History, mission, and ownership of this group

Over at http://groups.drupal.org/comment/reply/140679/470949#comment-470949, Pistachio Pony asked some good questions that I thought probably deserved wider attention/response:

• why was the group created?
• what will the group be doing?
• how does drupal fit into this?

I thought it would be cool to get other peoples' thoughts on this, as well. Here's my 2 cents as a member of this group.

History/Background

While I'm the $node->uid on the group, that's merely a technicality. It was very much a consensus in the room to create the group, and I very much feel like this group belongs to all of us. I just happened to be the only person in the room with the access/ability to get it done.

The group actually originated when hifalutin scheduled a "LGBTQ Lounge" BoF at DrupalCon San Francisco (complete with refreshments! :D) which a number of us attended. This was the first time we folks the "angle" community had ever really met each other in that setting, and it was a really awesome! We went around the room and talked about who we were, where we were from, what we did for the larger community, etc.

This was also around the time the non-binary Gender field debate happened. The tone that certain participants in that discussion had taken left a really bad taste in peoples' mouth, and some people felt pretty unsafe. :\ So that was a hot topic of discussion at the time, as well.

Mission

The group was primarily created for the following reasons, at least from what I remember (others may have a different list):

1) to provide a nice welcome mat to other LGBTQI in the Drupal community that "we're here!"
2) to provide a place to coordinate larger outreach into the non-Drupal-using (yet) LGBTQI community.
3) to provide a "social" place for talking about LGBTQI issues and their relation to technology, employment in our field, interesting community opportunities, etc.
4) to provide a "safe space" to have the sorts of "meta" community-impacting discussions, like gender, that tend to get ugly and heated when they're brought up in the issue queue with people who aren't as sensitive to them.

In reality, the definition of this group is more fluid than that, and it sort of becomes what each of us makes it by virtue of the discussions we start and take part in. But I think that captures the general idea of what we planned to do.

How does this relate to Drupal?

I think Shannon Lucas summed this up brilliantly. It relates to Drupal because Drupal is about community, and community is about humans. And all of the stuff that comes along with them.

We want Drupal to be a welcoming community to as diverse a spectrum of humanity as possible. Regardless of age, gender, orientation, religion, income, geographic location, experience level, you name it... regardless of who you are, if you have something valuable to contribute, we want to help you do it (and have fun at the same time)!

However, the Drupal community is a microcosm of the larger world community, and the larger world community is not always so... uh... "enthusiastic" about certain traits some of us have. :P~ And so hurtful things can get said, and those of us in this group can end up feeling dismissed or worse. So I think it's important that this group exist not only so we can talk to and get support from each other if things like this come up, but also so we can work to educate the larger community on how to be more sensitive to some of these issues.

And finally, I think it relates because if I were a LGBTQI person out there and came across the kind of honest, mature discussion going on in the other thread, it would make me feel like this was a group of awesome people I could really enjoy working with, and might very well cause me to look into this whole "Drupal" thang. :) Outreach++

That's my 3 cents, anyway. But please don't consider it some kind of "definitive, official" 3 cents. :) Very curious to hear others' 3 cents, as well.

I'm also going to appoint some folks I've seen being pretty active around here as "co-organizers" (who can in turn appoint other co-organizers) to help demonstrate the collective ownership of this group. If you feel like you'd like to be part of that group too, please chime in!