Sorry to pile into an already long thread here. I'm one of the people who has raised the childcare question (i asked about it during the debconf14 bid session at dc12), and i just wanted to put it in my 2¢ about why this is a worthy goal and also maybe rein it in some and put it in perspective. First: i don't think planning an entire "debian kids" track that covers a full range of conference material is a feasible, certainly not in the short term. A conference specifically for young people interested in debian and free software is a wonderful idea, but it's not debconf, and it needs a whole other type of planning than most of us have ever done. More importantly, we shouldn't make the difficulty of that goal keep us from doing the more reasonable thing: Phil Hands' suggestion of just some kind of explicit organization of cooperative childcare seems more like what i would expect from Debian. This doesn't need to be organized by the local team for any particular debconf, but the local team does need to be able to handle some of the logistical requests that might arise. For example, a "kids under 3" group might say "will there be a room or an area that we can set aside for the volunteers who will be with our group from the hours of 10am to 3pm on days 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7?". Such a group would still need to organize itself, figure out a work plan, make their needs and desired outcomes clear to the rest of the organizers (sounds a lot like other debian work, no?). If the perfect logistical accommodations don't work out (they never do!), such a childcare group would need to help in figuring out the next-best feasible option. fwiw, if people decide to form such a childcare working group, i'm happy to put some of my debconf volunteer hours toward it. This is because it's important that debian and debconf be open to more than just those of us who have managed to avoid the responsibilities involved with rearing children. There is significant quantitative evidence that being responsible for children is inversely correlated with career choices that are fairly similar to working on Debian: http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2012/2/when-scientists-choose-motherhood If we want to build "The Universal OS", and if we want to be truly welcoming (as the recent GR says), collaborating with our non-childfree peers is a worthy step to take. On 07/26/2012 06:02 AM, Daniel Pocock wrote: > The final word on the subject is that getting people to pay for > something is the only completely unbiased survey: Sorry to pull this one quote out of a long thread, but i couldn't let this slip by: The assertion above is only true if all people involved have the same access to money. There are enough things in our world that are biased in favor of people with more money already, and i'd prefer it if debian and debconf tended to work against those biases instead of reinforcing them. So i'd be happy if people could take a step back from the edgier positions that have been taken in this thread ("we'll run a whole kids' conference!" vs "no kids are welcome and we can't be bothered to help them avoid running away on the train with strangers") and approach it instead like we approach other goals for a more inclusive project. We already (imperfectly) try to welcome and provide for people with different physical capabilities, people with different levels and types of substance addiction, people with widely-varying sleep habits, and even weirdos with unusual dietary constraints, to name just a few categories that impose logistical constraints and difficulties on the conference organizers. We don't handle these existing constraints perfectly, but the fact that we legitimately try is a healthy part of our better nature as an effective and functional collaboration between people. Let's welcome our child-rearing friends too, please! Regards, --dkg
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