[cw: mention of theoretical sexual assault] Hi Daniel,
On 2019-06-18 3:09 p.m., Daniel Shahaf wrote:
Random idea: Can we do something like the "CoC contacts" but for people who feel uncomfortable joining a community? For example, some sort of way to pair people with one-on-one mentors?
I believe Shane is working on a new mentorship website/framework that could meet this need. I'd like to ask him to chime in on any specific considerations he has re: diversity and inclusion within that new system.
Once that system is ready to go, it'd be a matter of promoting it, alongside its support for D&I-specific topics.
Or, to scale better, set up a *privately-archived* [email protected] mailing list, where people who want to join but are reluctant to can contact us?
>
http://community.apache.org/mentorprogrammeapplication.html doesn't quite fit the bill, IMO, for two reasons: it uses a public mailing list and requires proposing a weeks-sized "project", whereas new contributors typically get started with fixing typos or minor bugs. ]]]
I'm nervous about this, because often questions re: personally important D&I topics are things that you might not want to perennially have available to all future members of that group.
Example: If I were someone who'd been sexually assaulted at a (non-ASF) tech conference, and wanted to ask someone @ the ASF about policies and procedures in place to prevent something similar happening to me within Apache ProjectX, or how it might be handled if it occurred, I wouldn't want that archived at all. I definitely wouldn't want it archived if my assaulter might someday be in a position to read it, either.
I think that, once the Mentoring system above is up and running, and there's names of friendly people willing to help newbies get involved in the ASF, some of whom self-identify with groups that match those of applicants, it'd be a better option than a list. But it does come with some specific needs, such as: mentors actually responding to applicants, support materials re: what does D&I mean at the ASF, how we define and enforce our CoC, etc.
If you're talking about something that isn't specific to a D&I initiative, but just community development, ComDev's mailing list might be more appropriate.
-Joan "yay friendly web interfaces" Touzet
