DEI panel

[dasaderi]

DI Panel 5 speakers. 5-7 minutes each 15-20 questions and discussion Potential topics:

• Equitable opportunities
• Diversity and inclusion in open education
• Diversity and inclusion in admissions
• Personal experience?

Potential speakers suggestion:

• Letisha Wyatt - OHSU
• Maybe someone from the Coalition for Communities of Color in PDX? (“The CCC believes that decolonizing data and research by empowering communities of color as experts of their experience and having the right to research, the right to know and the right to be heard is a crucial part of transformative change”)
• Derek Applewhite (Reed)
• Esther Choo (OHSU)
• Radhika Reddy (PSU) Participating with Build Exito Program
• Gerardo Sandoval (UO)

Copied from keynote speakers' issue - Luci's comment

I found some potential speakers. A lot of these people are not directly involved in the open community, but they do work that aims to give more people access to resources and research, so I thought they could be interesting to throw into the mix:

(1) someone from Coalition for Communities of Color -maybe one of the project leads on the Regional Equity Atlas

(2) Douglas Tsoi, JD: Portland Underground Grad School. taught a class last January about how big data can be used to study and define manifestations of structural racism. For a more “open” focus, could maybe give a talk at OpenCon about PUGS and its vision for making education accessible

(3) Haowen Zheng from eScience Institute

(4) Deborah Kelley, UW Oceanography prof, working with other people to analyze oceanography big data. It looks like super cool work and she also seems to be someone who learned over her career the importance of open and collaboration

(5) Shelly Farnham, project lead for “Assessing Community Well-being through Open Data and Social Media”

[dasaderi]

@LuciMoore I finally had the time to look up your suggestions, and they are great. I'd say Dr. Deborah Kelley could be also a great candidate for the OS panel.

[LuciMoore]

I started a draft e-mail for inviting people to speak on the panel: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SNMKHOWxlQ_wo1t59cr1GbOfhGVCeuSQ5HPDxJZrLyM/edit

[dasaderi]

Nice, thank you Luci! I think we could send the invitation to Letisha anytime this week. I'd love to get someone from the CCC. @walecain, thoughts? @theresacheng, would you like to help with putting together this panel?

[theresacheng]

Oh great! I made some edits on the email template, and I'll set aside some time to look through the panelists/research other potential speakers.

[theresacheng]

Sanjay Srivastava at UO (https://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/ but really all the action is at https://twitter.com/hardsci) has been involved in DI work within SIPS I think (https://improvingpsych.org/)

[LuciMoore]

Thank you for helping out, @theresacheng ! I'm wrapping up my PhD within the next couple of weeks so I'm nervous about how much time I can spend on OpenCon planning at the moment 😅. I added our list of speakers after the DI invitation boilerplate so that the info is all in one place. I can contact Letisha Wyatt at OHSU this week if everyone is cool with that. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SNMKHOWxlQ_wo1t59cr1GbOfhGVCeuSQ5HPDxJZrLyM/edit

[dasaderi]

@LuciMoore, thanks so much. Yes, please do email Letisha anytime this week.

@theresacheng let's give people a chance to vote today. Otherwise, I'd say go ahead and email Sanjay.

I would like to invite Dr. Esther Choo and someone from CCC. I don't know anyone there though. Any suggestions? Just by taking a quick look at the website, I'd say Dr. Shweta Moorthy. Ideas? @walecain @daniellecrobinson? @rchampieux?

Thanks!

[LuciMoore]

I just e-mailed Letisha. I can e-mail Dr. Shweta Moorthy from the Coalition of Communities of Color today as well if people agree. She seems like a good choice since it looks like she is in charge of their research department.

[dasaderi]

Luci, if you can email her, I'd say do it. I'll email Dr. Esther Choo today.

[dasaderi]

Just emailed Dr. Choo. My email is in the template Luci made. Finger crossed!

[LuciMoore]

update: Dr. Shweta Moorthy from the Coalition of Communities of Color said she'll be out of the country and can't do it. too bad

[rchampieux]

Thanks for the update @LuciMoore. I reviewed the CCC website and it doesn't look like there is anyone else on staff who is research focused.

[rchampieux]

@LuciMoore and @dasaderi per Luci's suggestion above re CCC, I found some more info on the Regional Equity Atlas. The project lead Brody Abbott from Ecotrust. Science we can't get Dr. Moorthy, I think Brody would be a nice alternative. What do you think? https://ecotrust.org/staff/brody-abbott/

[rchampieux]

A few updates and requests for action and feedback 😊.

• Invites to Letisha Wyatt and Esther Choo have gone out (we are waiting on their confirmation).

• Dr. Shweta Moorthy will be out of the country, and can’t accept our invite. As an alternative, I would like to suggest Brody Abbot from EcoTrust. Brody is project lead for the Regional Equity Atlas (on which the CCC is a partner).

Remaining two invites:

• Of the individuals below and listed in the Github issues, I think we should invite Dr. Gerardo Sandoval. His “research focuses on the roles of immigrants in community regeneration, the urban planning interventions of governments in low-income immigrant communities, and the transnational relationships that exist within immigrant neighborhoods.” Moreover, he has interest and expertise in theories of community development and inclusive public participation. I think it will be interesting to hear about his work in these areas and reflect on applying these concepts to the community we are trying to build.

• I’m concerned that we would be asking Drs. Reddy, Srivastava, and Applewhite to speak to work within academia and the research workforce that both Letisha and Esther will likely emphasize and address in their talks. Thoughts?

• A new suggestion – invite someone leading the UW eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good program (rather than a specific project lead as they are summer interns). We could ask its Director (or someone else engaged in a leadership role with the program) to speak not only to the projects it has facilitated but how the program educates and engages early career researchers on the dangers and potentiality of big data and big data science for communities of color, the poor, and other groups marginalized for aspects of their identify.

Action items:

• By December 27th at noon, please respond to this email or comment in Github on the suggestions to invite Brody Abbott and invite Dr. Gerardo Sandoval.
• By December 27th at noon, please reflect on and respond to my feedback about the potential overlap of content by asking Drs. Reddy, Srivastava, or Applewhite to speak.
• By December 27th at noon, review and make any final recommendations for our 5th panelists.
• We will send invite on Friday December 28, based on your feedback. Robin is volunteering to do this, but would welcome help.

P.S. No one has volunteered to write-up a short description of the panel. I think we can put a pause on this until we have our speaker invites out, but I will be bugging you all again on Friday 😊😊. However, I thought it might be helpful to read the description of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion session at OpenCon 2018 to inspire our speaker choices and particular focus for OpenCon Cascadia (this is not to suggest we have to mirror its exact approach).

While the Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education movements often lean on rhetoric around social justice, equity, and the democratization of knowledge, in many ways, the movements continue to marginalize underrepresented scholars and students. Mainstream efforts to advance Open centre digital solutions and dominant (often Western) ways of knowing. At the same time, they fail to acknowledge issues salient to marginalized social and geographical contexts, such as the digital divide, non-Western ways of knowing, and the colonization of information. This OpenCon panel session aims to prompt critical discussions around the ways in which the Open movements have replicated some of the same systems of power and oppression in higher education that they were originally meant to address.

Audience members should leave with a more critical view of openness, and be encouraged to reflect on the following questions:

• How do the solutions put forth by the Open movements reinforce Western dominance, colonialism, as well as barriers on the basis of race, class, gender, etc...?
• How does exclusion and a lack of diversity impact their own Open advocacy work in their communities and/or institutions?
• How might they begin to address this in their own communities?

[dasaderi]

Thank you @rchampieux!

I still have not heard from Dr. Choo. I'd say that if she says no, we could ask Dr. Reddy next?

I'm totally down with inviting Brody Abbott and Dr. Gerardo Sandoval. I don't know either, but don't you think they also might overlap in what they would cover?

Inviting someone from UW eScience Institute of Data Science for Social Good program sounds also good, but by looking at the website, I'm not sure who would be a good fit. I like @LuciMoore 's suggestions for Shelly Farnham.

Re to writing up a short description of the panel, I can help with that, but I'd like some help from others in the organizing committee who have their hands on EDI work, because I'm definitely not the best person to do it. The OpenCon description is very helpful.

[pamelapierce]

I agree that inviting Brody Abbott and Dr. Sandoval sounds good.

Another possibility for an invite from the UW eScience Institute of Data Science for Social Good is Magdalena Balazinska.

[LuciMoore]

@rchampieux I think those are good suggestions for people to invite. sorry i've been non-responsive. i'm going to talk to my friend Tavita Garrett, a fellow grad student, today about helping to organize the DI panel since we are short on manpower at the moment

[rchampieux]

Hi @LuciMoore no apologies necessary, I know you are focused on other things 🌟. Tavita would be an awesome addition to the team (she's also be an awesome panelist, now that I think of it)

[theresacheng]

Better late than never:

• I'm down to invite Abbott and Sandoval. Re: @dasaderi's comment about overlap-- I think they are different enough
• I agree that it might make sense to wait on sending out emails to others (Drs. Reddy, Srivastava, or Applewhite) pending declined invitations from Drs. Wyatt and Choo.
• For the fifth panelist I really like the idea of including a student (Tavita Garrett) or someone from the UW program. I took a look at both Shelly Farnham and Magdalena Balazinska (links provided + a quick google search) and while they are both very impressive, I had a hard time figuring out why y'all had them in mind for this panel specifically. Can @LuciMoore and @PJP1313 provide a little bit more context for those suggestions?
• I can collaborate on the write-up.

[pamelapierce]

After a closer look, I agree that Magdalena Balazinska isn't the best fit in terms of diversity and inclusion issues.

[LuciMoore]

I don't think Tavita should be a panelist because she doesn't really work in diversity and inclusion. She does engage in important extracurricular work around DI issues, but, as a more junior grad student, her focus has necessarily been almost entirely on her research in neuroscience.

@theresacheng you might be right about Shelly Farnham, I was interested in this project she was a lead on (https://escience.washington.edu/research-project/assessing-community-well-being-through-open-data-and-social-media/), but it's not immediately clear how she might fit into the DI panel

[theresacheng]

Oh yikes @LuciMoore i missed the original link from Daniela! I think that it would be interesting to hear Shelly Farnham chat about how DI issues were baked into that project, and would be nice to have representation more outside of academia. Otherwise I do want to do one more pitch for Sanjay Srivastava; he's the diversity committee chair for the Society for Improvement of Psychological Sciences, I think that what they're working on is well-aligned with the mission that @rchampieux described, i.e., doing work that is explicitly asking "how do we bake DI into our open science movement." On the flip side I can see him overlapping a little w/ Leticia Wyatt, can also see him saying no (based on another conference taking place next weekend).

[dasaderi]

Great! Let's discuss this all at today's call. @theresacheng would you be willing to email Sanjay Srivastava?

[theresacheng]

yes, definitely! let me know if ya'll decide yes

[LuciMoore]

@theresacheng I would def vote yes for Sanjay. there might be overlap with Letisha, but I don't think she does a lot of directly open science work at the moment

[rchampieux]

Hi all - we made a few decisions on today's call 😸 We are going to ask Carol Muñoz Nieves to be the fifth panelist. She is based in Vancouver and Asura is her colleague/friend, so he is going to reach out. You can read more about Carol's work here: https://www.scholcommlab.ca/people/carol-munoz-nieves/

I will send invites to Brody Abbot and Dr. Sandoval. If Carol isn't able to come, we'd still like to prioritize a student voice on this panel, so we have some more thinking to do.

[rchampieux]

Just confirming here that invites to Dr. Sandoval and Mr. Brody have been sent. I copied Daniela and Luci. I played with the template text a bit to include some high level info about the EDI panel (cribed from OpenCon 2018). Example here:

Dear Mr. Abbott,

I am contacting you on behalf of the OpenCon Cascadia organizing committee to invite you to participate in a panel to share your work and perspective on community participatory research and the Regional Equity Atlas. We think your experience and interest in using data to understand and address equity issues in Portland will be of interest to our audience, but feel free to focus on other areas of your work and interests.

OpenCon Cascadia is the premier PNW satellite conference for the international OpenCon conference. It is the mission of OpenCon Cascadia to create a collaborative community, spanning all disciplines, domains, and research communities. Together, we want to build a regional coalition of students, researchers, educators, activists, and librarians passionate about improving research, academic culture, and access to and participation in scholarship. Our keynote speakers for this inaugural conference are Dr. Kadija Ferryman and Dr. Leslie Chan.

The conference will take place on February 1st and 2nd in Portland on the OHSU campus. The Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion session will start at 2:00 on Saturday February 2nd. The panel will include five speakers with whom we aim to explore and prompt a critical discussion around the ways in which the Open movements, including open data, open access, open education, have replicated some of the same systems of power and oppression they were meant to address. The panelists will introduce themselves and their work in a 5 to 7 minute talk followed by moderated questions from the audience, for a total time slot of 1 hour.

We would be honored if you joined us. We ask if you could please let us know by January 7th.

[dasaderi]

Hi all! I just spoke to Tara Robertson over Slack. She is amazing and super enthusiastic about OCC. I think she would be a great person to add to this panel. She said she could talk about the work she is doing at Mozilla about trans inclusion policy. She could do that also in a lightening talk on Friday, if everyone we have already invited accepts.

Additionally, she mentioned she could run a do-a-thon: she has got an interactive exercise called Inclusion Cards, a structured way to get people having deeper conversations about systemic oppression in the workplace. <3 <3 <3

She also offered to help with Meet & Greet organization and with publicity.

In summary, as I said before, I think she is AWESOME and we NEED her to be there. :)

[dasaderi]

Oh, and maybe Tara could moderate the DEI panel if she is not in it.

[ashleyfarley]

That’s awesome! She could moderate the panel and then give a lightning talk!

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:17 AM Daniela Saderi notifications@github.com wrote:

Oh, and maybe Tara could moderate the DEI panel if she is not in it.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/OpenCon-Cascadia/planning_in_the_open/issues/15#issuecomment-450513961, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AVUo4ugC8kuCNkI3nGBvXOQPjqWpYowzks5u97-jgaJpZM4ZUd5D .

[JEmery972]

Like the do-athon concept. We’re meeting this next week to discuss do-athon ideas.

Jill

On Dec 29, 2018, at 11:31, Ashley Farley notifications@github.com wrote:

That’s awesome! She could moderate the panel and then give a lightning talk!

On Sat, Dec 29, 2018 at 11:17 AM Daniela Saderi notifications@github.com wrote:

Oh, and maybe Tara could moderate the DEI panel if she is not in it.

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[Bubblbu]

I had the chance to talk with Carol and, good news, she'd love to join the panel. 🎉

The only challenge will be to submit the visa application asap (Carol currently in Cuba on holidays and will only be back at the beginning of next year) which means that we'll probably have to provide an invitation letter.

Is there anyone who has experience with the visa procedures in the US from an organizers point of view? Maybe reach out to the global OpenCon folks?

[dasaderi]

That's amazing news, @Bubblbu! I'll send an email to Joe and Nick right now and cc you and @rchampieux.

[dasaderi]

Email to Joe and Nick about the visa sent.

[LuciMoore]

Letisha Wyatt confirmed!

[dasaderi]

I sent another email to Dr. Choo asking to confirm by January 4th. If she does not confirm, would you be okay with me asking Tara Robertson to be on the panel?

[rchampieux]

Yes, I think so!

[rchampieux]

Just catching up on some of these great developments. I'm very excited about Tara's involvement and Letisha's confirmation. I am getting the letter ready for Carol now.

[dasaderi]

I confirmed that if we don't have the funds already, I can use my budget to pay for flight for Carol. Do we need to book the flight in order for her visa to be confirmed?

[dasaderi]

Dr. Choo is out of town that weekend. I'm going ahead and invite Tara Robertson to speak at the panel. Have we heard back from anyone else?

[dasaderi]

Invitation to Tara sent. Email text available on the DEI panel gdoc in communication folder of OCC google drive.

[rchampieux]

Dr. Sandoval is travelling that week and cannot attend. Should we move forward with inviting Shelly Farnham and/or Sanjay Srivastava? I would be super excited about both nominees.

[dasaderi]

Yes. Either is good. @theresacheng would you be willing to send out an invite soon to Sanjay Srivastava?

[theresacheng]

Sent!

[dasaderi]

Luci will moderate the panel. Thank you @LuciMoore! <3

[theresacheng]

Sanjay is confirmed! @dasaderi @rchampieux

[dasaderi]

Wonderful, thank you Theresa! @rchampieux have you heard from Brody Abott?

[rchampieux]

Nope, but the requested deadline for a response is today. Thus far, we have Letisha, Tara, Sanjay, and Carol confirmed, correct?

[dasaderi]

Tara is not 100% as she needs to get permission from her boss. I should hear from her between today and tomorrow. Everyone else is confirmed.

[rchampieux]

Hi - Brody won't be able to participate, he has a conflict. If Tara confirms, we will have four amazing panelists, so let's not sweat it....unless Tara can't do it 😸