Improving diversity in our team

[andrewkern]

Hey all-

In this week's meeting we had an excellent conversation about the current gender imbalance on the team and ways that we might improve it and other aspects of diversity in the project. I'm opening this issue so that we can continue the conversation here.

One of the biggest topics was how to recruit new members to the team. Some things that we talked about included

• hackathons
• workshops
• actively recruiting individuals
• using stdpopsim as an educational platform
• trying to connect with pyladies.org

what else should be added to this list of possible routes forward?

[grahamgower]

I think developers are users first, and as such, we should expand our user base and simultaneously open a dialog with users.

• Encourange more students and junior researchers to use stdpopsim. (Gender balance is more even at more junior levels, but students tend to be shy to contribute unless encouraged directly). PIs are in a position to nudge their students, particularly new students.
  • Encourage students to submit feature requests and bugs to the issue tracker.
  • If you can't use stdpopsim for your project, because it doesn't do X, please tell us!
  • Report bugs, inconsistencies, or challenges encountered.
  • Confused by the command line interface? The documentation? Someone else probably is too. We want to know!

[petrelharp]

I forget who said "workshops", but that's a great way to get new people.

[andrewkern]

i'm trying to make the landing page of the docs a bit more appealing for recruiting first time / ECR developers over on #611