Hi Romaine,
thanks for your e-mail.
On 07/09/2017 05:19, Romaine Wiki wrote:
But why do I write about it here? Because in the rejection of the application I was triggerd by something what concerns me. In the message it said: "Many strong applications were submitted [...]" To me this reeds as that if someone does not want to open up their feelings regarding personal diversity, while trying to influence the movement with more diversity, this can't ever lead to a strong application.
In this world there are many people that express themselves strongly in their diversity, but that is only half of the people with the diversity. The other half keeps it indoors, mostly hidden for the outside world of anonymous people.
I understand the point you raise. This is, in general, something that happens in many contexts within the Wikimedia movement and other collaborative projects, i. e. you may have some very active people who are less vocal or less prompt in sharing their opinion. On the other hand, other people occupy a lot of the bandwidth of the communication. This is problematic as we lose many opinions and point of views from our discussions and what we get is a biased representation of the ideas of the community (see the "readers vs editors" debate, for example).
However, to be fair, "Many strong applications were submitted [...]" is a set phrase that is used when dealing with any selection process (from research grants, to scholarships, to scholarly articles, etc.). In practice, it is used anytime a merit ranking as to be made.
It can be a choice of organisers to select only those applications that have a strong story in the field of diversity (like for example because WMF funds only a meager conference). But then I think half of the diversity is missing. That is my concern.
It is a valid concern, and a solution could implemented by choosing seemingly "counterproductive" criteria or quotas when giving scholarships to participants to conferences.
For example, in WM-IT we have scholarships for Wikimania and every year we usually give one or two (over ~10) scholarship to people who have an interesting background with respect to the "open" world (be it involvement or projects regarding open data, open access, etc) but no experience on Wikipedia. This strategy brought has the biggest returns so far with at least two people that eventually becomevery active members of WM-IT and even served in the board.
Hope this helps. Ciao,
C