DDD Perth Diversity & Inclusion 2018 Update
Matt Ward
Treasurer
The organising committee are proud of what DDD Perth achieved last year, but as we came together to organise this year’s conference we didn’t want to rest on our laurels, we wanted to go further.
Our awesome 2017 speakers!
Branding
We started by reviewing our content, our branding, the message that we were sending out to the world.
A conference’s Code of Conduct is its official statement on what it represents, so the committee initiated a full review of ours, looking at what other conferences were doing and talking about what is really important for us. Please read what we came up with (opens in a new tab), it really sets the tone for the conference.
We asked Julie Grundy (opens in a new tab) (thanks Julie!) for an accessibility review of our website, and have been working, along with some much-appreciated volunteers, to address all the recommendations. The remaining issues (opens in a new tab) are all listed on our GitHub repo so please, get involved!
And finally we thought about our name. We believe the name DDD initially came from Steve Ballmer’s infamous ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!’ chant, but we wanted DDD Perth to be for the whole software community. Luckily, DDD Melbourne had already engaged Matt Birman (opens in a new tab) to redo their logo so we piggy backed off that, stopped talking about developers so much, and now if anyone asks what DDD stands for, we say Developers! Designers! Data Scientists! (DevOps? Data Architects? Distributed Testers?)
Our logo for this year’s conference!
Community
Next we thought about community, we are very much a community-focused event, and we wanted to see what new groups we could reach out to this year.
We decided that we wanted to focus on juniors this year, either in a speaking or attending capacity. We emailed academics, poked student groups on Facebook, and encouraged every junior that we knew to submit!
We reached out to the Autism Academy of Software Quality Assurance, offering tickets to its members to come along on the day, as well as mentoring for anyone interested in speaking.
And we’re thrilled to announce that one of our keynote speakers this year will be Mark Leopold from beyondblue (opens in a new tab), who will be speaking on ‘Better mental health in the workplace’.
On the day
Lastly we thought about the day itself, a conference can be hard to get to if you have kids, or intimidating if you are attending for the first time, don’t know many people, or identity as a part of a minority group.
We are thrilled to be providing subsidised childcare at this year’s conference. You can purchase an extra childcare ticket when you purchase your ticket, and your child will be cared for and provided with fun activities for the duration of the conference. You will just have to provide them with some food!
Last year we had one talk live-signed, and this year we are hoping to build on that by providing live captioning for all of our talks.
Finally we thought about assumptions that we may have been making about our attendees. This year when you purchase a ticket you will be able to indicate your preferred pronoun, as well as whether or not you are comfortable being photographed.
We hope that all these initiatives will lead to a more enjoyable, inclusive, and memorable day. If $50 is too much for you then please grab one of our free financial assistance (opens in a new tab) tickets. We hope to see you there!