Grant earmarked for diversity

Bonjour,

A 5,000€ grant earmarked for improving diversity is available for the fedeproxy project as of today. It is going to be the first instance of a decision made by the fedeproxy community regarding how to spend money. A friendly reminder: decisions are consensus based and fallback to votes if someone objects. Since this is a relatively important decision and the first of its kind I propose that the discussion goes on for a minimum of four weeks, starting today. That should be plenty of time for everyone involved to participate.

The discussion is open, ideas are welcome :slight_smile:

Since I drafted a short story about diversity in fedeproxy, my ideas won’t come as a surprise:

  • Look for someone from an under represented group willing to reach out to other people from under represented groups when the time comes. The first opportunity is likely to be when the service is usable and more UX volunteers are needed. Or when launching a crowdsource campaign to donate GitHub / GitLab accounts. Or any other activity of the same kind.
    • Ask for recommendations in the OSD Signal group
    • Find people involved in diversity in Free Software and send them, individually, a mail asking for advice, with a link to the narrative story posted on OSD.
  • An audit of fedeproxy as a project and recommendations on what to do to improve diversity. Although what is done currently makes sense to me, this is semi-random and someone with actual expertise would most certainly come up with action items neatly prioritized.

It’s been four weeks and since there has been no other idea nor objections, the diversity grant will be spent on services to:

  • reach out to people from under represented groups, when needed (for instance to find early adopters).
  • audit fedeproxy as a project and write down recommendations on what to do to improve diversity.

I propose that the cost of running the experiment in simultaneous interpretation for a one hour online meeting is funded by this grant.

If noone objects within two weeks, the decision will be final.

The funds were not spent in full and time ran out, unfortunately. The details of what was spent can be found in the accounting spreadsheet.

It was interesting for me to see that it is quite difficult to figure out ways to put money to good use to improve diversity. I’m still committed to spend 5% of my time to improve diversity, even though this source of funding ran out.

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