men to the event to engage them. Women's perspectives do not get enough space and so having a women's only panel is a good thing. There are other ways to engage men in the dialogue.

*         Have separate events to create male allies. The audience should be the general attendee population which is 90% + male.  This is the audience we are trying to reach.  Not a majority women audience.  Have mixed panels with men and women.  The panel can role model and demonstrate inclusion, listening, respect for each other.   Best to have a man who has knowledge and expertise in inclusion issues and not just someone who is interested but not educated on the topic.  Same goes for female panelists.

o   Recruiting men - demonstrate women showing expertise and men who know what they are doing on the allies panel - back and forth - men display listening

o   Explore doing another workshop on "How to be an ally and take action". Many men want to be an ally but do not know how to do it.

*         We also discussed that in general it is good to have training for all speakers at OpenStack especially on mixed panels on how best to show inclusion and good listening skills. Valerie indicated that it would be good to have moderators for panels who are experienced and seasoned in the topic of inclusion.

*         The bottom-line advice was that to advance inclusion what is needed is consistency and persistence in raising awareness every year.  People should get used to not ignoring it.

o   Explore other channels to reach the community, blogs, articles, etc. goals on articles in every newsletter etc.

o   Group  fundraisers for various things, outreachy intern, and having individuals to get involved and donating and not just organizations

o   She also liked the fireside chat format. Someone who is local to the community and asks question scripted in advance and uses the index card method to pick up the questions from the audience
Thank You,
Nithya A. Ruff,  Director, SanDisk Open Source Strategy Office
WIN Board Member
SanDisk Corporation
951 SanDisk Drive, Milpitas, CA 95035
T: + (408-801-7068)| M: + (510-378-3159)
Nithya.Ruff at SanDisk.com<mailto:Nithya.Ruff at SanDisk.com>        Twitter: @nithyaruff<https://twitter.com/nithyaruff>


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