Fedora’s Diversity & Inclusion Team determined in the spring of 2021 at a virtual meetup to evolve our yearly “Fedora Women’s Day” event to the “Fedora Week of Diversity”. Fedora Week of Diversity runs October 3–9th and features a series of interviews with community members telling their Fedora stories. We also started a Recommended Resources page in the D&I Team Docs that we will continue to improve upon. Last, but not least, we (finally) published the videos from Fedora Women’s Day 2020 to the Fedora YouTube channel. This week will be full of highlights from this content to showcase Fedora’s diversity!
Our Process
The Fedora Week of Diversity Working Group consisted of Jona Azizaj, Marie Nordin, Onuralp Sezer, and Vipul Siddharth. We had support from Grayson Penland and Ashlyn Knox as well. The team got to work and brainstormed what it would look like this year. There were some important variables to consider. The event would need to be virtual, and yet the world at large is experiencing virtual fatigue. Even though we had a handful of folks interested, most of us were already close to capacity with our work/volunteer-loads. We determined two things. First, that we wanted to create a series of content that could be enjoyed by folks asynchronously. Second, that we would use any existing frameworks as best as we could.
Video Series
We discussed a variety of ideas for the event including: live informational events, social hours, resources, training, Happiness Packets, and Contributor Stories. From those ideas we focused in on as “Contributor Stories” as the concept for FWD. We wanted to evolve the historical blog post format to something a bit more engaging. This is how we settled on the idea of creating a video series of stories from our community. We coordinated a session at Nest with Fedora to gather stories, and we also conducted interviews with volunteers. From there we have been coordinating the promotion, branding, video editing, etc. After the event we plan to do a wrap up which will involve analysis of the interaction we had during FWD as well as documentation for next year.
DEI Recommended Resources
We initialized the Recommended Resources page to celebrate Fedora Week of Diversity, but it is something the D&I team wanted to do for the community for some time. We want to improve this page over time. Education and awareness are important factors to help increase Fedora’s diversity. This page is not meant to be an ultimate source of truth, or inclusive of every single DEI topic (yet). It would be great it we could build it to be that someday. For now, it is something we would like to add to in a genuine way as the D&I Team and the community finds useful resources. Please feel free to contribute ideas for additions via a ticket on the D&I Team repo, or go ahead and create a pull request for your contribution if you are comfortable!
Fedora Women’s Day
In October of 2020 we held a virtual Fedora Women’s Day event. It had a great turn out, amazing speakers, and a positive feedback from attendees. Unfortunately we have limited video editing resources, so getting videos up on Youtube from FWD 2020 has taken some time. We are thrilled we were able to get them up for Fedora Week of Diversity this year, you can check them out here! You may be wondering what does the creation of Fedora Week of Diversity mean for Fedora Women’s Day? Organizing Fedora Week of Diversity doesn’t mean our community can’t hold Fedora Women’s Days in the future; this is just where the active team members would like to focus their efforts currently. The D&I Team and the Mindshare Committee are happy to continue supporting local Fedora Women’s Day events when it is safe to organize in-person events again.
Join us at this weeks Fedora Social Hour
We are taking over the Fedora Social Hour this week for Fedora Week of Diversity. Come hang out with a crew of Fedorans and chat about life, hobbies, and Fedora stories! The Social Hour is Thursday October 7th at 14:00 UTC. Join via the Fedora Social Element Room and jump into the Jitsi video conference if you’re up to it. We can’t wait to see you there!
Looking forward to next year!
The Fedora D&I Team always welcomes new folks to join in the discussion. We would love to have a larger group of volunteers to make Fedora Week of Diversity bigger and better next year. If you want to get involved, join our chat room and our bi-weekly call to chat and get to know folks around Fedora’s D&I Team.
Start the discussion by commenting on the auto-created topic at discussion.fedoraproject.org