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