Otter Tech offers advice for communities that want to become more inclusive, equitable, and diverse. We offer:

• Diversity and inclusion advice
• Code of Conduct incident response planning and training

Contact us today, or sign up for our Diversity Deep Dives mailing list.

Diversity and Inclusion Advice

Do you want a more diverse community or company? Do you not know where to start? Otter Tech offers private monthly inclusion advice sessions where you can ask all your burning questions. We’ll help you build a plan for creating a more diverse and inclusive community!

Inclusion advice sessions can be customized to meet your needs. The first session will focus on identifying barriers to creating an inclusive community.

Creating a more inclusive culture is vital to retaining community diversity. Barriers to an inclusive culture could be things like cultural norms, opponents of diversity, a lack of diversity in leadership, or problematic language/images on your website. These barriers make people from marginalized groups in your field feel unwelcome or excluded. If unaddressed, people will decide not to join your community or leave after encountering these barriers. We can help you make a plan for demolishing these inclusivity barriers!

Inclusion advice sessions are a minimum three month time commitment. Contact us today to see if we’re a good fit for you!

We specialize in working with technical communities, free and open source software communities, open education communities, and fandom communities. Otter Tech is open to clients from all communities.

Why Focus on Diversity and Inclusion?

Study after study has shown the benefits of having diverse communities and companies. Creating an inclusive and safe work environment increases worker productivity, while studies have shown toxic team members have a larger negative impact on company profits than the positive impacts of hiring “rock star” employees.

Paid Consulting

While Otter Tech is very enthusiastic about helping communities improve diversity and inclusion practices, this work is often emotionally draining and impacts our ability to take on additional consulting work. Therefore, we hope you’ll understand that Otter Tech does not offer unpaid consulting services.

If you’re from a small community or non-profit without funding for diversity consulting, please consider looking at the following resources:

• The Responsible Communication Style Guide – a book with tips for more inclusive language
• Textio – a website for creating inclusive job posts
• Ada Camp Toolkit – a free guide to creating an inclusive events
• Community Event Planning, 2nd Edition – a book on to creating inclusive events
• Geek feminism wiki code of conduct evaluations page
• Safety First PDX’s code of conduct resources
• Audrey Eschright’s “effective incident response” talk
• Open source diversity
• Mozilla’s open source diversity mailing list

Contact

Contact us today, or sign up for our Diversity Deep Dives mailing list.