Counting Days: 3500 Ways to Celebrate Culture
This month we announce that the Diversity Atlas Cultural Events Calendar is now live! We are proud to present our comprehensive report surveying the 2022 TechDiversity Awards and announce our partnership with the TechDiversity Academy. We are also pleased to share that Voices of Culture has adopted Diversity Atlas as best practice in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) space, share our participation in Amazon Web Service's Innovate for Impact conference and deliver a new product update.
Diversity Atlas Cultural Events Calendar
We are immensely proud to launch the Diversity Atlas Cultural Events Calendar, the result of many months of research, writing, data entry and editing.
We have created the world's most comprehensive cultural events calendar – which compiles not only dates and event names, but also historical, mythological, religious and political facts and knowledge.
The events curated here, while by no means exhaustive, are intended to serve as a starting point in learning about many cultural, religious and political observances, and for us all to realise the common humanity we share.
This is reflected here in the richly diverse ways we choose to commemorate and celebrate life's immense variety and vibrancy.
We would like to extend our thanks to Marc, Rezza, Tahlia, Sonia, Michelle, Catherine, Adrian and Jane for their hard work on this very ambitious project.
We will soon also publish a best practice guide on how to use our cultural calendar within an ethical and productive framework for your company's diversity needs.
TechDiversity Awards Attendee Mapping
We are thrilled to have mapped the diversity of attendees at the TechDiversity Awards event, both in the room and online, whilst also achieving a Merit Award in the Business category. A comprehensive report created by the Diversity Atlas team, using data obtained from over 270 survey participants, revealed vast cultural and statistical insights from the event.
The data uncovered findings that range from gender, age, language, country, worldview, ethnic background, ancestry, and personal identities, among others. These attributes were recorded anonymously, so as to assist organisations, such as TechDiversity, in understanding and empowering their audiences.
- View Report (PDF)
Our results indicated that the audience represented over 40 countries, 86 cultural heritages, 18 worldviews as well as the fact that 70 languages were spoken amongst participants.
We are also pleased to announce that Cultural Infusion is a partner of the new TechDiversity Academy. This community driven initiative exemplifies workforce diversity and inclusion through workshops, leadership sessions, mentoring and more.
Voices of Culture
Diversity Atlas has been adopted as best practice by Voices of Culture for their collection of audience data for cultural institutions in Europe.
Voices of Culture is a joint initiative of the European Commission and the Goethe-Institut. Their publication of the Brainstorming Report provides guidelines and recommendations to the European Commission and cultural practitioners around the world.
On page 49, Diversity Atlas is recognised for using a data-driven approach to unlock the value of diversity. Diversity Atlas analyses immense data across various employee profiles in the workplace, using an intersectional approach. Voices of Culture recognises this as a key opportunity to foster the connection and unity of team members and communities.
- To find out more (PDF)
Amazon Web Service (AWS) Innovate for Impact
Diversity Atlas’ CTO, Rezza Moieni and Chief Experience Officer, Michael Walmsley spoke at the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Innovate for Impact event.
The accelerated implementation of Cloud technology creates key challenges and opportunities faced by non-profit organisations. As business partners of AWS, Cultural Infusion's Rezza and Michael shared Diversity Atlas’ journey in achieving outcomes through Cloud technology.
Diversity Atlas uses a unique and secure analytics platform to track the diversity of the workforce across multiple cultural pillars. Cultural Infusion’s overarching goal is to improve the DEI space by providing workforces with a unique scalable platform that creates an engaging user experience and instant access to real-time insights. Facilitated by our implementation of AWS technologies and customer- centric practices, our digital platform assists the development of inclusive engagement strategies to drive business performance and social equity towards a culturally harmonious world.
Working with AWS, the world's most customer-centric organisation, Diversity Atlas supports the development of inclusive and engaging strategies to drive social equity, reach targets and improve business performance.
What's in a name?
In this product update, Diversity Atlas’ Cultural Attaché, Quincy Hall, discusses updates made to our survey.
Well, far too much for anyone’s liking when it comes to the collection of sensitive information.
It seems like a moot point to mention in a product update piece that we are removing a field from our survey that no customer ever wanted or used, but here we are. Our core survey has 30 questions in total, but the first two (optional) were:
- First Name, and
- Last Name
These have been removed even as an option for multiple reasons.
Firstly, even though we offered the option for customers to include this field, the ‘results’ of the question would reveal nothing other than (for example) Peter Petersen filled out a survey. There was never an option to find out what Peter Petersen, even if he put his name in, answered for any other question. Further, it was never a compulsory field even if the customer included it. Peter Peterson and everyone else were also given a clearly stated ‘I wish to remain anonymous’ option.
Secondly, what would be the advantage of Peter Petersen even putting his name in? Well, it would, in theory, make it slightly easier for him to have his survey removed if at any time he wished it. He could contact his administrator and say, 'Please remove my survey' and it could be done by the customer. Having said that, to meet GDPR and other global privacy law parameters, at the end of the survey we offer an (optional) unique link anyway to have your survey removed or edited, and that’s in the hands of each participant themselves.
Thirdly, we have had more than 200,000 people participate in Diversity Atlas to date and here is a numerical representation of how many of those people wanted to put their names in: 0. As it should be. We believe everyone should be counted, we believe everybody should be able to find their unique cultural and/or social identity in our massive datasets, but do we believe any one person should or could be identified? No. Not ever. We are counters of identity, we are revealers of group identity, we map and measure diversity across a range of metrics and provide intersectional analysis but we are also protectors of anonymity, and have spent countless hours (and dollars) solidifying our data-gathering practices so that we meet this privacy standard, and more so, exceed that standard with a multitude of safeguards and prevention methods.
So, ‘First Name’ and ‘Last Name’ fields as an option have been permanently removed from the platform as of June 2022. Sometimes, when a feature falls away from a product there’s a sense of nostalgia around it's retirement, but not this time.
Our core survey now has 28 questions, and they are designed to allow the participant to find and define their cultural identity for group analysis, but not one of these questions or the ways by which we gather that data will ever reveal who any one participant is.
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Cultural Infusion (CUIN)Address: Suite 2, 273-277 Wellington Street, Collingwood, VIC 3066
Email: info@culturalinfusion.org.au
Website: https://culturalinfusion.org.au