Getting more women involved in the open call for speaker (CFS)

[crtr0]

As a husband to an amazing wife and a father to two beautiful daughters, I am very invested in getting more women involved in the developer community, both online and offline. This is sometimes considered the "third rail" of developer community discourse, and I am not trying to make any broad statements or offer any broad solutions.

I am, however, the curator for this conference. I care deeply about the talks that are going to be given. They are the single most important reason that people attend a conference, and the curation of these talks are the single biggest way that I can add value, or subtract it if I do a poor job.

I believe that in order to maximize the odds of finding 20 amazing talks, I should cast as wide a net as possible and get as many different perspectives possible. Some of the best talks I've seen as an attendee have come from people who were "unknown" to the broader developer community. Some of the worst were from "celebs".

I also know, based on the data in this repo, that the overwhelming majority of the existing proposals are by men. I feel that this is not an accurate reflection of the available pool of female developers who might be interested in giving a talk at CascadiaJS. Therefore I feel like there is a communications failure: I have not worked hard enough to reach women who code via the channels that they are on.

Some people might think that by tweeting at @WomenWhoCode, I am displaying a preference for female speakers or that I would compromise our selection process to favor proposals from women. This is not the case. Our selection process is completely identity-blind (name, gender, etc) and focuses purely on the abstract submitted.

Thanks for reading this far, I'm eager to hear what people think of this. And please help us spread the word about the CFS for CascadiaJS 2013, it closes on 8/15!

[rockbot]

Have you seen the We Are All Awesome Curators Section?

Along the same vein is the JSConf EU blog post about how they got 25% women speakers.

Both of these articles very carefully encourage explicitly offering assistance/mentorship in terms of putting together a proposal/practicing talks/etc. There are a lot of people who are just plain scared to submit because they're new and don't have the experience - promising them that there will be assistance (if they need/want it) will go a long way to increasing the confidence levels.

I also kind of wonder if the super open nature of the CFP process (i.e. putting your talk out in the open in the repo via PR) doesn't also cause some extra anxiety? I know for myself, if I were a first-time speaker, I would have been extra nervous and might not have submitted.

Totally open for discussion :-)

[crtr0]

I had not seen either of those, thank you so much for sharing!

[chani3]

assistance would be awesome! I'm in the middle of trying to put together a proposal (as usual, I forgot there even was a deadline until someone tweeted) and (again, as usual) my brain is doing its best to convince me that there's no chance of it being accepted and I shouldn't even try. this stuff is scary! :)

[rockbot]

@chani3 try! definitely, definitely try!

And if you want assistance with the proposal itself, I'm happy to help :-) Find me on twitter (@rockbot) or IRC (rockbot)