Great! Since this goes along with the topics on ticket #11 please make sure to add the link there so people can follow the Diversity Panel planing.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Diversity_Events updated in this page.

Okay, it's taken me too long to do this, but here's some of my feedback from the panel. I'm also +1 to all of @amsharma's observations, I noticed the same things she brought up too.

Successes

Here's a quick overview of some of the things that I think we nailed and did well.

• Open for remote participation: Even with the technical issues, I think having a small number of people attending remote is a good idea if the venue supports it. In this case, we could realistically support 1-3 people on a video connection. This is also something VERY HARD to plan for, but I think we did well with including @tatica. Maybe next year we can try to include a small number of remote participants or make plans to do so.
• Audience engagement: With the fair amount of people we had in the room, I think we did a good job of cycling through questions and giving people a chance to speak. There were still some people who wanted to talk at the end, but I think this was really a time issue - discussion from the room, generally, seemed to flow pretty well.
• Diverse panelists: Considering the very short notice we had in assembling panelists, I think we did a good job of representing a diverse group of contributors (2 EMEA, 1+1 remote LATAM, 2 APAC, 2 NA; 6 female, 1 male).

Also, @marinaz++ @lailah++ @jonatoni++ @riecatnor++ @mattdm++ @bee2502++ @amsharma++ for all paneling. :smile: (Also, all of you are welcome to provide your own feedback here too while it's still sort-of fresh!)

To sum up this bit, I overall felt positive about how the panel ended. I think we established this as something that can be a regular part of future Flocks.

Needs improvement

This list may be a little long, but it's out of love and deep appreciation to help build an even better panel next year. :wink:

• Inviting panelists ahead of time: Next year, we should have our list of panelists well ahead of time. We did alright assembling them last minute, but when Flock 2017 talk proposals open, we should be inviting people to participating before the window closes. This will make it easier for us to plan and help build the panel around the experiences or knowledge that our panelists can best help illuminate.
• Longer slot: As we all observed, an hour was tight. It may be better to run this as a workshop slot instead of a talk so we have the benefit of two hours versus one.
• More voice from the panelists: I think this was because of our time constraint, but I don't think all of the panelists were able to best share their experiences or thoughts. It would have been better to build a section in for panelists to talk about their own struggles or experiences they want to share, offer ideas from their perspective about how to improve and make Fedora more accessible, or anything else they wanted to share. From an audience perspective, I would liked to hear more from the panelists (since we were overrun with questions and open discussion towards the end).
• Limiting scope of open discussion (??): Sometimes during the panel, the discussion went off on a tangent and eventually we had to reel it back in. I think this is inevitable, but maybe having a better way to control that and make sure discussion is relevant and focused would be helpful for next time. I'm not as experienced in this part so I'm open to feedback or ideas from others.
• "Early" question submission: With advance planning, we should open up question submission ahead of time. This way, people can ask questions well ahead of Flock, we can process them and add questions to the list that are helpful and add to the panel, and it also encourages community participation with the panel. This would also be nice for remote contributors who are unable to make it to Flock.
• Invite FCL: This isn't a criticism as much of an idea since it wasn't possible this Flock, but definitely making sure the FCL is invited and participating on this panel (with the FPL, if possible) would be most ideal.

Implementation suggestion

• Now until Flock talk submissions: Discuss successes and how to best capture them again, discuss areas of improvement for ideas on how to build a better panel, possibly start planning questions
• During Flock talk submission window: Invite contributors as panelists, open community question submission, create Etherpad / scratchpad with rough, rough outline of how panel should flow
• End of Flock talk submission to week before Flock: Fill agenda with details, process community questions, build topics for panelists to cover and answer, consider prompts for open discussion if time allows
• Immediately before Flock: Communicate info with all panelists, double check Flock scheduling site to accurately reflect all attending panelists, write Community Blog article for the panel, promote on social media (not just Fedora official, but personal too :grin: )

This is a big read @jflory7 :grinning: But all points are awesome. I really like the Implementation suggestions here.

That will be great if we can decide on next year's panel during FAD.

Discussed in in 2016-09-14 meeting.

What's happening now?

When we originally created this ticket, the target objective was for next year's Flock. But @a2batic had the idea of helping organize a diversity panel at FUDCon APAC this year. If we can take some of the lessons learned from the Flock and begin planning for this now, we can still have a strong panel at FUDCon and begin establishing this as a common thing in regional events as well.

There is FUDCon LATAM too, which @tatica is much more local to, but I'm not sure if organizing two panels in two different sides of the world less than a month apart from each other is something we want to do right now. But I wanted to mention the idea anyways. :)

Feedback

Marina and many others provided a lot of feedback on the panel, and there's also some other comments in the ticket above. Some of these ideas were…

• Collecting questions more ahead of time to ask the panelists (we were a little rushed at Flock due to last-minute changes)
• Diversity Bird of Feathers (BoF) session to focus more on audience participation, leaving panel more exclusively on panelists

Action items

• @a2batic @tatica @amsharma @marinaz @devyani7 Begin working on initial structure / format of the panel and what content to deliver for FUDCon diversity panel

Some of the feedback I heard, which agrees with some of the feedback already mentioned, is that there were too many panelists, and still, because of a lot of audience participation, people didn't get to hear a lot from some of the panelists. One of the suggestions that was made was to have a BoF instead of a panel if the main goal is to have a community discussion and planning session.

If there is interest in putting together another panel, I would suggest limiting it to 4-5 participants, and also carefully considering whether there needs to be anyone participating remotely. Perhaps remote participation should be limited to people who can't travel because of a disability or for another reason that prevents them from coming to any Fedora event in the foreseeable future. Having @tatica as a remote participant might also make sense to allow community members to get to know her.

Panelists should be invited well ahead of time, have a chance to prepare to discuss specific topics that the panel will focus on, and be the ones to carry the discussion during the session. I recommend watching the diversity panel from All Things Open for an example of a focused panel discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQrkgyArV5k

Just wanted to share the link from the mailing list in the ticket as well, but @devyani7 and @a2batic have started on the FUDCon abstract at this Etherpad.

I think having a live stream and remote participants would really help with disabled people getting more invovled. Same for those who are care givers and cannot travel.

If possible, having a live text stream of discussions would also be ideal for people who are deaf or those with autism who might feel over stimulated with a lot of speaking.

This can be done with a chat room or using some live text stream technology like reddit live: https://www.reddit.com/r/live/wiki/index

It would require a few people to be available who can type up the text as discussion is happening.

Do we want to work on the Diversity Panel again for the next flock. I would like to open a new ticket or edit this one to plan all the activities diversity team wants to perform in next flock.

Some of them can be -
1. Hackathon or Workshop - Like FAD, we can work on some of the selective items/pagure tickets of diversity.
2. Presentation/talk - This can be done to showcase the diversity work, progress, a retro etc.
3. Panel - We can work on the last year's feedback and can prepare for diversity panel beforehand.

@amsharma Thanks for bringing this up. I was thinking the same.

We can create a new ticket and link it here. This will help us in future to keep track of all FLOCK related discussions by Diversity team.

For upcoming FLOCK , I want to suggest two sessions -

1. Talk with an Open Floor in the end on the work Diversity team has been doing in the past, what we are currently working on and our strategy for the upcoming year. I think this will be a bit similar to Council report in #17 but I feel that having this discussion at FLOCK is important to creating awareness about Diversity team and our work. Also, we can get valuable inputs from the community and help onboard newcomers.

2. A 1.5- 2 hr long session on specific issues important to Diversity team's goals in upcoming year. It could be a BoF like @marinaz suggested or a workshop-cum-Panel/ open table discussion depending on what goals we want to achieve in the upcoming year. I think this would be a discussion for the new ticket relevant to upcoming years' FLOCK once we are done with the report for the Council.

For all Flock planning consideration, until we have more official information, I found this mailing list thread to be a valuable reference point.

Talk

Since the Diversity WG is one of the smaller initiatives in the Project, I see value in having a talk to introduce the Diversity Team, our goals, what we're doing, and what's on the horizon (more or less a refresh of the forthcoming Council report in #17 ). However, at Flock, we should aim to answer these questions:

1. How is this talk focused on contributors? Why should contributors attend it? Which contributors should attend? How will this talk foster greater contribution to Fedora?
   • Focused on the contributions and efforts within the Diversity WG
   • Worth attending to better understand this niche of the project, what the aims and objectives of the team are, and how others can get involved to help
   • Aims to bring greater contribution bringing more focus to the goals of the team and also to interest other contributors from the community by seeing first-hand what we do (with the hope of on-boarding new contributors)
2. What actions will you be taking as a result of the feedback you receive on this talk? What actions are you looking for your audience to take?
   • Feedback gained will be helpful to get input that isn't normally received on a regular basis from mailing list activity, IRC discussion, and meetings
   • Hoping for audience members to bring their own perspectives to see the work we're doing and to offer their views and input on these topics (would also be a goal to possibly on-board new team members into the WG during or after Flock)

Workshop / mini-FAD

I think this is strongly dependent on what we learn about how Flock is organized this year, but from the same email thread linked above, I think a FAD-style workshop on one of the days could be an effective way for us to maximize our time together at Flock to make significant strides on a select number of issues (one or two) that would benefit by having us in the same room, especially with others whose input we might not normally have.

The first goals I would consider for workshop planning is picking priority tasks that we believe would benefit from:

1. Core team members in the same room
2. Participation from non-members who might have a lot of input on specific topics

I am +1 for -

The first goals I would consider for workshop planning is picking priority tasks that we believe would benefit from:

Core team members in the same room
Participation from non-members who might have a lot of input on specific topics

AND, We for sure would like to invite people who are interested and would like to help them onborad. Like we did in last flock successfully for bee and Jona. In this case, this gonna help what Bee suggested -

Talk with an Open Floor in the end on the work Diversity team has been doing in the past, what we are currently working on and our strategy for the upcoming year. I think this will be a bit similar to Council report in #17 but I feel that having this discussion at FLOCK is important to creating awareness about Diversity team and our work. Also, we can get valuable inputs from the community and help onboard newcomers.

Another suggestion is holding a Women in Fedora Dinner/Lunch at FLOCK. If FLOCK doesn't have budget for this, we can use some of our budget here.

Related links, which also talk about why such events are important :

https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2015/WomensDinner
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america/attend/women-attendees

Another suggestion is holding a Women in Fedora Dinner/Lunch at FLOCK. If FLOCK doesn't have budget for this, we can use some of our budget here.
Dinner will be good idea? As lunch will be given by the conference.
We should pick a dinner night, pre-conferance if this can be sponsored one.
Related links, which also talk about why such events are important :
https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC/2015/WomensDinner
http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-america/attend/women-attendees

+1 for the pre-conferance dinner. If we want to do it, we need to -
1. Come up with agenda, talk points.
2. Need to sync with flock organizing team to get the list of female candidates joining.
3. Look after the budget part and venue.

It's time to talk about this topic at our next meeting, because FLOCK is really near and we should plan in advance what activities (panel or workshop etc) we want to organize.

Now that we know the status of the Diversity work session at Flock this year (and that we won't be doing a panel), do we want to close this ticket and focus the discussion in #27 towards our work session?

Now that we know the status of the Diversity work session at Flock this year (and that we won't be doing a panel), do we want to close this ticket and focus the discussion in #27 towards our work session?

yes, That is correct. Closing this one for now. Thanks for bringing it up.