 All right, I guess I will kick it off. Thank you all for joining us. We're excited to have you participate in our section, our session. What we'd like to do is we'd like to have a panel and we'd like to discuss red head bills and also for door the session in this title is really focused on how can we revamp our community outreach and how can we really transform the way that we think about diversity, equity and conclusion inclusion here. So we have quite a full slate of panelists that and a few questions, but we want to make sure that at the end, we leave time for Q&A. So before we jump in Marie, I'd like to just do a quick round of introductions of the panelists. So just to give them some space to introduce their name, just in case people are not familiar with the panelists. Sure. Do you want to go ahead? Sure. Hi, my name is Ron Brown. I work at Red Hat. I am the co-chair of Build Campus University Outreach, and I'm also working in the IT space as a facilitation, a Cattle Slap Facilitator. I will go ahead since my name is on this first screen. So my name is Kim LaLee. I am also the co-lead with Build Campus University Outreach Committee. My day job is a senior principal on business system analyst within our enterprise data analytics team under, within IT. I'll go next. I am Matthew Miller. I am the Fedora project leader. I assume most people know this already. This is really important to me because the thing that is important about Fedora Linux is that it's an operating system that we collectively are building for ourselves. It's something that we own and it belongs to all of us, and that it belongs to all of us can't be really true unless it actually does belong to all of us. We need it to be for all people, of all races, genders, sexualities, everywhere in the world. Like this needs to be something that, in order to really live up to the potential of free and open source software, we need to be inclusive in a radical way that we have not always been before. So this is super important to me. Thanks, Matthew. Hi, I am Marie Norden. I am Fedora's Community Action and Impact Coordinator. I've also been involved as a contributor to Fedora since 2013, working on graphic design and a variety of things. I am going to pass it off to Alexandra. So I'm Alexandra Fedora and I'm currently elected Fedora Consul Member. I work on CI and testing and automation of those things in Red Hat and in Fedora as well. And I've also been, for 10 years, the Russian Fedora Ambassador. So I kind of bring my perspective of the non-English speaking side of the community sometimes to the conversations around Fedora. Mariana, do you want to go next? Sure. Hi everybody. My name is Mariana. As my day job, I am a product owner for BeachFillist, which is an open source email marketing product. On my free time, I'm contributing to open source communities and one of them is a Fedora project. Currently, I am a council member and I co-lead in one of Fedora's objectives. And I can take the last, I guess, yeah. I work in community platform engineering. I work on infrastructure in Fedora and center-eside. That's my day job. I'm diversity and inclusion advisor to Fedora Council. And I also am in mind share for mentor project things. And apart from that, you can see me in Fedora Join and other community places. All right. Excellent. So thank you for those introductions. Let's go to the next slide. I believe Kimla is going to, I don't know, I think I will start us all really trying to ground us in the goal of this session. Really, we want to talk about some of the experience of doing diversity, equity, inclusion work. Kimla and I will be speaking from the perspective of working at Red Hat and working in BUILD, which stands for Blacks United in Leadership and Diversity in our campus and university outreach programs. And then the other panelists will speak about their experiences of doing the work and engaging in the work from the Fedora perspective. And we really want to have this panel to combine to also invite you all in to talk about some best practices and experiences that you all have of doing community outreach and just share lessons learned. So I'll start off with a brief overview of Red Hat. You know, you probably are already familiar with many of most of this, but I do want to kind of ground this in terms of, you know, our company started off as an open source company delivering the REL operating system. And we've expanded since then into in terms of our organization, our open culture, and also expanding into delivering the cloud. So next slide, please. So it's been more than 25 years. Really, as I said before, we started with that single operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And then, you know, we've expanded into that broad portfolio of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, middle of our containers. And we're excited to be a part of Red Hat. We're excited to extend that culture of the open organization, and also spread the knowledge of open source. So, Kimela. Hi. So, Jess, I think we already said what was built in the chat, but just for the ones that don't know, Bill stands for Blacks United in Leadership and Diversity. We started this group, and to be honest with you, it's really just a group of Black Red Haters within IT that was just kind of me in a lunch room or in a, you know, or in a conference room to kind of share our different experiences that we was having back in 2015. And during this time, Red Hat in general was working, you know, what at that time is called a DNI framework and trying to implement that. So, while I'm happening and when it got, when we launched in July or 2017, Mike Kelly was our CIO, and who is our CIO, and he was our executive sponsor then. And so, we was able to officially launch as Bill at that time. And then, of course, last year, Kent Pitcher, it was our executive sponsor in November 2019. And actually this year, which we have updated this slide, we now have a new one, which is Laura Krabs, which is our CFO, and she's now our new executive sponsor this year. So, that was kind of great and glad that she was able to take that on for us. So, they kind of give you some, you know, background. Our membership, you know, has been growing a little, you know, every year. But to be honest with you, last year, when in the U.S., when the George Floyd incident and a lot of back-to-back incidents happened in the United States, it wound up spending our membership, it grew probably at least, almost, I would say almost double in a way. Probably not quite double, but pretty close. It was a pretty good number of people that wanted to join it and wanted to participate from that. We can go to the next slide. As you can see here, these are just a few of us. This picture has been, oh my gosh, it's an older picture. We haven't been in the office now, goodness, over a year now. So, we haven't been able to get a new picture updated, but hopefully we'll be able to very soon. So, we can go to the next slide. So, just to talk about how we are structured within our group. Our goal, as you can see here, is all about fostering and connecting, have a connected community of Black Red Headers and our allies. We want to support the Red Hat efforts to recruit and develop and engage Black Associates so that we can advance within our careers. So, we have different communities here. We have the Community Outreach Committee, which is a committee that they kind of work and focus on different programs within, sometimes more locally, but we do try to broaden that to help out even broadly than our local area here in Raleigh, North Carolina. But we do a lot of fundraising. We go and help out when people need help with certain volunteers in general. So, this group kind of deals with that. Our marketing and communication team is the team that kind of deals with all our communications around major programs. We just had our, what we call our anniversary week. They was a big help within that. They did a lot of communications in our emails and let people know what's going on. In addition to, they also do all our swag things. They kind of help out creating all our swag, just I can't kind of see here, but I think a few of us has the Red Hat t-shirt on. And so, they help develop those t-shirts and our logos and things of that sort. The Education Program is really about and membership is really developing within the bill membership itself. We want to educate our members, whether it's from career type goals, all the way up to mental, you know, help type stuff. We just last year, because of the instance that happened, we actually brought in someone to help us through those incidents, someone to help with our mental capacity of dealing with all the things that was happening. So, this group kind of helps with those type of things around those type of programs. Then, of course, social membership is all about us trying to say, hey, you know, let's kind of relax. We've been doing a lot of work. Let's get to know each other more like networking and just having some fun, you know, with all the work that we do. And then, lastly, is the team that I am co-lead of and run here. And that's Campus and University Outreach. And we'll talk about more about this committee in a few. And we can just see all the different things that we have, all the different activities we deal with over the year. But we have a lot of different events each, you know, almost every quarter we have some type of event for the most part. Go to next slide. So, a little bit about Community University Outreach is we are about trying to offer professional development, mentorship, and partnership with our historical Black colleges and universities, which what you hear the term called HBCUs, when we do outreach and engagement. We try to help out with coding workshops. We do resume prep workshops, career panels, whatever they may need. It just depends on the school that we're working with, because we work with different HBCUs and whatever their needs may be. That's what we do. One of the big things that we do, because we have internship program here at Red Hat, usually every time, you know, every year before that, we have a bunch of resume workshops, things to help prep them for to get ready to apply for internship. That's pretty much what we do. And then the lastly thing that we kind of do, we also go out and do surveys. So, then when we do this presentation, we always have people fill out surveys, want to find out, you know, what they want from us. And then we ask them to participate. You know, that's the key thing for our group is that we need participation and partnership. Without that, we can't kind of just guess at what people need. We want to really give people what they need in order to advance their career from, for the different students. And that, and we do this from not only just college level, we do also start usually around middle school and, you know, up to college level. And next slide, I think it's over to you, Maria. Yep, that's me. Hold on, Lumia. Okay, right. So, I'm just going to talk a bit about the history of Fedora's DNI and DEI efforts. I don't know what year this happened, but I believe it all began with wanting a diversity and inclusion advisor to the Fedora Council. Do you know what year that was? I guess it was 2014 or 13 or 14. It was, it was when we started the Fedora Council and when we went to, before the Fedora Council existed, there was a Fedora Board and that didn't have any named roles. And as part of the Fedora Council, we wanted to give each position on the Council actually a named role and responsibility area. And so, when I was thinking about what those roles should be, this was one that was important to have. Definitely. So, we had that on our Council and we still have that today. The full is our current diversity and inclusion advisor to the Council. So, that's kind of how that was our first initial effort. Shortly after that, I want to say a group of people came up with an idea to create Fedora Women's Day. There was enough people and excitement and interest in this that a team was formed around this event and making it happen. That's how the DNI team came to be. Fedora Women's Day was a huge success. It grew and grew and I think by the last year we, we did it in person. I want to say there was over 20 countries holding local Fedora Women's Days. So, that was a huge success for our team and I think that was grown over maybe three to four years of Fedora Women's Day. But there was kind of a problem behind that. So, because that we were focused solely on this Fedora Women's Day, there were other things that didn't get as much attention. Things like governance and how the team was going to work, processes, ensuring that there was mentorship and sustainability, bringing in new contributors to the team. And it was known by no one's fault, right? These things kind of tend to happen, especially if a couple people are very, very passionate and they're just, they're going at it. So, basically those folks who were organizing for our Women's Day eventually began to feel burned out. And there's no, it's not going to be a good event or a good initiative. People are feeling burned out about it. So, things started to slow down with the group a little bit. And right around that time I had stepped into the community action and impact coordinator role. And shortly after that, we had COVID. And so we went virtual. So, Fedora Women's Day was online in 2020. Meanwhile, we have been talking about, you know, should Fedora Women's Day be Fedora Week of Diversity? You know, supporting women was a very logical first step as a team to kind of have inclusive efforts and initiatives. But as we have evolved and grown as a community and just in general, our knowledge of these topics as a society, we realized, okay, we need to make this even broader. So, right now there is a effort to move from Fedora Women's Day to Fedora Week of Diversity. And that will happen for the first time this October. I also organized a team meetup in the spring. Just to bring everyone together, we spent a lot of time just chatting and trying to understand what happened with the team in the past. And so that we can move forward in a good way after I kind of identifying some of the issues that I had outlined a little bit earlier. So that is kind of where we're at today. We meet every two weeks. The attendance is kind of spotty. We are definitely not 450 with committees. But having that amount of people involved in these types of efforts would be awesome. So definitely want to learn from what y'all are doing. Okay, Ron, take it away. All right. And now to the panel discussion. So if you're just joining us, what we started off with was we started off with a brief introduction of the panelists. We shifted from that brief introduction of the panelists to talking about some of the history of Red Hat, talking about some of the history of BUILD, which stands for Blacks United in Leadership and Diversity. And we also shared some of the history of Fodor. So we've grounded that work. We've hopefully given you some background about the different organizations. And now we would like to jump into some of the panel questions. I would like to say that as we open it up and start this panel discussion, please start to put your questions in the Q&A so we can also use some of those questions to continue this panel discussion and have interaction with the audience. So for this first question, I'd like to ask Kimla. Tell me about one experience you have had with trying to build sustainable diversity, equity, and inclusion in your organization. So one of the things, you know, that was when we first started with, especially the campus and university outreach was really about trying to reach out because the difference with our committee, we was reaching out outside of Red Hat to HBCUs and other organizations that started trying to figure out what they need and what, you know, and even what Red Hat needed, trying to figure out what kind of partnership we was building. The hard part was in the beginning, we didn't have a lot of people that was part of my community. And it was hard to sustain that relationship with each one of these schools. And even just us starting locally, we have within the Raleigh Durham area, we have about five or six HBCU schools in addition to all the other organizations we were trying to partner with. So one of the things that was harder to do was to keep that relationship together and have a consistent, you know, you know, relationship with them where we'll constantly talk with them on a regular basis. So as I mentioned over this last year, we actually got an increase in our membership and also an increase in our committee membership. So now one of the things we're doing now to help sustain our committee in particular, and this is across with all our committees to be honest with you, but definitely I'm speaking more for our committee, which is the campus university outreach, is that now we have a lot more people to help us build that relationship with the different schools and the different organizations that we're partnering with. That's great. That's great. And yeah, I like how you brought in like, you know, the notion that, you know, from the perspective of campus and university outreach, one of the things that I think you're also talking about is turnover. Can you speak a little bit about turnover on the campus side and how we deal with that? Yes. So, you know, people, you know, it's one of the things when you're doing any committee and a membership is that, you know, trying to get volunteers and from both sides, because you have turnover, even on HBCU side, where you're meeting with a particular person, and they, you know, lead, they're just like any other organization, they have turnover on their side. So having that was always a problem, even having turnover within our organization and having people lead within our committee, and, you know, they'll come in and help. So it's really just, you constantly having to always figure out, you know, get more volunteers and reaching out to people. And now we kind of have, I kind of understand that most people just want to just do the work and say, okay, here's a workshop I need for you to do, like this one item is one event. So that's kind of how we're starting to do when it comes to volunteering, when it comes to a part, you know, the turnover on the HBCU side, we just constantly have to reach out. That's why it's good for us to have that continued relationship, because if that person is leaving, hopefully, because we built that relationship, they'll let us know and they'll listen to us to the next person. All right, excellent. Thank you for that. I'd like to turn it over and ask Marie the same question. So tell me a little bit about your experience with trying to build a sustainable DEI in Fodor. Sure. So as I stepped into the role of FKIC, I was handed over a project updating, reviving, modernizing Fodor's code of conduct. So this was like a huge effort, and it's the code is out. There's still more efforts that are being done for this. And it's something that a lot of people at this point, like, don't want to be involved in a community if there's not a code of conduct there. So people feel safer in our different platforms for chatting, and they have an avenue to come and resolve some of the issues or inevitable conflicts that will come up because of our differences in who we are. Matthew and I deal with code of conduct reports, and you know, there's just a lot of misunderstandings that can come between cultures and genders and et cetera, et cetera. So getting the code of conduct in place is a huge step for Fodor's DEI sustainability. And not only that, we involved the community in it as much as we possibly could and had a lot of rounds of feedback. So we believe that there is a significant amount of buy in it as well. I want to add a comment maybe from the perspective of the less engaged person. I think what the experience I got from my involvement in Fodor's community from the start was that generally the community is very friendly, and you start participating in the community, you don't see that much of a barrier, and it really helps to engage and start and so on. But I also learned that even though I had no particular goal to become the DEI representative or person like this, just by being there and being me there, I started to become like a focal point for many of these conversations in the local communities or in the community, in the ambassador group or further in there. And there was the experience I would say is the growth from just making it naturally because it just happens to you and you have to be in these situations anyway, to some understanding that probably various needs to be addressed and needs to be resolved in some broader scope and we can find each other and work together on resolving these things. So there is a certain growth once you enter the open source community and start working with it and look into those topics. Thank you for that. We do have two questions in the chat that I think are related to this question, so I do want to pause and shift the agenda slightly so that we make sure we get these in time. Luna asked, is it easier to get a job at Red Hat after school for these students that have already done some of the rail slash open shift courses, etc? Kimla, I don't necessarily know if you want to speak to that or if you would like for me to speak to that. I do, I can go ahead really quickly and say we really try and partner with the people team at Red Hat and we actually, part of the programs that we build, as Kimla mentioned in that introduction, we try to do soft skills, resume writing, we also try and bring in our Red Hat team, the Red Hat University team, to partner with these universities so that when they get to the step of internships, we have also facilitated meetings with managers and so we do try to make it easier for students to get a job at Red Hat and that's really the focus and the goal of Beals Campus and University Outreach. I don't know if Marie, if you or someone would like to discuss that also. I think in general, if you're able to be involved in Fedora or have open source, it's going to be easier to get a job at Red Hat. I would say absolutely yes, but I think that there's also been, I wouldn't say it, I don't know if it's a shift, but the messaging about hiring is very much we are hiring people at all skill levels and it's more about the human potential versus the, you know, having some super evolved expertise on something. Obviously, we need those people too, but I think that the hiring practices at Red Hat are, they're looking to become more diverse. Bottom line is though, if you're involved in Fedora, you probably have a step up at applying to Red Hat. Excellent. David Duncan also asked, what are the ways that you think general company policies and guidelines have changed to better support leadership programs like Beal? Marie mentioned the Code of Conduct. Are there others? Does anyone want to take that one? I can at least talk about a little bit on our side. For the ones that, you know, part of Red Hat, one of the new things that they did at Red Hat, they created a separate organization and now we, like if you remember, I said that we started off just the DNI, that it was like a program that was standing up. Well, as of this year, they actually implemented a whole organization called DEI, which is diversity. They put the equity, equitable part in there. So now, you know, that is, I feel like that's another way of them, you know, Red Hat saying that we're taking this, you know, seriously and they're trying to look at, you know, multiple areas, not just diversity, but make sure everybody can pay properly and things that sort of, make sure that people are included because once you hire, well, the other things you want to feel included. So it's really bringing what open source is, you know, and I guess, you know, almost full circle in a way by standing up this organization. And that's one step towards, you know, the leadership have been from a Red Hat perspective. And of course, we still got room to grow. That's always the case, but that's a step forward. Kim, it's been brought to our attention in the chat that your audio is a little bit choppy. You may want to refresh or you may want to drop out and come back, come right back in and we'll make sure you get promoted back to moderator. Let's make sure, if you all would, please continue to add your questions to the Q&A. We want to keep this interactive. We also want to try and make it through some of these questions that we have. The next question is leadership. What education and training has your organization participated in? I would like to kick this to the Fodor team first. I believe you have something that you'd like to share? Yeah, we have had one training which we recommended to the community. But at the same time for coming to the week of diversity, we have been looking at more and more resources on what we can recommend to the community on different time structure. If someone wants to spend a couple of hours to a week-long length course and how we can support that, there are more and more people can learn about that. The current, the one we have been recommending is this and we also have a badge for it. Fidora badges is very much loved in the Fidora community. People do it and then they come back to us that they completed the training and we award them a badge. We are also looking forward to have more of those. I have been working and I have been working with Marie and some more folks in the community on a resource space that we are trying to put it through for Fodor and for diversity. I think I have it online somewhere and I'll propose that in chat. It's from my personal note, it's not on docs.fp.org because we need to go through multiple review process but that resource space is something we are looking forward to and we can guide people to have certain trainings and then look on how we can support it. Be it from reimbursements or be trying to organize trainings for all of the people together. So, yeah, we are looking forward to those things. Thank you. I apologize for mispronouncing your name there. Go ahead, Marie. I just want to add a follow-up question actually not to the full and specific but everyone. You know, one of the things that we've been talking about is we've been organizing for the Fodor Week of Diversity is specific to these trainings is we're concerned that the only people who will show up for these trainings are people who are already very aware of these issues. So, how do we or how does anyone here in the chat on a panel kind of incentivize or encourage folks and actually get other people to join in folks that are not like naturally gravitating towards these topics? Go ahead, Matthew. All right. Yeah, so one thing one thing we have done is at NEST last year we had a keynote speech which was a plenary session everybody was invited to which was about diversity and its importance and we also picked a speaker with a great talk with a Star Trek nerd focus on it to have, you know, some specific appeal to our audience so that people who might have been like I'll skip that one might find a little twist on that and it was also, you know, a big focus of our conference. So that's one thing we've done. From my perspective I think it is important to understand that not all audiences are ready to talk about the diversity and inclusion the way the diversity and inclusion group talks about this and I see this a lot in some local communities and I think one way to address this is like to learn the language and learn the style of your target audience and find the way how to communicate with it in that language or in that style. It doesn't mean you need to like discard your goals of building the diverse community but you need to understand that like you cannot always come to the community with the banner like let's be diverse, diverse and inclusive and everyone will be happy about it. So we need to find more different forms of communication in different ways. How do we engage with people without like really pushing the same kind of communication as we use in other audiences. So tailoring the message to the specific audience is important and not being too direct but maybe becoming more subtle sometimes and more like understanding to be target audience to which you are working with. Like the stark reference, yeah, as you mentioned. Excellent. I want to close this one out. I just want to say that what we had is a rich environment for education and training in this space. We have opportunities participated in LinkedIn training. We have sessions that are conducted by our DEI affinity groups and so there's also training outside of Red Hat that is posted to MemoList in other areas and so I often take advantage of the vast amount of resources that we have to learn about this perspective and to try and educate myself further on this. There's a lot of great questions in the chat. I do want to move to the next question because I want to get Mariana in here to talk a little bit about strategy and then I'm going to go back to some of the questions in the chat. So Mariana, how are we planning to implement yearly goals to move our DEI strategy forward? How are you going to measure those goals? Talk a little bit about strategy. The closest action from the Fedora perspective towards diversity inclusion is Fedora Week of Diversity which just by renaming it and focusing into diversity in general except only women I think is a great action to take. Besides that I would like to mention the outreach participation and other mentorship programs which help directly the students that work on the program but also help the mentors that mentor the students and help them bring closer to people that suffer from diversity issues. Another thing that the council did last month two months ago in June is that we launched a survey to the community and a part of that survey aimed to gather some feedback from the Fedora community in terms of how they feel when it comes to participation, how they feel when it comes to joining teams, joining mailing lists, et cetera, et cetera. I think the next step towards that is have that data collected, analyze it and try to build a strategy in the upcoming months or for the upcoming months or even for the upcoming years towards that. And of course the documentation that people mentioned earlier I think this is a very, very important step towards diversity inclusion within the Fedora community into having something in region four besides events. Yes, thank you. Ben Cotton has a great follow-up question and I think someone from the Fedora team can talk, speak to. A lot of DEI companies seem to focus on compensation and career advancement, but those don't necessarily apply directly to open source communities. How can Fedora improve our DEI in similar ways? Everyone now thinks about the question. Yeah, I think Ben you stumped us and in terms of DEI you can't necessarily solution everything. I think that we would invite you in to work with the group and work with Fedora and work with Red Hat to come up with some of the ways that we can change some of this focus from a compensation and from a career perspective, career advancement perspective. I think the compensation in the open source community is more about giving a credit and making these people visible and valuable by the community and one way to make certain efforts compensated in open source communities is to provide the publicity and the necessary support in this way for the effort and making these people visible. We did some of this when we, for example, highlighted the testers of Fedora who made the Fedora really successful, which does not always happen and with the DEI efforts we also need to show the people who invested time in it and achieve something and we need to talk more about this and bring this as a reward to the people who invested time in this. That's one aspect how we can do it. Can I add something here? So from Ben's question I understand that compensation refers to monetary compensation so when it comes to money within the Fedora community I would say that sponsoring contributors into attending big events has been something that really has helped contributor into connecting with one another but actually gaining more experience and knowledge into different topics. Yeah I've seen quite a bit of revolution in sponsorship and how that's been used in an open source community, particularly sponsoring people and creating open source software and GitHub and things like that. Go ahead, I apologize, I interrupted someone. No no so mentorship is also something open source communities can do a lot and it can range from participating in outreach which requires certain funding to also other programs which does not require a lot of funding and sometimes none and just it requires knowledge transfer kind of things and Fedora as mentor project committee in mind share I'm also responsible for looking on all the mentorship projects that Fedora wants to participate in and Mari and I have been looking into more and more programs which does this thing mentor more people who may not have the same options and opportunities so that's something open source committees can do and not just outreach but even more. All right excellent I want to bring Kimla back in here to talk a little bit about strategy and then we're trying to move on to some of the questions and some of the next slides that we have. Okay now can you guys hear me okay now because I don't want to talk at this okay cool all right so one of the things I guess around our strategy that you know that we changed up a little bit this year I mean we always kind of had yearly goals it kind of came down to whether we had enough volunteers to kind of implement some of the workshops and things that we had put in place for those yearly goals so this year we actually did that and also we're making sure we kind of have a strategy now of knowing what workshops over the years we started learning okay in the fall we want to prepare our students for the internship program that's coming up there that usually we start that the people team at Red Hat you know sends out those job requests you know round October timeframe so we try to make sure we have workshops in place you know doing those times so we focus on making sure we have enough events and workshops where we're preparing our students and then by doing that we measure a lot of those goals by seeing how you know whether we're advertising good enough by looking at how many people actually attend and then the people also look at how many people actually even apply from an internship as much as we can we don't know directly because one of the things about when you get the when you start coming in-house is that those numbers doesn't always can be seen by us because of privacy issues and things of that sort but we can somewhat see they people team are able to tell us whether that person came would attend it some of our events or not so that's one way of us trying to measure you know give you one strategy that we use for um measuring those type of goals there's other goals that we do but I just wanted I just trying to keep my question short that's the one I'll focus on you know the most absolutely we want to um yes we want to continue on to the next question and try and get some more audience engagement so the next one is actually focused on engagement so how will we continue to engage with our community on a regular basis and what is the best form of communication to keep our diversity and equity and inclusion community informed and aware so um I'm not sure who wants to take this one first I'll tell us to the entire panel I can kind of go first at least kind of tell you guys what we kind of do we have to do multiple avenues what I have learned and continue to learn as now that we have interest coming in we actually even asked them like how can we reach you especially from the student side of things you know it's like they have a I'm to be honest I've been you know in out of away from college year you know life for a long time so and I feel like you know my age and just how you know students communicate now is a lot different than I was back in my day so um so it was it's more about you know everybody's talking about their influence right so what I learned this year for my interns is that sometimes we have to leverage the students that was part of our internships that kind of help us communicate some of this continuing engagement with some of our schools that's one avenue we're going to look into this year other than that we also send out surveys to the students that sign up so when people sign up for our different events we ask them do they want to continue to receive information from us so we do send emails out too but you know sometimes you can see those emails and sometimes they don't and then the other one is caused by social media and we you know try to post things on our different you know social media platforms whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram it's probably two that I mostly kind of focus on so I can talk a little bit about um FWD so uh as I mentioned we're moving to the Fedora Week of Diversity and um this is a yearly event that's evolved from Fedora Women's Days so we do plan to continue um running that event yearly uh I'm not sure how it'll look if we're we're going back to in person but um it's been great to have people all together so definitely engaging in that way um also you know we meet regularly um as I mentioned though we do have a small team so there's less resources to do all those types of promotions and talking with uh every you know network and avenue that we have so in some ways we have to you know rely on our uh the the contribution circle like right around the team as well right so mindshare committee and some of the other uh the community blog and and things of that nature I want maybe to add to this uh as we discussed in the previous question that um sometimes we need a local kind understanding of this topic so it works for the local environment for the local community so maybe worth mentioning that uh if you want to participate it doesn't mean that there are like set of rules written in stone which is how DNI effort should be done and you should just learn how to do it and copy it but you can have your own ideas and the way to like engage with the EI communities uh really uh maybe you do something for us and then tell us what have you done and how it worked it also works right so so try to uh I think it's important to like not just follow the uh rules or ideas which are provided to uh the EI community but also like uh maybe find something like this in your current work in your current environment and then just share every experience with the rest of us uh to know how this this works and then and so on so this community engagement means uh we just need to learn about each other in and to share the experience this and to communicate on on these topics that's uh how I would see it also thank you for that I want to do a quick time check I think uh I'm at 10 46 a.m eastern standard time are we going to 10 50 or till 11 we can go right up till 11 or a few minutes before some of us might have sessions right after this okay uh thank you I appreciate that I do want to be respectful of everyone's time um the next question that I see in the chat I do see there there have been quite a few questions asks I think and I totally ask are there any quantitative metrics for DEI is a dashboard possible and I want to just jump in and take this uh Kimmel and I participated in an open source uh certificate technology um certificate and then we got this opportunity through Brandeis it was an opportunity offered to select people at Red Hat and we learned quite a bit about the open source community we learned quite a bit about learning the metrics that you can use to measure success uh within open source communities and there was actually a suite of metrics that were designed to measure open source community designed to measure participation and engagement and there were some quantitative measurements about measuring diversity of your board measuring diversity of your events and things like that so if you were to take kind of all of those metrics I think you could potentially build a dashboard but I think you potentially and you know as others have said you really want to define those metrics based on your community and also consider um some local variation if you are to engage in that I don't know if there are other people that want to respond to that as well I'll respond to that one um so this is a topic that we've talked about many many times um we would love to have some more data about Fedora's DEI the unfortunate truth around that is that it involves a lot of personally identifying information and that takes legal resources to handle that Fedora as a community uh doesn't necessarily have we do have some legal resources but not that many whereas you know Red Hat has you know they're serving maybe their own um their own employees or you know you're you're having students opt in to something that's going to advance their career in Fedora people are very privacy minded so gathering these types of pieces of information is problematic on the several different axes so we kind of have to focus on other things like Marianna was talking about like are people comfortable to speak up in channels right are people comfortable emailing our mailing lists that sort of thing I think if our resources in that department grew or Red Hat became invested understanding that uh data then maybe we can move forward with you know doing surveys that are quite that specific but a problem with that is because we have such unique contributors if we find you know we even if it's anonymous if there's someone who's in Italy who's identifies as gay and there's only one gay contributor in Italy then now we know like who that person is so it becomes problematic on a couple different levels even for the people who would be looking at the data so just a little note on that side from Fedora all right excellent thank you for sharing that the next question was from Daniel he asked uh in in a remote work and distributed like Fedora it's impossible to look around the office and get an idea of how diverse it might be so how do you really think about remote diversity equity inclusion efforts well I think just the point that I was making just to go off of that right we have the survey where we're really looking into folks sentiment around like inclusion and comfortability and accessibility to our resources our people etc etc so you know we're looking at um what you know looking forward to next year's results on a separate note I will say that I have a feeling in my soul that we have increased our DI effort DI efforts simply by being virtual right so you probably if you've been around the sessions you know we've been talking a lot about like registrations and our goal there right and we've just seen like increasing numbers at all of our events and I think that just means that we're reaching more people right the people who are weren't previously able to travel to conferences so we are reaching people who are stay-at-home moms or need to take care of their family members over the weekends or have pets or simply folks who are neurodivergent and would not be comfortable in a conference environment so I think that we can say that virtual going virtual the silver lining is the accessibility that we've seen for folks who were previously not able to reach this content so moving forward hybrid is going to be what we do once in person events happen um and what that looks like is still up in the air excellent I see one more question in the chat and I do think we have one more question in slots I think we will have enough time to cover both the focus is on leadership obviously from David how do we extend this to outside of the technology we're used to at red hat etc and so I think the questionnaire is you know many of the the efforts in diversity equity inclusion is trying to call people into leadership but you know what about areas outside of technology I mean a lot of times we focus on kind of engineering and products and things like that but we don't necessarily focus and again David I would love for you to clarify if I'm misinterpreting your question but we don't often focus on like maybe leadership in marketing or leadership in the people team or other areas that are not technology focused and and I can say that we you know one of the things least within build I definitely try to make sure I don't focus completely on technology because I'm not a developer I'm not an engineer so I also try to mix it up and in partner with other people within red hat we did have a lot of different organizations within red hat that reached out to build as far as helping to increase their diversity numbers and so it's definitely we definitely do that and actually I can actually tell you even within the internship it is a number of people that that came from not they weren't just technology they was mostly they was across the board we had people from not from a people team that was part you know that was interning we had people from you know the marketing team we had a multiple facet on that where we don't focus on both I know that one of the things we're doing like I said we talked about soft skills and that's mostly that you're going to need across the board so we do try to make sure we focus on all areas as much as we can you know but like I said if it's really want to get targeted on a particular organization such as marketing what they're trying to do then you can you can create workshops surrounding that and make sure you get the right type of you know the right you know skill set for to hire those people in marketing area hopefully we kind of answer your question on that all right awesome so I think we can move to the last question maybe wrap this up we appreciate the participation what future plans does your organization organization have to continue this work participation in more mentorship program that has a focus on this is one as I mentioned fedora week of diversity and actually I'll just plug the session right after this we're doing a tell your fedora story fedora week of diversity session so that that we're really excited about to see what we can do for the first time around with it and we hope to engage our community with that yeah I'd like to put a quick plug in some in for some of the work that we're doing in campus and university outreach some of our future plans are we would like to build a series of workshops that are focused on professional careers and we would like to take these this series of workshops to different hbc us to introduce them to things like engineering marketing to to to being an architect to to whatever opportunities there are at red hat also trying to support that but also introducing them to our certification process and red hat academy so um yeah I think you might as well it was it was my connection and I I missed the last thing that you said and I came back everyone silent I'm like what's going on I think we're just wrapping up here I really want to appreciate everyone's participation definitely if you have questions this is a community effort and we appreciate your thoughtful questions we appreciate your thoughtful feedback I think we all are maybe in agreement that this is the first step in a very long journey so we would like to invite you all then to participate in this and and and help us grow as a community thank you so much for your participation and take care and thank you so much Kimla and Ron for coming here we're really glad to have you in the fedora community here with us yes thanks everybody and the other panelists as well