Fostering diversity of thought

During the SymfonyCon hackathon members of the diversity initiative met to discuss how to improve diversity in the Symfony community. Increasing diversity of thought is a huge opportunity to grow collectively as a community.

At SymfonyCon Lisbon, together with Anne-Sophie and Emilie, we already managed to implement a lot of small but important details to make the event more welcoming. An example of this is having stickers, so people could signal if they are first time attendees or if they have an interesting topic to talk about. We also added a quiet room which could be used for people that sometimes need a breather from dealing with large crowds or people that need a quiet space for prayer. Such things hopefully made a difference for the attendees already. We hope it will also help spread that Symfony events are a place where members of underrepresented groups are welcome. In turn this should also help improve diversity among our speakers.

However, in this blog post I want to touch on another way to increase diversity: mentoring, especifically speaker mentoring. While researching this topic we came across Jill Binder, who has done tremendous work on this very topic within the Wordpress community. With this workshop, more kinds of people build up their interest and confidence to apply to speak at a meetup or conference. It is clear that for the biggest effect we will need to try to bring such a training to the local level. For this we will need to build up the infrastructure and set up local connections. As a first, more feasible step to help people get into public speaking, we, therefore, intend to organize an online training together with Jill that will cover everything that is needed, including coming up with a topic to speak about, a proposal, fleshing out your slides and practicing how to present.

The content will mostly not be Symfony specific but we will work with Jill to ensure that we adapt the content from Wordpress to Symfony where it makes sense. The workshop itself will be two separate sessions of two hours each. In terms of time-zoning we will focus on members within Europe/Africa/America. Depending on how much interest there is we can of course consider doing another round where we try to accommodate Asian and Australian time-zones.

This workshop is for you if:

• You identify as a minority (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, mental health, varying physical abilities, etc.)
• You’ve thought about speaking a Symfony event but haven’t been able to think of a topic
• You think you don't have anything worth speaking about

When more kinds of people are speaking on stage, it helps the whole community. They bring in ideas to be more inclusive and new, innovative ideas that benefit everyone. The processes and our products improve as a result.

As we want to make sure the community stands behind this idea, we opened a sub-collective to collect donations for this specific cause on Open Collective. If you plan to attend, please consider donating $5 - $10 or more for the cause if you can. If you do not plan to attend but like the idea and wish to support this cause, please donate to this sub-collective. If you are a current donor with a regular contribution and wish to allocate funds to this specific cause, please contact me and I will move the funds from the main collective to this cause specific collective. Any leftover money from this cause specific collective will be moved to the main collective.

We have also published a Twitter poll to try and see how much interest there is within the Symfony community for this online workshop in becoming a public speaker. Please also RT the link to the poll and share it with communities that you think are under represented. We want to specifically go further than our current community reach! Note while in the Twitter poll we mention $5 to $10, but we would appreciate any donations if you wish to donate more to support this cause.

If you wish to help the diversity initiative, please visit our Open Collective page and donate. You can also add a text to your donation to mention that you want to support this initiative specifically or that you want to support a specific person with your donation. You can also join the discussion on the Symfony Slack #diversity channel.

Update

• For some reason the twitter poll ended after 100 votes, with 40% being interested in such a training and the vast majority willing to pay a small fee. Given the fact that we got so many responses in less than 24h, it sounds like there is sufficient interest that we should make this happen. But now the main obstacle is being able to pay for it.
• We do not plan to charge for the training. However without donations we will not be able to afford the training. So in order to be able to hold the training it might be necessary for attendees to donate 5-10 Euros. So please start donating!
• Anyone that does not have access to a credit card but wants to donate, unfortunately atm we cannot accept IBAN transfers. However it is possible to do one time donations via PayPal in $. You can let us know as mentioned above if you want such a donation to be used for speaker mentoring initiative

Update 2

• To clarify, the training itself will be open to the entire community as the infrastructure can host up to 1000 people!
• During the last diversity initiative chat meeting we decided that based on the feedback on the twitter poll we want to move forward with this training. This means we now need to get enough donations to afford at least the Level 1, ie. $1500. At this point there is clearly not enough donated, however the vast majority of poll respondents indicated that they would be ok with a few of $5-10. So the time to donate is now! In parallel we are also talking to some potential corporate sponsors to help us get over the finish line!
• If you prefer to donate in US $ or you prefer to use Paypal over a credit card (done time donations only), you can donate here and simply let us know that you want the money to be used for the speaker mentoring initiative via a comment during the donation.