It would be useful to first assess what is preventing diversity in OSM - what happened for the Board election to choose all white men from Europe/NA for example? Do people from other groups know about the nominations? Are you proactively working with diverse OSM groups to prepare their members for board nominations? What kind of mentorship is available for people so that they can one day run for leadership positions? Exclusion is often systemic and when you figure out what parts of the system are causing it, its easier to know where to focus efforts.

I’d also like to point out that the language we use can also be exclusionary - saying “women are less interested in technical stuff” is a very different statement than “women have often been systemically removed or excluded from certain fields and therefore may not always feel comfortable in those spaces” (there are many women who are comfortable as well, but I don’t want to exclude the ones who don’t). The first statement says that it is an inherent issue of the women; the later puts the onus on the community to adjust itself for people who have been ‘othered’. The same goes for other groups who have been underrepresented. Also, I would love to do more programming and development (background in GIS), but many technical groups are heavily male dominated and just not inclusive. They’re not fun places to be - I feel out of place. Comments like the above contribute to that.

I think a diversity working group is a great first step. In addition to reading through some of the resources @mapeadora posted, it should be imperative to gather information on how people from diverse backgrounds participate or would like to participate more (encouraging participation in more languages is a great idea). A diversity statement and code of conduct would also be really useful. Even taking these questions beyond this thread would be great - have you posted this on Twitter? Did you @ a diverse set of accounts to gather feedback from them? If you’ve only asked these questions here, you may run into an echo chamber effect.

Some other resources to check out: * Women in GeoSpatial+ * Resources from OpenSource4Women * Black Girls M.A.P.P * Geochicas * The Real Reason Women Don’t Go Into Tech * Github Repo on improving diversity and inclusiveness * BetterAllies