Call for Volunteers: Global Diversity Working Group

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This team oversees official events, mentorship programs, diversity initiatives, contributor outreach, and other ways of growing our community.

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We have Office Hours four times a week in the #community-events channel on Slack: Mondays & Wednesdays 22:00 UTC, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:00 UTC.

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Events WidgetWidget A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. WordPress widgets were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user.

If you have questions about the Events and News dashboard widget that came out in WordPress 4.8, please read this FAQ!

In the words of the author Junot Diaz, “We all have a blind spot around our privileges shaped exactly like us.”

For members of the WordPress community, it can be difficult to know where to start to make our events more accessible and inclusive to a wider variety of people. In the spirit of openness, creating events that are inclusive, welcoming, and encourage a wide variety of attendees to join are some of our community’s biggest priorities. However, even with the best intentions, inclusion only truly thrives when we collaborate with others who have different experiences and backgrounds from ourselves.

That’s where you come in.

What is the Global Diversity Team?

The Global Diversity Team is a diverse collection of WordPress community members, organizers, and participants who are interested in providing educational resources and guidelines to the community to actively promote diversity and inclusion.

Our goal is to create safe, inclusive, and welcoming events, for all participants. We believe that change starts within our communities, whether that’s at a meetupMeetup All local/regional gatherings that are officially a part of the WordPress world but are not WordCamps are organized through https://www.meetup.com/. A meetup is typically a chance for local WordPress users to get together and share new ideas and seek help from one another. Searching for ‘WordPress’ on meetup.com will help you find options in your area. or one of the larger WordCamps. Our hope is to conduct this work in conjunction with the many other diversity and inclusion projects ongoing within the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. community, such as the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training and the Code of Conduct Team.

What’s next?

We’ve been meeting bi-weekly for the past two months to develop our goals and vision for this project. In order to make our vision as inclusive as possible, we need more people to help us.

The team is still in its beginning stages. We’re looking for volunteers who are interested in developing project ideas, guidelines, and curricula for event organizers to make their events more accessible. We especially welcome participants from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, experience levels, interests, and marginalized groups.

If you’re interested in joining, please talk to us in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. and we’ll add you to the group (names are below the post). We’re looking forward to making WordPress even more diverse and accessible with you!

The current Team is also willing to answer all the questions you have here in the comments or if you want to chat in private with us you can do that in Slack.

Laura Herzog (@lauraquellmalz)
Erica Varlese (@evarlese)
Birgit Olzem (@coachbirgit)
Bas Brader (@basbrader)
Carole Olinger (@caroleo)

Andrea Middleton 12:28 pm on August 13, 2018
Thanks for your interest in helping all community organizers create welcoming events, @lauraquellmalz et al! While this is a fundamental expectation for all our organizers, it’s not an easy task — so having people who are interested in helping new and experienced organizers make diverse, inclusive events is great.

With Laura’s permission, I’ve edited the post title, changing “Team” to “Working Group.” On the community team, working group is the name we use for people who come together to work on a certain project or set of projects inside of the global community team. 🙂

As for projects that might be considered for this group: I have some suggestions.
- It seems like the CCOC group could use some help with data analysis on the survey we sent out earlier this year. Working to move forward on that project would be my suggestion for a top priority for this group.
- Documentation to the handbook on things like “how to recruit a diverse speaker roster,” “how to recruit a diverse organizing team,” “organizing welcoming events,” and “responding to incident reports at your event,” (to name a few) would be incredibly powerful and helpful
- We could also really use some training for safety officers/incident response people for our organizing teams that don’t have experience handling code of conduct issues.
- Laura 12:34 pm on August 13, 2018
  
  Hey Andrea,
  
  thanks for changing the title 🙂
  
  It seems like the CCOC group could use some help with data analysis on the survey we sent out earlier this year. Working to move forward on that project would be my suggestion for a top priority for this group.
  
  We already included the CCoC team in our group and we will discuss the goals of revisiting the CoC in the next meeting. I have to thank @gwendydd for her help at this 🙂
  
  Documentation to the handbook on things like “how to recruit a diverse speaker roster,” “how to recruit a diverse organizing team,” “organizing welcoming events,” and “responding to incident reports at your event,” (to name a few) would be incredibly powerful and helpful
  
  Is on our list of goals.
  
  We could also really use some training for safety officers/incident response people for our organizing teams that don’t have experience handling code of conduct issues.
  
  Yes. And additional to reactive behaviour we need proactive conclusions and action plans in advance to make events inclusive from the beginning, starting with the compilation of the organization and volunteer team.
  
  We have a lot of work to do 🙂
- Andrea Middleton 9:14 pm on August 13, 2018
  
  Oh wouldn’t it be amazing if we could set up some kind of ally training program? (insert starry-eyed emoji here)
  - Laura 7:15 am on August 14, 2018
    
    Okay, added to our list. Can you explain what you expect from this workshop?
Junko Nukaga 3:32 am on August 14, 2018

Hi!
I am very interested in this activity. However, I am not good at English, and the meeting time of SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. is always midnight in my time zone. Still, there is something I can do?
- Laura 7:20 am on August 14, 2018
  
  Hey Junko!
  
  Thanks a lot for your interest! We already know that there are issues with the meetings and timezones and stuff. In our next scheduled meeting (which is next wednesday at 14:30 UTC) we are going to talk about this issue. I think that we are chaning our format to chat and two meetings at one day so that every timezone has kind of a “comfort” zone.
  
  Regarding to english, I think if we switch to chat it might be easier for you and other non native speaker to understand what we are talking about. We are going to announce everything, what we are talking about here in the blog.
  
  Also, I’ve messaged you in SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. 🙂
  
  Arigatō!
  Laura
  - Junko Nukaga 8:05 am on August 14, 2018
    
    Hi Laura!
    
    Thank you so much for your information!
    Can I also join your chat meeting?
    Thanks for the DM at SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.! I will send it to you.
    
    Arigatō, too🙂
    Junko

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