Following the announcement of the CARE team members by Fabien, we would now move forward to organize a training to ensure that we are well prepared to handle incident reports. For this training we intend to draw upon the expertise of Sage Sharp from Otter Tech.

The training will be provided online. A training requires at least 5 attendees but up to 14 attendees can participate in one training. The training is a 3 hour workshop that includes:

  • Practice taking an incident report
  • Practice giving an incident report
  • Practice following up with a reported person
  • Instructor modeling on how to take a report and follow up on a report
  • Discussion on bias, microaggressions, personal conflicts, and false reporting
  • Frameworks for evaluating a response to a report
  • 40 minutes total of Q&A time, to answer questions after each practice scenario

Currently our CARE team consists of 3 people, but we intend to also ensure we have a few additional people trained so that ideally every official Symfony event has more than one trained person physically at the event.

That being said, of course a professional training costs money. One seat in the training costs $350. Now we looked at different ways to get sufficient funds to pay for this. So far we have done a few one-off donation drives in the past and we would like to take the same approach here. The reason to stick with one-off versus continuous collection of donations is that managing a budget can be a slippery slope as an open source project.

To keep things simple, we are therefore asking individuals or companies to come forward and contact me if they are willing to pay for one or more seats. Once I have a list of confirmed donors, I will ask Sage Sharp to invoice each of them separately. As soon as those invoices have been paid, we can schedule the training. All donors that want will be named in the blog post following the training where the attendees will have a chance to reflect on what they learned during the training.

Our goal is to at least get 5 seats paid, but if we manage the 10 seats it would be even better. That being said, it might prove to be a challenge to get all the relevant people to agree on one training day, so we might have to split it up into two training sessions with 5 people. Also beyond the people from the CARE team, we don't yet have a specific list of people to add to the training. It really depends on how many seats we get sponsored, so lets cross that bridge when we get there. However any conference that has a dedicated Symfony track should also get in contact with me and potentially we can include some representatives from your conference in the training.

Published in #Diversity