Add ideas and strategies for making your workplace and teams more diverse
Please remember that you're submitting content that will be tied to your public Github username. If you're concerned or feel unsafe saying something, please don't feel that you have to. If you'd like to submit anonymously, feel free to contact me on Twitter (@DanRoeSparks) or via email (dan@roesparks.com) - you could also create a new, free, throwaway account or ask someone you trust.
Secondly, please consider if you're submitting information that might identify someone else. If you are, it's best in every case to get their permission, and to take into account any feedback they might have for you.
Thanks folks, stay safe <3
In conjunction with Hacktoberfest (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/) I'm looking to find ways people have successfully made their workplaces and teams more diverse, built an environment that fosters inclusivity, and other Generally Good Things. Ideally this will be focusing on the positive, but there's a place for anti-patterns too.
Whether you have good or bad experiences, please submit them so we can share as a community and hopefully spark conversation, initiatives and best practices in our places of work.
Lots of people I speak to are aware that more diverse teams produce better business outcomes, work smarter, and are generally more successful. If you've not seen this yet, I'd suggest starting with Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. What these people aren't so sure of is how to build a culture that promotes and maintains diversity.
We see the fruits of biased thinking every day, from apps that create an unsafe environment for women, to recognition systems that fail to detect people of colour. We can build better systems with more diverse teams. Diversity will make us all more successful; it's there for the taking. Working together by sharing stories of failure and success seems like a worthwhile endeavour.
Just submit a PR with your experience/idea. Please don't call out individuals or businesses by name - if you absolutely must you can be heavy-handedly unsubtle, but, like, please make the effort so I don't get sued into oblivion... that would be neat ;)
This is starting off very unformed; I'm interested to see how it goes. For now, let's go with the following structure:
/experiences/good : This is for things you've experienced that have had a positive effect /experiences/bad : This is where the negative things you've experienced should live /ideas : Put ideas here that you've not seen implemented, or at least not on a wide scale, that you think might help
I'm not going to be precious about formatting - do what you're most comfortable with for now, at least. If you're here because of Hacktoberfest, then maybe check out how to use Markdown - that's the format this readme uses. See https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/ for pointers.
Again, name the files whatever makes sense to you - hopefully some kind of consensus will be reached at some point (yeah, I know that's wildly optimistic) - I just don't have a good reason for naming anything a particular way for now, so eh. If I can't defend an approach, go for it :)
If you'd like to, once you've added an experience or idea, add your info to CONTRIBUTORS.md - you can add as much or as little as you'd like. Use a new line, and add zero or more of the following:
Github Username | Name | Pronouns | Site | Social Media | Description
Use a dash (-) or N/A if you want to skip certain pieces of info.
Assuming anyone contributes, if you see some kind of structure forming, feel free to re-organise, suggest new layouts, formats, the works. Open issues, discussions, whatever feels right.
I'm Dan Sparks, I do DevOps-type stuff, and I'm especially interested in automation, processes, culture, and how all those can be used to make the work I do and the teams I work with feel safer, more welcoming, more forgiving, and less stressful. I believe the best process is the one that makes it easiest to do the "right thing." I love my teams and also my awesome family and terrible dog who is lovely though she will not stop digging holes in the garden.
I'm bad at having my own ideas, but good at implementing other peoples'. In 2018 I gave a talk on men being less terrible to women at Velocity London, as part of the Ignite event. You can find that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh9NSPiUaxU As part of that talk I launched a slack group for people to discuss diversity and inclusivity - I'm currently planning another talk about how that failed horribly, and why it doesn't really matter that much (hint: because there are better ways to address these issues that aren't in a private clubhouse).
I'm in the UK, and I work full-time, so if I take a while to get to your PR, please bear with me; I promise I will eventually (or I'll find a friendly helping hand).
I'm grateful for your time; thank you.