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w3c / idcg

Inclusion and Diversity Community Group
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Track and report diversity of nominated representatives #29

Open chaals opened 4 years ago

chaals commented 4 years ago

W3C reports on diversity of its leadership, including groups that are partially member-elected like TAG (6 of 10 are elected) or AB (all but one of 10-12 are elected). Perhaps we should extend that to Working Groups.

In #18, @tobie wrote

Could we consider making W3C members sign (on a voluntary basis) a pledge with concrete steps to improve the diversity of working groups, communicate about it, and then hold them accountable (including those that have refused to sign the pledge)?

I'm not sure how you propose to hold an organisation accountable to something they have decided not to claim they will do, but I think it's worth exploring concrete proposals.

W3C members have a reasonable amount of information about the largest participants in W3C work, and most of them are public companies that in turn provide a certain amount of information about their overall workforces and geographic locations. If someone in the membership wants to collate a bit of that and point it out, then even where figures are approximate, they would be able to publicise that among the membership (or more generally if they are relying on publicly available information and respecting the privacy of individuals).

It's possible that funding or sponsorship is available for some of this work, and that might be worth exploring too.

tobie commented 4 years ago

I'm not sure how you propose to hold an organisation accountable to something they have decided not to claim they will do

“Here is the list of members who have signed the pledge. Here is the list of those who haven’t yet.”

chaals commented 4 years ago

The proposal here is to look at the diversity of "Official" W3C groups. The quotes are because as well as IGs and WGs, there are a number of Community Groups in which W3C is investing significant resources (given that formally chartered groups are assigned as little as 2% FTE in staff resources, that seems like an appropriate bar at which we should be tracking CGs with W3C involvement).

chaals commented 4 years ago

If we do want W3C to do this, I can imagine them asking how we are meant to do it in practice. In particular, for international organisations it can be difficult to track the relevant information, as some jurisdictions make it illegal to ask or unlikely that people will give an accurate answer.

@jeffjaffe @koalie thoughts?

jeffjaffe commented 4 years ago

@chaals , I'm sorry but I don't understand your question.

You seem to be asking how to track information that is illegal to ask about. I may be misunderstanding. But if that is the question, we are not proficient at doing things that are illegal.

koalie commented 3 years ago

I'm not sure how you propose to hold an organisation accountable to something they have decided not to claim they will do

“Here is the list of members who have signed the pledge. Here is the list of those who haven’t yet.”

I reckon we could do that. And add a third category for those from jurisdictions where it's illegal to ask (per the point chaals made).