Deliberate, Directed, Positive ACTION!
Peter Aitken PARISS: Cool.
All right.
We're back.
Have everyone's attention?
Me and Peter were back there doing the power pose because we're both nervous when we get
up here so.
Can we clap on Peter Aitken?
[ Applause ] PETER: There we go.
How are you all doing, JSConf?
My name's Peter Aitken.
Today I'm going to be speaking about deliberate, direct positive action.
During the day, oops.
I'm a slide ahead.
I think I'll just start again.
So, during the day I work at litmus where we built something called email creative platform.
My day job involves looking after a team.
We build the app with JavaScript, Rails in an agile fashion.
We all work remotely.
Currently we're hiring.
If you would like to if this sounds interesting, please catch me later.
Previously I spent many years organizing Scotland CSS and Scotland JS.
And now I focus my community efforts on something called global diversity CFP day which is going
to be the focus of our talk today.
And what I learned throughputting this together.
Just to give you an idea what that is, on a single day we host a load of workshops all
around the world with the sole aim of supporting and encouraging people from underrepresented
and marginalized groups and putting together their first tech conference proposal.
The aim, thereby, being if more people from these groups apply, then you'll see more people
with different coming from different backgrounds with different experiences and different perspectives
and sharing that on stages like this.
So, to just I want to introduce some definitions here.
Because I get a whole lot of questions around two of the terms in the title of the event
name.
First up, diversity.
What we're talking about here is something that is contextually dependent on your location
in the world.
And excuse me it's usually easier to describe who diversity doesn't apply to.
And so, in the western part of the world, the people that make up the majority of the
workforce, the privileged group, as I would describe them, are the cis white hetero men
like myself.
And pretty much if all of those things, cis white, hetero, able bodied, man, if there's
any of those that don't apply to an individual, usually diversity refers to that individual.
Does that make sense?
And there's another question that I get.
Or variance of any time I'm involved in a diversity and inclusion initiative.
And these questions usually come from someone who presents, like myself, and are along the
lines of, can I participate in this event?
Because I think diversity applies to me because I work with this really, really obscure database
technology.
In case you're wondering, folks: No.
Next up, we've got the acronym CFP.
That stands for call for proposals.
This is effectively a process that a tech conference like this would open to encourage
the community to come forward to propose topics and share their knowledge and experience.
So, who is this talk for?
As I mentioned, this is a talk about the things that I've learned through organizing this
event.
And there's gonna be things that will be useful from a management perspective.
If you are bringing a diversity and inclusion initiative, perhaps in the workplace.
If you want to be a better member of the tech community, if you organize meetups, if you
organize conferences.
So, given that all of you are part of the JavaScript community, this talk is very much
for you.
So, the rough order of service, I suppose, today, is we'll be talking through where did
CFP Day come from?
What happens during a workshop?
What's involved in organizing a workshop?
And through that there will be the sort of things that I have learned.
So, where did global diversity CFP Day come from?
It won't surprise you to discover that this grew out of my experience running conferences.
And I think from 2013 to 2015 when the call for proposals process was open for those conferences,
to encourage and engage people to apply to speak.
I would host a number of, like, video public video call sessions.
And it was kind of like meet the organizer and some previous speakers.
If you have any questions, you know, let's try and address them and encourage you to
apply to speak.
And by 2015, I had really no idea how many people from those calls were actually applying
or making the final lineup.
So, was this worthwhile?
And in 2015 at the after party, after giving our talk, Katie Fenn and I were chatting at
the after party.
And Katie mentioned that the video calls that she attended was just the nudge that she needed
to finally put together that first talk proposal.
And if I remember correctly, Katie, kind of like myself, when it came to trying to
or to doing this kind of thing, procas somebody want to say it for me?
Procrastination was really getting in the way.
So, if we fast forward to 2016.
Again, the CFP was open.
And I was trying to figure out a way of, you know, these video calls were useful.
But how could we amplify that?
How could we do something that was more direct, targeted, positive in terms of supporting
people from underrepresented and marginalized groups?
And that was a good question.
And how do we go about answering it?
Then three days later I just kind of sat up first thing in the morning and the idea just
had kind of came to me in any head.
And that was the idea of hosting a diversity CFP workshop.
And that was specifically to encourage people to apply to Scotland JS and Scotland CSS.
So, this idea of having a workshop, you know, it was like, what was I doing?
I already, you know, I've got a full time job.
I've got family to look after.
And, you know, tend to and spend time with.
We've got we had two dogs that were running wild.
I was organizing two conferences.
Let痴 lets run a workshop here, yeah, in a couple of weeks' time.
And then I sort of started chatting to people.
For instance, Katie, who said, you know, as soon as I shared this idea Katie said, can
I run one in Sheffield?
I was chatting to a friend in Dublin, oh, we'll run one too.
And this kind of snowballed from having to effectively having a workshop in three
weeks' time in Glasgow in Scotland, Edinburgh, Sheffield, Dublin, London and Berlin.
I did literally get in touch with Robin from Berlin JS thinking, everybody was saying yes.
Just for a laugh, what do you think if we got this to happen in Berlin?
And Robin said, yes.
So, running those workshops I think it was about 60 people attended.
And it had a massive impact on the diversity of applicants to the conferences to speak.
And in terms of the lineup, particularly for Scotland JS, it had a massive, massive impact.
In terms, 60 people attended these workshops.
And there were 17 slots available for that conference.
And three people from those workshops were speakers that year.
And bear in mind there was like 200 applicants to speak.
So, that was just it just validated the idea.
But in terms of putting these workshops together, I wanted everybody to have a the attendees
at each workshop to get a consistent message and set of advice.
And to try to make that happen, I wanted to sort of provide that message.
But at the same time, you know, because I didn't want six different groups of people
trying to put together their own workshop on really short notice.
They're already running about looking for venues and mentors and team members and all
this kind of stuff.
And so, I thought, how can we sort of make this a whole lot simpler?
How can we boil this down to like a conversation?
So, I was thinking, could we how could we make this happen?
And I got in touch with Raquel and Sarah Mei and asked, if there any chance that the two
of you could make some time to have a chat and share and discuss things like advice around
putting together a proposal?
What would you put in the title, in the abstract, the description fields?
And your experiences of that.
The highs and lows of being accepted, being rejected from events.
And on the flipside, you know, what's your experience with being in review committees.
Knowing that they both had done that kind of thing.
Oh, and can you get it to us in the next fortnight, please?
Two weeks?
And they said yes.
What's going on?
How can we put this burden on so many people and they just keep on saying yes?
And so, with those videos we were able to enable all of the workshops that were actual
material to get going a whole lot quicker.
And so, enable people is the first thing to call out there.
So, the event was, let's see, right about the June time in 2016.
And come about August time I had finally sort of my brain had reconstituted enough that
I'm sure the organizers say that's the same, running these types of events.
And given the huge impact we mentioned earlier on Scotland JS, how could we well, it was
more like, there was nothing in the workshop, there was nothing that was JavaScript specific.
There was nothing CSS specific.
And there wasn't really anything even Scotland specific.
It kind of made me feel a little bit sad in that regard.
But let's turn the frown upside down.
You know, could this concept be shared with all tech communities and support all of the
people within those communities?
Could this be shared with all tech communities everywhere?
Which I still struggle with.
Just seems huge.
How does this all come to be?
So, next up, what happens during a workshop?
If you come along to attend a workshop, there's a whole host of people that have are keen
to egg you on and make this happen for you.
I've already mentioned Raquel and Sarah giving you CFP advice.
Danielle, will help you in crafting your biography.
Saran will help you put together your perfect tech talk.
Melinda will introduce you to slide design.
And Jess will take you through a whole host of things that are gonna happen on the day
of your talk and how to handle them.
Some tips and thing like that.
And the mentors in the workshop will be working with you to help identify what exactly it
is that you should be proposing a talk about.
And, you know, later on there'll be the opportunity to actually start writing that proposal.
And ideally we'll all have prizes if you get that applied to an actual event by the end
of the day.
Which may be a bit of a challenge and a stretch.
Okay.
And so, did anybody see Ariba's talk on Monday?
[ Applause ] Woohoo!
Ariba was talking about bullying teenagers being bullied and the assumptions that her
team had made around trying to support the teenagers.
And through talking to the teenagers, they were able to sort of disprove some of those
assumptions and get a whole lot of better ideas.
So, this totally ties up with my experience at this point.
And to talk to people, you don't have all the answers.
And in this situation, in this example where is it?
There we go.
Danielle on the top right there is the CEO of walk talk design.
They host a whole series of workshops related to encouraging women to be speaking and trying
to elevate and promote them.
So, we have very, very similar goals.
We were having a chat and Danielle was rapid fire going through all these things that they
have basically in their back pocket.
And to try to see where the holes were in the CFP Day curriculum.
Whether there was anything that we could add.
And when it comes to applying to speak, there's two things that you'll need to put together.
One being your proposal and the other one being your biography.
And, here I had completely forgotten about the biography.
That's why Danielle stepped in and put that workshop activity together.
Yeah.
So, given what you've heard about these workshops, if this is something you feel might be of
interest, you might want to dip your toe into the water, there's no commitment necessary.
We will be running CFP Day in January 2020.
And we have advice from Ramon from his talk as well, just go for it.
Next up.
What's involved in organizing a workshop?
So, the first thing that you need to do before you dive in that this event worldwide is 100%
free of charge.
We want to ensure that no attendee has to go through any sort of financial barrier that
may stop them from participating.
These are exactly the type of people we're hoping to support.
And also, you know, nobody gains financially in terms of the workshop organizers, the team
members, myself.
Nobody financially gains from this event.
So, what are the actual things that you need to do to be in terms of being an organizer?
And this is the sort of list of things that you need to do from a sort of logistical perspective.
You need to find a venue.
In terms of finding someone to pay for catering, that's kind of optional.
But it's really nice if you can take care of that and make that happen.
Because, you know, it's gonna keep everybody together in terms of the lunch and that sort
of thing.
And next up, you need to build an awesome team who share our values and mission.
You need to promote your workshop.
You're gonna know your location a whole lot better than me back in Scotland.
You're gonna know who all the different tech communities are.
You're gonna know the best people to reach out to, you're gonna know the best way to
get in touch with the communities, Slack, meetup.com, whatever it may be.
And finally, code of conduct training.
Everybody in your workshop team needs to go through this code of conduct training.
Attendees will potentially be bringing you issues to deal with.
And it's to you to handle those situations.
The idea of training is that you're in the best position possible to handle any eventuality.
And I suppose explain to you how we expect you to handle that situation.
So, at this point we've got a number of lessons learned.
All lined up.
First one, don't be shy.
And this is all around finding your venue and asking folks to pay for catering.
You know, it's like, reach out to companies to borrow their office at the weekend.
And excuse me ideally, everybody, you know, if we look back at the original first
six workshops, everybody kept saying yes.
So, please, bear that in mind.
And, you know, sort of use that as encouragement to reach out if you're looking for sponsorship
or space.
Another thing to bear in mind is that when you're reaching out to these companies, there's
more than likely somebody in there who has like a line item and their list of value goes.
And it has empty check box, and it will say something like, support diversity and inclusion.
And it maybe possibly will have a check mark after it.
Reach out to them.
Think of it like this.
But maybe not put it in these terms.
That, you know, you're helping them by taking up their office space as a venue.
By accepting funding for catering.
You're enabling them to tick that box when it comes to the end of the year for those
in review.
You're helping them.
Bear that in mind.
Ideally, I'm hoping that will encourage you to take these steps forward.
Next up, we've got visibility.
So, this, again, is very much in relation to your venue.
Once you've found a venue and you're going add all the details to the website, there's
quite a few questions and the access information section.
There's about 35 questions in there.
And covering things like, does your venue support  or have gender neutral bathrooms?
Does it have a nursing room?
Is there a quiet room?
Is there parking nearby?
Is it well lit?
There's quite a lot.
So, I'll hold off just there.
But the idea is that we're sharing the information about what your venue has available.
Ideally, if it's in an office, it's gonna be quite accessible.
I doubt that it's gonna support all the things that we've got questions about.
But the whole purpose here is to convey to the potential attendees what is available
and supported so that they can look at this and decide, does this venue support my access
requirements.
If it doesn't, ideally then we'll reach out.
And hopefully the organizer will be able to do something to remedy that.
Which might not be possible.
But they can bear it in mind for doing something better that would support people with that
particular requirement in an upcoming year.
I would like to give a huge shoutout to Aisha Blake who looks after our Detroit workshop
and has started a whole community around supporting newbies and public speaking all year round.
And from here, the events that she has been previously involved in organizing has a list
of access questions.
About 20 questions.
And passed them over and that was a huge start for getting us going.
And we're continually adding to them and be we're continually refining the language to
make it as inclusive as possible.
Thank you, Aisha.
Next up, representation matters.
So, this feels like something that shouldn't need called out to organizers.
Because really this is what the whole event is about.
We want to have more people from different background on the tech stage.
And ideally, you know, when people from similar backgrounds who generally up to that point
haven't participated in events like this, when they see people like themselves on the
speaking lineup, if they're comfortable enough, hopefully they will step forward and start
to participate in these communities.
As an organizer when putting together your workshop team, please remember, representation
matters in your team.
There have been cases where there's a group of men, very well intended, making workshops
happen.
Which is great.
However, there are have been women that have got in touch and said, I'm not gonna
participate.
If anybody is unsure as to why that might be, catch me later for a chat, okay?
Next up, promote autonomy.
So, earlier we were talking about enabling workshop organizers by providing as much materials
and a schedule to get everybody going.
When you're putting together your workshop team, you will be pulling in people that are
that have public speaking experience.
You will be pulling in people that have gone through these CFP processes and been accepted
and rejected.
And they will have a whole lot of advice and experience to share around that.
If they have time and availability, could they put together a talk or a workshop activity?
If they have the time to do that and give the attendees in your workshop something that's
even more engaging and memorable as an experience and like an educational experience.
You are fully empowered to do that.
In terms of the materials we supply, you can use as much, all, as little or none as you
see fit.
As long as we're all driving towards the same goal.
If we've piqued your interest and this is something that you would like to participate
in, would you like to organize an event if there isn't one in your area?
We will be opening the call for workshop areas and teams between September/October time.
We would love to have you.
If there are any questions, grab me after this.
And if there isn't, if there is already a workshop organizing being organized
the team's details will be on that workshop page.
You will be able to get in touch with them and reach out and offer to join in.
And everything has always been very welcome and keen to just bring everybody in.
Code of conduct.
Let's see.
Today this section I'm gonna talk about a very specific aspect around the CFP Day
code of conduct.
So, in 2018, this is what the page or a section of the page looked like.
And at the bottom you see we have the code of conduct team which is myself and Kim.
And I suppose the TL;DR, for the purples of this section that you need to be aware of
in terms of the code of conduct, is that if there's an tissue that happens within the
workshop, ideally the team will be remedying that within the workshop.
With one exception.
And that's if there's an issue reported with the organizer.
In that instance, the reporter should be where is it going?
See that lovely big orange button there?
If the person wanting to report the issue presses that button and sends an email to
the team, we then handle that and address the issue with the organizer.
And so, there was something I should explain a little bit first.
So, there was no incidents of this kind during the event.
However, in the latter half of 2018, we received a number of complaints about a small handful
of organizers.
And I'm not really gonna go into that too much.
But it's more about how the people got in touch.
So, we put this shared inbox together.
And nobody used it.
Everybody got in touch privately through Kim's DMs.
Which suggested to me that everybody either had some sort of affinity with Kim or trusted
her.
And in that situation, it was that they trusted Kim and didn't trust me.
Or just that they trusted her more than they trusted me.
I don't know.
And in 2018, we were very much trying to make the team bigger.
And more representative.
But that didn't quite work out as we'd hoped.
Because we're keeping on asking people to do more and more things and adding to people's
workload.
So, by 2019, we had more people involved and engaged.
That picture down at the bottom is right off the bottom of everybody's screen when they
come to visit the page.
And any issues that we've received since they have come through that shared inbox.
So, the thing that I would call out there is that a cis is that as a cis white hetero
able bodied man, the most marginalized communities may not trust me.
If you're an event organizer, or you're running some sort of initiative in the workplace,
please bear in mind that as a cis white hetero able bodied man, the most marginalized in
our communities may not trust you.
We hear the term "People from underrepresented and marginalized groups" a lot.
These two things go hand in hand.
What's the difference?
White women are underrepresented in tech.
They're not marginalized.
People of color, particularly women of color are marginalized.
Members of the trans community are marginalized.
With that in mind, as a cis white hetero able bodied person, the most marginalized in our
communities may not trust you.
If this is something that you would like to learn more about, I would recommend following
Kim Crayton.
Kim will be sharing her lived experience online and does.
And I would highly if anything I have said in the last few minutes has made you perhaps
uncomfortable, I would suggest just sitting with that rather than having perhaps emotional
or defensive reaction to that.
And just try and figure out why.
And so, Kim shares her perspective and continually makes everybody aware that she will be making
you feel uncomfortable by, I suppose, yeah.
Sharing her experience as a black woman.
I would also like to point you to Julien's talk from Monday.
I thought that was an amazing talk.
Introducing us to a whole load of scenarios and terminology that we might not have been
aware of.
If you haven't seen Julien's talk, please catch the video.
And so, bearing all of this in mind, there are people who have raised issues and sent
them into our shared global code of conduct email account.
If I go back just a little bit.
What if there's people that haven't got in touch because that picture's on there?
We want to support the most marginalized in our communities because we know that they
are actively harmed every day in big and small ways.
Intentionally and not.
And for that reason, I am gonna be stepping out of this team to let the people who have
similar lived experiences to the people we are aiming to support handle those.
And ideally, just by trying to be transparent and list all the people there, if I'm going
to be a barrier to that, I am gonna step out of that.
So, the next thing to call out you hear lots of people with lots of good intentions.
There's people writing lots of blog posts about diversity and inclusion in the community
and the workplace, in companies.
That's lovely.
But for change to happen, there needs to be action.
If there is no action, good intentions and talk, it just really doesn't count for anything.
So, just in summary, it's to give you some stats around the events themselves.
In February 2018, we had 53 workshops all around the world supporting over a thousand
people who attended.
In 2019, we had over 80 well, we had 81 workshops.
Over 360 volunteers making this happen for over 2,000 attendees.
At this point I would like to ask anybody in the room who is involved in organizing
or mentoring or facilitating at one of these events, could you come up and join me, please.
Come on, Ramon.
And while folks are making their way here, I would like to introduce you to our Boston
workshop this year.
This is the folks from our workshop in Nablus in Palestine.
Glasgow, Scotland.
And a very enthusiastic bunch in Johannesburg in South Africa.
Whoops.
At this point, could you please give all of these people a huge, huge round of applause
for making this happen.
[ Applause ] And I'm gonna keep you here for a bit longer,
sorry.
It's just for effect.
So, the people that we've not really heard from or talked specifically about are the
people who have come through this event and went on to become speakers.
And this is just a small group of the people that have done that.
And when we look at social media, we hear things when we're talking about diversity
and inclusion is we hear things like: Diversity will bring us will help make our products
better.
Our teams better.
Our events better.
By bringing a whole lot of new experiences and, yeah.
Experiences and perspectives.
But we never really hear of sort of like concrete examples of how that's happened.
So, I would like to introduce you to Suz.
Suz attended our London workshop this year.
About a month later gave a talk which was all about her experience of changing career
from working in the metropolitan police force to becoming a programmer.
And I know I haven't looked at YouTube, this is the thousands upon thousands of views already.
And the thing that I want to say there is that, as a cis white hetero able bodied man,
that's not a talk that I could give.
I'm sure there's some men that could.
And I'm sure there's some that may attempt to bluff their way through it.
If that's the case, let's see how you might feel about Benedict's talk.
Benedict is at the top right here and she attended our Oslo workshop.
Talking about her side project which is a web based privacy first media tracker.
This is something that I am in no way qualified to talk about.
I'm not even gonna I could not attempt yeah.
This let's see.
Tech has come a long way in the last couple of years in terms of diversity and inclusion.
But it has such a long way to go.
Our society, our world, to achieve any level serious level of equality, really needs to
change.
These are just some of the people taking that step forward a very brave step forward
putting themselves out there to make that change happen.
They are the real models for the people that come after them.
Yes, by becoming a tech speaker, there will be the benefits to each of these people individually.
There will be opportunities for travel.
There will be better networking opportunities which can lead to, you know, better career
opportunities.
Yes, it benefits them individually.
However, collectively, they are all enriching all of us.
And it only seems appropriate for someone who has been through this process to close
out this talk.
I would like to welcome Ariba Jahan.
[ Applause ] ARIBA: Hi.
I think some of you might have seen me here yesterday.
So, as an immigrant woman of color with a disability who switched careers from biomechanical
engineering to product and tech, there's not a lot of rooms where I can just watch in and
automatically feel a sense of belonging.
But I did at Global CFP Day.
When I first became interested or curious about speaking, there weren't many resources
available that easily walked through how did people figure this out?
Where did they find the opportunity?
How did they craft an idea?
How did they design a talk?
How did they show up on stage?
It somehow felt like there was a group of people that just knew how to do all the things.
And then there was the rest of us.
And and I think Global CFP Day was the first resource and community that I discovered
that felt very accessible and made for people like me.
Where it was okay to just not know what to do and know that we could all collectively
figure it out together.
So, that experience started a journey in me journey for me that eventually got me to
this stage yesterday.
That was my first talk.
And I couldn't have done it without having that community to show up to feel like, I
don't know what I'm doing.
But I'm hoping someone can help me.
So, if you're in the audience today and you think that you don't have anything to share,
I want you to know, someone needs to hear your story.
You know?
Even if the talk subject has been shared before, your lens and your experience with that has
to be shared.
So, find your local CFP chapter and learn with them.
Thank you.
[ Applause ] PETER: Thank you.
Thank you.
Cheers.
[ Applause ]