Re: Q: Diversity plans

On 22 March 2026 4:23:25 am IST, Thomas Goirand <[email protected]> wrote:
>Hi Shruti,
>
>In your platform, diversity and outreach takes more than half of the total amount of text.

Yes and I would take this chance to make it clear that Diversity and Outreach are not the same. While Diversity focuses on encouraging contributions from the underrepresented groups, Outreach involves activities to attract more contributors in general.

>
>Have you done some actions to increase diversity in Debian in the past?
>What actions? Where they focus in India (which would IMO have been a very good and pragmatic first approach)?
>

By Diversity, I do not mean just gender diversity, it includes geographic, ethnic and all other types of diversities. I would say my biggest activity with respect to Diversity was organizing DebConf23 in India. In addition to that, I have been involved in mentoring new contributors from India before and after DC. Directly and indirectly I could get more contributors and Debian Developers from India.

Regarding gender diversity, I personally talk to potential contributors wherever I go and motivate them to start contributing.  
I have been successful to some extend. Our FSCI group in India had plans to organize women free software hackathon, but we could not do it yet.

What I have noticed is that when you see people who you identify with, visible in a project, you are more interested to get involved with the project. I intend to be one of the visible women in Debian which would encourage more women to get involved.

>I understand that becoming the DPL will make a spotlight on your diversity actions, which is a good thing, and I support it. Though in what way having a delegated team will help, apart from a larger budget?
>
>Last thing, Debian budget is currently tight. Don't you think that spending money on our infrastructure (buying hardware for example) and Debconf should have priority over diversity expenditure? Do you have any idea of how much has been spent in the past, and how much you believe should be spent in the future?

I want to clear a common misconception here, more diversity activities does not mean spending more money. My aim with the delegated team is to streamline the diversity activities of Debian, not to spend more money. We already are spending some money, but being honest, we do not get as much result as we should. I want the team to study the spending pattern, what we are doing wrong and how we can use the money more efficiently. I personally do not believe in spending money on diversity just for the sake of that. Every Debian penny spent should be justified and have reasonable output.

I currently do not have any solid number for how much is spent in the past, but I can say in the future, I do not want to spent too much more than what we spend currently. What I want is better utilization of the fund.

>
>Cheers,
>
>Thomas Goirand (zigo)
>

-- srud