2021 Q4 - October, November, December

Owned by Karen Ruggles
Last updated: Apr 14, 2024
6 min read

October 2021

10 November 2021

Attendees: Joshua Minor (Pixar), Barathy Rangarajan, Bill Roberts (Adobe), Carol Payne, Kirstyn Salehi (Foundry), Laruen Neely, Pasadena Opensource, Tracy Priest, Sergio Rojas, Aliza Carpio, Rachel Rose, JT Nelson, Bill Ballew, Katilin Pollock, Krystal Cooper

  1. Introductions

2.Review of D&A Ambassador Ideas https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cr5f7P744FvrYe9qegatIhOrhcOXRoheAq6zm_B85b8/edit?usp=sharing 

  • We are still looking for volunteers for some of the projects - the next step is to meet with volunteers (Lauren Neely just volunteered for one of them) 

  • We need to still discuss how TAC, Technical Advisory Community, is connected to D&I group. TAC provides technical oversight. 

 

  1. Action: JT Nelson will add short descriptions to projects on Slack. He will also add community addendum - how this group is involved in community

  • Request from participants is to get feedback on “helpfulness” of the project descriptions

  1. Open Discussion for Succession Planning (includes term limits for board to increase diversity in ranks). This is still ongoing and we are making progress. 

  • Is it time for us to have consultancy help? This stems from survey and there is a general question around hiring consultant for D&I space. Where do you see someone with this role to be most useful?

  •  

    • (Bill) Sourcing for ideas may be a good space - having someone vet the ideas but someone with the business acumen may be helpful in this space

    • There have been times when we have questions but we do not have the answers...ex. How do we phrase this or organize this?

    • What is the goal or mission for this role? 

    • It’s good to know that ASWF is committed to this and that we have the opportunity to contract and invest in this...we need a plan and recommendation for spend

    •  

      • Could we get a group to come together and come up with a pitch? 

      • Have we looked at this far enough that we can engage via a retainer? 

      •  

        • What is the baseline cost to have someone who is open to being asked questions?

  1. What do we want to do next year? Our goals (charter) are: external goal to get more people into open source/industry by inspiring them...help provide information around D&I topics to our member companies...Help our organization better reflect the communities we serve (leadership and participation) 

  • Summer mentoring program (Bill R) - high volume, low touch (+1 from Kaitlin, +1 Tracy Priest)

  • Do we have same focus? Same size>?

  • Translate our projects to our languages?  (Joshua) Or having start to documentation to help people understand what they are looking at? 

  •  

    • Are there equivalent orgs in other countries?

    • Translation is a lot of work

    •  

      • Dreamworks/LatinX group?

      • Action: Bring up with the board around US/international

      • Action: review projects for language and make it contextual - there are resources to connect with 

  • Deaf and hard of hearing individuals - have hyper focus here? (+1 Lauren, +1 Aliza) 

  •  

    • On all Zoom calls, you can have transcription/captions enabled - this has a broad reach

    •  

      • Action: Speak with John to enable transcription on our zoom meetings

  • Blog and more educational articles - renewed focus here

  • I would like to see more collaboration, and outreach  between community college and HBCU. (+2) 

  • Google Summer of Code - Technical internship

  • Grace Hopper Open Source Day 

  • Hacktoberfest (Digital Ocean) 

  • Open Source Days

  • For OpenTimelineIO, the Google Summer of Code was very well worth it. Our intern still attends our meetings and contributes more than a year later. It did take a significant time commitment to mentor him, but it was well worth it.

  • Also curious if there is interest in looking at including programs for people with autism and partnering with groups like Exceptional Minds.

  •  

    • Exceptional Mind

    • s is one of my favorite orgs (Krystal Cooper)

    •  

      • Action: Need to speak to this org

08 December 2021

Attendees: Ferby Cremer, Allen Stetson, Tom Snezher, Sergio Rojas, Rachel Rose, Barathy Rangajaran, Shabnam Abbarin, Greg Grusby, Tracy Priest, JT Nelson, Kirstyn Salehi (kirstyn.salehi@foundry.com) , Shoni Doe, Bill Ballew, Kevin Clark, Kaitlin Pollock

NOTES

  • What do we want to do in 2022?

    • Educate our members on diversity and inclusion

    • Affect the actual ASWF and the make up… we did do a survey and we have been working with board to develop succession plan to bring in new folks to the board (and reflects diversity of our community)

    • External goal: Affect highschool and college age students - informing them of roles and getting them involved. We had summer learning program and webinars. 

      • Do we want to go younger? Was there discussion around this?

        • No, not at the last meeting but we can talk about this 

      • Are we exploring to make it more technical (more art focused last time? 

      • Was there discussion on going global?

        • Last year was open globally. Rachel will look at demographics and there were a number that we accepted outside of US

        • Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to advertise - we need to focus here this year

          • Idea is to connect with Academy office in London

      • Were the webinars published anywhere?

      • What about sound?

        • This is related to our industry but I can see us pushing this off and promote what we have already created. 

      • IDEA: Introduce pathways to help young people know these jobs exist…could we put these videos together then have 20-25 min Q&A. A lot of this is lack of awareness - they don’t know

        • Could we combine what was said around re-advertising and reuse the recording + have someone LIVE (the Q&A portion)

        • Reusing materials we have and adding to it

Question: When is summer learning program? Summer learning program was run in July for 3 months. Ideally, we could start in June. 

Shifting to another topic

NEURODIVERSITY: Another topic is that we focus on a specific group - last time, we focused on women and other under represented groups. This year, we talked about another group like neurodiversity.

Feedback: There is some exchange to adopt the term BIPOC on chat. 

Questions:

  • How can we increase awareness about our programs?

  • How can we provide opportunity to give folks a voice - learning by doing?

  • Where else are we expanding to now? Which other groups? 

  • Awareness is key

  • Could we simplify the access (made easy)? Could we have a project on curriculum? 

  • Have you heard of 11 seconds club competition?  This is on their own pace … we should consider how to diversify how we deliver the content https://www.11secondclub.com/ 

  • Would like to follow up on financial idea per Ferby 

Proposal:

  • From Greg G: Proposed Summer Program Goal: Increasing access points into the entertainment, technology, and the media industry so people from underrepresented groups can excel in creative and technical careers.

  • From Allen from Blizzard: Resources from other side for people who can champion how we can get involved in these programs…devote resources to enable us to sell to our leadership

  •  

    • This makes a great blog post

  • Per Rachel: Open sourcing diversity and inclusion plan from Adobe

  •  

    • This was put on hold but there is hope that we could work on this

  • Per Kevin Clark: Workforce plan beyond the program (for placement) 

  •  

    • How do we onboard folks 

  • Per Sergio: As an ambassador for OpenTimelineIo I will have office hour for anyone that needs help contributing to OpenTimelineIo.

  • https://bricfoundation.org/about 

Stories of Diversity

  • Aliza shared story about how Intuit created an easy way to blog open source project to increase awareness 

  • Leveraged AWS blog post in inclusive language - a Win!

  • (Shabnam) Think and design session for employees..on Mural, reimagine the workplace in diversity and inclusion - includes safety, creativity and technical success..IDEA: Another potential blog post