A blog about people, culture, organisations and teams.
I run a remote meet-up called Agile in the Ether. A while back I asked twitter followers if I should extend it out to a conference and they said yes, so I did and it was great. This is what happened and what I learnt.
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About a month ago I put together a list of needs for conference speakers. I’d been thinking about it because I’ve been speaking at a fair few conferences recently and seen various approaches by different organisers. I’ve also seen important information missed that other speakers and I could have benefitted from upfront.
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If you read my blog, then you’ll know that I have an interest in diversity and I also run a meetup called Agile on the Bench. At the Feb meetup I joined forces with Lakshan Saldin to give a 10 min talk about how diversity, groupthink and echo chambers affect our teams.
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I co-host the meetup Agile on the Bench with Cara Bermingham. We have been collecting stats of perceived gender diversity (counted rather than surveyed) since it started in Nov 2014. This post is sharing those stats and some observations.
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I realise that I haven’t blogged about one of my latest projects, the diversity charter (although I’ve tweeted about it quite a bit).
This came about after this blog post about considerations for event organisers and frustrations at seeing the same people at conferences. I created it to make people think about how the impact that they can have in making events more diverse, whether they are event organisers, speakers, people that attend events or venues.
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I have been thinking about barriers to diversity at conferences a lot recently. This is sparked by a few things, including my own recent conference submissions, an experiment that I carried out recently that let people encourage their friends to speak and conversations on the topic. Here is the round up of some of that thinking and things for conferences to consider to reduce those barriers.
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I am currently involved in running meetups in London (Agile on the Bench) and Leeds (Agile in Leeds) and co-ran a conference last year. A couple of the challenges that I have are around finding new and interesting speakers and maintaining diversity in the speakers and the audience, which is a challenge that many organisers face.
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Recently I blogged about the Agile on the Bench conference, a minimum viable conference in a campsite that I ran with David Lowe. It happened last Saturday, 25th July and it was an awesome day. The speakers and audience were fantastic and, much like our lunchtime events, the sun came out, despite the heavy rain the day before. In my last post I talked about what we were trying to achieve and here I’ll talk about the successes, what we learnt, where we could improve and share the conference budget.
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Back in February I saw an opportunity on twitter to talk at a fantastic event called 300 seconds. The event is series of lightening talks (300 seconds, or 5 minutes to be precise) on any subject aimed at women speakers. I’ve been looking for more chances to speak in public, so I signed up straight away.
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