Diversity Initiative Governance, Donations and Speaker Mentoring

SymfonyCon talk

SymfonyCasts has published the video of my “One year diversity initiative” talk at SymfonyCon, which includes a transcript. As the title implies, this talk gives an overview of what was done in the first 12 months of the initiative. At the beginning I also talk about how I decided to get involved in this topic. This video is available for free.

Governance

A governance process for the diversity initiative has been added to the documentation. We pondered different ways to grant people voting rights, from having the entire community vote on everything, to giving voting rights based on participation in the bi-weekly chat meetings and finally settled on having Fabien appoint people for the time being. Since this is all rather new, Fabien hasn’t had time to do this yet. As this initiative is still fairly young and we do not even know yet what topics there will be and what challenges we will face, we figured it is better to start with such a top-down process. Once the initiative has matured we may find other ways to handle things.

Donating in US $ and donating via Paypal

Right now we can only accept donations in one currency per collective. Since our largest region is Europe, we collect both general donations and donations for specific topics (such as the speaker mentoring initiative) in Euros. People that wish to donate in US $ can do so in a separate collective. On this collective it’s also possible to do a one-time donation via Paypal, which enables people to donate even if they do not have a credit card. We hope that in the future Open Collective will make it possible to donate in multiple currencies as well via bank transfers.

Speaker Mentoring

Given the positive feedback on our twitter poll about organizing a speaker mentoring workshop, I updated the original blog post accordingly. However, I realized that people probably will not go back to check up on old blog posts and more importantly, people were left wondering when exactly the workshops will take place. We have decided to set the dates for the workshop sessions on March 24th and 31st at 10:00 PST / 19:00 CET.

We still need donations to be able to afford to offer this training. So please donate if you can! We have some good news here, the php[architect] magazine contacted us wanting to help to make this idea a reality. Specifically, as soon as the donations reach $ 1000, they will donate the remaining $ 500 needed for the online workshops. With the current donations, this means we are about half-way to our goal already! Furthermore, they will promote the initiative via social media, their podcasts and they are even offering to publish a free advertisement in their magazine in February to help us reach out to people interested in participating and to hopefully get some more donations.

Right now, we need more involved community members to step up and donate. Again we suggest a donation of about 5-10 Euro if you plan to attend the workshop. If you are not interested to attend yourself, please also consider donating to help someone else attend in your stead. If you prefer to donate in US $ or via Paypal, please use the US $ collective and let us know in the description that you want your donation to be used for the speaker mentoring initiative.