Anti-Racism, Pro-Astronomy: Week 2

For background on what this is all about, check out my first post on Anti-Racism, Pro-Astronomy.

This week, I've gotten the ball rolling on the Diversity Journal Club (DJC) blog idea, which I'm calling astroDJC. Before committing to a name, I briefly considered renaming Diversity Journal Club to a new name with less contention like "inclusion" or "equity" rather than "diversity". After a brief Twitter discussion about alternatives, I decided to stick with Diversity simply because many institutions have DJCs by that name, and its goals and purpose is widely recognized. If you have strong opinions about the name and what alternatives you'd prefer, I'd love to hear them on Twitter or in the comments.

astroDJC

The first iteration of the blog is now live(!) with two posts contributed by Nell Byler (with Russell Deitrick) about the Genius Effect and the Matilda Effect. I encourage you to read these posts, first for content and then for format, and give feedback about how these posts work as a template for future submissions.

Submitting a post to astroDJC

I created a GitHub repository for suggested posts for astroDJC where anyone can contribute their resources and discussion questions for DJC presentations. For those unfamiliar with GitHub, there is a wiki page (still in development) with a tutorial on how to contribute a post to astroDJC on GitHub in the browser, without any command line nonsense.

The workflow goes something like this:

1. A contributor will take a template post file styled with markdown, and fill it with content. 
2. Once they are happy with their draft post, they can submit it to astroDJC for review via a pull request, where we can collaborate on improvements and make corrections. 
3. The finalized file will be merged to the repository where it will be stored, converted into HTML with pandoc, and posted to the astroDJC blog.

Why GitHub?

Using GitHub for contributed posts ensures a few things that are important to me:

• The ability to post must be open to everyone. Pull requests can be submitted by anyone, removing the need for a moderator or gatekeeper – which has been a sticking point in some social media circles lately... This way, if an undergraduate or physics graduate student wants to contribute but wouldn't have the credentials to prove that they're an astronomer (though they may be an expert on DJC issues), the content of their post is all that will matter to be considered for a submission.
• The collaborative dialogue on each post – from the moment it's submitted via pull request to the moment it's merged – is done in public, where those who are interested can contribute and those aren't can ignore it. GitHub's notifications settings are flexible and easy to use, allowing you to get as much or as little notification about each pending update as you like.
• Appropriate attribution is natural – you choose how you'd like to be referred to in the final blog post, and the history of your contribution is logged in GitHub for bragging rights/reference.
• Writing posts in markdown enables contributors to have some control over the formatting of the post without prior knowledge of HTML (though of course, this is in exchange for prior knowledge of markdown, but I think this is a preferable exchange).

If you would like to submit a post and have any difficulty, reach out to me and I'll help you and work to update the tutorial to make it more complete and intuitive.

Make a submission and gimme feedback!

I'd really like to hear what you think about the blog, the post template, and the example posts that are up. The best way to get good feedback would be to have you give it a test drive – if you've given a DJC talk, try putting it into astroDJC format and submit a pull request. Then be sure to make suggestions about how can we make this tool more effective and easy to use.