Re: TPAC diversity scholarship

I agree with Deborah on point 2. There will always be people that see it as positive discrimination. And I guess it’s by definition—it’s a diversity fund not a get more white men to attend fund.

— Michiel

> On 20 Nov 2018, at 19:04, deborah.kaplan@suberic.net wrote:
> 
> My initial thoughts:
> 
>> The goal of the scholarship is to achieve greater diversity at TPAC, but W3C received criticism this year because it was felt that the scholarship was based on positive discrimination, instead of being open to any self-funded person wanting to attend TPAC.
> 
> I'm not clear exactly what this means, but if it's the usual concern trolling against any kind of affirmative action program, I've got very little patience for it.  Opening a diversity scholarship to any self-funded individual has no liklihood of increasing diversity. The goal of the scholarship is to fix an explicit problem at the W3C and a TPAC, and as long as it isn't breaking any laws or ethical guidelines then a selected group of awardees is a good way about it.
> 
> Every diversity initiative in the world is subject to concern trolling, from Black Girls Code to women's colleges to disability in hiring intiatives. I argue that we need to guarantee we are operating legally and ethically, and we should come up with some success metrics that we reassess periodically, and then stop worrying about it.
> 
> In my perfect world, we'd have different scholarships for different underrepresented groups: disabled people; women; people from non-Europe/non-North American countries; people of color (though the definition of that is complicated in an international organization, of course).
> 
>> 3. How do we differentiate the scholarship from the Invited Expert (IE) fee waver?
> 
> I ended up not applying for either (and thus not going to TPAC) because of confusion about this. I would have needed both the fee waiver and the scholarship to go, and I knew one was much harder to get than the other. I felt uncomfortable applying for the fee waiver if I'd have to say no based on the scholarship results.  Later I was told that this would have been fine, but it was unclear at the time.
> 
> Deborah
>

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2018 09:14:38 UTC