Inclusivity

Why are we interested in Diversity and Inclusion?

We live in a country rich in linguistic, cultural, religious and geographical diversity. We are located in Bangalore, a software industry hotspot. Thus, Bangalore comprises people from all parts of the country with over 50 percent non-native residents. The population is diverse with varied socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. We believe that inclusion and diversity are not interchangeable ideas but not distinct either. Diversity has to do with representation and how individuals differ from each other in the population. The degree to which the contributions, presence, and viewpoints of all groups of individuals are appreciated and incorporated into a setting, is called inclusion.

Even though an environment may be diverse, it is not inclusive if it contains people belonging to different genders, ethnicities, nations, sexual orientations, and identities, and does not value everyone's perspectives. We also believe that inclusivity spurs on creativity and innovation. Talent is always spread across multitudes, and embracing diversity and being inclusive will not only help attract a diverse set of talented people and ideas but also help retain the diverse potential we attracted in the first place.

Secondly, as we plan to tackle a global problem, inclusivity facilitates an all-rounded and comprehensive perspective on how our solution could aid everyone.

What strategy did we opt for to create an inclusive environment?

To understand diversity and recognize the need for being inclusive and respectful, it is crucial for diversity to exist within the team. We are grateful to be a part of IISc, as in this regard, regional and ethnic diversity naturally arises due to selection of students from across the nation. To ensure inclusivity to a greater extent, we held regular discussions among ourselves and outside of our team as well, and incorporated their suggestions throughout the project. In our team, we have people representing diverse regional, social, and economic backgrounds. In India, issues related to gender equality and sexual orientation incusivity have not been resolved, and ingrained prejudices still loom large. To ensure that this is not a problem for any of our team members, we actively maintained a warm working environment. iGEM IISc had a team of 36 people directly working on the project, with both the leaders being, and a fourth of the team comprising women.

We realise that the reach of science and science education is extremely limited when it comes to the more rural parts of the country, because of inaccessibilty of communication media. we decided to focus this year's educational activity on the rural populace. We recognized the intended audience and approached relevant authorities in and around Bangalore to bring them (the rural public) closer to science. We approached Prayoga (education research institute) and volunteers from the IISc SFRI (Science for Rural India) activity club. With the help of Prayoga and experience from SFRI, we successfully developed an education package suitable for the rural population with a module on Synthetic Biology named 'Sync' under Education activities. We have scheduled a workshop with the help of Prayoga intended for high school students from villages. As an extended attempt to reach a greater population, we aired a program on AIR 101.3 Rainbow, 'Talk on SynBio' in Kannada and English. We received an overwhelming response from all over Karnataka from people belonging to different age groups and educational backgrounds. That being said, to ensure the engagement of children of all ages, that is for younger audiences, we adopted a more suitable storybook format and a comic strip on synthetic biology and the pressing issue of climate change, respectively. 

Keeping in mind the emergence of synthetic biology as a novel field in science and the fact that a large population of the world not being acquainted with Biology, we got in touch with other teams and had our module 'Sync' translated into the major world languages, namely: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish. We also translated the material into major neighboring state languages: Marathi, Malayalam, and Kannada. We achieved coverage of more than 40% of the diverse language population. Not to mention, four of these languages are UN official languages. We are grateful to all the teams who distributed this booklet over nearly all the major continents.

To make sure we do not miss out on people with special needs, we put ourselves in touch with Kripa, from Oceania College and got our module on Synthetic Biology and ethics translated into sign language for the deaf as a script and as video content as well. We plan to roll out a braille script and an audiobook to reach out to visually challenged people.

Our Inclusivity goals were not restricted just to the on-ground activities. But to ensure better accessibility to our project on a virtual level, we kept in mind all the aspects of the technicalities and the visual appearance of our website. To make sure that color-blind people can read the content and interact with the website in a better manner, we have kept the colors on our web pages as few as possible, and used colourblind friendly palettes.

With appropriate font sizes, minimal use of video-heavy content, and addition of alt-text as placeholder for images, we have made our webpage accessible to people from remote geographic locations and with limited availability to the internet.

We have made sure to reach out to stakeholders from all parts of the world, local, national and international, to take inputs that affected our project directly: from the design of the project to the implementation of our idea. The stakeholders belonged to a diverse set of fields, from economists, sustainability heads, and engineers to researchers in science and education. We contacted companies and mechanics for the development of an appropriate implementation level of solution, with an equal say of both the parties. The experiment design and the lab activities were designed by multiple conversations with people in various field of sciences, biologists, organic chemists, furthering optimization of the project overall. We reached out to people acquainted to the field of sustainable development, and organizations hunting for better solutions to current cooling techniques and proposed an implementation with a feasible execution.

Thus, we hoped to achieve inclusivity as much as possible on various forefronts.