Kaleidos does not have a formal policy on promoting diversity in the IT workplace but it’s time we had one. While we start an internal debate on that, we wanted to share with all of you our approach to sponsoring events and conferences both by Kaleidos and our spin-out Taiga.
From now on, we will only sponsor events that present an easy to understand and easy to find Code of Conduct that is explicit on the issue of harassment, how to identify it and how to deal with it. A good example of Code of Conduct can be found here.
Good intentions alone won’t qualify and neither having a Code of Conduct that is actively being neglected by the organisation itself, something that we have become aware of recently. We should be way past “you misunderstood us” type of apologies by now, we have a fine historical collection of those already and genuine principles, call us crazy, tend to NOT need that sort of apologies.
On top of that, we will only sponsor events that promote diversity by having relevant figures attending (speakers, hosts, conductors, etc) other than “white caucasian males” (since sexuality is considered a private matter, we’ll have to stop there with the default). Diversity itself is good, we enjoy being able to choose from a hundred programming languages even if not every one is “the best for any given task” but we narrow down options either knowingly or not when it comes to people.
Kaleidos and Taiga are not rich lobbies sitting on a pile of cash ready to be spent on SUPERNOVA DIAMOND sponsor levels. On the contrary, we count every cent, but we believe that we have to take a stance on what it appears to be an involution in terms of how people departing from the “default” are treated. Some of these Internet-era bigots, well armed with a dozen logical falacies, will accuse us of being victims of political correctness. We are past that dilettante-stage and actively engaging with “something must be done, inertia and wishful thinking is not enough” mindset.
Kaleidos itself scores poorly in terms of diversity. Ethnicity-wise, we are pretty much vanilla with some exotic toppings here and there. What’s worse, only 3 women out of 23 employees and none have “management” status! We are proud of many things at Kaleidos but this is clearly not one of them, as you can imagine. We are trying to solve this situation by doing all sorts of things and this policy for sponsoring events is one example.
We hope you see our decision as a constructive approach to our vibrant community and industry. How we do things, not only what we do, is what made us create Kaleidos in the first place.the first place.