I agree that it’s a challenging topic to address. Not much useful happens inside of comfort zones, in my opinion, so I’ll continue to make people uncomfortable for one more email round.
1.
By way of background to the conversation, and in support of the goal of bettering my own knowledge, I recently followed a friend’s good advice and read David Berreby’s “Us vs
Them, the Science of Identity”, I found it very informative on a number of topics relevant to this topic. While I can’t claim to be a “bias professional” after reading it, I have an extremely concise summary that I hope could be useful: All of us with human
brains have circuits within that are dedicated to sorting out people into groups (“kinds”) just as surely we have sensory homunculi and letter-recognizing neural networks. What is not hard-wired is the value judgements and decisions we form based on that circuit.
Those value judgements instead are taught to us, propagated via culture in all its vagaries. The critical thing to recall is that any one specific attribute is likely to be a poor predictor of any person’s full story.
2.
On the broader topic of training in support of objectives, I’m sure that the organization will provide some resources or guidance but I don’t know if it would take the form of
rigorous training. Evaluate all the code of conduct objectives in the same light - e.g., for the objective regarding conflict of the group should to provide some resources on steps to take for managing potential conflicts. Finding qualified trainers on all
the topics seems a potentially challenging. Whether training occurs or not, I would think the objective is worthwhile.
My $0.02, and now I’ll try to listen, which is always a good thing to do when conversations become challenging.
-
Scott
From:
Kaliya Identity Woman <kaliya@identitywoman.net>
Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2016 at 1:18 PM
To: Scott Shorter <scott.shorter@kuma.pro>
Cc: Megan Cannon <megan@kantarainitiative.org>, "dg-idpro@kantarainitiative.org" <dg-idpro@kantarainitiative.org>
Subject: Re: [DG-IDPro] Reminder: ID Pro Discussion Group meeting today at 11am ET
On Wed, Dec 7, 2016 at 11:38 AM, Scott Shorter <scott.shorter@kuma.pro> wrote:
Hi Kaliya,
A fair question - identity and bias are certainly inter-related issues. Who do you envision would be the recipient of such training?
The ID professionals you are suggesting follow this code of conduct.