Week 14
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Cohort call
We used google doc to take notes during the cohort call to avoid any issue when collaborating: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lXDdsq1jLsV3VRo7-oWyTFvhXY0BR0A8kZl3hzVVvB4/edit?usp=sharing
- Please note that this call will be recorded
- The video will be available on the YouTube channel in the next days
- Turn on your webcam if you don't mind sharing your face (or off if you do!)
This week : During this week's cohort call, we will:
- Personas and pathways for contributors
- Community interactions & mountain of engagement
- Implicit bias & mental health care
Before this meeting
- Do the implicit Bias Quiz
- Go to https://implicit.harvard.edu complete the 'Gender - Career' or 'Gender - Science' quiz (10 minutes). You can 'continue as a guest' by choosing your country,
- Answer these questions when you've finished the implicit association test: What does inclusion mean to you? Did your results of the implicit association test surprise you?
- Bring your notes to the cohort call.
Roll call
Please edit your Zoom name (click on the three dots on the top right of your video) and add one of the following letters in front of your name.
W for written reflection-based exercise in the main room
S for Spoken Discussion Breakout Room
This will help us assign you to the breakout room with format of your choice (Read more about why we run different format of breakout rooms):
- Emmy/ OLS cohost + TU Delft/ t emmy_ft / 🌫
- Malvika / OLS +Turing / t+gh: malvikasharan / ☕️
- Ismael / The Turing Way’s Guide for Ethical Research / t: @Ismaelkhergar; g: Ismael-kg
- Emma/Open science in phytolith researh/ t ekaroune -
- Markus / he/him / sktime / t: mloning_ gh: mloning
- Bailey Harrington / Chronic Learning / gh: @baileythegreen, tw: @baileythegreen, @ChronicLearning
- Piv Gopalasingam / mentor / t: @Cascade21 / gh: @PivG
- Laura Carter / Turing Way Guide to Ethical Researcher / @LauraC_rter gh: LauraCarter
- Beatriz Serrano / Growing the Galaxy Community / t: Birthae, gh: beatrizserrano
- Kate Simpson/ Housing Retrofit/ t: @Dr_KateSimpson/ g: @KateSimpson
- Ben Krikler / Uni. of Bristol / gh, tw: @benkrikler/ he, him
- Teresa Laguna / Sci4All Food / t: @teresa__laguna g: @tlaguna
- Alex Chan / Wellcome Collection / @alexwlchan & alexwlchan.net / they/she
- Georgia Aitkenhead/The Alan Turing Institute/She/her/GeorgiaHCA/ 👾
- Kirstie Whitaker / The Alan Turing Institute / sher/her / t: kirstie_j G: KirsteiJane / 💃
- Tania Allard / Microsoft / gh: trallard, tw:@ixek / she/her 🦦
- Camila Rangel Smith / Turing Data Stories/ The Alan Turing Institute/g: @crangelsmith/ t: @camilarangels
- David Beavan / Turing Data Stories / The Alan Turing Institute / @DavidBeavan
- Arielle Bennett / The Alan Turing Institute / she/her / t: biotechchat
- Peter van Heusden / RSSEAfrica / he/him / t: pvanheus
- Paul Owoicho /The Turing Way / g: paulowoicho t: ogbonokopaul
- Renato Alves / EMBL Bio-IT / g: unode t: renato_alvs
- Jelioth Muthoni/Open Science data/g: Jelioth/
Icebreaker question
What is the coolest, most mind blowing fact (nature/people/animal etc.) you know?
Name / answer
- Emmy: platypuses glow! https://www.sciencenews.org/article/platypus-glow-blue-green-ultraviolet-light-fluorescent-fur
- Piv: the colour purple is not a spectral colour (i.e. within the visible spectrum). It is still a colour though! And a great one at that :)
- Malvika: Elephants live in community and pass on information of their surrounding to other families <3
- Georgia: waterbears are born with their full set of cells and they grow by their cells expanding instead of splitting!
- Kate: That the largest living organism is a honey fungi, over 2.4 miles long! http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism-in-the-world
- Alex: The Chinese water deer is the only species of deer to have tusks rather than antlers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_deer
- Kirstie: Sea otters hold hands while they sleep so they don’t drift apart, and also because they’re adorable and are in love. 🦦 💕!
- Emma - Sloths move 3 times faster in water than on land. They can turn their head 270 degrees to stay above the water! They are so cool!
- Tania: Otters have a pocket in their skin to store their favourite rock (they use it to crack shells open) some otters use the same rock during all their life
🗣️ Welcome!
Emmy (⏰ 5 min)
Introduction to the topic
"Open leaders design and build projects that empower others to collaborate within inclusive communities."
✏️ Designing for inclusion
Emmy (⏰ 15 mins) 25
Silent note-taking using prompts (10 mins)
(If you haven’t done the implicit bias test, please take this time to do that!)
- What’s a place that made you feel included the first time you visited? (online or in-person)
- What made that place so inclusive?
- Shared Insights on the implicit bias test?
NOTES
- Malvika: In 2012, I attended one of the first scientific conferences and I was invited to join a birds of a feather discussion by Aidan. He facilitated that session so inclusively that for the first time I saw myself as a part of a larger science community because in general I had always witnessed a divide between Speakers (them) and audience (me). Running inclusive events where everyone feels valued is very important to me personally for that reason.
- The place that made me feel included straight away was the Community Engagement Fellowship Program - we started with developing a shared code of conduct and everyone was very open about their struggles and ready to ask questions so I felt thI could be brave and ask mine too, even if others seem a lot more experienced or knowledgable!
- The place I felt included: lab group at The Turing: lots of curiosity and genuinely wanting to support and share knowledge instead of compete +1
- I think the place that made me feel most included was the very first Mozilla Open Leadership workshop in Berlin in 2016. It was in person. They’d covered all my travel costs to attend and generally made me feel really special, like they were so delighted to have me there. The way the workshop was run meant I felt safe asking “stupid” questions and there was always this feeling that the diversity in the room was its great strength.
- On the implicit bias test, I really dislike it. But I also know how poorly it replicates and I’m not confident that implicit bias is a particularly useful construct for thinking about inclusion. I’m open to being told that it’s useful for folks who haven’t thought about implicit associations though.
- I think it’s a useful tool to introduce people to the idea that they might be biased even though they think of themselves as not - it’s a good introduction to the idea that inclusion and non-discrimination takes work, it’s not enough just to assume that you are unbiased because you think you are. I have had to gently disabuse someone of the idea that getting better at the test means they are getting less biased…
- Haha - yes! Yikes! That’s a risk. These are first baby steps and there have to be a lot of other actions going past the test.
- Yes exactly! It’s a gentle introduction - useful but not sufficient
- My current work team made me feel included from day 1. I have been surrounded by managers and colleagues that really want to see me succeed and encourage me to prioritize my own mental health and career development. We are also very open to feedback and ideas on how we can do better for our communities
- I felt listened
- My hairdressers! It sounds silly but they go to huge lengths to make everyone feel like it is a place for them: including explicit statements of inclusion, lots of accessibility measures (including financial accessibility): it is designed in from the start and it really shows +1
- I went to a narrative therapy conference once and they did this wonderful thing of swapping the panel of speakers with people with lived experience from the audience who were asking questions, then there was a group art/collage session. It broke down the division and made it feel like everyone was sharing a set of goals rather than a scientific elite talking down to people. +100
- On the test, the male-man/female-woman is a bit questionable. I’ve done a couple of the tests in the past. I recall it being designed to show bias in either way.
- I was really shocked by how strong my implicit male=science / female=arts bias was, according to the test. +1000
- I discovered I had a slight bias of male-career/female-family which really troubled me! My parents broke gender norms and my dad looked after me and my sister while my Mum worked, so I really thought I would be immune to this one- but social expectations still permeated my subconscious unfortunately,
- I did the gender-science test: “Moderate association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts”. Which makes me reflect on how we’re all shaped by society and how difficult it is to overcome these things. Challenging (implicit) bias takes purposeful consideration and pausing to think about these things I’ll have to do, but I also wonder how well I (or others) can keep that up with the pressures of work.
* I also do wonder how my score would have changed if the test didn’t use the ‘liberal arts’ category - it’s not a feature of the education systems I have been part of so I had to think about it every time, maybe that had an impact?
- I’ve recently felt very welcomed in The Carpentries, at several different levels of the organisation. Despite the fact that in other realms I would not be considered an expert on computer science topics (I do not have formal training in this area) they have accepted that I do have some expertise in this area, from my own informal pursuits, and given me an outlet for using what I’ve learned.
- I felt very included in a youth summer camp where on the first day we started by defining common rules as a group with the help of two “camp leaders”, the joint deliberation of how everyone wants others to behave created a strong sense of community and mutual respect for the rest of the 2 weeks
- These meetings are super inclusive, mainly via the different modes of interaction between other attendees and hosts. I felt safe! The implicit bias test I took (perhaps not the right one?) showed no automatic preference between African American children and European American children.
Silent reflections and +1ing (5 mins)
- I consider myself quite open and I made so many wrong assumptions in the implicit bias test. +1
- I’ve become better at finding my own biases but sometimes I worry I’m overthinking to the point I introduce bias back in.
- I obtained the result “Your responses suggested a slight automatic association for Male with Liberal Arts and Female with Science”, should I be happy for that? Not sure?
🖥 Unconscious Bias & Designing for inclusion
Emmy (⏰ 15 mins) 40
Inclusion not an afterthought
Notes
- What is inclusion? Imagine you’re hosting a party
* Diversity means inviting as many people as possible
* Inclusion is about making all these people feel welcome and safe
- Humans are very good at pattern matching - we learn and come up with rules
- But the rules we internalise and come up with unconsciously are not always helpful - and we act upon these, and we end up excluding some people
- Having biases is not us being bad, it’s rather our pattern matching gone overboard
- Developers/designers of tools/algorithms/machines bake into their designs rules that they know, but they may not be applicable/they won’t work for people who are not like them.
- Inclusion has to be part of our design process - not after, it has to be an integral part throughout
- We can all try really hard not to be biased - but trying really hard doesn’t really work. Then how do we spot the rules that we don’t notice?
- Go out and get more data and counter-examples, listen to people who don’t look like us
- Considering internalised bias (for instance my own sexist bias against female scientists, despite being onee!) - how do we empower a group which may not realise they have internalised biased expectations, without undermining their experience or narratives about themselves?
Q&A
- Any important tips of designing work to avoid misinformation?
- Remember that not everyone comes from the same background and have the same experience, not everyone is scientist
- Make your info accessible - meet people where they are
- translating communications into languages other than English
- Have you found any useful ways to make people aware that they need to act to combat their biases? I have come up against people who acknowledge that they have unconscious/implicit bias but then decide that because it’s implicit, it isn’t their fault, and so they don’t really need to do anything about it other than acknowledge that it exists :( <- +1 on this
- Relate their work back to the mission - assuming that this person has a goal in mind
- E.g. hiring - you want to get the best person possible, so you do want to reach out as widely as possible
- Inclusion for inclusion
- Acknowledging is the first step - and not repeating the mistake should be informed by that.
👥 Shared insights
Prompts for questions and discussions (⏰ 5 mins) 45
- What was insightful about design thinking for inclusion?
- What lesson can you apply to your project?
- What are you doing now to combat bias? What can we do in the future?
Notes/thoughts/comments?
- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/ on designing
blindspots for the “average person”.
- Speaking of inclusion, “blindspot” seems innocuous - but should be avoided -> instead use the term “awareness gap” :) or dead spot
- I have a text expansion macro set up on my computer to add a question mark after phrases I want to cut down on, e.g. typing
blindspot
becomes blindspot?
. Sometimes it’s the right word to use, but it gives me a little moment to rethink.
- Would love to have some technological thing like this assisting. Any recommendations? Old habits … +100
- I use a mixture of TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro (both on macOS; I’m sure there are similar tools for other platforms)
- It’s great to have such concrete examples
- Kate: I think acknowledging the ‘human pattern matching’ is useful to try and think beyond this and change our patterns! I am currently grappling with how to think about suitable energy retrofit options for varying householder groups and it feels tricky to avoid stereotyping and be inclusive/considerate. I find talking, listening and being reminded of this is helpful to avoid fixing my ‘patterns’
- I recently learned about “talking circles”, i think this is a great way to help inclusion in a small project (https://poway.instructure.com/files/3950366/download?download_frd=1.)
- Talking circles: you ask people to say what they want to say, so they feel included -
- This seems like a good way to build trust as well :) +1
- Kate: Thanks for sharing this - I like!
- I’ve been learning about how to accommodate different visual impairments in the context of the internet: making graphics accessible for colour-vision impaired individuals, how to write html for a website that works well with eReaders used by many.
- This is a good resource for more accessible learning environments - https://abilitynet.org.uk/news-blogs/university-kent-creating-more-accessible-learning-environment
- Aiming for a diverse research group and therefore trying to bring in many ideas/backgrounds to the project so more likely to be inclusive. Also engaging with your discipline specific association to enable funding for inclusion for research activities.
- An interesting phrase was “inclusion for inclusion’s sake”. I haven’t heard this one before, but I do think we often seek diversity for diversity’s sake, and that is easily put in question.
- For any kind of research it’s clearly better to have a variety of perspectives, ideas - inclusiveness makes our research stronger
- Allow for different forms of engagement, synchronous, asynchronous, speech, text. Meetings don’t get the best out of everyone, nor does doing everything on screen
- One tip I got is that before i launch a programme I should reach out to a group of diverse members and seek their advice to make sure that my program is not unintentionally excluding someone
- Combating bias: reminding oneself semi-regularly that the audience I have in mind may not be diverse enough, and try to note down on paper the different kinds of people I want to include. It’s not a perfect system. I find really listening to people (listening to understand, not to reply) sometimes leads to a better offering (in this case, workshops / manuscripts). Last week I ran a virtual course and although I felt the selection process was more inclusive / fair, I hadn’t designed the course to be as inclusive as possible. The idea of ensuring equity of access AND equity of outcome is even more important to me now.
- This was a wonderful presentation thank you! I found it especially useful to remember how much vigilance and self-awareness are foundations of good science.
- 📚Further reading
- Open Source Inclusion Basic Checklist
- Complementary slides
Malvika (⏰ 15 min) 60
Community interactions and mountain of engagements
- Speaker: Tania Allard, Microsoft Sr. Developer Advocate
- Contact information:
References:
Notes/thoughts/comments?
Q&A
- Another community participation model can be found here: https://www.cscce.org/resources/community-participation-model/ (it's more general vs focused on open source communities specifically, and there's a link to a more detailed guidebook on the webpage)
- Hilya: how to invite people for our project, when we know there’s no budget to pay for honorarium?
- Peter: I have a similar challenge Hilya… I'm going to re-study this talk I think! Also looking forward to the next talk on personas to understand the roles that people can play. :)
- Kirstie on “how we encourage people to join our community projects if we don’t have funding to pay them”
- My question is: Why are you all here?! To the best of my knowledge no one is paid to participate in the OLS programme. So why are you here?
- There’s almost certainly loads of different ways of rewarding you for your time. And my point is that IF you build pathways to having contributors feel ownership and leadership in your project, then you won’t be this special person as founder / leader. They’ll be able to join you, and then their motivations will be very similar to yours!
- There are lots of other ways to reward people, but I see leaders second guessing themselves a lot, and I think we probably need to not let the perfect (everyone is paid!) be the enemy of the good (everyone is valued and included). +100000000
- Bailey: @Hilya, I recently had a twitter/slack conversation about ways to encourage/reward contributors without money. I intend to compile the suggestions I got to share. Just need to find a small bit of time to write it up.
- Malvika: Honorarium is not the only value exchange there is, you can offer skills, workshops, a platform to highlight work, and ask your volunteers what they need.
🖥 Personas & Pathways
Malvika (⏰ 15 min) 75
Using Personas and Pathways to Build Community
Notes/thoughts/comments?
-
Flip your thinking: what can you do for your community, not what the community can do for you
-
I love the persona template! That’s really useful
-
It’s not just about bringing people in but moving them forward -> leveling them up and making their journey clear.
- Help them see their journey from the start so they know here they are going (remove fog)
-
Arielle: I love the idea of combining all these concepts from the different talks into one to produce a massive, inclusive map of different project participants and engagements :)
-
Integrate bad experience as well when thinking as in reality people go through different stages
-
Typical stages: discover, first contact, participate, sustained and networked participation and finally becoming leaders
- Create this for multiple persona
-
How do you fill out the persona templates? Do you do interviews? Or are there other ways to fill them out?
- Interviews are the best - but it's not the only way.
- Collect questions: create surveys.
- Ask people what do they want to get out of it -> what values they have.
- Give a clear task -> help them see what they will get out of that -> skills, recognition, experience.
- Templates are good way to brainstorm these ideas:
- In addition to persona template -> recommend doing one for customer journey, value proposition
-
Many projects (inc our OLS-2 project, Turing Data Stories) rely on GitHub for their interactions. Thinking of engaging a diverse community, is there some advice on lowering the barrier to entry for those with no GitHub experience?
- It’s tricky because git and github is definitely a learning curve.
References and further reading:
🗣️ Closing
👥 Balance: Have this discussion on Slack this week!
Balance: Value exchanges
What are you giving to your community, organization, or project? What is it giving back? If there are gaps, how might you close them?
Silent insights on slack using prompts
- What kinds of things do you give to others in your open leadership practices?
- What kinds of things do you get back?
- Does the balance seem right to you, or are there adjustments you’d like to make?
Assignments: After this call
Next Week
Q&A for after the call - response will be shared through notes
*
Feedback
- What worked?
- What didn’t work?
- What would you change?
- What surprised you?
Reference: Open leadership Framework, Mozilla Open Leaders 6 & 7, Open Life Science 1 License: CC BY 4.0, Open Life Science (OLS-2), 2020