DEI leadership post

[jnywong]

Blog post to acknowledge the gender gap in the current leadership team and our intentions to address it in the future.

[haroldcampbell]

Thank you for the draft @jnywong!
@choldgraf may I invite you to add/update?

[choldgraf]

This is a super important topic to me, and the post is an excellent start @jnywong - thank you for putting it together!

I agree w/ @jnywong's point that it's important for my voice to come through here as well. How about I take a pass at the post today (or if I run out of time, this weekend) to provide some historical context of how we've tried to improve diversity within the org, and also to provide an idea for how these issues align with our goals of growing our organizational maturity and resilience over the next 3 years.

If that sounds safe to try, I'll try to add my thoughts to the post ASAP, and invite @jnywong to give feedback/edits/etc to make sure they align with her ideas as well. Jenny would you be willing to be a co-author with me on this post?

[aprilmj]

The historical and future context would give this post even more meaning @choldgraf. Go for it!

I hope @jnywong is done working for the week, and I look forward to seeing this post evolve with y'all collaborating on it.

[jnywong]

Yes, @choldgraf (and anyone else), please feel free to directly contribute to this post in this PR 👍

Jenny would you be willing to be a co-author with me on this post?

Of course, great! Happy to provide feedback and edits after you have added your piece.

[choldgraf]

I've gone through the DEI post and made some edits with the following goals.

• Provide more historical context for how we've tried to build an inclusive culture and diverse team over the years.
• Add more detail for why we think diversity is important to 2i2c
• Note that improving the diversity of our staff and our leadership is an important part of the organizational growth of 2i2c in the coming years.
• Provide a few more concrete things we need to try to make initial progress.

I'd love to hear thoughts from @jnywong on what you think about these changes. Please make any edits or changes of your own to make sure you think we're delivering the right message effectively!

[jnywong]

Hey @choldgraf , really great to see you riff off my initial stub and add the much-needed backward- and forward-looking perspectives to round out this post!

I am pleased to see you explicitly committing to more concrete plans that we can hold ourselves to in future.

There's rightly a lot of emphasis on bringing in new voices to the table, as we scale as an organisation, but we also need to remember to look within and retain brilliant talent over time as we mature cb7859e .

For example, there have been previous efforts to map out career development for the engineering team and hopefully we can roll this process out across the whole team in the future. This is a "nice to think about, but not right now" item for this specific blog post.

Overall, I am happy with this going out once @damianavila gets a chance to take a look as requested!

[choldgraf]

Sounds good, thanks @jnywong - also just noting we've had an issue about this for a few years now, that we could either repurpose or replace. This is another one of those "good intentions" issues that we haven't yet had time to flesh out because of the chaotic nature of small and growing organizations:

• https://github.com/2i2c-org/meta/issues/132

Rather than block this PR on @damianavila's approval, can we instead give him 24 hours to either approve or request changes? If he approves, no changes are requested, or changes are requested and we make them, we can post in ~24 hours.

Does that work?

[jnywong]

I have resolved all the comments.

Damián is happy with this going public with the caveat that we hold ourselves accountable for what we say we'll do in the medium term.

Leaving this to @choldgraf to merge in to go live 🚀

[choldgraf]

I looked over the post again, and don't have any worries about the stuff we're saying or committing to in there. I think it will likely take more time than we think it will (it always does), but O(year or two) feels safe to try and I think this comes through in the post.

Thanks folks for seeding this conversation, I'm really hopeful we can make progress at a strategic level in the coming weeks, and see the benefits of this in the coming months/years.