 Yeah, welcome to a diversity panel. We're going to be talking with three people locally and one person remote, and they will be introducing themselves in a moment. Really quickly before that I would like to say, while people are looking, I think I'm going to do an LGBTQ open space tomorrow, maybe sometime right before lunch, so watch the board. I'll put it up there, okay? That's just a quick sort of slightly diversity-related commercial. But now what we would like to do is actually go and have our introductions from the people that are going to be speaking about diversity. For those of you who are watching in the audience, they've been asked to briefly introduce themselves and say a little bit about what they think diversity means for them. So let's actually start with our remote guest. So go ahead. Hi, everybody, and yeah, so greetings to Dublin. I'm tuning in from Hamburg, Germany, and I was supposed to be there, but I decided to go for the famous virus or infamous. Yeah, so my name is Teresa. I'm part of the Hamburg Python community and PyLadies, and I've been working in the diversity and inclusion space of the Python community for quite a while now. So I joined the PSF Diversity and Inclusion Workgroup two years ago, and also I'm part of the Code of Conduct Workgroup with the PSF and recently the Diversity and Inclusion in Scientific Computing Committee. So yeah, that's about me and passing on. Thank you, Naomi. Okay, Marlene. Hi, everyone. My name is Marlene Mangami, and I am a Python developer from Zimbabwe. I am part of Diversity and Inclusion in terms of the fact that I am the current chair of the PSF Diversity and Inclusion Workgroup. I also, just in general, I'm really passionate about diversity and inclusion, mainly from the perspective of geographical diversity and inclusion. I'm from, like I mentioned before, I'm from Zimbabwe, and I am the previous chair of PyCon Africa and an outgoing vice chair of the PSF. So really interested in having Africans and other, you know, not just Africans, but Python people from across the world represented and having a space within the Python community. So yeah, that's me. Hi, folks. My name is Sikpal Abdullah. I'm a Malaysian Piper, but I reside in Japan, Tokyo, for the past over 20 over years. I was the founder and organizer for PyCon Japan and also PyCon Malaysia, and currently I'm helping around managing the regional PyCon APEC, which I hope to pitch to you folks in one of our LTs. We are going to have it in September, but that's going to be for the LTs. In the context of the PSF, in general, I am currently now affiliated with the DNI Workgroup, which is chaired by Malin, and also the Trademarks Worth Group, which is co-chaired by David Mertz and also Mark Andrelemberg. Diversity and inclusion on a personal point of view, so I cannot speak for my compatriots from the APEC region, but on a personal point of view, is actually sharing a common set of values that is beneficial to the community, regardless of where or how you come from or how you look like. Hi, everyone. My name is Navanita Roy. I am a data scientist at ACI Worldwide, and I've been residing in Ireland for about five years now. I work with women in AI Ireland, their education lead. I try to build programs that help women and also men, and anybody who wants to really skill up in the realm of AI wants to get a taste of how it is like to work with Python and the different tools about data science and analytics, help them out, build programs that support these people. And diversity and inclusion really excites me, and really, you know, great to hear all the introductions here and great to know these people who work in this realm as well. And it's important to me as well, and I really don't like to associate it with like different individual work groups, but I like to address diversity inclusion for anybody who feels inferior to step up to do whatever they want and basically just be free from all the stereotypes. Thank you. Thank you. The first thing we're going to do since we do have some members of the PSF Diversity and Inclusion Work Group is just have a little sketch of what that is because maybe many of you weren't aware that it existed or don't know what it does. So for that I think we're going to start with Marlene and then after that other people will kind of add what they might. Great. Thank you. So the Diversity and Inclusion Work Group is a group that is sort of part of the PSF or coming out of the PSF and the goal is to further the PSF's mission to make sure the Python community is as international and as diverse and welcoming as possible. So our goal as the Diversity and Inclusion Work Group is just to make sure that continues happening and in a more I would say strategic and intentional way. And you know just some background in terms of where this came from is that for those of you who don't know Python is a very popular programming language and Python is being used on every single continent in the world. It is being used by over 10 million people globally. But when we look at the leadership of Python whether that is in our core development team or when we look at the board of directors we don't see the diversity of the users represented in that leadership. And so this kind of the Diversity and Inclusion Work Group actually came about when the PSF which is the nonprofit behind Python had some elections in 2020 actually in 2020. A great year for all of us. But in 2020 what happened was several people ran for the board of directors and in that year I think most of the people that made it onto the board of directors were from North America and Europe. And even currently right now there are 13, 12, 13 directors on the board of directors for the PSF and out of those 13 only two of those people are not from Europe or North America. And when you put that in the context of the fact that the Python language is being used by over 10 million people across the world it shows that there's some disparity there and there's a lack of representation. So in 2020 there was some sort of community discussion where a lot of people didn't think that this was good and sort of voiced those concerns. The board got involved in those discussions and the community was from different parts of the world was very vocal about the thoughts thinking that that was unfair and so the diversity inclusion workgroup came out as a result of that and currently the workgroup has representatives from every single continent around the world with the exception of Antarctica. So I have been asking if someone is from Antarctica please reach out to me. But yeah so we want to make sure that we are making the board or the community as representative as welcoming to people from all around the world and we're starting with geographical representation as our main focus for the workgroup. So yeah that's a bit of a summary of what the diversity and inclusion workgroup is about. Okay. Anyone want to add anything to that? I think Marlene summed it up very well. Teresa do you have anything you want to see? Okay. And I do want to be clear that this session is not just about that working group but we wanted to kind of give you a little bit of background as to that's where some of our experience comes from. So the first question that we have down for people to answer would be what do you see as the biggest challenge to increasing diversity and inclusion in Python communities and you kind of choose the scope? Is it locally, nationally, globally, whatever? So I default, why don't you? Go ahead. Okay. The biggest challenge. So working on what Marlene just mentioned just now so unfortunately I'm using an example by the PSF again but it also boils down to that in a way. The diversity and inclusion workgroup was started because we wanted to address a problem whether it's a real or perceived problem from different parts of the world of the lack of representation and diversity in the leadership. And the root cause from my point of view is actually the lack of involvement from the community worldwide in choosing that leadership. And this when we think about it, so I've done some discussions in my own community. It's, what's the word for it, the apathy. So I don't see how this organization relates to me and how it can better my situation so I do not get myself involved. And because of that we do not have the so-called grassroots movement to actually make the change in the diversity itself because people are not getting involved. So at least in my part of the world that seems to be one of the hardest things to do because you need to come down to the level, a very low level where you actually convince people and give them reasons why they need to get involved in the first place and how can it affect your work or your livelihood or your quality of life. So that's from my perspective. Thank you. I think I'll talk from the Ireland's perspective and from what I've seen in women being involved with women in AI for about two and a half years now. I think in the Python community or in the women in AI community there's very less participation of the local people. I think the most percentage of the group has participation from different other places. They're immigrants, they're not basically from Ireland. So there's a disparity in the motivation of why do you want to be involved with the community, with any community. So once, you know, and there are some people who want to take away maybe, you know, a job or some recognition and then that's it for them. So when the time comes when you actually give back to the community there's a gap there. So I think that has been a challenge, retaining that motivation has been a challenge for us and then growing a sense of, oh, you know, you've got what you've gotten but now it's a time for you to transfer, motivate, mentor more people to follow your path really, you know. I think it's been a challenge for us here in, you know, from the Irish background. Theresa. Thank you. So yeah, I think this is also happening in Germany or in Europe but another issue I think is also that most of everything that we do today is in English and English is not the main language of everybody, right? So, and sometimes diversity and inclusion means also tackling difficult topics that it's not really easy to tackle in a language that is not your own. So I think there's been quite a lot of effort in the Python community to translate some of the documentation. I think Spanish is almost done but there's so many other languages that have a lot of people and if you think about code of conduct or if you think about, yeah, even like documentation of how to, like people getting involved and like contributing to the ecosystem, this is currently mostly in English and I think this is still, then it mostly feels foreign for a lot of people. So I think that's actually quite a big of a, that's quite a challenge that is not really obvious to the people when we speak, when our English is quite fine. That is a big challenge in India as well because I'm from India and it has got a diversity of languages so sometimes I understand that problem because not everyone knows or is well spoken in English and also understanding what somebody else is saying. Some concepts are difficult to understand and I think many companies are doing a lot in bridging that gap. Yeah, I definitely in line with what was just said even in terms of language barriers but I think there's so many, I mean, I think the world is divided even by opportunities, economic boundaries, things like that and by virtue of the fact that the creator of the language is born in one of, lives in or was born in one of the wealthier parts of the world then what happens is the community around that or the center of that community is kind of based in those spaces and I think sometimes the aftermath of that, what it looks like is that we have a very large growing community, python community on the continent of Africa but it is very difficult for example to become a python developer to become a python developer in Africa to become for example a core developer because maybe a lot of some of the core developers for example become core developers by attending the sprints but people who's leading the sprints is the core developers themselves and if they're from North America or Europe then it's unlikely that they'll be at a sprint in Africa and so because of that there's like this bridge that's not there where those opportunities are just not there for many African developers and I don't think it's just those things but like lots of things like Theresa just mentioned the language barrier can be a problem but I really think it's I think a lot of the issues are just just not being connected as a global community and having those opportunities or having the center of the language be in regions of the world that are not accessible to everyone as well Thank you Now of course those were the challenges we also wanted to give everyone a chance to talk about a success so the follow up question is what is a success you can think of again you can choose the scope and yeah let's start Navanita why don't you kick off Success in terms of addressing this challenge is so one thing that I've been doing is even though it's a volunteering organization I've been having meetings with these people individually and trying to understand what they really want to achieve and if I can motivate them to contribute a little bit more I've also setting those expectations from them and basically making them aware what they could achieve even with whatever little they do to help us down the line the other thing is in terms of the language barrier I myself have been involved in translating a few things and wanting I've contributed a few projects in there to translate the concepts in my native language and someday I would like to translate all my blogs in my language and then publish it there because it's pretty much kind of a remote place most people understand English but then there is a huge urban and rural gap in India and so people who belong to the rural areas who do not have access to the English materials at all they will not understand it so it's one of my ambitions sometime later but yeah thanks I could say that yeah that's it for me let me break in here I'm going rogue, I'm sorry we were going very orderly but the question of translation do any of the others of you have any comments about that process it's impossible, it's easy what do you think of the challenge of translating the documentation the community stuff into various other languages any thoughts on that? the key problem here is the terminologies number one, number two the Python is predominantly written in English so even though I translate the concepts in my language you still need to have some knowledge of English in order to write code so that's another thing these are the two things that comes to my mind any other comments? can I just add on successes this is also concerns with the translation and how the different languages how do we actually overcome the barrier so from my region specifically East Asia South East Asia none of the countries have English as their main language none but as something which I'm proud of we've overcome that and we have run the regional Python APEC since 2010 for a single year now and all these different countries communities basically all these different communities they have figured out what they think they need for their community and they've organized around that so we've basically given a free hand to each of the communities to decide what you want to do for your particular conference even though it's a regional conference everyone else from the rest of the countries around them will come there we make the regional conference for example you have the Euro Python here in Ireland so in our case we have the Python APEC but it is for the Irish so in this case for the Singaporeans or for the Malaysians for the Japanese-Indonesians for the Vietnamese so we welcome guests but we do it for us and in that sense it's two of them will be in English but there will be one track in the local language that's what we do and what is important is that language barrier what Teresa just mentioned Malin just mentioned a very important thing just now it's opportunities so language barriers they take away opportunities from our community people who have the talents and have the capabilities but do not have the tools because they don't have access to the tools so when we have this special track which is a local language it opens up access to role models where people can come up and ask concepts in the language that they are family with which allows them to get hooked and climb into our collective bus towards a particular destination for the community so this is one of I think that Python APEC the Southeast Asia region is very proud of one of the success I think we can consider any other comments on the language Oh, maybe I'll go and then Teresa you can go off to me but I think it's a complicated issue because like even for us to be here even for the diversity and inclusion work group to communicate amongst ourselves there has to be a shared language so if I could not speak English you wouldn't be listening to me right now you wouldn't unless we had like great translation and that's something that Python is also involved in right now maybe we need more real time translation and I feel like at some point we do need some shared language and I mean in Africa you have a lot of Africans being able for example to speak English because we were colonized by the British so a lot of people can speak English but I think so in a way English is sort of this bridge language that we have to use at the moment and I think as a stepping stone to get to a place where we are at least on as much equal ground as we can be I think English is fine as a stepping stone but I do think ideally in the future as we are going on these opportunities cannot stay in English like it both is we need to continue this you know movement to making sure the languages translated into as many you know Python documentation is translated into as many languages as possible and that becomes quite difficult because I don't know necessarily if like how many people are going to be completely just relying on the Python core documentation it's like tutorials and things like that and I think that's also like a community issue as well that our communities, smaller communities as well need to be translating as well but that's something we've seen quite a lot of progress in recently in terms of the amount of Python documentation or like central documents that have been translated and I think even as a Christian inclusion work group we had a slide like on US where we showed the progress in terms of improvement of translation so I do think it's improving I think English is a necessary evil for the moment so that is what I will say on that probably Yeah, Teresa please Yeah so I think coming back to what Iqbal was mentioning also with the tooling so the tooling itself sometimes can be a barrier when it's just in English especially as it's like tools we use every day and I remember I was at Kaya Cascades two years ago and during the Spring there was a track on translation and that's how I found out that there's quite a lot of effort and available it's super easy to get into just translating and providing like translations which is like sentence level for Jupiter lab right which is a lot of people are using Jupiter lab and I did it because I'm from Romania and I basically I just did it as I had time back then to do some sentences to translate in Romanian so that the tool is available in Romanian on one side it's really easy once you have this information to contribute but basically it's not encountered quite often since then like in your face hey look if you want to contribute to translating these tools improving this ecosystem making it more inclusive and accessible how do you do it this information is kind of a little bit like grapevine and kind of not really like you know advertised a lot so I think it's also something that we could do because I think a lot of people think that contributing to open source means just writing code but sometimes there's a lot of stuff happening around the code that would be a lot easier to get into than just writing perfect code to become a contributor but even translating is contributing so I think initiatives like this to have them a little bit more like better advertised is something that this is also something that we could do and could help quite a lot of people down the line okay thank you well okay so sorry for derailing everything let's get back to the other so Teresa I think you're up next in terms of a success that you would like to call attention to okay yeah well that was that right I think that was a success that was mentioned and I think the fact that well Python documentation was translated I think last year almost 100% in Spanish and Chinese was also not far away but yeah so I think another success story that whenever I think about diversity and inclusion is the data umbrella community and I think they are doing quite a lot to onboard new people in the United States contributing to open source running sprints also in Africa everything is remote and basically really doing a lot of effort into just getting people from outside the United States contributing to open source and like just getting that one step just getting the foot through the door so I think I really being encouraged by seeing the growth in the number of people for example that feel confident enough to run for the PSF board of directors like this year we had more people running for the board at least since I've been around since then ever I'm sure this is the most amount of people that have run and it was very diverse so many great candidates unfortunately all of the people that got elected onto the board were from North America and Europe though there were so many candidates from all across the world I don't know what's going on there but it was still very encouraging to see how many people felt confident enough to run I am also encouraged by the number of Python conferences that we're seeing around the world you know I've been to so many Python conferences across Africa and I think that number is increasing even in terms of the number of meetups and things like that I mean we now have a pike on Middle East in Africa as well so I feel like that is very encouraging I mean pike on China so many pike-ons happening across that region as well so I think just seeing the community continuing to grow and connecting to the PSF is something that is very encouraging to me as well you mentioned the success of language do you have another one I can't really point to something but the fact that in such a diverse region with different languages you don't have the same kind of people even for example in Indonesia for example you have the Sumatra Islands from Ache up until down to Australia even within Indonesia itself which is the biggest island nation in the world has many many different types of people and languages on it and just getting all of us together on the base of the platform of the base values for the whole community we want them to enjoy this have access to these equal opportunities for that they can have the tools that they need to do what they want and move on in their careers or in the life and whatever they do we've managed to run that so far without much issues having the conferences the meetups to be accessible affordable and making it our own I think alone is one of our biggest success yeah excellent okay we've got a couple more questions here for the group the next one is what is your suggestion maybe the thing you could do if you could wave a magic wand and just have something happen what is your take on how to get more people involved be that in terms of voting as I think Paul mentioned in PSF elections or in your local community however you see that so let's see I think because we've rotated Teresa you're up okay of the PSF for example just small advertisement if you're contributing I think 5 hours a month to Python community that means you're running a meetup everybody knows just running one meetup a month takes more than 5 hours so any of this qualifies you for becoming a Python software foundation member and then that gives you the so managing member and then you can just vote so getting more people from everywhere in the world to just join and you know you get the news newsletters and whatnot and then you see where there's elections and you're basically part of the loop and you can vote next time so that would be something that I would do just get everybody using Python to join the PSF members Marlene what do you think 100% I think what Teresa said in terms of getting our regional communities to vote but I also think as well getting people from Europe or North America to vote with diversity and inclusion in mind keeping in mind the statistics we talked about earlier hopefully that would make someone think twice before putting down a name that maybe you've seen around Twitter or something like that and instead maybe be a bit more thoughtful in terms of how for PSF members how you vote so it's a combination of those two things where it is within our regions trying to motivate people to vote of which that is like a little difficult we were talking about this actually quite a lot in terms of how do we encourage people from our regions to understand the importance of voting and to kind of motivate them to be able to do that which I think is actually quite difficult to do but those two things I think would be my suggestion Okay Well, yeah so a few things here, can I just see a show of hands in the audience where are you a PSF member in any form these will be the people who has not raised their hands these are the questions that we'll be asking them they will give us the best answers why are you not joining PSF, why are you not a voting member number one it is true as part of the DNI workgroup we have started a questionnaire to actually first to get to know what our community members look like where are you from, what cover languages that you speak and why are you aware of the PSF and that you can vote in the PSF and so far we have known from this data that around 70% are not members of the PSF or they don't understand that they can actually vote in the PSF and what the Board of Directors does in fact, so we know this and if I have a magic wand which now me hopefully could give me one day I'm more than that I guess you are I'll just wave it and make everyone understand this is a PSF, this is for you this is the community and actually it is up to us to actually take action and make it shape the way that we want it to be to reflect the real us the 10 million people that is using Python around the world today so if you will be kind enough to spend just a little bit 5 minutes get down to the PSF booth and then we have QR code there which you can scan and you can put in your details in the questionnaire tell us where you're from, what cover languages you speak and whether you understand what the PSF does so that is one thing that I would like the audience to do during the conference next one so I haven't been a part of the PSF you can make it for your community but yeah, so that's where I'm going so probably there's some gap because of which I haven't known before the panel and now that I knew it so I wanted to figure out what that is so I went I registered myself as a member I'm probably the newest member there and maybe after this I will be more involved in there so if I had a magic wand for the same reason maybe I would want to make people aware of all these different initiatives that are going on to involve more people to take part thank you we've got one more question that we have on our list of things that we wanted to cover which is actually from Iqbal and it raises the point that Python Software Foundation is a US based non-profit and then the take that they have is the US perspective on diversity and inclusion and one thing I have learned in traveling and in talking to people is that everybody in every different place has a different set of concerns and solutions for diversity and inclusion so our question here is particularly based in contrast this is EuroPython for those of you who are in Europe the two of you what would you say are some differences maybe that you wished were more recognized in the terms of what the European reality is versus our default tendency to push the US perspective to the front well I can talk from the women in EI perspective and in Ireland I think there are very less women right now in the workspace in STEM in general and I think that is because they don't have role models from when they start schooling and by the time they're in high school they've already made a decision for themselves I think this might extend to the greater EMEA region but by the time they're already choosing their subjects they have an opinion that they might not want to go to STEM maths might be too difficult for them assumptions like these so that's kind of a challenge and going back to maybe India a lot of people are there in STEM you will find so many women are there but the same problem the diversity and inclusion problem goes when you climb higher up in your career two very contrasting subjects here one where you need a lot of motivation to go take the STEM route and I think the very few people who come they've done excellent jobs they've been working up the career whereas in India which is a developing country there are many women who are there in STEM who want to pursue STEM their family wants them to pursue STEM but they only go up to a certain level so that's a D&I challenge and two different perspectives interesting can you elaborate so when they go up in more like seniority levels there are loads of responsibilities but at the same time you have changes in your personal life and that's where the gap comes in expectation from society your general rule I see Teresa I would say that's still a problem in Germany as well I think if you look at women in leadership the percentages drop quite a lot or if they are still rising they are maybe for the wrong reasons and I think I still remember when I was running piloties meetups in Hamburg in person I still was getting sometimes every now colleague asking isn't this discrimination if I'm running meetups just for women and it's all this I think a lot of the diversity conversations have just not started sometimes it feels like compared to the United States and this is sometimes something that people working in diversity and inclusion in Europe they just need to be prepared for all sorts of a lot of like this random statements questions well meant which are Indian in any other country would be considered microaggressions but here they are like well meant so yeah I think it sometimes feels like we are a little bit lagging behind and it's going to take a lot of it takes a lot more I don't know energy than it should and so yeah climbing up the career ladder is a lonely planet for women in Germany at least I don't know about the rest of Europe but I expect at some point it becomes like that and a lot of companies if you look at even the statistics on startups and who's like women founders and big companies you know they are inherited and stuff like that it doesn't really look good so that's why I think there's a lot of effort at least in Europe to at least get more women through the door of yeah in the diversity and inclusion so in companies in coding, in STEM and there's a lot of initiatives for getting people from school already because so I come from Romania where kids don't grow up being told all the time that at least you can't study math because you're a girl and you're not going to be so good at it but I've heard the stories way more often in Germany right and I think this is something that is currently being fought this one front you know to how to get kids in school to go to STEM you know to kind of find that math is cool and it's not hard at all and things like this so I think yeah so it feels a little bit like the world wants to go into one direction and we have to kind of try to keep the world not going in that bad direction that it's trying to go to at the moment but can I just add to that as the single male panelist I just want to say that I acknowledge this, this is a problem but it's not a single problem for uterus cell it's actually a worldwide problem half of our world's population is women and we are not using the power, the force we are basically just working on one feet I mean one leg when we have two right unfortunately I don't have the answer to this world problem of ours I think I would like to use the magic wand from Naomi to resolve this instead if I can Japan is not really a great example of empowerment of giving opportunities to women the latest study says that we are actually one of the lowest ranking in the disparity of the women not only in STEM but in politics, in senior positions in leadership roles there are many reasons for this which two panel will not even surface right, like all of you already know but it is a problem and we need to do whatever we can at least small steps to actually solve this fundamentally I mean Marlon do you want to go say or maybe I fundamentally there is a problem of having role models in one of the recent conferences people say that women seek more mentorship women seek guidance more than men and I think that's because men have a lot of role models out there and they can see guidance mentorship pretty much available but when women don't see women or any other whatever you identify with they don't see somebody like them up on the stage for them it becomes like can I do it or if they see that one person on the stage they tend to go to them and ask them can I do it can you help me get it whereas when you see there are five women on the stage I could be one of them there's a very different you know psychology that goes behind it yeah I think that's right yeah I think absolutely that is a layer that is there I think that for women definitely just being underrepresented in general in programming and computer science when honestly we really shouldn't be like I just don't really understand like yeah it's just that I think is a really big barrier in terms of how we also approach diversity and inclusion from that inspiration perspective or thinking I can do something I think also the layer when we even drop down one layer deeper as well I think in a difference for example between like what we were saying a different in perspective from maybe the US or Europe and for example with Africa it's just like sometimes the diversity that we have to take into consideration is like economic diversity and that's like probably for me I would say in Africa probably the number one thing that is like on my mind when I think about diversity and inclusion there say for example right now we are going we went into COVID and I I mean here with Europe Python and Python US and all of these other conferences it was like relatively seamless to be able to host a remote conference Teresa is calling us in from you know calling here from Germany but when we tried to organize Python Africa remotely it was very difficult it was extremely difficult and you know prices of data I feel like data is just very expensive and it's not always like easy to stream things live and things like that and so I just think in terms of like economics that's like makes there be like an extra layer there and so we are even thinking okay someone might even feel motivation feel that they can use something but do they actually have the resources to be able to do it and so it's also thinking okay how do we make things accessible how do we make programming accessible for people in places that don't have the same amount of money they can't spend a hundred something dollars on a laptop or something like that how do we get them Raspberry Pis or something that are like a lot more affordable to maybe get the basics of that down and then how do we let them get to the next step of that you know so this is even before we're thinking about do they have the motivation but if they get the motivation what do they do then you know so I think those are also layers of diversity and inclusion that we have to keep in mind yeah absolutely okay those are questions I think before we do anything else I'd like to offer each of you kind of a chance for a closing statement call to action whatever you want are you up for that or not okay well go ahead Marlene I think you're the next in the road you should okay perfect yeah I just think well first of all I just want to say thank you to everyone that came to this this session in general just I think that people need to care about diversity and inclusion I think it's awesome to care about the technical side of the language but just the community aspect of it there's like a human side to throughout this conference I've been hearing people saying that programmers are humans too and I think there's a human side of Python and so I think it's awesome that people care about this issue so I think if you have come to this panel session if you are interested in the work the diversity and inclusion work group is doing or whatever it is I would say number one sign up to be a member of the PSA you can do that at Python.org and when the election comes please vote for someone who's not from Europe or North America that would be like even though you're from Europe please rebel from your own people so I would say that I would also say I would encourage you to if you do get the chance as well to go to conferences outside of Europe and North America if you can I know that can be tricky as well but definitely encourage you to also kind of get out of your own perspective and try and travel to other spaces to be able to like understand some of the challenges and I think that natural exchanges is actually quite helpful for diversity and inclusion so I think that would be my call to action. Python Ghana is coming up soon and I think the CFP I think might still be open so if you would like to go to Ghana feel free to apply to that. Yeah. Okay call to action register as a voting member vote organize meetups organize conferences I have found it personally very rewarding and very powerful to get involved with people who are different than me where I stay the language that I usually speak from and backgrounds whether it's cultural or social economic backgrounds and they always come to a point where we share a common thing a common value and those are usually during conferences such as this I also make it a point when I go to a conference to volunteer like what I'm doing for EuroPython 2 and that automatically allows me access to the people there and also understand them better which allows me to bring back things and we can learn from one another which will only make us better and stronger and go further together. And go scan the barcode down at the booth right? Yes, yes scan the barcode down at the booth and tell us who you are where you're from and what language you speak and whether you understand what the PSF does I second that and of course I'll pitch for voting for PSF I'm going to do next year next year is it? 100% and then just on the side of maybe last comments I started with saying like for me diversity and inclusion means breaking from the stereotypes so my last words would be like if you have a certain perspective in your mind already about someone, some community some race to different categories there are think about that one single person that individual who that person is and is it worth stereotyping that person and discriminating against that person, is it worth it? Why would you do it? Get over the stereotypes, celebrate individuality and that's it and vote for PSF Thank you Teresa So I have on the side of organizing things and events now that we're doing more and more conferences and meetups and small events, large events I think the large events are starting to be better formed in the sense everybody who's organizing in large events now cares about diversity and inclusion and to kind of have diverse lineup diverse attendance but we should try not to forget the small events so if you're organizing a meetup try to get your community involved and try to get more local people also engaged and to present of course it's always nice to bring a celebrity in but try to figure out how do you get the local people who are representatives of your community engaged and you know to get and also ask yourself what do I have to do to get diverse lineup lineup are the people attending diverse enough and what am I doing wrong and reach out if you don't have the answers it's really important that we're having these conversations trying to really care about diversity care about inclusion and also all the intersections of diversity and think about all the what can you do in your community to have more of that because then everybody is going to come I hope and have fun with python I think we're really right about at the end of time so thanks to everyone who joined us either in person or remote we didn't forget about you don't worry and again these are good things to think about and these are some people that you might want to talk to if you want to pursue this more so yeah thanks everyone thank you Naomi thank you Naomi thank you everyone so thank you for thank you Naomi for moderating thank you and Teresa has gone off now so thank you I want to say thank you Marlene, Iqbal and Labanita we do have like two minutes if people are if you're Iqbal and Labanita do we have anything remote? no is there anyone want to, you can approach the mic if you have a question just up here two questions I think we should be okay Hi there so first of all thank you for organizing this panel and thanks to all panelists it was a very interesting discussion that's better so I was wondering about the votes did you ever consider to include quotas like to make quotas for diversity into the vote for board of directors so that would be yeah I'm interested in that I know there's been discussion about having dedicated seats for regions and that has been something that has been discussed but it's never actually been implemented or it hasn't been implemented yet that's something I think could be a really good solution but it is something that would be quite a big change and needs consensus both from the board and then from the community so if there's going to be a bylaw change there has to be a quorum in terms of every single in terms of a high enough number of the members voting for that bylaw change to happen that's a great question and it's a great idea that I think would work to an extent so hopefully it does happen in the future good luck with that thank you I'm really sorry we're just like time just so you can there will be down in the PSF you have questions and you'll find Nabynita around as well so I'm really sorry about that I'm also a member of PSF and you need to talk about the PSF table in the forum and it's coffee break in a few minutes so it's five past so thank you again to panel thank you to everyone here for joining us it's been quite important and I learned a lot and also Naomi and myself are also on the PSF Brands Work Group as well so we need more people to give more input be nice as well not just in Europe I learned a lot and thank you everyone