 Well, the idea of this workshop is to discuss with you about how to increase the participation in our community, participation in general. Usually, we take care about the developer, new developer. We have Jan that is a mentor for a new developer. We have something similar for documentation. And some members of the community are working on the wiki to take care about all the pages related to getting started in QA development documentation and so on. But those aren't all our contribution area. So what can we do in the other areas? We could talk about diversity, diversity in general. I think that we could work also with schools, with university, because with schools and the university, we have the possibility to find new contributors. And in particular, I would like to make a stronger relationship with other free software projects like the Fedora One or Gnom, Ubuntu, and so on. So the idea of this panel is to discuss and find where we can do more and how we can do more for be a more inclusive project. So for our community, we also talk about development. But I think that the most important part are our users. And we need to find a way to involve them and to involve them to use the software and then to contribute to the project. Any idea on how to... Marina said before this talk that we would really like to... So I talked about gender diversity, because I'm of a different gender than the majority of people in this room, and so did Jona. But this is not what we want to focus on exclusively. And we'd like to focus also on the other types of diversity. For example, how to include more people with disabilities into our project, because we are all that are sitting here. We are able-bodied, so we just have no mental model or frequently can't even imagine what kind of issues those people can have. And if we don't include them in the community, we will never find out. And I could go on like this about all the different... Or I don't know, for example, different nationalities, people who don't write from left to right, but from right to left. We also have... We can improve liberal office in this way as well, if we include more right to left writers and speakers. We can easily somehow widen our user base and make the product less buggy for people whose language and it's not really the default one or the majority one. So, yes, again, I can't stress this enough. We'd like to focus on different kinds of diversity, it's not just the gender one. And with that, I'd like to pass the microphone on. So I'm not sure that we... Or I'm not really aware of really problems we are having in this way. I have been working with people which are like... Yeah, working with languages which are not written left to right and after I've got bug reports, I have fixed stuff in the KDE backends for them. So I did not really have... And then I went through that way into the Edibian community because the guy was also working there. Same as... At least in the QA channel, there were some people coming there which say, okay, we have some disabilities and something in 5.2 or something broke the accessibility framework and it's much worse than before. And they said, okay, please create bug reports and then we will have a look. So I'm not sure at which point we really actually have to do something. I mean, when somebody opens a bug report, stuff probably will get fixed. Now we can talk about priorities, but we are paid sometimes. I think most of... Probably even most of the contributors which do a lot of contributions are paid. So I'm not sure how to handle that in a more fair way or good way. But stuff happens there and it's not like they are excluded per se. At least that's my point of view which I see from the community. Okay, do we have another microphone for us? This is the mic. I think it's not a gender problem. It's a diversity problem. Tomorrow we will talk about the project that we are doing as Libertalia in Rome with the Public Institute for Deaf People. And for example, in this case, we know that there are a lot of informatic people that are really good to develop because they are deaf. So they have, we can say implement a different way to learn some different things but we had the problem to communicate with them because they, how we can say, they way of learn and understand things is a little bit different. For example, to make all the material for this project we had to need to collaborate and to work with the person who understand the disability as a diversity, as value and not as a minus we can see. And for example, maybe it's the point about what we can see is for how we can push the community to be more inclusive because I'm not a technique, okay? But I think that openness could give this opportunity and maybe could be opportunity for all of us. How do I know if I can take the point for the disability for example? Because to develop a code, I mean that maybe from a technical point of view could be the same things. You have to write a code so maybe could be the same. But it's different the way of think and the way to learn. And that is important for example, the collaboration with the schools or with the universities because we have also when we do some projects in the schools about the awareness and we can see is digital freedom so about not only the project of LibreOffice but about all the things that are included in openness. We had to know and this could be a great point to make the community more big and more inclusive with I can say other different people that is are not only, I mean it's not only for a technical point of view. It's also for the community about culture we can say, culture of openness. See this example you mentioned that there was some people coming to IRC and telling us, hey guys, your new template manager is really cool but I'm blind since birth and I can't use it because it doesn't work with the screen reader and I have absolutely no mental image. How a screen reader works and what I as a developer can do to make the project I'm developing more accessible because I don't have any disability and I'm simply not aware of the needs of those people have and it actually takes some, well I'm reluctant to say like you need to have post but the barrier like you have to actively go to the IRC and say, hey guys, your software sucks. You have to do something and this requires quite some courage and I assume like not everybody has that courage and not everybody has even the means to go to IRC channel and yell at the developers. So this is something perhaps we're doing wrong that we're like we ourselves have some privilege and like from the hate of that privilege we don't see different people with different needs. This is something we should somehow perhaps strive to improve. In my experience, we have to be very careful when we talk about making groups of people, nevermind big groups, small groups because if we focus on a group and want to attach that group we sort of push all the other groups away. What we need to do is to be open whenever somebody from a group comes to us and we have one big untapped force that we don't use at all. We have our user base. We have contact with our user base through the update pointer. We actually know where they are out there so we could instead of focusing on single groups we could send out messages to our users also all closed software do that. They make announcements every now and then which are generic. Asking for instance, do you have any problems with the software? Are you a power user? Would you like to help us confirming a couple of bugs? A user list, I'm talking about everybody who has installed Libra or isn't it? Just to make sure, there is a bug that has been already let's say blessed by the UX guy in the help menu. We have now new entries. One entry will lead, bring the user, the installed base to the localized forums and question and answers. Another one that will go in will be to address to get the user to the documentation page so we narrow the gap between the software and the user base. So this is on the way, okay. No questions? So I like the suggestions that were made. Yeah, I mean for example regarding using the leveraging what we have in Libra itself already. One thing that I've seen as a problem is that over time if we don't use a part of the software, if we don't test it, so say we don't have many people developing and testing on the Mac, we don't have that many people testing or at least vocally testing with screen readers. So if maybe we made more of a framework like those little signs like 10 days without a workplace accident. So if we had something like that that said how many days since we've had feedback on one of these major components such as using a screen reader with Libra Office, that might visually help us stay better on top of the topics that the community can deem what's important, maybe raise priority. But if we wanna say we wanna be accessible for people who are blind, then we could have that be one of our dashboard items. And that would be a tool to help us stay up to date, that's just a thought. If I cannot, okay, about the missing test and QA activity on screen reader and so on, we can try to involve some other contributor from other project where for example, there are support packages and so on. This can be a way to obtain a better software. Yeah, something else that's something interesting what for example Launchpad and Ubuntu is using is that users can actually actively subscribe to a bug and vote for a bug. So for obvious stuff like something really big is broken, even as a developer you can see you have to fix that quick but when you have 10,000 bucks and everything but it just says, oh, that's my lovely pretty super bug and every time we change that to okay, it's not so important we think the users come back and just upscale the bug again. So probably at that point, something is missing that you can really see what is important for the user. I'm just talking about. Some bugs laws have this feature indeed. For example, open SUSE bugzilla, you can vote for bugs. So if it's really like not so severe back but annoying one that impacts many users, they can vote and like. Okay, it's already there or? Yes, it's already there. I'm not sure if it can be somehow transplanted to our bugzilla or if it's some SUSE add-on but indeed in SUSE bugzilla you can vote for a bug and when I was a SUSE developer, one of my bugs collected record number of 52 votes. Yeah, so because normally I just, when I'm mainly working on mail merge bugs and normally this is out of everybody's normal user scope and I just think okay, probably I'll have time for that but no really a measurement. Did I misunderstand a little slight thing because now we talk about bugs, we talk about making our software better but that doesn't grow our community. I thought we wanted more people to come into our community and be active in the community also but it's also important of course. It's related because if more diverse people come to our community and actually tell us what their needs are, what issues they face, this is how we can, I mentioned that in my talk as well, this is how we can improve our software. But probably according to what Ian said, a good way to have inclusion and in particular inclusion of diversity. It's a self-powering system meaning that including trying to include diverse people may help us to improve our software for them. So it could be and to be honest, we have some and one of them is around. So and also what Emma said about the schools, probably it could be a good place to find out some kind of diversities and to try getting them inside our community from two point of views. The first is that well, there are plenty of people and you have many chances to find diversity there. And also we could try, profit also, the possibly the availability of people specialized meaning that for example in schools or in university or so on, I think much more in school than high school and lower schools than university. But anyway, sometimes they used to have teachers specialized in assistance to diversity to, so you could have two benefits from there. Meaning that you could gather people and also people able to help them and us to be collaborative and to including. So it could be a good idea to go there and also for other reasons because you know, I always believe that school, sorry, I also believe that school are the first place to think about because from there, you go to Roots anyway. So from that point on, you can open mind to young people and hopefully have them tomorrow contributing and joining the community. So. We've been kind of mulling over ideas like Robinson had a number of ideas and I really had and we'll be mentioning some things in her talk before like this outreach program. So what I was wondering, do we have examples from the past where it worked, where we were able to encourage people to join the project that would fall under this diversity label so that perhaps we could, we know what works and we could just copy that or transplant it to some other topic. Because it's kind of abstract what we're talking about now. So maybe there was something like, I don't know, you said the Turkish community with Gulcan has been, I think, from Belgrade, there was a number of GSOC students. Is there anything else that comes to mind? More questions? Just from the last tech first that was there that was in May and it was in Ankara. So I'm not sure I would go to Turkey now, but in May it was still okay. That's why, unfortunately, like none of the Turkish hackers is here. Yeah. Because of state of, I was really looking forward to. But they are okay. I talked with them in contact. I thought I would make the girls happy by showing the slides about them. They just said, okay, we're working for a university, we are not allowed to travel, but anyway. And actually that hackfest was three core developers, 15 girls and two boys. So it really, I don't think much depends on how to get people inside. I think it's okay to organize hackfests everywhere. And normally TDF is paying for core developers to go there. More, yeah, I don't know how I can encourage people to say, okay, we want to do something. Yeah, it's not really broad knowledge. That's something like that. That's it. They say, okay, we want to do a LibreOffice or a free software hackfest. And please come somebody with some knowledge come there and that's something that TDF is already doing. But I have a feeling that it's not happening enough of time and probably we need some more information spreading at that point. And it just happens for developers. I'm sure it would be great to get some other people and like really UI designers that's normally not stuff on the developers really great labs. So you have a group of, I don't know if there's something we can do at university UI design. I don't know, but if they do a hackfest and work on stuff and get some output of that would be great too. It's gonna be an event in Berlin end of October. It's called Ladies Who Foss. Focused on women. And I actually, I'm going there and I'd like to take our UX mentor Hiko with me so that he can actually show some easy hacks for people who don't code. Because I do think this is really a problem. There's a lot of mentoring, a lot of resources available for people who code. And it has something to do with what I mentioned in my talk that the coders are some kind of aristocracy in the project and everybody else. Like those contributions are sometimes like wrongly perceived as somehow less valued and much less resources and much less energy gets invested to them. Unfortunately, I have precious little ideas how to change it because I'm a bias developer. Yeah, I was thinking about how to fund all this stuff because everything is possible but who will do the work, et cetera. So should TDF hire some person who would continuously organize events at universities and schools because Open Hatch non-profit was active still a couple of years ago but unfortunately now it has somehow language but it had a very active organizer and she did dozens of events at US community colleges and it seemed pretty successful. So the attendance was great and I guess the diversity as well. So I encourage everyone to go to their website and study all their event sites and use cases and stuff they learned. So it's openhatch.org. More questions? So actually in my professional life I've been a professional PR person for 30 years in an environment where 95% of people are women and it was one of the men. And so it's always been tricky to look at and it's true, I mean, there has been a point in my life where I was adding 48 people company in Italy and it was the only men. So 47 women and one man, which is normal for PR. And so I've lived the opposite situation in trying to attract more men into PR. And I think there is probably something that we might be doing with communication because I think there is an underlying perception that some roles are for men and some roles are for women independently from the kind of the role. So I don't understand why communication is more for women and technology is more for men because I've been a man in communication and not really able to do technology a lot. It's difficult to know. I mean, the question is attracting people, you go to universities, I've done internships in university to attract men into communication. And then I've got stupid questions like, oh, they will think, let's call it gender questions in a man that is in a women environment, which is totally stupid, I think. You evaluate individuals, not genders. I don't know. In some cases and at the university, I have a degree in humanities and although the number of women in humanities is lower than the number of women in PR, it was 75%. So I did a university where 25% were men and 75% were women. And there are some long time trends. Maybe we can help with some communication. I don't know if doing focused stuff, it's helping really. I would like to help because it's, I understand your point of view, which I cannot reproduce because I'm a man and therefore it's, thanks God we are different because otherwise it's going to be boring. But can we try to do something specific? But in my opinion, without making this a kind of, I've always perceived that when you start into this kind of discussions, there is the risk that you increase the separation then reducing it. Because in some cases, the feeling that you are alone, which I've had when I was heading a 48 person company with 47 women and one man, which is funny. So the main toilet, there was never a queue, of course. And the, let's try maybe to do something with, also with media, trying to help. But I think I would like to get the help in general, not maybe not focus on LibreOffice, more in let's say women and technology, more than women and LibreOffice and a single project. Because otherwise I think that the risk is that the perception is of walled gardens outside the project. Sorry if, but I was thinking while speaking and was evident because I'm usually a faster speaker, but I really don't know how to help in an effective way without looking at a kind of separation, yes. Was I clear or not? I don't know, I mean. It's something that in a sense might embarrass me because I never judge people according to gender. Never. So I've never managed, I've managed many people and I've looked at people like individuals, so no, no. So if they were good at their job, they were good and full stop. And, but of course looking at the numbers, there's something that has to be solved. I just want to say that I agree with Italo and that that's what I wanted to point out before. While Yana was talking, meaning what I meant when she talked about special ways of communication just for women, special channels, just like many at least or whatever. Because yes, and as also Ian said, sometimes even if with the best intentions, there is a risk to create exclusion and not inclusion. And I want to say also compliments because this is the first time I hear Italo without words. It's really an event, really. It's been incredible, really incredible. Thank you. And it's really difficult, although you know that one of the, I mean the best thing of my life is my wedding, so and I've always told that and I would have liked to have my wife here and listen to what my wife was saying, but unfortunately my wife is not here. And because I think it's difficult as a man to figure out the perception that you have being in the opposite part and, but on the other hand, I think it's beautiful that we have different perception as otherwise. It would be extremely boring in general. So, but I was trying to figure out, I mean, if I were in their position, what I would do, but it's, sorry, it's 62 years that I have my man so it's difficult to think or try to think like a woman especially younger woman because my wife is younger than me but it's not that younger. So I know our 55 years old women things, not younger ones. So just some random thoughts on this whole topic. The first is, I think it's a very good idea to start thinking with contributors right away and not so much about users. For the same reason, if you look at the development channel of LibreOffice and someone comes in there and says, I wanna have this pet bug fixed, we smack him. And the reason for that is if we don't, then two days later, 200 other people will come up and we'll show up with their pet bug. And so even if you're a white middle-aged man from Germany like me and asked for this bug to be fixed, I would still get out or fix it yourself. So I think we should really start looking at the contributor side because then we can grow from there to actually support the users. And so that's the first thing. Second thing is like Charleston said, I think we need to find some concrete goal and then we need to find a commitment to how to, what we wanna do to achieve that because right now we are only talking about ideas. And I can unfortunately not commit much time because I'm already drowning. So we need to find, this is why I'm hesitant to say more but I still have a third point and this is an idea where I have no time to commit to it. So sorry to do the same that we did all time here but we did some stuff with schools, for example in Gran Canaria and stuff. And yeah, it is interesting but for example in Gran Canaria it failed because even the computer science students were mostly on Python and not interested in C++. So we have a very high barrier to entry there. So if we just wanna look into diversity and not explicitly frame that in or we wanna talk to these people which is a horrible way to start it off. The Document Foundation is an NGO and there are lots of NGOs that care about groups that have special interests. So we might just look, one way to start might be to look for another NGO that cares for specific groups of the population and then just do something together with them without explicitly calling it, we are doing this for that reason, just doing an event about LibreOffice at their place and it's pretty implicit that because of the audience of this NGO we will get to the topics that these people are interested in. So maybe that is a starting point. Well, one excellent example of such an NGO is the Software Freedom Conservancy that runs Outreach Program for Women. Common misconception is this is a equivalent of Google Summer of Code for Women which is not the case. And the interns in Outreach Program for Women can work on any area, they don't have to be coders. So this would be an opportunity for Document Foundation to cooperate to somehow enter this Outreach Program and we could have, for example, documentation intern or an infrastructure intern or I don't know, user experience intern. It just costs money and it costs manpower because somebody has to take care of such an intern and somebody has to mentor her. A group of women, that are women for example because in Wikipedia there are not a lot of, women contributor and that's a problem, a problem in the aspect that Katarina explained. But I'm really agree with what you have said because we had to work together with the person who understand the different field. For example, I'm not an informatic, I'm not a technique and that's for this that in Rome we decided to make a protocol with the public institute for DEF because we have to implement with them their needs and what we can do to make them more closest to LibreOffice. So that could be an idea for a practical, something that we can do in practice, so. So I think I mentioned before that Wikipedia actually started the project that you mentioned because they found out that there are few articles about notable girls and women and if you think that Wikipedia is one of the top five or 10 websites it influences a lot of people with information which also makes the issue that we are talking about now even worse if you think about it. So one thing is the information and the intimidation we get and the other one is that they don't have many contributions. Also Wikipedia had last year, the last two years had many, many issues with let's say bullying cases against some contributors and they're trying to fix this and this should be a case and a lesson for other communities in order to avoid these kind of situations before it becomes a major issue inside and within the community. Also there is one of the things they do and this is what is good with the free software communities you can also take good things from one community and bring them to the others. So what they always insist on having a cut of conduct many years before so that even at meetups and conferences the let's say gender issue is not an issue at all. So they're trying to somehow fix this for the last years. I don't think it has been very effective and yet and I think that the steps need to be faster. It's like we had, I learned that there is a parliament in a country that said we will have by law 33% of women to be in the parliament which is even worse if you think of imposing that that's a big debate but I think that why 33 and not like the same percentage with the population, right? Yeah, but what I'm trying to say is that I think this needs to go faster. It's worldwide, yeah. We are not talking about reserved seats, absolutely not. No, we want to be more inclusive. We won't ever, no, okay. It's what I told when Robinsson asked his question at the end of my talk. This is not about pulling people in and forcing them to do something they don't want to do and they're not interested in. This should all be about somehow pulling the people in who are staying out for no good reason. Yeah, but my question would be how can you make the whole process faster? Do you think it's getting fast enough like the inclusion in Floss communities? Personally, I don't think so. I don't know what's the solution but it seems that there is a long work like work to be done in many areas. There's a couple of solutions and I outlined some of them in my talk. For example, providing some role models for the minorities, a good mentoring program, family-friendly events, some kind of, I know people see red when I say positive discrimination but it's really like some improved hiring practices simply like with the internships, with the jobs, with the mentees, I don't know, Google Summer of Code students just be aware of those issues the minorities might have and actively reach out to them because they wouldn't come by themselves so actively seek out those people and encourage them to contribute.