Welcome to Wherever You Are

In the tech industry one of our favourite ways of sharing information and ideas, gaining insights and knowledge as well as growing our network of contacts is to attend and speak at events such as conferences and meetups. Unfortunately we often see that attendees and speakers look similar, come from similar backgrounds and have similar outlooks, all of which leads us to miss out on the innovation and creativity that diversity brings us.

So why is this happening and how can we make our events more accessible to a broader and more diverse group of people? As a co-organiser of DevOpsDays London, Coed:Ethics conference and several meetup groups, Paula will present some of the measures she’s experimented with to increase accessibility to these events. What worked and what didn’t, with suggestions for how we can all contribute to making our events more accessible and welcoming in the future.

Transcript

1. “Welcome to Wherever You Are” - things to consider when trying to make your event more accessible and inclusive
2. Paula Kennedy @PaulaLKennedy ({=}) COED:ETHICS
4. “Transforming the future together” ACCESSIBLE INCLUSIVE WELCOMING DIVERSE
6. • Humane teams • Continuous delivery • Metaphors • Healthy minds • Non-allegiance • ChatOps • More …
14. The End?
17. • Neurodiversity • AWS features • Self-Care Tech • Blameless Failure • Managing people • Distributed Systems • More …
18. q Super Early Bird - £100 q Early Bird - £150 q Full Tickets - £200 q Supporter Ticket - £300 q Corporate Ticket - £400 q Under represented or Unwaged - £0
24. What could possibly go wrong? - Pronoun stickers were not understood by volunteers or reception staff which created confusion and hurt - We apologised (on twitter & to audience) - We tried to explain to the team the importance of the stickers
25. What could possibly go wrong? - We asked if anyone in the audience required the sign language interpreter? - We apologised (again)
26. Show me some metrics!
27. Show me some metrics!
28. What will we do in 2019? • Outreach to larger number of marginalised groups • Better awareness of the event and our accessibility measures • Learn from and fix the things we got wrong • Keep on doing the things we did well (thanks @andyburgin)
29. WELCOMING Key takeaways: ACCESSIBLE INCLUSIVE DIVERSE
30. Key takeaways • “A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.” — Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google • IT REQUIRES EFFORT….YOU WON’T ALWAYS GET EVERYTHING RIGHT, BUT IT’S WORTH IT!
31. Thank you @PaulaLKennedy