All right, I think we're about ready to get started so welcome everyone to the afternoon keynote. My name is James McGregor. I'm a

publishing associate director of publishing as strategic projects and services It's been a long long few days. Some of us have been doing this since Monday It is my sincere pleasure to introduce Tara Robertson to you to you today Tara an intersectional feminist

Who uses data and research to advocate for equality and inclusion is the diversity and inclusion lead at Mozilla her core values are social justice collaboration and all things open source open access and open education as A librarian with five years leading accessibility work in higher education She brings practical expertise of how universal design can be used to include people with disabilities enhance and enhance access for everyone

So that's the bio I've got to say I I can't express how excited I was to see Tara's name Tara's name. Sorry Fuck sorry. I also swared first. So that's done There the swearing is allowed. I

Can't express how excited I was to see Tara's name on the list of keynotes For this conference when we were preparing it earlier Which what she will be talking about today? Specifically diversity inclusion and accessibility are the most timely and urgent issues that we deal with today I believe for us as pkp as a software developer

And as just this social group that we have here PKP has made some incredible strides. I think over the past year or so in our approach to these topics For example, we've created an accessibility team And we've included developments towards accessibility as though as part of the forefront of our development effort And that's that's no that that takes time that takes money, but but we've committed to that

Just the same. I do believe that there are many other things that we can start to do At the governing level and at the community level as well to promote these these crucial crucial issues today I Am thankful for the leadership and guidance provided to our community by members like Tara and in a spirit of openness

Urgency and solidarity, please. Welcome join me in welcoming her today

While you're introducing me I dropped the clicker on the ground and the back came off and it fell under and a battery came out and I was Like, oh great. This is actually my worst nightmare And there goes my phone

I'm so excited to be here when I saw Kevin Strannock's name in my inbox. I was like gosh Wonder why he's emailing me and it's such a delight to get to come to Barcelona I've never been to Spain. I've never been to Barcelona. It's been a really amazing opportunity

I heard some really great talks this morning about interrogating our language and being inclusive there as well as accessibility so Really heartened to hear that those conversations are happening here so Oh, did I break it when I dropped it? Where do I point it? Shazam

Get a hand for the awesome AV support. Oh

There we go. It works. Okay, so I was born in Vancouver, Canada And I grew up in a logging town called Prince George, which is halfway to Alaska Who's cheering? Um It was a 17-hour trip to get here from Vancouver and then this morning when I left my hotel in Barcelona

I took the metro and I saw someone holding a PKP folder and that was lady from by Teka and I was like, excuse me. Are you going to PKP? So I followed her on the train and then on the bus and then came here It's been worth the trip

So Growing up in Prince George We measured the size of towns by the number of McDonald's restaurants. There were Prince George Population 75,000 had four McDonald's. It was the biggest town ten hours drive in any direction

This is mr. PG he's the town mascot Originally, he was made of wood, but he rotted and he was rebuilt with sheet metal and fiberglass and made to last My mom is Japanese Canadian and my dad is Scottish of Scottish and Irish ancestry

He's white. So growing up as a mixed-race kid in Prince George. I was kind of different I'm also queer. So I've had a lot of experience in my life feeling like I don't fit Now that I'm an adult I realized the superpower that it gives me as I can look into the majority group and see things that many people might not

also kind of in my Search for home. I've lived in seven different countries including Scotland and Japan and They were really great experiences to live and understand other cultures, but my home is in Vancouver Before Mozilla I was a librarian for 12 years and the last five years I ran an accessibility organization

Which I'm going to talk about a little later people ask about my strange career path from libraries to doing diversity and inclusion and tech and It's not that strange for me. So I'll just connect the dots

In libraries, I worked in library technology and within our conferences and technology communities I helped work to make our comp our keynote conference or conference keynotes more diverse and Worked with the community to put codes of conduct in place so we could be explicit about what our what our norms were together

So two years ago. I joined Mozilla's diversity and inclusion team. That's right I work in HR now, and it's kind of fascinating working with people for that to be my full-time job I'm sort of the data nerd on our team I look at HR Information system metrics to better understand who works at Mozilla as well as who we're hiring and who's choosing to leave as

Well as looking at our employee engagement survey both the qualitative and quantitative data there. So it's very much a data-driven process I've also worked on projects on trans inclusion and accessibility

So this quote from Toni Morrison She writes all paradises all utopias are designed by who is not there by the people who are not allowed in and I think for those of us who work in scholarly publishing and libraries in academia We like to think of our work in a really positive way and I think our work does make a big impact on the world

but it's also important to forget that The worlds that we're building and the things that we're building that we see as positive are leaving people out So Robin DeRosa an academic who I admire a lot use this in her digital pedagogy lab presentation

So for me for the last 10-15 years these two questions have been the fundamental ones So in most social situations, I think it's interesting to observe who's in the room Who sits at the table

Who speaks a lot? Who has social capital? Who feels welcome and? Whose ideas are respected and centered by default? I? Think it's even more important to note Who's missing? Who doesn't who's sitting on the margins?

Who doesn't feel welcome and who has to fight to have their viewpoints heard by others? so I'll invite you to look around right now quietly and Ponder these questions for yourself

So I think we all know what it likes What what it feels like to belong and we know what it feels like to not belong So I just want to kind of sink into that for the next couple of minutes through a short exercise It's gonna be a think pair share. So first I'm gonna ask you to think on your own for one minute I'm gonna time you

About a time where someone did something to make you feel welcome It could be at your workplace on a sports team in your neighborhood or church Anything where you were new and someone did something to make you feel welcome What was that? So either write this down in your head on your computer on a laptop. You've got one minute

ten seconds left

Awesome. Now I want you to get into groups of two It could be someone beside you or behind you if you're a person of one join and make a group of three You've got two minutes to share those things with your neighbor go Okay

No

Okay, I want you to get into a group of four or five, however that works and The question is going to change a little bit What's something that we can do to make the PKP community even more inclusive?

So in your group of four or five, please discuss this and then add your best ideas to this document It's bit.ly slash PKP hyphen inclusion Got it. So there's three parts group of four Discuss this question add your ideas. You've got four minutes go

You have to take photos or something

And delighted that they did Yeah, I will let Jason take the photos Is the clicker working now, yeah, I didn't do anything

So Kevin cheered about PG because he's moved I didn't know that he is now He likes no showing Yeah, no they

He can play I think it was the right time to sell Pretty much yeah, he likes sort of an outdoor lifestyle

Yeah

That's like the semi-secret

More Yeah, like that kind of stuff And like it doesn't have to be run by us right we have people who know all this stuff

So you've got 30 seconds left there's some great ideas going up Wow

Okay. Thank you so much I was really worried that I was gonna throw this out and everyone was just gonna look at me

So thank you so much for participating. I'm gonna just leave the doc up for a second before I go back to the slides But there's some great ideas in here. So Figure out which ones that you can help move forward or figure out which ones as a community you want to prioritize

Here is familiar with Mozilla. Um, I work at Mozilla

And we're a company that has about 1,100 staff worldwide. There's two people here in Barcelona And there's about 10,000 community volunteers Our mission we're a mission driven company and our mission is to ensure that the internet is

Open and accessible to all and the way that we do this is through products so some people might be familiar with the web browser Firefox and we have a whole suite of Firefox products now we have lockwise which is a password manager monitor which will tell you about data breaches and

Send which is an encrypted way to send files up to one gigabyte. That's the end of my commercial We have one shareholder and that's our nonprofit Foundation, so it's kind of a it's a unique structure in the tech business

The foundation does really awesome work on policy they fund the Mozilla fellows and there's a bunch of them doing open science work and They publish the internet health report, which is a really excellent and accessible document around internet health

So diversity, what is diversity? I'm Mozilla this word cloud is from the original focus groups. We did with mausoleum Those are people in the Mozilla community

About diversity. So when I say diversity, I'm talking about different facets of someone's identity or Demographic that could be represented so like gender sex religion race age Something That's unique to Mozilla in the top right you'll see

mofo and moco So people who work at the corporation work for moco and the people at the foundation are called mofo So these are just different kind of facets of who we are as people inclusion

Inclusion is more like the feeling like do people feel like they belong at work if they speak up will their voice be heard And if they disagree like can they speak up so well diversity is more about the demographics of the organization inclusion is about the feeling and if people feel included and

those types of things So there's a ton of social science research connecting diversity and diverse organizations to innovative organizations and innovation My favorite article is by dr. Catherine Phillips She's a professor at Columbia Business School and she read a really accessible summary of the academic literature in scientific American in an article called how

diversity makes us smarter and she summarizes that Diverse groups tend to outperform homogeneous ones and when we're around people who look different than us or have different

like political Opinions or how I come from a different discipline. We work harder to make our arguments We don't assume that the person sitting across from us has the same background and way of thinking of things so we actually work harder to express ourselves and When we hear dissent, we think more carefully and more rigorously to respond to that

Yeah, and there's a couple other points that she she summarizes from the research and that's Diverse groups also tend to have more conflict and Conflicts not necessarily a bad thing if it's done respectfully

but it's something for us to consider my background is in libraries and in libraries we Generally as a culture aren't very comfortable with conflict So as we want to become more diverse as communities or as institutions We also need to give people the tools to engage in conflict productively and respectfully

so Mozilla's mission is To keep the internet open and accessible for all and if we don't have everyone at the table helping us build these products There's no way we're gonna achieve that and you know, it's the right thing to do So this fall we won an innovative workplace award. This is Selena Declan. She's a senior director in the Firefox organization

It was cool to be recognized this way by fast company and they called out the six million that we've donated to universities

to fund innovation there as well as our open innovations Common voice project which is kind of Crowdsourcing the corpus of data to be able for anyone to make voice assistant products. Not just like the big tech companies

So like diversity is not all just sunshine rainbows innovation and la la la That piece about conflict We've got our community participation guidelines, which is our code of conduct to kind of outline the behaviors that we tolerate and

The behaviors that we don't in our workplace. So it's our agreements on how we want to work together So this quote is from Mitchell Baker our chairwoman She says most Mozilla's mission is to build the internet as a global public resource open and accessible to all

Open and accessible to all implies a deep commitment to inclusion and to building inclusive practices As part of this commitment, we describe a set of behaviors of inclusion that we aspire to These are set out in our community participation guidelines So it's linked directly to our mission these like inclusive behaviors

So our community participation guidelines or our CPG is open licensed and available on the web I also recommend reading it because it's written in plain English and has lots of concrete examples in it. I Think when we're working we have staff and I think 18 different countries

We have to be really clear what we mean when we say we want to be inclusive and respectful Because that could differ from place to place and from person to person. So as an example One of the required behaviors is to be direct but professional and

The CPG says we're likely to have some discussions about when criticism respect is respectful and when it's not We must be able to speak directly when we disagree and when we think we need to improve We cannot withhold hard truths

Doing so respectfully is hard Doing so when others don't seem to be listening is harder and Hearing such comments when one is the recipient can be even harder still We need to be honest and direct as well as respectful So for me, this is aspirational as well

I Go back and I read our our community participation guidelines probably once a month and I realized I was Real being reluctant and having a conversation I needed to have with a teammate and It was uncomfortable for me. I'm I don't like conflict but reading this I was like, oh, yeah

This is what I signed up for and it's difficult, but that's the work. So Rereading the CPG on my own was kind of the nudge that I needed to have that Conversation with my teammate about something that I didn't agree with him about and it was good that we had it

And I should have had it much earlier It went really fine So our CPG also outlines behaviors. We don't tolerate which include like obvious things like violence threats of violence harassment But it also talks about some stuff like we need to get consent before we touch someone's body

And calls out pregnant women's stomachs people's tattoos hair Mobility aids like a cane or a wheelchair and I think by being really Concrete and specific and helped me really kind of wrap my head around like what that looks like

Some of these things were I was for me were common sense But I'd never thought about touching a pregnant woman pregnant woman's belly like I don't think I would but I never really thought about it and Because so much of our work takes place on in an online environment There's also the example of using the kiss emoji like don't use that unless someone

Has given you permission or you've asked and they're like, yeah, give me a kiss emoji because otherwise it's weird and gross So I think by having our CPG being in plain English and have some having so many specific examples

It gives us a really good foundation about the way we want to be with each other So the diversity part of the diversity and inclusion part of my job is looking at the demographics of the company And I think tech has rightfully got a bad rep in the media

For not having a lot of women Especially women in technical roles as well as like other other dimensions of diversity that tech isn't doing great in So we've been examining our hiring process and Looking at like the unconscious bias that we have and where it could be entering different parts of the decision-making process and

It's interesting the research on this goes back to Symphony orchestras so in the 1970s top orchestras in the US were only 5% women and

At the time there were a lot of reasons given for that Some People said women were smaller than men so had smaller techniques Women were more temperamental and likely to demand special attention or treatment

And one person just said the more women the poorer the sound One Orchestra conductor just said I don't think women should even be in an orchestra. So it's like, oh, okay So by 2000 orchestras in the US were almost 30% women what happened

Orchestras started using blind auditions. So people who were auditioning for The orchestra would play behind a curtain so the panel couldn't see them They were only judging The players on the sound of the music that they were playing which is the key criteria for being an orchestra musician

So at first with the curtain they could still Distinguish between men and women because of women's high-heeled shoes on the stage So they either got women to take their high heels off or put a carpet down so even I like that because the they they had a good intent in de-biasing that process and

Then realize that they still needed to go one more step So Now most orchestras in the US are 40 to 50 percent women the places where women like behind are In conductors and in the brass section and they call this the brass ceiling

So at Mozilla our version of this kind of Blind audition or evaluation based on the key criteria We use a tool called hacker rank, which has a bit of an unfortunate name but we're evaluating people on the code that they're writing and

Basing that on the job that they would do so we're not looking at the university that someone went to or If they have a PhD or not unless that's necessary Instead we're thinking about the key criteria for the job Figuring out an assessment process for that and then picking the best people

so it's with our university internship program that we've kind of done a lot of this experimentation and Over time we saw a huge increase in diversity Women went up from six percent to forty three percent people of color went from forty two to fifty five percent

But the biggest area of increase was the educational institutions represented so for people who work in Educational institutions we we have an idea of kind of like what the top tier universities are and I'm sure you can name them for like engineering and computer science and

Just because you went to MIT or Stanford Doesn't necessarily mean you're the smartest person or the best person for a specific job So this was really interesting. We also saw that There was an increase from seven to forty one institutions and that also included a code Academy, which was cool

So it kind of doing these experiments helped us Kind of question the assumptions that we were making about who the best candidates were So I think this is also relevant to open journal systems

In an article in wired titled diversity and open source is even worse than tech overall by Clint Finley He says the open source development community remains startlingly white and male even by the tech industry's dismal standards

So at Mozilla we removed meritocracy from our leadership and government governance documents About two years ago there's When I started getting involved in open source I loved sort of the myth of meritocracy that I could get involved and it would just be my contribute contributions and that they would be evaluated on that and

that's kind of like the best bits would rise to the top and We have to kind of question who's got the time to volunteer on projects if you're not paid to be a developer on a open source project or Who has the equipment or the child care?

So I think it's if meritocracy is a key idea for PKP I'm not sure if it is it may be worth kind of interrogating the assumptions behind that So I had a lot of imposter syndrome when I applied for this job at Mozilla I wasn't really looking for a job. I was pretty content doing what I was doing and

Mozilla was a company that I've admired for a long time So when I applied I just thought like who do I think I am like there's just no way And even at the application stage there were a couple things in the job posting that kind of nudged me off the fence and towards applying and

The job ad said you demonstrate a history of working in a collaborative in a collaborative and open manner Whether that be in an open source project or simply openly discussing projects and questions in your office Hmm was like I was intrigued and I was like I think I think they're like poking at this open source thing and digging

digging underneath and It said you should apply even though even if you don't feel like your credentials are a hundred percent match for the position itself And I was used to library jobs where there could be 27 bullet points, and you need to hit all of those and like that's

that's really a lot and The job said we're looking for relevant skills and experience not a checklist that exactly matches the position itself So I was like hmm like if I can map the work that I've done to what they're looking for They're open to people like me applying

And of course all of this was my design it was all deliberate knowing that open source scales white and male requiring explicit open source experience would limit the candidate pool and People would self-select out. I might have self-selected out The key experience the key criteria is the open collaboration not the open source experience itself

So we also use a tool called textio to make sure that our job postings use balanced language So we don't post job ads for rock stars or ninjas anymore So how diverse is the PKP community?

Who is missing and who doesn't feel included? Want to change? Topics a little bit here and talk about accessibility So my last librarian job was at caper BC Which is an organization that format shifts print textbooks into digital formats for students with print disabilities

So a print disability could be any kind of disability that makes using print not feasible so a student who is blind or visually impaired a student with a learning disability a

Student with a physical disability who can't hold a book or chronic pain and can't schlep their books around All of those could be print disabilities so I was thinking about OJS as publishing workflow and the dissemination of information and In some ways the caper BC workflows were opposite

We were literally chopping spines off of books Scanning them and putting them into an electronic format that would work with students assistive technology And while our focus was textbooks We all know it's not possible to study at a university or to do any kind of scholarly research without access to journal articles

We also remediated those and it was particularly frustrating to take Inaccessible digital journal articles and have to remediate them to be accessible digital journal articles We would OCR them at headings so students using screen readers could could navigate throughout them as well as adding

alt text for charts graphs and images and Like it's a digital thing It could have been accessible from the start and kind of the tax on students with print disabilities is that they need to wait

So their progress is slower and they're not able to progress as quickly as students without print disabilities So in the built environment We've got these things called curb cuts or dropped curbs apparently in the UK Which makes it easier

For people who are using wheelchairs to navigate off of the sidewalk off of the curb and across the street It also makes it easier for people who are pushing bicycles parents with a baby carriage or a Delivery person pushing a heavy load on a cart to be able to get off the sidewalk and cross the street

So we can think about curb cuts in the digital environment as well I'm just looking at the time and I've got three minutes. So Check out the accessibility toolkit. It's great

one of the advantages about working in the open is that it was translated into French and a second edition was published by Someone who's now doing a masters of design and inclusive design So yesterday was the transgender day of remembrance or T door

It's an event to remember and honor the lives of trans and gender diverse people who've been murdered It's also called the transgender day of resilience to honor the resilience of these communities. I want a world where trans and Non-binary people aren't just surviving but where they can thrive

So some of the work that I've done at Mozilla was to write guidelines to make Documentation on where you would need to update your name and gender marker if you transitioned your gender at Mozilla And The work has been successful and leading and there was an article in Forbes about it and my mom was like

You mean like there's another Forbes like not the business one. I was like no mom the real like Forbes magazine She's like, huh? How about that? It's like thanks mom So because we're a distributed company 50% of our staff work remote

we come together twice a year for all hands and Last summer was in San Francisco. So imagine 1200 of us in a giant hotel ballroom and It was the first day of our plenaries and we had each of our executives doing present short presentations about kind of the highlights

And what was coming next and in between each of those was? An individual contributor either sharing a user story Reading some feedback from one of our end users or something else And this is Lauren and she spoke between our chief marketing officer and our chief people officer

My name is Lauren Nylat, I work on lifecycle marketing out of my home in North Carolina. I recently sent a letter gets louder we just met and

I'm gonna share it with all of you know, yeah You might recall a conversation. We briefly had at Austin all hands about some some interesting Changes in my life But just to put a label on it. I'm transitioning my gender presentation to female

this has been a Lifelong time coming. This has been a lifelong time coming

While I wouldn't say changing genders is anything close to the easiest thing I've ever done This ongoing process has already been one of the best I've been asking colleagues one or two at a time to start calling me Lauren and Referring to me with feminine pronouns and I'd like for you to do the same Don't worry about slip-ups. I forget at least once a day and it's my name

Like any self-respecting marketer. I'm working with HR and a go-to-market strategy to take this news big That is by the way highfalutin talk for an email to all of marketing

But I'm writing to give you an early heads up. I do want to mention That your personal and professional commitment to making Mozilla marketing a safe space That values all people was a huge factor in my decision to begin transition As a member of the group that worked on team norms. I'm very aware that things here weren't perfect

But I also know that after I began living authentically I would feel respected and protected at Mozilla and The work I do would be more important than my pronouns You should know how much of an incredible impact your commitment to these values can have on one individual life

Thank you. Just doesn't seem to capture it Thank you, so

The feeling in the room is amazing I think when we all realized what was going on on stage everyone leaned forward and I think it takes so much courage to say that in front of your company and Also to speak in front of 1200 people is super nerve-wracking The feeling in the room was really magical. I wish I could like spray something so you could feel that So I know I'm over time

So I just want to go back to these the two questions that I introduced at the beginning When you're back at your work next week doing whatever thing you do and whatever workplace you work in and encourage you to think about these two questions like Whose voices are missing here? And How do we include these voices?

Have a great rest of the conference. Thanks