As an online event will, bandwidth permitting, allow for a larger attendance, this is an opportunity to also increase the diversity of the attendees. Promo hopes the this will have a trickle down effect and lead to a more long term participation of a more diverse crowd in the KDE Community long term, which is one of Promo's goals.
Things we can do:
| Status | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resolved | allyson | T13084 Akademy 2020: Promo | ||
| Resolved | allyson | T13088 Akademy 2020: Increase Attendee Diversity |
We can increase diversity by making one or both of the key note speakers female. This can encourage more female attendance from the KDE Community.
Go through YouTube and PeerTube to see which videos has the most views
It is here to be a reminder, in general. I believe it is a simultaneous goal for promo and Akademy team/talks/committee. It is also something I wanted to speak about with the program committee based on my meeting with Promo this morning
https://community.kde.org/Promo's_Long_Term_Goals#For_KDE_community
^ In Section 1 for the Promo's long term goals is diversity. Adding such a goal to Akademy will positively benefit such a goal for promo in the long run. Since Akademy is virtual, as said before, we want to try to encourage newbies to attend who couldn't otherwise come to an in person event. By increasing diversity in general (to the overall KDE Community/Promo team) it would directly effect increasing diversity for Akademy. Moreover, the goal of increasing diversity at Akademy is overreaching to the larger-scaled Promo goal
Also, seeking and pitching KDE stuff (including Akademy) to new (= more diverse) audiences is part of what Promo should do.
A friend that teaches computer science at Polytechnic University of Valencia once told me that, apart from his regular pure Computer Science classes, he was often asked to teach shorter courses at other faculties that married a subject of their course with CS. He has taught, for example, "CS applied to pharmacy", "CS and Macro Economics", "CS for Historical Data Collection", etc.
Many of these courses were not compulsory, so students who attended did so just because they were interested. The point is that he observed that in these classes there was much more gender diversity than in his regular pure CS classes. This led him to conclude that pure, theoretical CS has a narrow appeal, while CS applied to something else attracts a much broader audience.
We can apply this knowledge to Akademy talks. I am not suggesting that there are topics that are more "female friendly". That would be sexist. I am suggesting that talks that bring together more than one topic, say "Educational KDE software (and how to use it in class)", "KDE software for artistic production", "Filmmaking and KDE", "KDE software and statistical data analysis", etc., would logically appeal to a larger crowd than talks that are inlooking about KDE, because it would be appealing to KDE enthusiasts + enthusiasts of the other topic. By attracting a larger crowd, common sense says that the likelihood of it being more diverse would also be larger.
As an online conference does have limitations (for example regarding bandwidth), but not as severe as a physical conference. I say we at least talk about the possibility of having a track that will contain talks like this.
As for my suggestions for keynote speakers, I will bang the same drum I bang every year and again suggest