Accidentally in Code

Tag: technically speaking

  • No Technically Speaking in 2018

    No Technically Speaking in 2018

    Something_Sticker_2.jpg

    About three years ago, Chiu-Ki and I were wondering around Copenhagen and we came up with the idea for Technically Speaking. We sent the first issue to ~100 people from the hotel lobby in Malmö, Sweden (we were both speaking at Øredev). It’s been such a great experience to build this project out of that – to measure our reach in thousands, and to make it revenue generating (and give most of it away). Putting together our Emoji Report Card at the start of this year made it clear how far this has come.

    I love working with Chiu-Ki. I love – and I’m proud of – the impact that we make.

    But I don’t love the project right now. So after a lot of thought, I told Chiu-Ki that I needed to take a break, and I didn’t want to do it in 2018.

    I have the urge to apologise at this point, like that’s what should come next in this kind of post. However, rationally, I don’t think I owe anyone an apology. What I will offer is an explanation and some insight into how I got to this place. Because I don’t think I am the only person who does community work who ends up here. And I don’t think Technically Speaking is the only project that stops for these reasons.

    Is this a casualty of the world ending? I don’t know. It is definitely true that everything feels trivial. All year I have have been grieving for lost human potential – mostly from women (who have been making 86% of calls to resist the US regime) because instead of doing what we were going to do in 2017 we are dealing with this shit-show instead. I think this was an amplifier, but not the cause.

    The biggest reason why I decided I needed a complete break was because I had started to feel resentment for it. In community work, people copying and basing their work on yours without credit is honestly one of the better outcomes. If I start to need more than that, something is wrong. Two years ago or so a dude made such a poor copy that we couldn’t even call it out. I managed to laugh that one off, observe that nothing says you’re doing a good job better than a mediocre copy from a (white) man. I can’t do that, lately.

    Community work needs to be a gift. I’ve been (slowly) reading the book The Gift (Amazon) – slowly because I hate it, because it’s a very long expression of one small idea. The small idea is that gifts have to keep moving, they can’t be taken out of circulation by being consumed or used for personal gain. I feel that way about community work. It has to be a gift – but also, it has to keep moving. I don’t write with any expectation of return – I put things out there and trust that they will come around and come back. With Technically Speaking, I started to feel it wasn’t circulating.

    Is this true? I don’t know. This isn’t really about what is objectively true, but how I feel. I feel jaded and in need of a break.

    I hate hustling for sponsorship. Mid-year we dropped to bi-weekly, and the biggest driver for that was not wanting to try and find sponsors. I am so grateful for our sustaining sponsors Glowforge and TravisCI who supported us since we went on strike in March 2016 and enacted the rule of no-sponsor-no-issue. This project would likely have ended much sooner without their support. This has helped us give our guest contributors a meaningful gift, and also allowed us to help inclusive events we believe in.

    Will Technically Speaking come back in 2019? I don’t know. I think we have to give it space to not come back. I hope by stepping away we can see the core and the most valuable parts of it more clearly.

    Three years is a good run, though. I know we have helped people get started or level up their speaking. I know we have helped events diversify their lineups. I believe that we have moved forward and created transparency into conversations around Codes of Conduct and speaker travel. I believe that we have made a difference.

    The sad thing is that I don’t have any good alternative to offer people. There are resources I recommend (like the Eloquent Woman blog) but nothing with the angle we had on content, or with the standards of curation we had for CfPs.

    I want to leave you with some takeaways.

    The first, and the most important, is that you have something to say. Yes you. Your voice is valuable and you deserve to be heard.

    The second thing is that if there are projects you appreciate, please keep the gift in circulation. Saying thank you is good, crediting and paying forward is better.

    Third, and finally: without financial support community projects die. Our sustaining sponsors doubled the lifespan of this project – that’s incredible. But we were well connected and lucky, and it has still been really painful.

    Good luck on stage in 2018, y’all. I might not be actively helping… but I still believe in you.

  • But Unfortunately, As You Know, People

    But Unfortunately, As You Know, People

    Monkey_Whisper
    Credit: Wikimedia
    We’ve been relatively public with Technically Speaking about our commitment to inclusivity. We only include conferences with a Code of Conduct, and we heavily weight whether travel costs are covered in our consideration.

    There is something we haven’t talked about (although I touched on it a little in this podcast). A Code of Conduct is not a high bar of inclusion, and as a result we absolutely do blacklist people and events (that meet these standards) from inclusion. Clearly, this system is fallible – it is our best effort, and unfortunately that is insufficient.

    If we see things happening, we highlight them and will not include that event again. For instance, in January of 2016, we included Lambda Conf – before they went full Nazi apologizer. We highlighted the trashfire in March and April and will obviously not be including that event again.

    If problematic people are associated with an event, we do not include it. An event we included the past two years was not included this year because they invited a person who attacked me personally, and extremely viciously another woman. Notably after good representation of women in recent years, they reported that no women applied for 2017. We have also excluded other events because of their association with this person.

    If a problematic person wrote something, we will not include it. There are certain high profile men who despite the fact that everyone knowns continue to get a platform. We don’t feel the need to include them in ours.

    But we don’t know everything and sometimes we include things only to find out after the fact. Whisper networks are not global, they are local. Whilst in particular affinity communities or locales everyone knows about that guy, often it doesn’t make it further out. The consequences for the victims speaking out are typically more severe than the people they speak out against, and many – understandably, rationally – choose not to.

    As someone who was harassed, for – of all things – refusing to speak at an event without a proper Code of Conduct, I know what it is like to be reminded of the event. There were people who I had to mute or unfollow on Twitter because there is never a good day to see someone I used to like, who is aware of what happened, with their arms around that person taking a cute selfie. Sometimes people tag us in tweets together and that is invariably a horrible surprise.

    When it comes to harassment, there is no neutral, there is only tacit acceptance of the perpetrator.

    We endeavour for active support of all victims. And where we fall short, we apologise.

     

  • Technically Speaking: 2016 Emoji Report

    Technically Speaking: 2016 Emoji Report

    Accessible PDF version

    Subscribe at techspeak.email.

  • Invitation Only

    super star domo
    Credit: Flickr / Takashi Hososhima

    When I set my speaking goals for 2016, I set a limit of 6 talks. As someone asked, “did you just give them all in a two week period?” – actually I decided that 1 meet-up, 3 workshops, and MC-ing did not count (this is the thing about unclear goals).

    When I set my goals I didn’t say anything about invitation vs CfP, and my plan had been to submit to some CfPs. In practise, I did not submit to any CfPs. I decided to eliminate this source of stress early in the year. But I never talked about this publicly for two reasons. One it seemed like bragging. And two, I was worried that it undermined Technically Speaking.

    But I don’t think this is uncommon to move to a point of invitation only, and really I need fewer external commitments, not more. A CfP submission is like, Schrödinger’s commitment. It may or may not be happening. If I’m enthused enough about something to submit a CfP, that means keeping that uncertainty in my schedule in the form of space to fulfil it for weeks or months until I hear back. I decided this was a stress-vector that it was easier not to deal with.

    And then Technically Speaking – part of being public about this meant accepting that maybe Chiu-Ki and I are not the right people to run Technically Speaking forever, and that’s OK.

    What were the benefits?

    • Reduced stress.
    • Reduced uncertainty.
    • More time to decide what I was going to talk about.
    • Fewer surprises for Future-Cate.

    What were the downsides?

    • Missing out on events that I would loved to have been part of.

    I’m OK with the downside. It’s not that big in the scheme of things. It’s possible next year I get fewer invitations, and I either need to decide to start submitting again or I just give fewer talks.

    The other benefit was that I was more comfortable asking for things. Straightforwardly, travel and accomodation. But less straightforwardly some things that I ended up asking for this year included things related to harassment. These were pretty horrible conversations to have to have, but that would have been even scarier to do as someone who was picked out of a CfP. Because people invited me because they knew me, they were also already generally aware that I was someone who experienced some level of harassment. I would have hated to be trying to explain that as I sold myself as a good speaker.

  • Technically Speaking Workshops

    Technically Speaking Workshops

    cate_chiuki

    Chiu-Ki and I gave a workshop last year called Technically Speaking – From Conference Proposal to Submit, and we meant to do more with it… and then never did. But luckily, Mozilla reached out to us about doing a workshop as part of their Tech Speakers program (such a great initiative – see this blog post from last year). So we took what we learned last year, re-ordered things a bit, switched up the exercises for the homework, and ended up giving it three times in a week.

    It was super fun! The first time giving a workshop is always quite stressful – for starters, you can never be sure how your timings are going to work once you add actual people! But we had a pretty good base to build on from last year, so that made it easier. We’d allowed time between events to learn and change stuff, but didn’t feel like we needed to make any major changes, so that was awesome.

    And then co-presenting is another kind of stress. It’s super fun but challenging to present with Chiu-Ki. Super fun because we know each other well and always have a blast! Challenging because we have wildly different styles – of presenting, slides, and preparation. We heard that’s part of what makes it good for the attendees though – because we complement each other, and showcase different ways of doing things. It’s a good exercise for us to push each other out of our normal ways of doing things.

    Anyway we had a lot of fun! And we’re super excited to see all the amazing people from our workshops giving talks in 2017… and beyond!

  • Technically Speaking Update

    Technically Speaking Update

    techspeakWe have changed a few things with Technically Speaking lately. Firstly, we stopped using Google Docs to collaborate (partly because of the terrible formatting problems in the HTML that gets generated) and moved over to writing in markdown and checking into GitHub. We also open sourced the repo – so now the content is more searchable, but also the process is more transparent. We aren’t squashing our commits, so if people want to see how issues get built up (and when they get written!), they can.

    We also got two sustaining sponsors – these are companies who are supporting an issue a month through the rest of 2016. Both Chiu-ki and I hate chasing sponsorship, but we think that projects should be sustainable, which means $. We are also opposed to the devaluation of work done by women. This is why we went on strike earlier this year, and why we have decided to operate on a principle of no-sponsor-no-issue. Knowing that two issues a month definitely have sponsorship has removed a big cognitive load and means that this project is definitely viable through the end of the year.

    We use the money to cover operating costs, like stickers! Web hosting etc, and being in a position to do things for readers e.g. Sending gifts etc to our mentors last year, and giving away tshirts and books in a competition. But mainly we have been using the money to support events that we believe in – mainly in areas that are less affluent. We sponsored alterconf (and donated to Ashe’s sustainability fund), Self.Conference in Detroit, Rubyconf Colombia and also we were pleased to be one of the founding sponsors for try!Swift diversity tickets. We’re really happy we can support what Natasha is doing.

    We both spoke at Write Speak Code last week, and it was amazing to meet so many readers, and to hear from some of them the difference it has made. The impact we have had has been way beyond anything we imagined when we dreamed this idea up in Copenhagen. Actually we never talked about impact, we just had an idea that we thought was needed. Now, it’s clear we were right – so thanks everyone who supported us from the beginning, and everyone who has joined us along the way.

    And thanks to our sustaining sponsors – Glowforge and TravisCI, whose support has made such a big difference over the past few months.

  • Running a Mentoring Program

    Running a Mentoring Program

    Use the what?
    Credit: Flickr / mendhak

    As part of our Technically Speaking Anniversary, we ran a mentoring program. If you’d told me a year ago that we would be running a mentoring program as part of this I would have been shocked, because we had explicitly gone in this direction of scaling up the mentoring we did, and moving away from 1:1. But it was clear from the emails we get, and the tweets we see, and the questions asked in our webinars that, especially for people who have never got on stage before, sometimes what people really need is a bit of 1:1 help.

    That being said, a lot of mentoring programs fail. They fail publicly, by going nowhere. And they fail silently, e.g. women report being over-mentored and under-sponsored. Mentoring gets offered as this panacea, like you just get a mentor and everything will be fine. This is completely wrong. Getting a mentor is the least of it (I wrote a bit about why).

    The way we tried to deal with that was simple: Expectations. Expectations. Expectations.

    Mentors

    A note first on how we found out mentors – we reached out to people with varying degrees of speaking experience, mostly who we knew. We deliberately did not ask the “usual suspects” commonly found in any mentoring program that has some aspect of “diversity”. We also did not publish the names of our mentors, but encouraged them to share what they were comfortable with.

    The main reason for this was that we wanted people to focus on what topics they wanted help from rather than who might help them.

    First, we set expectations with our mentors.

    • Sessions would be 1-hour.
    • Asking for preparation is encouraged.
    • No obligation for follow up.
    • We asked for minimum 2 and maximum 4 (it’s a lot easier to ask for 2-4 hours of someone’s time than to ask them to enter into an indefinite relationship with a stranger).

    Initial email to mentors:

    Thank you so much for agreeing to be a mentor as part of our anniversary celebration! We super appreciate it.

    We want this to be the most efficient use of your time possible. Please feel free to ask your mentee to do some preparation, and highlight what aspects you are most comfortable helping with.

    We’ve set expectations as one 1-hour mentoring session. If you want to follow up that’s great! But there is no expectation that you will do more than one session for each person.

    We still have some slots available so if you want to share the anniversary with your network and mention that you are mentoring that would be awesome!

    Finally – we’d love to send you a Technically Speaking tshirt as a thank you. If you pick out what you want and let us know an address, we will get one sent your way. If you’d prefer something else, we’d love to buy you a book! Some of my recent faves: Gravitas, Hot Seat, Slack, Women Don’t Ask, Why Not Me, or let me know if there’s anything you’ve been meaning to buy. I need to know whether you’d prefer a Kindle version or a Real Book (and if so what address to send it to).

    Thanks again!

    Cate

    Mentees

    Most importantly, we set expectations with mentees.

    These two things were helpful to us in assigning mentors. They also encouraged people to think and be concrete about what they wanted to achieve.

    Email to mentees:

    Hi! Thanks for taking part in the Technically Speaking Anniversary!

    You’re receiving this email because you signed up to get a 1 hour mentoring session. Following this email will be another connecting you to your mentor. Meanwhile here are some guidelines we’d like you to keep in mind.

    • Remember your mentor is giving up their time to help you! Be respectful of their time:
      • Show up on time.
      • Follow up with a thank you note if their advice helped (e.g. when you get a CfP acceptance).
    • Please reply to the intro email with some background on you and your speaking goals. Try to be as succinct as possible.
    • If your mentor asks you to do some preparation, please make sure it’s done well in advance of your call.
    • You will get the most out of mentoring if you have concrete questions and specific things you want to work on. E.g.
      • Turning an outline into a good abstract.
      • Putting together an outline for a talk about <specific subject>.
      • Choosing what to talk about from a range of topics.

    We still have some slots available so if you want to share the anniversary with your network and mention that you are taking part that would be awesome!

    Cate

    Matching

    We matched people based on their experience and goals, and the expertise of the mentors. Some were really clear and obvious matches, and others less so. We also considered timezones, but chose what seemed like a better mentor-mentee pair rather than convenience. E.g. Someone focused on giving their first talk would be paired with a mentor who had become a regular conference speaker relatively recently. Someone who was thinking about how to get paid to speak would get one of our most experienced mentors. We also tried to connect people who worked on similar platforms where possible, especially when the mentee was thinking about things like branching out to international events.

    Intro email:

    <Mentee, mentor is>

    <Mentor, mentee> participated in our anniversary and suggested that they would most like to work on <XXX>

    <Mentor> please respond to this email with some times you have available and your communication preferences.

    <Mentee> please respond to this email with a short explanation of your speaking experiences and what you want to work on.

    Best,

    Cate

    (Notice again we are clarifying expectations: Mentee will accomodate the mentor’s availability, and be clear in what they are hoping to achieve).

    A Note on Thank Yous

    In the initial mentor email we offered to send all mentors a small gift. Firstly, being able to do that kind of thing is part of why we started having sponsorship for the newsletter. But also this is circular – if money goes through whatever it is you run, some of that should be allocated to thank people who volunteer to help you.

    Secondly, it’s amazing to me how many programs that rely on volunteer effort come across as entitled to and unappreciative of those volunteers. If people are giving up their time to help you, that needs to be appreciated. The time to do that needs to be factored in to the overhead of the program. We (with a little help) opted to surprise and delight people where possible (this part is ongoing).

    Learnings

    • Running a mentoring program is a lot of work.
    • … especially if you do work as an organiser that makes life easier for mentors: e.g. getting people’s goals out of them.
    • Expectations are important. We needed to be clear about them in even more places – e.g.what does a good goal look like?
    • Template emails help a lot.
    • Having a collaborator that keeps you honest is gold. E.g. Chiu-Ki and I both reviewed people’s goals and requests and pushed each other to do the right thing by our mentors rather than the easy thing for us.

    Surprises

    We basically have no idea who subscribes to our newsletter. We estimate >50% women, in part because a lot of people think it’s for women even though it’s for everyone – we just consider women as first class consumers of the content.

    We more mentoring requests from Europe than expected, so more mentors based in Europe would have been really helpful.

    We also had about >25% of mentoring requests from men. This was initially surprising to me, but actually I think makes sense – there are so many “mentoring” programs (of dubious effectiveness) for women, but Technically Speaking is for everyone because everyone is afraid of public speaking.

    Support

    One way to support what we do is sponsor Technically Speaking. Sponsoring an issue is currently 250 USD, webinars start at 500 USD.

    And if you haven’t already… why not subscribe?

  • A Process for Writing an Abstract

    A Process for Writing an Abstract

    spelling danbo
    Credit: Flickr / Matt Newfield

    As part of the Technically Speaking Anniversary last week I did two mentoring calls. Both of them focused on writing abstracts. This is cool, because one of the things I discovered when Chiu-Ki and I ran our workshop is that Abstract Writing is something of a speciality for me and I actually quite enjoy writing them for other people.

    General Comments About Abstracts

    • Your abstract is a pitch for your talk. It’s when you sell the topic.
    • Your bio is where you sell yourself as a good person to speak about the topic.
    • It doesn’t need to be long.
    • Be concrete, but not overly detailed. E.g. specific takeaways are good, the details of how you get to them are unnecessary.

    Three Lists

    Think about your topic and make three lists.

    1. Why is this topic important.
    2. What things do you want people to take away from it.
    3. What points do you plan to cover.

    List #3 is the easiest, but lists #1 and #2 are most useful for writing your abstract.

    A Formula

    [Strong statement about why this topic is important at a macro level]. [Specific points that tie your more narrow topic to this macro point].

    This talk will cover [2-3 most important points], after which you will be able to [concrete audience takeaway].

  • Technically Speaking Anniversary & 2016 Speaking Goals

    Technically Speaking Anniversary & 2016 Speaking Goals

    Tiny Raccoon sits atop a pile of stickers that say "I have something to say"
    Tiny Raccoon Has Something To Say

    A year ago Chiu-Ki and I met up in Copenhagen and decided to start a newsletter about public speaking in tech. Technically Speaking has been going ever since. We’ve learned a bunch about speaking  (of course!) which we’ve shared with our readers. But also about running a sustainable project, and (gasp!) self promotion.

    A year in, 2000 subscribers is in sight, we started getting sponsors for each issue (we’re currently booked out a month in advance), which is great because it turns this from passion-project to sustainable. We’re starting to experiment with branding – our stickers were a hit, and we launched an anniversary tshirt (available until November 24).

    I’m really proud of what we’ve done over the last year. The best thing is hearing from people – especially women – that it’s encouraged them to speak!

    To celebrate, we asked our readers to join us in setting their public speaking goals for 2016. We won’t ask people to do anything we won’t do ourselves, so here are mine:

    • Six talks (currently 3 planned, 1 in negotiation).
    • Speak on three continents (2 planned).
    • Give a keynote.

    Some of my 2015 public speaking highlights:

    Things I’ve written about speaking this year:

    Thanks to everyone who had me speak this year, and so much love to all the people who I got to hang out with again or meet for the first time. I’m really excited for what I’ll do as a speaker in 2016, and what Chiu-Ki and I will do together and with our community. I hope you’ll join us, if you haven’t already, and subscribe.