2019 was an amazing year for Diversity Atlas and 2020 is set to be a bigger one!

Among all projects and responsibilities that I have been dealing with at Cultural Infusion, Diversity Atlas became my main focus in 2019. After almost 4 years of brainstorming and development in different scales, it was finally released in early 2019, however the development did not stop there and there was new features in every release. I am grateful of working with a team of open minded SMEs, highly ethical people around the office and a motivated CEO whose vision drives this project. Here is a quick review of 2019 for Diversity Atlas.

Technology Development

?     Our application and database servers moved to AWS that made a huge difference in our security (confidentiality, integrity and availability) of our system. We implemented strategies against DDOS attack (By Masking our IP ) and network isolation by using VPC, also network ACL is in action in order to guarantee a higher level of privacy. We kept adapting the project with the latest version of Laravel and other languages and also implemented a Load Balancer with standby on-spot servers. AI, Machine Learning and NLP have been recently introduced to DA and they will play a major role in every step of DA soon!

   New Features

You can think of Diversity Atlas as a high definition (HD) screen which shows details of different sorts of diversity within your team! You can see your team in 4K screen quality:) There are new panels which show the demographics in details and new time stamp feature which companies can use as a diversity monitor system in their community. Companies with multiple departments now can compare the balance of diversity between different departments. Balance of diversity is as important as just having variety of diversity within your team. There is a comprehensive analysis of age vs gender vs position level in the system which goes far ahead of any other tools.

 Our Team

·        I cannot be more proud of Diversity Atlas team. Peter, our CEO, played the most important role here by spending more than a 1000 hour on just this project himself. His inter-state and international travels and speaking to people had a huge impact on our progress. We spent 100s of hours discussing this project together, from early in the mornings to late in the nights. Peter's passion and support to this project was the best thing that I could have as a project manager. (Dr.) Martin Plowman joined us earlier this year. He has developed Workforce Mutuality Framework. This framework and Diversity Atlas work fantastic with each other and create a deeper insight to any organization. We are already invited for two conferences next Feb and May on this subject. I am also so grateful working with (Dr.) John Garzoli. Apart from his contribution to the project as an anthropologist, I am very much enjoying our current research project together with Peter which is accepted for a conference in Milan next June. I wish I had more friends like him. Thanks to Nivy, the director of operations and client engagement, we did so many presentations and zoom meeting and yet, there are more to happen in 2020! Nabi’s work as a tech lead and his 24/7 commitment was exceptional. Amir, Sobhan, Mo, Maisam and Kav did a fantastic job in development team. Everyone can see the exceptional graphics on the website and Osvaldo’s world-class graphic design could not be better. Yilu, Ayla and Ningsu did an amazing UX design and improvement here. Angelina’s contribution to blog posts and print design in this project was remarkable and she will continue more on DA next year. I also have to thank Lia, Jenny and Pooja for their impact and contribution to the project. Another amazing and talented teammate is Maximo who joined us in Oct and is working remotely from Barcelona. It was also great to work with Cat who joined us 2 months ago and I am looking forward to working with new talented people who will join us in 2020, including Liam.

It was also great to finally start our partnership with Australian National University (ANU) - (Dr) Amrita who will play an important role in this partnership and research projects.

 Events:

Diversity Atlas was presented in many events and occasions, including conferences, workshops and training sessions. It was presented to 200+ organizations and decision makers. Our first adopters are already on board and started using it to map the diversity of their community and the project could not be successful without their feedback and positive attitude.

  here is some few more events ( out of many ) that Diversity Atlas was presented in:

• Melbourne Youth Orchestras trial – June – October 2019
• Workplace Mental Health Symposium, Brisbane 2-3 September 2019
• FECCA – HOBART - Oct 2019 9 Including a live demonstration and showing the results at closing speech )
• Joint poster presentation with HealthWest Partnership
• Rhodes – Greece- International soft launch - Oct 2019
• AHRI – presentation - Nov 2019

And DA was presented in many other forums, conferences such as Vicforum and PMI Chapter Melbourne

All these happened according to working with a team of competent people who deeply believe in the value of the work they do. I am looking forward for 2020 and the journey we will continue with the whole Cultural Infusion team.

Rezza

Dec 2019