 Thanks everyone for coming out to our session here. We have five lessons learned from the last five years, technically six or seven, of Fedora DEI events. So I'm here, Justin Flory, together with my co-speaker. I'm Vippo. And let's go ahead and dive into the presentation for today. So on the agenda, we'll be covering four topics across this session. First, we're going to start with a little introduction about how the Fedora diversity, equity and inclusion team got started. We'll talk about those five lessons that we learned over these last few years by organizing and supporting events. Talk a little bit on what all of these lessons have in common, and also share a little bit on what's coming next for the DEI team in Fedora. Oh, first and foremost, let's just do a little bit of storytelling here. Build some narrative around how our team came to be and why events eventually became an important part of what we do. So, next slide. First and foremost, we are a team. The Fedora DEI team, originally just the diversity team, was formed in 2015 following the appointment of Fedora's first diversity advisor. The DEI team was formed up around the diversity advisor and helped them with their work. Although later, the work expanded to more broadly focus on DEI across the Fedora community. A big shout out to Tatika, who was our first diversity advisor. So today, we still have a DEI advisor who serves on the council, but we are also a community of people who care about diversity, equity and inclusion in Fedora. Next slide. So, the DEI team has a few areas of focus, and one of those largest areas is events. We love events and we have helped influence many of them in Fedora over the last seven years. So this is what we're here to talk about today. Our first go at event organizing was with a panel discussion about diversity and inclusion in Fedora at Flock 2016 in Krakaw, Poland. Later, we helped shape Fedora events in a number of ways. This was advice to boost inclusivity at Fedora's flagship in-person event, Flock. This was things like communication preference stickers, lanyards and stickers for your preferences for photographs, having a quiet room, and a few other things. We also created resources and guidance for local event organizers to consider inclusivity for their own events via our documentation. And we also organized Fedora Women's Day. Now, Fedora Week of Diversity to celebrate the women in our community, which will later evolve to the Week of Diversity to celebrate the many diverse groups of people who all wave the Fedora flag. Next slide, please. So the top title is a little bit of a gimmick only because our history with events actually goes back more than just five years. But our work around the events began to formalize in 2016-2017. And since then, we've learned a few things. We learned things that worked well and some things that just didn't. So some lessons were easy and some of them were tough. Today, we're here to share an excerpt of those learnings with you. And I will pass over to Vipple to take us into the five lessons. Ah, I was muted. So without further ado, here are five lessons from our five-hour adjusting set, six or seven years of event organizing in Fedora. Number one, measuring is complex. Measuring the success and diversity of our events is complicated. There's not a magic formula or there's not a single number that tells us whether we were right or wrong. Sometimes we don't even know how many things can be measured. Our work needs to be multi-dimensional and should have intersectional perspective. In another way, you have to consider many different variables and how they interact and affect each other. One event where we learned this is Fedora Women's Day, now which is Fedora Week of Diversity. How do we know whether we did it right? How do we know we were successful? A lot of it involves conversation, listening to people, listening to our community. One of the examples around this was Fedora badges for furthering education to encourage others to learn more about inclusivity with events and beyond. So we made a badge for Inclusive Open Source Community Orientation Foundation Training. If you did that, when you got the certificate, you could request a Fedora badge and that encouraged a lot of people to learn things around it. So what did we learn from it? It was to be creative. The takeaway here is to be creative with how you measure success. Don't get stuck on numbers or get gazed in on coming up with perfect formula or measurement. Storytelling is a big part of DEI work. Consider how you engage with people before, during and after an event. One of the old favorite quotes around the team is said, Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance. And recently I read somewhere that heard Edison to it. Then belonging is about being able to reveal that you can't dance and still be included. Listen, second, where you are geographically changes a lot of our work. As we grow our geographic diversity in new countries, cultures, events will need a different approach based on unique context. Before COVID, when we did Fedora Women's Day, at first the idea floated around to have a structure guidelines on how to organize sessions to do a somewhat fixed agenda. But very soon we realized that won't work everywhere. The best case was to trust the local organizers, plan their own agenda. And it could be where to host the event, personalize this in as per the audience, sessions and activities were different for students and different for professionals. So we learned. Listen to locals. There's not a single, as you said, not a single magic numbers and not a magic formula and one size does not fit all our third learning. We have been evolving continuously. As our team has grown, the range of our work has grown and evolved a lot. As Justin mentioned in the introduction, DI work in federal began as an advisor, then became a team and then focus on events immersed. Sometimes our work grew too fast with too few people. We'll get to that in lesson four. Even though inclusivity was always our goal, we would later find that we were hitting and missing the mark at the same time. While we originally focused on celebrating and elevating the women of the federal community and their contributions, we may have over compensated and missed opportunity to highlight and elevate the contributors of other underrepresented groups. As we were doing work, our team grew and our team involved new people, new events and new areas of focused. And just with that, we have evolved in doing more things. If we go through the timeline of things in flock 2016. Justin mentioned we had a panel discussion around federal diversity in community and in federal leadership. Summer of that year, we had first edition of federal women's day, a weekend of celebration to help raise awareness and to thank the women contributors across the federal project. Next year, around May, there was a LGBTQ plus awareness community call. Few years later, in October 2021, women's day became federal week of diversity, celebrating the diversity and participation of all people in federal project community. Now, where are we now from celebrating week of diversity, we are also growing into organizing a group around accessibility on desktop and a possible accessibility test week, which will help making our federal Linux operating system a much more inclusive place. So the moral of this lesson is to embrace bringing in new people to our inner circle, but not just bringing them in listening to them and their ideas, hearing the feedback on what is working well, and what is not. So leaning to new perspective, sometimes it may feel uncomfortable, or putting on the edge of your comfort zone, but this is normal, and often it is where the best opportunities for growth and evolution exist. Except that your work you're doing now may change and evolve, just as your team and project will evolve too. And Justin, up to you now. Thanks. So what is our fourth lesson that we've learned. So the work is also emotional. Organizing events is a lot of work. It's difficult, but it's often rewarding work. But the important takeaway here is that the work does not start and it does not end with the event itself. Organizing events that center and celebrate people from underrepresented groups and backgrounds often comes with additional hurdles and usually extra scrutiny or questioning. And this isn't specific to Fedora. It is just a part of working with diverse communities. People may not always understand why or they may feel that centering other groups means detracting or reducing the contributions of people who look like them. So getting angry, upset and flustered, that's usually the easy emotional response, but usually not the best response. To do this work and to do it well is a lot of effort, and this should be recognized. To point out some examples of this, one of them is that burden of moderation, especially as it relates to challenges around a code of conduct. So who takes on this kind of moderation labor in an event? How are negative, hurtful and passive aggressive comments handled asynchronously, like on a discussion post, a mailing list, social media, but also synchronously, real time at an event, whether that's in a chat room or in person at a social activity? Surprisingly, this work actually becomes easier if it can be shared by more people. Thereby, taking that heavy burden off a single person or a small group of people from being the social justice adjudicators or warriors to a community culture of, we don't do that here. Another example is specifically to our team and some of our struggles is pacing our energy and excitement with our capacity and the time that we have. For events, we were sometimes so ambitious and had so many ideas that we would struggle to keep up with them and actually execute them successfully. Two examples of this was we created a really comprehensive set of event guidelines for previous editions of Flock. We created pages and pages of ideas and recommendations for making our events more inclusive. Some of these were implemented, but many were either forgotten or passed over because we had so many competing priorities. So this is also the challenge with balancing with that flux of life. We all have things in life that can knock us off course and require us to rebalance our time. Most of the work by the DEI team in Fedora is done by the passion and energy of volunteers outside of their day jobs. So when we get knocked off course, sometimes that means we have to step back and it hurts when we can't do the ideas that we really want to or feel like are most needed. Next slide, please. So the lesson here, don't forget to take care of yourself. Ask for help. Be okay with making mistakes. Emotional work is absolutely still work. And don't discount that. When you need to take a break and prioritize your own care and emotional well-being. Sometimes we're just not going to be able to do all the things we want to do, especially with DEI work. And trust us, there's a lot to do. So it's also okay to make mistakes. Sometimes things won't go perfectly according to plan. Actually, I take that back. Things will never go perfectly according to plan. So be ready to adapt and make sudden changes when they're necessary. And remember that failing or messing up doesn't mean you are a failure or you are a mess up. Next slide. So our fifth and final lesson for this talk is doing it right means we can innovate better faster together. When we do DEI work and organize empowering events that bring people together, it means we will innovate better faster and together. Embracing diversity and explicitly including voices that are often left out means we have better equity in our work. And we can nurture those creative ideas that have not yet had their time to shine. Boosting the diversity of the community brings together different perspectives, raises issues that are important to different people, and it enables us to organize around those issues. So events, what this talk is really about, both small and large ones are really effective way of bringing together the voices and empowering new folks to speak up. Examples of this are Fedora Women's Day, evolving to become Fedora Week of Diversity. Some other examples of this are also the calls for participation that we've done for the accessibility SIG meetings, which are just starting to get off and going. The Week of Diversity, starting to put together organizer meetings, and even other communities learning from the Fedora Code of Conduct and modeling their efforts based on ours. We'll talk a little bit about some of these calls for participation in a minute. Next slide, please. So the lesson to take away here is give space for new ideas to grow. We go further when we go together. That means not only bringing new folks in, but also listening to them and giving them space to grow together with their ideas. Events are a powerful way to elevate and lift people up. They're opportunities to recognize and to mentor. So our pro tip, be reactive. Sorry, be proactive, not reactive. Avoid leaving a DEI focus as an afterthought. Instead, consider it and plan for it from the start. Next slide, please. So we just went through all those five lessons. We've made it to getting to the homestretch of this talk. But what do all five of these lessons have in common? What single point do they all share? And that is the people. All these lessons all share people who care a lot about our community or the Fedora family, if you'll allow that. So each lesson was something that was brought about by a team that was focused on making things better, more welcoming and more friendly for others. Sure. We can look at our work as a community just as a Linux distribution that it pays our bills and we package stuff so people doing enterprise workloads can ship the bits and get their own bits done. But I think it also goes a level deeper. We're creating an operating system capable of doing many things and empowering people in ways that include but is not limited to technology. Said more simply, our work in Fedora matters. And when we let our powers combine and merge, we can be better, do better and be the example of world that we want to build together. And I'll pass it back to Vipple to talk us through what's happening now in the DEI team. Events and more. Obviously, this talk is about our learnings from the events, but also we are doing more things, but we got diversity 2022 our event. Last year we evolved our yearly Fedora Women's Day event to Fedora wake up diversity. And it ran from October 3rd to nine and featured a series of interviews with community members telling their federal stories. We also started a recommended resource page in the DEI team documentation, which has a bunch of recommendation if you want to learn who we are what we do and why we do it. This year. Yes, exactly as Luna said, we are back this year and we have planned a live event on October 14th and 15th. There will be other things the whole week, but live event will be on those two days. And there's a lot to be done and we are looking for volunteers who are video editors, speakers, graphic designers, translators. Interviews if you are interested in communication aspect of things we need blog post drafts tweets so many things. If you are interested, open a ticket on per year.io Fedora diversity, federal hyphen diversity I'll share the link in chat and tell us how you can help or just reach out to anyone of us anyone in the DEI team or reach out to me. That was the event section of it. We have mentioned accessibility working group a bunch of times in the stock and Matthew's keynote he shared some of our focus areas for coming years and making federal project and federal Linux more accessible is one of those. So following a few discussions and seeing interest in community everywhere. We initiated an accessibility working group. And we are in very, very early stage, we need a lot of help. Emma kidney from community platform engineering has kickstarted a discussion thread calling for volunteers, and we need to decide who we are as an accessibility working group what we want to do the things we want to focus on and what can we can tackle first. We also need your perspective and thoughts on the best course to improve accessibility. It's a long walk and the one that will help. Sorry, I was started by the pole. So it's a long term goal. And it will help not just federal Linux users, but also federal contributors. And more making accessibility as a priority. And not an afterthought will ignite more of such discussions everywhere in other communities and general Linux workspace and Linux space in general. So if the work around making our operating system and our community is more inclusive interest you would love to meet you in our coming meetings. Find that on federal discussions or reach out to me I'll help you with all the links and resources of where we are as we go. With that we have two minutes or seven minutes to take questions and discuss more. That's it from us. Thank you. I see the Q&A tab is empty, which means that we must have been so thorough and so complete that we just answered everyone's questions. We learned a lot and shared and taught a lot. So if you do have anything feel free to drop those into the Q&A tab or anything in chat and we'll be here for a couple more minutes. Yeah. So Marie has a question. Do you have any ideas about how to bring folks who are not already interested in DEI to these types of talks or events? That's a great question. Vipo, do you want to kick this one off or should I? Good, Justin. While I edit my parts on this one. Yeah. I'll also need to do the same. Well, the first thing what I'll say there is there's definitely this is something that comes up a lot in DEI spaces is it's amazing that all of you are here and we're listening to this talk. But there's also some self selection bias, you know, that this kinds of things, you know, certain types of people show up for these kinds of sessions or these kinds of talks. I had the same experience with me when I facilitated some workshops at Gwadek. So my radical, maybe not so radical idea is that and actually this is something I think is starting to happen, which makes me very excited is that the DEI work needs to be intersectional and cross team. So thinking about ideas instead of DEI existing as its own bubble and things happening within that team are being pushed and organized exclusively by that team. I believe we need to be better at bringing other people in and or meeting people where they are. So I think the great example of that is things like this accessibility working group or SIG where we're actually starting to engage at the operating system level and think about how can we build a more inclusive desktop for people who have accessibility challenges with using their desktop. This is an area that I think we can be very innovative in which ties into one of those lessons the fifth one in our talk and also ties into that kind of, you know, the work evolving and changing as well. So my answer to that would be I think we need to think more about where the DEI team can embed themselves or work together with other people in the distribution where they already are. Yeah, I agree 100% love the idea also. A lot of people love other things and maybe meeting them in what they like. One of the examples is Fedora badges, the one we did, making them do a course just so that they understand who we are and where we come from. People love badges so they did it. And after that we got some interest. Oh, I attended that. I did that certification now I need a badge and then starting the conversations and then they them understanding why we are doing this. So that's also a good idea to just make people excited about what we do by introducing different cool little small things. Just like we do for community swag is a way of increasing our community members. We should do some things in DEI to invite people and once they are here, you know how people say started for programming language and state for community, something like that sort start for something and once they understand who we are and why we do this. They would stay. That's what I think. So we move to the next question just in. Yeah, so we have about three more minutes and it looks like three more questions so I think we can try to speak. Yeah, so the next one when it comes to European Union directives, do you also have concrete examples of what those directives might mean for web design in reality. I might have to say could you clarify a little bit more about what you mean with that question. I'm not sure I follow. Well, because expands. I think they're talking about how European Union has made accessibility and just general software accessibility as a priority. And they want to include it generally for everyone. Web accessibility is quite common. There are very good practices and there are a lot of groups who have worked towards it but I'm more interested in beyond just our websites and documentation. It's more about people. Your websites can be perfect and still there is it's not as accessible for everyone. So I don't have exactly what you're asking for and how it would look for web design in reality. Because these things need to be discussed and that's what the accessibility group is about like when you show up to the meeting. We need to talk about these things and understand who we are and how we can move in the future. So this is a very young group and I think because this comes from accessibility group meeting last time. That's what this conversation flows just in for more context. So we don't have a lot of time while Ricardo answer should we move to the next question. This is one from Isabella with the lessons learned in the past five years. Is there a particular goal aimed for DEI to be established in the next five years? Vipo I think you might have some talking points ready on this one even though I don't know if we thought that far ahead about five years from now. But one of the discussions was how quickly we evolved as more people come in to bring new ideas. And I'll be very interested and see where we are in five years from now on. Because what we think right now might be a very small aspect of things we understand. And as more people come when we start working around accessibility and more different, we would also like to go and research a bit about neuro side of the neuro side of things. Because when you are not in that section, you can't understand it exactly and such a huge group. So I would say more people, more activity, more active active users and participants with clear way of how you can step back without feeling guilty. You know, since it is a lot about emotional work in this team, when you don't do it anymore, you have a tendency to feel bad and guilt a little bit. So once we have enough members that it's sustainable without one having to stick around for longer than they should or take a break. That would be my personal goal, I would say. Without marking any specific milestone that we want to have it done because as I said, we evolved so quickly from in just last five years. I think so. I have saw the comment from Marie, we can spill over a couple more minutes as needed. So I'd say my answer for that one, I'm thinking two things in my head. One is I love to grow the core group of contributors in the DEI team. We've definitely had growth. That's definitely something that has happened, but it still probably hasn't been at the rate or at the amount that we might like to. Like I said earlier, there's a lot of ideas and passion projects that we haven't actually been able to fully follow up on and complete. So one of those would be growing our core contributor team. And the second one is this kind of this new frontier of growing the periphery of what DEI work means. So it's not exclusively happening in the DEI team, but actually happening across the distribution. So like one example that I think of, you know, this is just a thought, but having in the change process for how new changes are proposed at the distribution level, having some kind of question or section or prompt about DEI as it relates to, you know, maybe it could be accessibility or inclusion, technology accessibility. You know, there's a couple of different ways we could look at that, but that would be one way I think just getting people to think about these things a little bit more. I would call that a huge success. So that's my two things. That's my two things is one, grow the core contributor team and two, grow that periphery area of what DEI work means and looks like. So I think we'll have time for this last question from Marie before we wrap. How should we address cultural differences in the DEI space and specific to Fedora 2? Every country has had a different place with this journey and conversation. That's a good question. Empowering people, something about psychological safety. And the reason I'm saying this is if people are comfortable enough to talk about the problems, it will be noticed. I can't understand the problems going on exactly in where Justin is right now. I can read about it, but I can't understand it exactly. And same goes the other way. But having a psychological safety or just knowing that it's a good place to share or okay place to share. That will let us talk. And once we understand it, perhaps we can grow. Did it make sense what I'm trying to say here? I follow you there. So maybe my one quick expansion there. There was a thread on Twitter the other day. I think Marie chimed in on a thread about the candy swap that we used to do at Flock's. For those of you who hadn't had the great joy of experiencing this, we would organize candy swaps where we have one evening of the conference. Everyone before the conference who wanted to sign up and do this was advised to bring some sweet or some candy or some snack from wherever home means for you. And so then at that night we have everybody set up with tables and they bring out all their snacks or sweets and candies. And everyone goes around and shares a story of like, well, what did you bring? What does this mean to you? And how does this tie into cultural differences in Fedora? Well, I think being able to bring people together who have different backgrounds and different understandings and perspectives. This is a way that we can all really feel like one community where we can all really experience this joy of sharing what makes us unique and celebrate those differences with each other. So it's a very specific example. But I mean, there's things like this that, you know, those are the things in Fedora that, you know, really mean so much to me. And I think mean a lot to other people as well. So any opportunity to break down some of those barriers and bring people together, not just in the same conference or the same space, but actually getting them to interact with each other and engage and share different perspectives. That's one thing I think can really help. But maybe we have to think more about how to do that, especially in a virtual first context too. Yeah, so that takes us to the end of the questions. So we're five minutes over, so we'll go ahead and free you up to go and check out the rest of Nest. Thanks so much for being here with me in the poll and hope to see you maybe in person soon or at the next release party or Nest. Yeah, we need to meet in person to plan a diversity hack first. We need more in person things. I guess every talk's been going around it. I'll see you all around. Bye bye. Thank you all.