Re: What we need to do

Defining the vision of the group is also important, in regards to the role
and contributions of men.

How do you envision a typical Postgres Women meetup to go?

For example, Women Who Code membership is restricted to women and people
who identify as women, with men excluded from the majority of gatherings.
This approach provides women with a comfortable space to empower one
another and foster growth, but in my opinion alienates potential allies and
supporters.

On the other hand, when I had opened a dialogue last year about creating an
international group of women in Postgres, I was met with enthusiasm mostly
from men stating "OH! We can do this, and this, and..." Which was
appreciated, but why not let women be the catalysts and the leaders? IMO,
we need allies and supporters, not "white knights" -- give us guidance, but
let us do the heavy lifting.

As a female professional with a "portfolio" career in no less than 4
male-dominated industries -- Postgres, craft beer, water, and film! -- I've
observed and been involved in a broad spectrum of approaches in creating
diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Setting your goals and tactics are the first step to building a strong
foundation and achieving your overall mission.

Respectfully,
Debbie

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 4:45 AM, Valeria Kaplan <vk(at)dataegret(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Here is my two-cents :)
>
> @Postgresmen is run by Nikolay Samokhvalov and his main focus is indeed
> tech Pоstgres news. He also organises #RuPostgres meetups. I agree that
> purely tech news is not exactly what we should focus on since there are
> many other channels in place focusing on that. Agree on open source /
> women focus and maybe we can do general tech news/women focus too.
>
> Partially, I think we need to do the last step (*Define goals and steps
> to reach them*) first and then we will realise who exactly we need to
> follow, how broad we should be and what to post overall.
>
> Here is my thinking and please feel free to feedback :)
>
> I am keeping in mind our already defined goal: Postgres Women is a
> non-profit organization created to* encourage and support women to become
> active members of the PostgreSQL community* and *foster recognition of
> their contribution to PostgreSQL* development.
>
> 1. We want to *increase awareness of our initiative across tech
> industry *(this is broad I know, but I think there is no harm in it)
> >> To do this we could follow major women's initiatives in tech on
> twitter/facebook in hope they will follow us and we will boost each-other's content
> aka get a wider reach/awareness. Note: we could also get ideas on what
> initiatives we could do from their pages.
> 2. We would like to *raise awareness of contribution of women in
> Postgres* >> @planetpostgres has a good flow of all news related to
> Postgres development, ideally we would retweet women-led contributions
> (blog posts, patch announcements etc.)
> 3. We would like to *encourage women to become active members in the
> community *>> any big conferences in north America, Europe and Asia
> have their own twitter channels and announce relevant talks/blogs, we could
> take that content and amplify women in it (retweet announcements about
> women speakers, solicit content from those women for our channels e.g.
> interviews, focus posts, opinion posts etc.)
>
> Reg face to face meeting, unfortunately I won't be there but if you will
> be meeting there maybe others might join via skype/slack/whatsapp?
>
> thoughts?
>
>
> Valeria
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 7:53 AM, Lætitia Avrot <laetitia(dot)avrot(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi Dian,
>>
>>> I don't think there's enough content under the heading of women-focused
>>> Postgres stuff to keep this thing going without branching out some. As far
>>> as Twitter/social media goes, @postgresmen seem like a decent reference
>>> point: they publish general news, showcase interesting projects and useful
>>> tools, boost on-topic blog posts, and so forth. Doing that with an eye
>>> toward emphasizing and advancing the work women do on+with Postgres and
>>> developing a supportive community would be awesome.
>>>
>> I might be wrong but I think Postgresmen is related to a russian postgres
>> meetup so their followers are interested in tech news whereas our purpuse
>> is quite different. But maybe I'm wrong...
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Lætitia
>>
>
>