October 2021

 November 2021

08 December 2021

Attendees: Ferby Cremer, Allen Stetson, Tom Snezher, Sergio Rojas, Rachel Rose, Barathy Rangajaran, Shabnam Abbarin, Greg Grusby, Tracy Priest, JT Nelson, Kirstyn Salehi (kirstyn.salehi@foundry.com) , Shoni Doe, Bill Ballew, Kevin Clark, Kaitlin Pollock

NOTES

• What do we want to do in 2022?
  • Educate our members on diversity and inclusion
  • Affect the actual ASWF and the make up… we did do a survey and we have been working with board to develop succession plan to bring in new folks to the board (and reflects diversity of our community)
  • External goal: Affect highschool and college age students - informing them of roles and getting them involved. We had summer learning program and webinars. 
    • Do we want to go younger? Was there discussion around this?
      • No, not at the last meeting but we can talk about this 
    • Are we exploring to make it more technical (more art focused last time? 
      • Yes, it would be great to find other partners. We had challenges with the technical content. We may have had less material on the tech side. 
      • https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/5/22817753/doja-cat-video-girls-who-code
    • Was there discussion on going global?
      • Last year was open globally. Rachel will look at demographics and there were a number that we accepted outside of US
      • Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to advertise - we need to focus here this year
        • Idea is to connect with Academy office in London
    • Were the webinars published anywhere?
      • They were published and they were hosted on Linux Foundation website. Now, they are on YouTube. Maybe there is another area to advertise. 
      • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6D97hEvdd8&list=PL9dZxafYCWmyXoXQ945n_9hTNWFxOCs2t
      • IDEA: Is there a specific language that was used so that we can share out too. This will maximize views.
    • What about sound?
      • This is related to our industry but I can see us pushing this off and promote what we have already created. 
    • IDEA: Introduce pathways to help young people know these jobs exist…could we put these videos together then have 20-25 min Q&A. A lot of this is lack of awareness - they don’t know
      • Could we combine what was said around re-advertising and reuse the recording + have someone LIVE (the Q&A portion)
      • Reusing materials we have and adding to it

Question: When is summer learning program? Summer learning program was run in July for 3 months. Ideally, we could start in June. 

Shifting to another topic

NEURODIVERSITY: Another topic is that we focus on a specific group - last time, we focused on women and other under represented groups. This year, we talked about another group like neurodiversity.

• There is concern on “readiness” for neurodiverse focus. There may be struggle with this until we are ready to support
• This may be also a difficult group to find and we will need clarity and focus. Currently learning that this is defined a bit broad. 
  • IDEA: Could this be a blog post to give prompts (launching blog post) 
• IDEA - Could we tailor videos for exceptional minds community?
  • Could we shoot a video with them (exceptional minds) ?
• What do we mean by the term of neurodiversity? It is currently defined broadly
  • This is HR term and asking for clarity in this definition
• https://ict.usc.edu/news/press-releases/usc-ict-and-the-dan-marino-foundation-partner-with-magic-leap-to-deliver-spatial-computing-experience-for-individuals-with-autism-and-other-developmental-disabilities/
• https://jdscreativeacademy.org/ 

Feedback: There is some exchange to adopt the term BIPOC on chat. 

Questions:

• How can we increase awareness about our programs?
• How can we provide opportunity to give folks a voice - learning by doing?
• Where else are we expanding to now? Which other groups? 
• Awareness is key
• Could we simplify the access (made easy)? Could we have a project on curriculum? 
• Have you heard of 11 seconds club competition?  This is on their own pace … we should consider how to diversify how we deliver the content https://www.11secondclub.com/ 
• Would like to follow up on financial idea per Ferby 

Proposal:

• From Greg G: Proposed Summer Program Goal: Increasing access points into the entertainment, technology, and the media industry so people from underrepresented groups can excel in creative and technical careers.
• From Allen from Blizzard: Resources from other side for people who can champion how we can get involved in these programs…devote resources to enable us to sell to our leadership
• This makes a great blog post
• Per Rachel: Open sourcing diversity and inclusion plan from Adobe
• This was put on hold but there is hope that we could work on this
• Per Kevin Clark: Workforce plan beyond the program (for placement) 
• How do we onboard folks 
• Per Sergio: As an ambassador for OpenTimelineIo I will have office hour for anyone that needs help contributing to OpenTimelineIo.
• https://bricfoundation.org/about 

Stories of Diversity

• Aliza shared story about how Intuit created an easy way to blog open source project to increase awareness 
• Leveraged AWS blog post in inclusive language - a Win!
• (Shabnam) Think and design session for employees..on Mural, reimagine the workplace in diversity and inclusion - includes safety, creativity and technical success..IDEA: Another potential blog post