# Solid Project: DEIT

* Date: 2021-08-10

## Agenda
* Emotional and Mental Check-in (Marrelle)
* Community Survey Presentation (Kyra Virginia)
* What are our next steps? What are our action items? – Let's try to get one action item out of this.
### Links
* [DEI Team Project Tracker](https://github.com/solid/deit/projects/1)
* Community Survey

## Meeting Notes
* We'd like to start incorporating self-care and a self-checkin into the DEI meetings, by starting with a mental and emotional check in
* Anyone can lead the emotional and mental check in
* Shout out to Kyra and Jeff for their presentations at Solid World
* Goal for this meeting will be to create at least one action item on the DEI Team Project Tracker, based on the ideas from the community survey
* Note that everyone is invited to add items or work on items on the DEI Team Project Tracker

### Review of Survey Data
* Virginia went through the [survey data](https://virginiabalseiro.github.io/survey/)

#### Brainstorming
* The team likes the idea of rotations for Solid World times, to incorporate different time zones
* Sarven had suggested creating intro videos for the different Solid events, so that people can understand what the events are about, who is invited, how to participate, etc
* This can help with increasing participation
* The Solid Team is working on making a blog
* The majority of people in the community are white men, which isn't inherently bad, but means there is less diversity in the community
* It would be great to invite people of more diverse backgrounds to the community
* The age ranges suggest that the community is comprised of millenials and Gen Y, so it makes sense that the preferred modes of communication are videos and written content like blogs
* If we want to expand the community to Gen Z and younger, we should look to channels that they are on (like TikTok)
* It would be great to highlight individual contributions to the community, like Jackson's videos
* Suggestion to have project briefs for people to work on projects together, for people who can contribute to different sections but not do the entire thing themselves
* This has been done before in other communities with success
* There is a lot of existing software that needs work- some have good code but bad design, some have good design but poor code
* It would be great to have a pathway forward to allow creators to advertise that they need help in different areas
* It would be great to be able to track this in a central place that is findable by the community
* For example, the Solid Team could be an example of how this could work
* When you see issues in Github that are open, that people could contribute to, you don't know how much work or how hard it is to work on, so labels to indicate difficulty level would be very helpful
* Important for everyone to remember to be kind and compassionate when giving feedback or doing code reviews, so as to not scare people off
* Virginia wrote an [amazing blog entry](https://www.virginiabalseiro.com/blog/how-to-give-feedback) about how to be compassionate when giving feedback
* Suggestion for a buddy or mentor program. We would have to gauge interest in this first, to determine whether people would be intersted in being a buddy or mentoring others
* We could initially see if there is interest in a buddy system (which might be less intimidating than a mentorship program)
* We could open a forum section for beginners
* People also often reach out to the visible members of the community, looking for help
* Other people have different experiences, where they find that if they are more visible, they get people trying to correct them :(
* A lot of Solid is described in terms of interoperable specifications and it requires a deep technical understanding. So how do we onboard new people who might not have this understanding?
* Also the specifications are drafts and they keep changing, so it can catch people off-guard when things change
* On the other hand, if you invite people into the spec meetings, and it's full of acronyms and references to other specs, it's overwhelming and uninviting
* We need people to be able to contribute meaningful feedback, but it seems difficult right now
* For all the specifications, there should be a much better on-ramp for people who are interested and want to learn more
* Giving more time in the spec meetings to ask questions
* Agendas should include introductions and questions from the community
* The meetings could open with questions from the community, and then go on to the main content
* Sounds like we need more onboarding resources for people new to the community, including acronym definition
* For a community project, we can try to limit the particiaption to new developers, and delegate more experienced developers to being mentors on the project

### Action Items
1. Beginner on-ramp improvements
3. Introducing a buddy system
4. Creating a community project to work on

### Follow up conversations
* We can add these things to the DEI team project board
* We can discuss the framework for the buddy system on Gitter or at the next DEI meeting
* We can further brainstorm the community project and how we envision it working