tl;dr Are you an event organizer who wants to increase the number of speakers from marginalized and underrepresented groups at your event? We're having an online training November 16 so you can learn how to hold your own Speaker Diversity Workshop in your local area! Register here now!
One of the most common questions we get in the Drupal Diversity and Inclusion channel is from event organizers, asking how to increase the number of speakers at their events who are from marginalized and underrepresented groups.
We were delighted to offer an online two-day Speaker Diversity Workshop, on September 21 and 28, to help people from marginalized and underrepresented groups to prepare for submitting talks to events. We had a tremendous response and great attendance!
To help event organizers even further, we are very excited to share that on Saturday, November 16, from 1-4 p.m. ET, we’ll be offering a Train the Trainers online workshop on how to run the Drupal Speaker Diversity Workshop at your local events. This will allow meetups and DrupalCamps to offer the workshop all around the world! Register for this workshop here.
The Drupal Diversity and Inclusion group has partnered with Jiil Binder on this effort, as she successfully pioneered this approach within the WordPress community. By both offering direct speaker training workshops herself and teaching communities how to run these workshops, she’s been able to make a huge difference in the WordPress community since she began this outreach in 2018. So far the workshop has been run by twelve WordPress meetup groups in the US, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and Venezuela.
All of the communities that held this workshop experienced a real change in the speaker roster for their annual conferences; many of their WordCamps went from having 10% women speakers to having 50% or more women speakers in less than a year. In 2017, Seattle had 60% women speakers and in 2018, Vancouver had 63%.
— “Want to See a More Diverse WordPress Contributor Community? So Do We.”, Automattic blog post
This workshop includes the following:
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A three hour online workshop
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PDFs with Dos and Don’ts for running anevent that supports people from marginalized and underrepresented groups
We strongly encourage local meetup groups and Drupal Camp organizers to identify one or more people within their local community to attend the Train the Trainers workshop. Having trainers who are themselves people from marginalized and underrepresented groups is a big help in connecting trainers with the people they will be working with in the workshop. Allies can assist the primary leaders of the workshop, so all folks are welcome to attend the Train the Trainers event.
Marginalized? Underrepresented? Could you clarify that?
Some people have asked or wondered if these workshops are right for them, and what we mean when we say “people from marginalized and underrepresented groups”. On our Statement of Values page, we say the following:
We believe in intersectionality.
There are many intersecting oppressions in society today. Some of them can make it difficult for people to take part in open source communities. We oppose excluding people due to racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, Islamophobia, class, and BDSM or kink lifestyles, as a non-exhaustive list. We seek to amplify the voices of those affected by oppressions. We also want to create safer spaces in the Drupal community where individuals can work and grow.
If folks have felt tension around speaking due to an aspect of their identity that is underrepresented or marginalized in the Drupal community, we’d love for you to bring your experiences to learn how to lead a Speaker Diversity Workshop!
Sponsors
A huge thanks to our partner in this workshop, Pantheon: without their matching fund, this workshop would not be possible.
We also want to pass on a special thanks to our corporate sponsors, Lullabot and Kanopi Studios, who helped to kick off this fundraising drive, and who believed in this effort from the very start. And another big thanks to individual sponsors Dries Buytaert and Drew Griffiths.
And finally we want to thank all the other organizations and individuals who stepped up to make this possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Our work is never done! We welcome one-time donations and ongoing sponsorships to help us do the work of diversity and inclusion in the Drupal community: donate today with Open Collective!