I’m pleased to announce the opening of the DDD Perth 2017 Call For Presentations. I’m particularly excited this year because we’ve spend a fair bit of time and effort to make a few key changes that I’m hopeful will positively influence the diversity of speakers we have in this year’s conference.

I was really sad last year when we didn’t get a single presentation submission from a woman presenter. When I introduced DDD Perth 2016, I had a slide about Women in IT (opens in a new tab) and I promised the attendees that we would try and do better next year. Thankfully, the committee wholeheartedly agreed when we far and away voted improved speaker and attendee diversity as our #1 item for improvement this year.

To that end there has been a range of measures we’ve been putting in place to try and improve diversity this year, not the least of which was the abstract writing workshop (opens in a new tab) we held (opens in a new tab) this (opens in a new tab) weekend (opens in a new tab) to try and help less experienced speakers come up with talk ideas and write great abstracts around them. By (opens in a new tab) all (opens in a new tab) accounts (opens in a new tab) there (opens in a new tab) were (opens in a new tab) some (opens in a new tab) pretty (opens in a new tab) awesome talk ideas discussed and I look forward to seeing some amazing submissions this year!

2017 DDD Perth Abstract Writing Workshop

2017 DDD Perth Abstract Writing Workshop

Come on spill the beans… What are these changes you mentioned above!

So we’ve made a few changes to the CFP (opens in a new tab) this year and the voting process that selects the talks:

We’ve explicitly called out that we aren’t just looking for developers to speak; we’ve removed the “by developers, for developers” tagline of the conference and instead are just focusing on the software industry as a whole. This isn’t anything new, more a recognition of what was already there and we’ve listed out the huge variety of talks we already have seen in previous DDD Perth conferences to drive that home.
The big one: We are doing anonymous session voting this year! That means, when it come to voting time you will only see the title, abstract and audience notes for each talk and not the presenter name(s)! We are hoping that this helps to not only remove conscious and unconscious bias from the voting, but also encourages more diverse submissions by removing an element of fear around the voting process.
We are providing confidential one-on-one mentoring by an experienced speaker for anyone that requests it. We’ve supplied an email address to contact on the CFP page.
We’ve introduced a half-sized session option (15 minutes of speaking rather than 40 minutes) which we hope is less scary for first-time or less experienced speakers.
We’ve made it explicit that you don’t have to present by yourself; you can co-present (something I personally love doing and have done in the majority of my public talks in recent years) or present as a group/team. Again, we hope this is less scary for first-time or less experienced speakers.

We’ve implemented these measures after much research and discussion both within the committee and with prominent groups and people in the community that have credentials around diversity in the tech industry.

It’s my sincere hope that these measures will help to improve the diversity of speaker submissions and actual speakers in DDD Perth 2017. If not then we will keep trying next year with different experiments to see if we can start to move the dial and have an important impact in the industry.

Get on it!

As I said above, super excited to see the session submissions start rolling in! Let’s make this year another great conference. CFP closes on 1 July 2017 (opens in a new tab).