 Let the last couple of stragglers come in. Yeah, if you could maybe not leave random empty seats on the side so that latecomers can find seats. I'm sorry that we're behind a podium. I wish that we could sit at the table and do this, but they have to record audio. So I know that this isn't ideal. And maybe for the conversation part and the question and answer part will all kind of come forward a little bit. Hello, welcome. This is the talk about the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Group. This is our official title. We wanted to pick something catchy, but also long. So this is what we picked. Before we have to figure out how to make the slides go forward. No, it is. Oh, man. OK, that's fine. Everything's fine. Before we even tell you who we are, I want to talk about the goal of why we're here. And it's not to talk about what the intricacies of diversity are. It's not to talk about all the ways that we can include people. It's to talk specifically about what our group has done over the last year and to give you just enough context so that we can have a conversation about that. Just as a little bit of level setting. So I'll not speak for Ruby. I'm Nikki. I've been in Drupal for about nine years. I don't know how old my D.do account is, but I've been a programmer back in Dev for about 19 years. And I started this whole thing after New Orleans. And we'll talk about that in a minute. Hey, I'm Ruby Sennreich. I've been making websites mostly for nonprofit organizations since the mid 1990s. And I mean, it says it up there already. Usually when I'm doing a slide, I like to tell people like other stuff, like that I'm a human being. I'm a mom. I live in Durham, North Carolina. And I love music and stuff like that. Like we're regular people. And obviously you can find us there. I'm also a human being. So just a little bit of background then on how the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion Group started. Didi and I for short. This is my little kind of rah-rah background. I am here in Drupal. And I started this group because primarily I believe in open source. I believe in the values that it stands for. I believe in doing work and giving it away. And I believe that that benefits all of us. And I also believe related to open source and the power of community. So I believe in doing open source work by yourself. And I believe in doing open source work with other people who also believe in open source. I believe in the power of individuals to change the communities that they're a part of. And we see this all the time with local neighborhood boards. And we see this on large scale with voting, right? Individuals as discrete units have the power to effect change. And individuals and collectives have even greater power to effect change. We all have heard that Drupal is a democracy. So when I looked at the Drupal community and I thought, well, I wish someone were doing this. Man, jeez. If only someone would do this. And I thought about that honestly for a couple of years. Wow, we really need this. Why hasn't someone done this yet? Finally, I was like, well, damn it. Cool, OK. If I want this badly enough, I will just do it myself. And I have not done it myself. I started it and have done it with a ton of other wonderful people. But out of this philosophy came the Drupal diversity and inclusion group. And we are, and these are probably the most important things to know about us, we are volunteers and we work totally in the open. So all of the work that we do happens on GitHub because I'm a developer and I want to start something and so I just go put it on GitHub. In retrospect, I could have maybe made a different choice to make it more accessible for everybody. But that's where we are. We might change that moving forward. I have a slide about that. It's that important. That's right. People have said that we work in secret. Whatever work it is that people think that we do. But we don't. Literally everything that we do is on GitHub. Everything is accessible. All of our meeting notes are there. All of the things that we're going to be working on exist in our issue queue. And our meetings are in Slack, which is also open. Some important things that we are not. We are not, you're laughing because affiliation with the DA is funny. I think, I'm sure that you, I'm sure that that's why you're laughing. We're not affiliated with the Drupal association, although like Ruby said, they gave us booth space very generously and they helped us. They printed the banner that Scott designed. But we're not affiliated with the DA. We're not affiliated with the community working group. We're not affiliated with Drees. He mentioned us this morning, but I didn't even know that he knew about us until a couple of weeks ago. And we're not a bunch of other things. We are not funded. We had a couple of people, generous donors, donate to the photo booth that we're doing. A company paid for our stickers, but in no way are we funded. We don't report to anybody, accept ourselves and our own sense of right and wrong. And we in general don't let people boss us around to the best of our ability. So Ruby's gonna tell you about the things that we actually do. One of the things that I've been telling people a lot who visit our table is that because we're just a group of volunteers and members, what we do is based on the interests of the members of our group. So for one thing, we're advocating for a more inclusive and more diverse Drupal community. Oh, I have to drive. See, it's tricky right? You're right, it's trickier than I thought. She's right. So when we say a more diverse community, anytime, as you probably know, anytime you try to list these kinds of things, it's extremely problematic. But we thought it'd be helpful to give some examples of what kind of thing we're talking about so that you can also understand what kind of thing we're not talking about. And there's been many different issues that have even come onto our radar in terms of different types of diversity that we might not have even thought about. Like I wasn't really thinking about ableism six months ago in the Drupal community, but now it's on my radar. So we are pretty broad, but not everything. The next thing we do is advocate for more inclusive events. There's a couple of ways we've done that. What does that mean? Inclusion means not just like you look around the room and you see people who aren't just white men, but they're actually people who aren't white men are part of the process, are engaged in every way as much as anybody else would be. There's a lot of interesting language around this, and I recommend Googling it because there's some great articles actually. But specifically, some of the things we've done are helping the DA with organizing DrupalCon when they wanted to measure the diversity of the group here. They added some demographic questions to the registration form this year, which I'm sure you all saw, and we helped advise them about how to do that because again, those things are very fraught and there's no perfect way, but we tried to get the questions framed in a useful and productive way. Also, some folks in our group are working on a packet for camp organizers about how to make more inclusive events at the local level as well. Feel free to jump in if I'm forgetting anything. So, I don't know how much to say about this. This is something that comes up. You know, diversity doesn't mean universalism. And for example, and we have another slide that mentions this later, but the thing that I think explains it the best is if you make it a point to include every single person, that actually inherently excludes certain people because just to use the ridiculous example of Nazis, right, like, oh, well, we can't exclude them just because they're Nazis. Well, if you include those people, then some other people may feel not so welcome, right? So there are some limits. When we wanna include people, it doesn't actually mean universal. It means making the space an inclusive one for people who wanna be in there and be a part of it. Is that making sense? So here's the resource packet for organizers and this is all living on GitHub right now too, so anybody can contribute and help us out. Did we talk about our meetings? Yeah, okay. I'm sorry, but hey, that's us. That's our photo booth. So yeah, look, we're wearing the same clothes. No trickery here. So another awesome idea that one of our group members had was to have a photo booth here at DrupalCon to take pictures to highlight the diversity of the Drupal community. Many of you all have already had your pictures taken. If you haven't, you should come by and we're taking little tiny Polaroids that you can see on the back there and we're posting those on Instagram as well and we're using the hashtag which I love, I'm partial, humans of Drupal. Hashtag, so if you like humans of New York, it's kind of awesome. So that's another example of making this event more diverse and inclusive for people because it's highlighting something. Yeah, you're Drupal and you're Drupal too and you're Drupal and all these people. Creating safe spaces such as our Slack, right? So as you all, there's no official Drupal Slack but one of the contributors to Drupal decided, hey, we ought to have a Slack. And we have one and there's just a few volunteer moderators. It's totally free. It functions a lot like IRC, always has, except that it's usable. It's a slight improvement there. I know, sorry, I know some people love their IRC and much respect but I turn it on and then I never go back there. But Slack, I leave it open all day and I'm there. So we started a channel there and in addition to our meetings weekly in Slack, we're hanging out there all the time. So that is a really great space especially if people are having issues where they can come and talk about them and we can figure out what might be needed. We can help back them up and say, no, you're not crazy. That was inappropriate or whatever it might be. We can rally the troops if needed and it's been a really great space. Is that our current number, 363 members? I saw about two weeks ago. Yeah, I think it's 400 now, right? We used to have about 100 or so. What was it before? But there's been some greater interest. But to be honest, not that many people are actually participating in the group, they're just hanging out in our Slack channel. But maybe I think because they feel like they can learn from us and they can. A lot of people have come to our channel, frankly, just to sort of learn and get different perspectives. Again, especially recently when things have been really confusing and very complicated. We've had a space where people can safely talk about stuff and it has been very, very helpful. Possibly too helpful? No. Another great idea one of our members had was to have this flag of approachability because Drupalcon can be kind of intimidating and it's also just hard to talk to strangers always. So you can come to our table, I've got a couple right here and get these smiley-faced pins to put on your badge to show that strangers can come up and talk to you. And lots of you already have them. They're really awesome. I think it's perfect because I hate talking to strangers so it's a really great opening. And then building capacity of our allies. A lot of people want to be allies in the Drupal community. People want this to be a more inclusive space but they don't always know how. And nobody's an expert but it's another thing that we can do by even having the space where we have the conversations and where we talk to each other and when we share resources and new perspectives with each other. So this is sort of showing on the right going from active opposition all the way over to being active allies. And I have definitely seen some people and even I on certain issues have moved across the spectrum on different issues. People, we have a really great group in there and we have really been able to help each other a lot and learn a lot from each other. And hearing each other's perspectives is fascinating. For example, as you can see, I've been involved with Drupal for a long time but I don't really know how those inner workings and stuff go. But there's some people in our channel who are core contributors and they have some different perspectives that I've never been exposed to and I learned a lot from that. They also didn't realize what it looks like to be someone like me who's like, what the hell is going on here? Why is trees like what? Because if you're a core contributor you work with trees every day, you don't know what that's like to be us. So we're all benefiting by sharing those perspectives and making better allies within the Drupal community so that folks can be more effective advocates. We're all on a non... just in a technical ecosystem. It's been really good for me personally to remember that people are not everybody's a developer. Just like I started my thing and I put it on GitHub. Everybody will be fine. And so talking to people who are site builders and project managers and content strategists and designers and all of those things has been really helpful. Oh yeah, here's how we got here. Yeah, on a calendar. I'm not a designer. Yeah, y'all know. Anyways, we started in New Orleans. We met at IRC in June. We migrated over to Slack in June. The wonderful folks at Drupal Camp Costa Rica highly recommended it. They had me down and I key noted about diversity down there which kicked off some more stuff. We went to Bad Camp and a bunch of people who are more organized than me were like, hey, probably get a domain name. I was on Twitter. So I had a lot of help with that. And then we did a diversity of the web survey which is still going on. We still need people to take that survey. And then in January around that time we helped the DA with some Baltimore stuff. Up next is a meme. Ready? We made it, yeah. We didn't find it online. So I'm I think Obviously this is all to be taken with a gigantic frame of thought, right? We love everybody. Most people. I love most people. I'm not trying to speak as a global we. And for our organization there is no global we. We as an organization are just a group of people. If anyone says we as DD and I do X and we believe X we don't have any positions on anything officially, right? We have some guidelines within which we work. We have a strategy meeting tomorrow at which point we may decide that we have an official spokesperson or we have an official position on something. But right now we don't. We're just an organization that's doing things and we're just here to talk about the things that we do and to get more people involved and to answer questions that you have. Do you want to talk about the things that we do in the weeks? Sure. Also, one of the things I was worried about a lot just in making this meme in general and all this stuff is to avoid the perception that we're a bunch of white women doing this stuff is actually a much more diverse group than that. And a lot of you are in the room. So anybody who's been active in our Slack channel please stand up right now. Look at our awesome posse. And there's more. So, the recent unpleasantness so what happened is you all know about the situation with Larry Garfield, right? This is going to be the first time. You should give for sure. Okay, so I've had some practice at this. Hopefully I'll, you know. This is why Ruby is doing this part. Okay, so as I mentioned, recently a contributor, a very involved core contributor was asked to leave the community and was also relieved of his position as a track chair for Drupalcon. And a lot of people have strong feelings about it. It's a very complicated issue. Some people in my opinion have looked at it as sort of black and white. But there are many, many shades of gray. It's very complicated. I'll tell you what happened to me. The morning I woke up and found in the Slack channel, someone who's in Europe had already posted a link to a blog post by Larry who had been asked to leave. And I read that and I was like, what the fuck? This is unfair. What the hell? Burn it down. This isn't right. And so I start, you know, we're all in there posting and we're going what? But because of the benefit of the many perspectives that we have in our channel we learned much more about the various complexities of the situation, the history. I never even worked with this person, which most of the people who have opinions about it don't as a matter of fact, right? I've never worked with this person. I didn't know what they were like. I learned about the history of their relationship. I learned about the process because I didn't understand what the community working group was doing and what it wasn't. And I think we all agree. One thing that I think everybody agrees on is that we have discovered if you didn't already know that there are some real problems in our community structure. We're lacking the infrastructure to handle issues like this. But through participating in the channel I learned about how things went and that it did follow the process that it's supposed to follow. And throughout the day more and more people were going through that same process I was going what? And in our channel we just kept talking to each other we kept processing things. But I'm still concerned about this. Endless concerns. Yeah. We're thank goodness for the adorable dogs in our channel. Because that's what I look like. What? And all day long people keep coming in and actually not all day long, but then actually for weeks. And frankly we're pretty active about moderating our channel. We've had a lot of experience running online communities locally and in various places. Actually not just locally. But we stayed on top of it. Everyone in our channel who we had already been there and this is important that we had been there working with each other for months and months at that point. So we trusted each other. If someone else said well but you need to think about this Ruby I'd say yeah but you're just saying that because you're a white man or something. You're just being able to have a good conversation there. And so because we had these great conversations and were able to be rational about it which there wasn't that much going on at the time. More and more people were referred to us and when people had concerns folks from the Drupal Board and others were just saying go talk to the diversity and inclusion group because they I don't know understand it or something. Which was interesting because it meant that we were very busy acting as therapists for several weeks of all the angry people coming in there. Now some people were just like your therapist would say right. Some people were ready to change. Some people not so much. And people who came in with their guns blazing and not listening usually left really angrily after a little while because we didn't really tolerate that foolishness. It's our space. We're going to have them coming in there crapping all over us and over things that we care about. So that has caused our group profile to be raised a lot much more than we intended or anticipated. But the silver lining obviously is that now people know what we're doing and a lot of people did listen a lot of people joined our group since then and became participants and a lot of people are seeing the needs for improvements in the community partially related to the situation with Larry and partially related to the broader perspective. Is that good? So what's cool about this is you're all here. All of a sudden all of these people whether they had thought about it or not are like we need to think about how people experience our communities. Whichever side you're on if you believe in taking sides even there are already sides. I'm just being diplomatic. But still people are now thinking well how do I feel as a member of this community? Do I feel safe in this community? Does the person next to me feel safe in this community? And those are things that are important. Those are questions we should always be asking. Is this person who I'm passing in the hallway having an okay experience? Are they feeling threatened? Are they feeling safe? Which means it's time to get involved. One of the common pieces of feedback that I got before recent events was people would say oh well I'm you know I'm just me. I shouldn't get involved. Whatever dimension of identity they thought they needed to have in order to be an ally. They felt like they were missing. Does that make sense? People would say you know what I'm just a white guy. I can't be. I can't help. And I'm here to say that that's not true. If you didn't receive one in the mail this is your official invitation to join us to get on the ally spectrum and to let us help you figure out ways that you can be an ally that's sustainable for you. I'm going to do a tiny plug for my talk on Thursday called 100 ways to be an ally. There are literally 100. There are more. I'm only sharing 100 of them with you in 30 minutes ways that you can be an ally and in there you'll find ways that are sustainable for you to be a part of this. But specifically you can get involved in our GitHub repo and if you have GitHub phobia or other GitHub challenges come talk to me we'll figure it out. We have weekly meetings in our Slack channel you can follow us on Twitter Ruby runs our social media which is a Herculean task especially lately and you can come to our booth and we'll start the questions. Thank you very much. Oh yes Kathy just made a great point of reminding me to explain how this works core conversations is where we talk for 30 minutes and then we do Q&A for 30 minutes so that's the track that we're in so we have done our 24 and a half minutes of talking and now we have about 30 minutes if you want to talk about what we're doing you have questions about diversity or inclusion or the Drupal community or anything that you want and if you don't have any you can leave. Hi my name is Bladwin. I'm a human as well. Welcome human. Thank you. It wasn't hard I was born this way. So you mentioned tolerance and you Ruby specifically mentioned you can't tolerate the intolerance it's like you can't rationalize with the irrational which is a really good point to make right so where do we draw a line both actively but not to make that a hard line that is discriminatory right I think that's where this makes this becomes complicated like how do we set a guideline to be inclusive and have certain tolerances without objectifying other people based on those tolerances and those values because if we create a box or a white list or a black list that's immediately discriminatory right so that's I think why this group exists can flow with the community at large and kind of define our diversity by our actions right so not exactly a question I did this wrong you did okay you did great thank you it's hard to go first right but I think that's kind of the impetus for this right like why we're having this bop now at this event you know and why we're getting a lot of people involved in this group even more now because it's really in the light we all see this as a big issue and just like when we went from archaic PHP to new PHP we now have to go from old governance to new governance it's a hard transition well we're not going to talk about governance sure sure so I will draw one line there but diversity plays a role in that it does so I will just address this last part and then I'll let Ruby talk about tolerance I'll tolerate Ruby talking about tolerance governance conversations are happening community governance conversations are happening for those of you who don't know they're in an office a couple of sky bridges away we have pamphlets on our DNA table if you want to figure out how to get there and what they're about and they're specifically for people who have concerns about the governance model about how the working group made the choices that they made how Dries made the choice that he made and whether or not those are the right choices in the right way those concerns are real and valid and also outside of our initial scope so just there's that as for tolerance well I wanted to say if you think about the that little diagram of the ally spectrum one of the things that I think is useful to think about is if you're thinking about a person who seems intolerant they're a person just like us and personally I believe there's potential for good in every single person that's just like a personal belief that I have and so I would think that spectrum started with active opposition that's what's on that there's no big line between it there's a gradual little process so if there's a way to work with someone to help convert them from opposition to neutral and possibly on to ally ideally then I think it's productive to make that space and to be open to people who want to who are open to that and who have the potential for that but on the flip side is we do want to have a safe space and so if people's behavior is a problem that is disruptive to others that is threatening to others that is making people just not feel welcome in the space because that's a real problem not just women have imposter syndrome last year I went to the little imposter syndrome talk and I was like there's men here men have that it's true because really all of us struggle with like do I belong here and so that's why I think it's important not to make space for people who are going to make others not feel welcome so there's never going to be one single line and our group doesn't have any official positions about that so we don't have like a talking point this is okay and this isn't okay but it's a spectrum so the people who are actively intolerant there has to be a willingness on or actively opposed active intolerance I meant actively opposed sorry on the spectrum there has to be a willingness in those individuals to want to change their behavior so how do we as a group as a community as other humans kind of facilitate that change how do we do it in a way that is not discriminatory or defamatory or negative that I think is really hard I think you do it with things like codes of conduct where you basically say if you want to be a part of this community here are some of the baselines that the community agrees are needed and if people can't deal with that then they've made the choice to opt themselves out of it basically so I mean I think it's by defining what your norms are going to be and so that by that way you can say well this action this isn't conforming this is not okay of course that is very hard to write those so you kind of already answered my question so maybe I shouldn't even ask it but it was on a similar vein to that like where to draw the line for not being tolerant of intolerance like the ideas of course that you don't want to include people who make other people feel uncomfortable and the Nazi example is so easy I know because it's lazy I know well yeah because Nazis actively want the genocide of certain people much gray area like for example and I don't want anyone to take offense to this but to say like a Trump voter they don't actively want to kill someone or someone else might assume that they have opinions about for example Mexican so if you have Mexican heritage maybe if there's a Trump person there you would feel unincluded so then how do you make those well again that's why it comes back to the sort of saying this is a community that respects people and doesn't tolerate racist speech so that if you know we have to you can't police people's thoughts only their behavior one of the problem is that a lot of behavior isn't recognized as being problematic when it actually is so I think that's something that we need to work on more if you think about the history of people I don't know if I should go into this but the famous thread about the gender form on Drupal.org like people can all be very polite and they're not breaking any rules of civility but they can still be doing things that are hostile and make other people not feel welcome by literally not recognizing their own gender identity for example so I think it should still be focused on actions and not thoughts but that we have to recognize a lot more actions as problematic than we do right now and I will add that as a developer I want to write everything down I want things to be explicit and I want to factor for edge cases I want to have a flow chart for everything and I want to be prepared for everything and not even that that always works in engineering but that's the instinct and I think what I have found over the last year and before is that this is so much on a case by case basis and so much conversation and empathy and back and forth and listening and clarification is needed that it really is it's like okay well in this case but it's actually okay someone two people in good faith misunderstand each other in this case it seemed okay but it was actually very problematic and that's really frustrating so kind of in response to Eric's question slash problem statement and in response to a couple of things I think Ruby said during the dialogue I think it's important to remind ourselves that intolerance is not a trait of a person people have the capacity to change and it's important to remember that people have a variety of different motivations or exposure to like how to not be exclusive right so it's I just want to encourage us to be careful to not assume that there is a binary thing just if someone does something once and the first time you call them out on doing something that was maybe said this horribly offensive thing their first reaction the first time I hear it might be just to get defensive and put up a wall and not listen and then maybe the second time I hear it maybe they hear it and like oh someone told this to me before why are they saying this maybe I'll listen for a little bit before I get angry or I'll get angry and then I'll listen the second time and I think that we like it's important to remember that when someone like we're all going to screw up at some point and do things that are wrong so I just have the courage to not say this person is intolerant because people have the capacity to become better and learn from others so that's all that's my comment which is not a question oh I'm just I'm also human sorry I didn't follow the rules sorry Kathy she only cares about the mic and that's exactly what we saw over those weeks after the Larry Garfield situation happened we saw people come in with guns blazing being very oppositional staying oppositional things and then being exposed exposed exposed and kind of being really chiller about it even if their beliefs hadn't changed they were able to engage in constructive conversation that helped people and it went from like no you're dumb to like oh okay we disagree but I still respect you as a person right and that's the goal I mean ultimately that's the goal is like but I still respect you and I'm we're still physically safe with each other hi Angie I just wanted to say on that note that I really appreciate what you guys sorry what you folks have been doing no seriously because it's been a really shitty couple of weeks and I think having somebody disconnected from the different organizations and power structures that you are doing the important work that you're doing has been insanely valuable because I've witnessed that I'm sorry I'm not very active in your channel I didn't stand at the time but but I observe and I observe that literally anyone is welcome in that room even if they're hot headed even if they're mouthing off at first they'll be treated like a person they'll be saying I understand you're upset you know talk to me about what's going on they're able to have a sounding board that is neutral and encourages dialogue and I've seen you change hearts and minds by treating people like people and I think that is really important because this issue has been so incredibly divisive and it's required all these people to choose sides and get pitchforks and stuff and it's like no we don't need any of that we need to remember that we're all here because we love being here like these people are like my people you know it's like and I just wanted to say thank you because I've been on the back end of this kind of you know talking I don't say that this is what I do but but you know I'm just trying to manage that whole situation and so having folks on the front lines who are really genuinely interested in in actual diversity and inclusion of all broad spectrums of ideas and trying to get everyone to a common understanding in a place where we can like talk to each other thank you I just wanted to say thank you thank you so I'm Kathy and I have some experience working in open source and I hear some words that people use like Angie like we value the work that you do and in the keynote you know like things are really important and what are we gonna do about this and it reminds me that it upsets me because I see people who it's difficult for them to do this work and they're being asked sometimes to do it without assistance support that could be useful to accomplish that important work that we're really thankful for so I think it's frustrating to be like when something happens in the community like hey go talk to those diversity and inclusion people like they have all the time in the world and their lives aren't hard so let's add some more work to them so I find that upsetting in a similar way that I have wanted the way that we fund development on open source to change and I feel like if something is really important to us then we need to make it really important and not burden people who may not have the resources or the power to be accomplishing the work or make changes so it's just there's like an element to this that it's worrisome so also not a question it's a core question it's core conversation I agree with that I will say personally I couldn't have done it this year without canopy without working for canopy and letting them be flexible with me to work later hours because I'm running meetings or just even being here so I've been very lucky but I do think that canopy shouldn't be subsidizing the work for the community we need to figure out a way to do it we have a strategy meeting tomorrow we're looking into it but to Angie's point we exist outside existing power structures and it's also part of what's so valuable and so it's how can we be sustainable and how can we prevent burnout and how can we care for the people doing this work myself included right how can we care for everybody who's doing this and also not make them beholden to someone's bank account and I have to believe like any new engineering challenge there is a solution to this we'll probably get it wrong maybe we'll get it right the first time who knows but it's something that because if we were just if the next year were like the last two months we wouldn't make it the next year so something has to shift a little bit yeah and I really appreciate you saying that because there has been a lot of that and you can't really see it we had people come into the community who were just like really angry and talking about everything and governance and we were just like look can you go to the governance channel or something and they're like well I was told to come talk to you it really happened and then I was like who told you that so that's been happening and so I do appreciate the recognition I think that's getting better though I think people were just everyone was freaking out just going yeah I was going to say something pretty similar to Kathy I guess what's your name? my name is Matt and yes I'm a human yeah this is an amazing initiative that you and a few other people are doing I'm assuming you can only be the unpaid therapist of the Drupal community for like it's probably already too long yeah and then on top of that there's the burden that like this is people who have less privilege in the community for the most part who are stepping up because they're the ones who see this as a problem there's even though they're probably already doing more work than other folks just to like tread water and stay in the community there's the fact that I see often in mostly male communities that like a small number of women are responsible for the like emotional tone and maintenance of that because that work is just invisible to everyone else despite the fact that it's obviously necessary so yeah I guess my question was like how long do you think you can keep this up slash what's your strategy going forward because like other than like just handing out stickers and getting lots of people to join this channel and get excited like I'm assuming you're thinking about at least some of the time so and how can so and you're talking about how you said you're going to give another talk about how people can be allies which I guess maybe this is a segue into that but like how like yeah where do you see this going how can people help specifically with this issue is if you are someone who is business minded or human network minded come give suggestions if you're someone who has organized large groups of people in sustainable ways let's talk and brainstorm how we can apply that and the other challenge though is that a lot of this work is one-on-one work and it's hard to scale one-on-one work up right so getting more people in the channel is not always it's more work because now there's more people so one thing that I've personally been thinking about is how to make a network for men to do this work with each other because a lot of the problems and this don't take this the wrong way men are making these problems and the problems are trickling down right so how can we have men on the front line supporting other men to do this work with each other and that would take a huge burden off of so many people who are already marginalized and so if anyone wants to lead that male initiative come at me that would be amazing yes come at us bro there are some white male long-time contributors who've been really active with this and have been incredible allies and advocates and it helps us so much when they are visibly on our sort of team or whatever you want to call it that's been very helpful so there's a great role for allies to play there for sure hi I'm Molly I'm a human maybe part alien so you know I just wanted to thank you both for your work I recently actually had an incident and I had to sort of come to the channel and look for some guidance and some support and it was just really really amazing and I really appreciated that so I wanted to say that and I also wanted to sort of ask a question sort of pause it sort of a comment around the work you guys are doing a lot of it is online right it's communication in a tech space format online and I was just wondering is there been any strategies you guys had around like this week are there things that one-on-one in person can be achieved that maybe you've been building up to with certain interactions or are there things that we can do while we're here this week to really help forward that I know you're going to talk about stuff in your allies talk or something maybe potentially but so I was just wondering sort of we have an opportunity here we're all in person we're not necessarily in a chat room but when we do this week to really foster inclusion and to gatherness and unity and look at everyone like the beautiful humans that we are and the work that we're doing and open source and free software that's a great question I'll start we don't have like a specific do this one thing but we do have a table again generously hosted by the Drupal Association which is a very low bar ask of anybody but really want you all to come there I'll tell you all a funny story I think this is funny when we were planning this somebody hit me if not when we were planning the photo booth the humans of Drupal and the woman who's the mastermind of that is not even in the room but I really want to give a shout out to Alana Alana Burke amazing amazing work we were like so we're going to do these pictures and we're going to post them online and it's we are Drupal and humans of Drupal and we were like what if a bunch of white men come and take their picture and it's like that's a Drupal a bunch of white guys and we're like well that is Drupal in a certain way so we're like well I guess and as a matter of fact that has not been a problem at the table we've had so many different kinds of people that I actually have been actively reaching out to white people white men who walk by because I'm like please come take your picture but so I'm telling you that to tell you that all of you please come take your pictures and especially if you're like oh I'm a white guy I'm not who they're talking about you are who we're talking about we want your pictures in there too because again the whole point is this is important for all of us there's you know all those articles that are like diversity is good for your bottom line it helps you think better and stuff like that diversity is not a women's problem or people color or queer or you know whatever problem it's everybody's problem and you can show that you're an ally by coming to our booth and having your picture taken and saying yeah this is what I'm down with also and then you can retweet it when we post your picture and stuff like that and definitely do come to the ally talk because again that's really what's been so helpful with people being allies so far and there's tons more everybody can do I think something else just if you say okay well I can't do anything for the rest of the year I can be an ally while I'm at Drupalcon I don't know why that would be true but if that's true make direct eye contact with people when you see them in the hallway and smile at them especially if they look like people you don't see all the time whatever that means to you literally just say hey how's your morning good morning and that's really hard if you're introverted or have social anxiety but that's one way that you can just make the space feel friendlier yeah thank you for that and I think that's a great idea just if you see someone alone who looks like they're a little bit lost or feels out of place just reaching out to them so thanks for that alright thank you guys thank you so much for your work thank you for all you do and everybody in this room for being a part of this conversation I think that's really huge to be proponents for more diversity and inclusion in Drupal I'm Justin as a white-ish male I'm interested in not being part of a problem anymore is there any resources that you could actively suggest or recommend for folks, literature oh we also have a resources page on our website www.drupaldiversity.com www.drupaldiversity.com www.drupaldiversity.com www.drupaldiversity.com and there's a resources section there where we've collected links and if anybody has great links about this stuff that they want to share of like videos, talks, articles that help explain these things because we do get a lot of requests from people just to like they're like okay I think you have a pretty good point to understand this stuff like that so come check out the resources page and send us other good ones yeah gender is over if you want it I also think coming to the Slack meetings and even just observing I see so many good constructive behaviors modeled there every week well actually 24-7 right now but I just think it's a great way to get into the conversation and to hear what people are concerned about dip your toes in also if you want to help but are feeling weird and you are someone who feels really comfortable contributing code and doing patches and that kind of stuff one way that you can contribute is just to help us gather information put it out in a way that makes sense that like organizational stuff I'm really bad at hey I'm Chris my organization's digital bridge solutions sort of interested in improving the diversity of the Drupal community here we are actually doing an event tomorrow with Palantir we are bringing six students from an organization called N-Power they represent disadvantaged or under-representing groups and we're going to bring them out to DrupalCon and we sponsored their tickets I think that's really cool I would encourage other folks to do the same at camps we would love to make this bigger next year instead of do six do like 60 so if you're interested in being part of that I would love to talk to you about increasing representation of under-representing groups at Drupal and to his point if there are ways you want to get involved but none of our ways work for you we can figure out ways that will work for you so that is another way that you can get involved I'm Michael I'm a cisgendered white male but I'm here ready to go it's not a but it's an and whatever you are my question first of all thanks again so much for everything you guys are doing it's so it's unfortunately we're talking about that it's coming down to I guess you consider the minority groups having to do most of the work so I think that's why we do need to encourage involvement I think just having this conversation is so helpful in that this will be some kind of standing thing at Drupal with the booth but my question such a conversation point would be going forward hopefully there's silver lining to this controversy similar to the Trump election how that has spurred a lot of political activity across the country a lot of engagement I think this similarly seems to be a great thing I think this would be such a full room people involved right now and I'm thinking especially at Drupal being so much more integrated with the larger community now we're tied into so much more of the PHP community and beyond now that Drupal is opening up itself it seems like we can actually be a beacon to the rest of the kind of tech community in general as we open up our own APIs and everything and so I'm curious if there's been conversations around that or like any kind of plans ahead of that how can we then even reach out beyond to further communities and try to kind of spread this message encourage these kinds of conversations going forward in communities even beyond Drupal yeah that's a great question I think for me personally again not speaking for the group for me personally I always feel like you should make sure your own house is clean before you go clean someone else's you know we do have this wonderful opportunity to affect change in governance in community culture and so it's like well let's give it a year let's make some changes give it a year and if we make great changes I think other communities will pay attention we have 10 minutes left thank you but if you want to start talking about how do we do outreach now let's go come to the come to the meetings Hi Damien human, alien bunny bunny yes have you heard any positive results yet of people who said like I was considering leaving but because there's so much theoretically the whole momentum behind inclusion that they've decided to stick around longer only like one honestly they might not be reporting to us yeah they might not be reporting to us I've talked specifically with people who like I said were really really really angry and they felt very personally slighted by what had happened come into the channel and say okay well now I'm back to neutral not hopeful but I'm back to zero and maybe I can get to hopeful in the future but I haven't heard of anyone who's like I'm out and then totally change their mind I feel like people are cautiously optimistic Hi I'm Eric I'm a human at his first Drupalcon and I think it's a great time to be at my first Drupalcon and that is because of this idea of crisis is opportunity and I got to experience this in a couple of ways one very personal but one very public in the form of I work at like a college in last in 2015 we had a diversity crisis and at the time it seemed to shake the foundations of our community what is a diversity crisis there were there was a lot of racially charged issues I don't want to characterize that specifically because what I think it is important is that the community felt threatened by division that were around these kinds of issues and the response is what I want to point out because you know these things are very hard and they are long work and one of the most amazing things to me out of that process the process that has that emerged from that is the people coming together to have conversations and doing this over time not just like okay we're going to have the public meeting we're going to have a conversation today but coming back week after week after week and I hear you talk about a Slack meeting that you have those kinds of conversations are the kinds of events that I have found in the process that we experienced are the most transformative you know showing up and starting to get other perspectives that take a lot of time to get through so I want to applaud you all for being in the thick of this and yeah I'm going to check out the weekly Slack meeting it sounds like it exists and would say people please be engaged in those kind of things at Drupal Meetups finding the ways to have these hard conversations to do it in person and be vulnerable and be open to connecting with people that I think that's where you get it thank you we are basically out of time so just a quick call out Ruby has a pretty tight name on Twitter so not hard to find I'm Dr. Nicky we're on Twitter as Drupal Diversity Contribution sprints are happening on Friday if you can be a Drupal mentor be one it's so good mentoring is so amazing if you can do it or come to mentored sprints the diversity group might be sprinting on some other stuff also if that's how you want to get involved there's a survey somewhere oh it's right there please fill out a survey about our talk and that's it thank you so much for coming come to our booth