 Welcome, everybody, to AdaConf, the making of. My name is Amalili Estam, which is just if you take that Twitter handle and put a little bit more extra letters into it, you get Amalili Estam. This is the agenda for the day. I'm going to talk about making of AdaConf 1, 0 and 1, and what we're going to do for AdaConf 2. And at the part, next part, I'm going to show you the user stories and the vision mission values of AdaConf. Thereafter, we will turn off the livestream and do some group work in plenary discussion. And this session works best with lots of questions. They could preferably be short due to the video, but I'd love some during the session, and not at the end, but also at the end. So AdaConf was conceptualized in October last year, that's some seven months ago. And the idea is to have a hands-on tech conference for women and trans people. One day, multiple-tracked in Malmö, Sweden. It's going to be free of charge. We had the very nice blessing of having an actual, there was a separate artistic conference before us called Geek and Meetup. And this year, they had decided that they didn't want to do it. And we over at Fulcafe said, well, we can't have that. We must have our separatist conference. And we had basically already had all the rooms and stuff because Malmö has a quite vibrant stage for meetups and talks already. That was really nice. That's also one of the reasons why we could pull this off in 31 days to make 100 people come together, including speakers and workshoppers and catering and all of that. We used Trello and Slack very much during our organization, simply, like how do you get a voluntary group to stand up together and say we want to do something and then actually get them to do the things that they love to do, not do the things that they think are boring, and actually continuing doing what they wanted to do. So for that, we used, I'm a very big fan of different kinds of visualization systems. So also on the conference, we actually had a visible scrum board where I posted on it saying this needs to be done, work in progress and done. The people attending, we asked them if they want to actually just take a posted note for something that they felt needed to be done and do that thing. One very big problem that we often see in organizations like this, voluntary organizations, is our bottleneck problems, which are very classic IT problems. You have a coordinator and people feel like they have to ask for permission for anything that they want to do. Instead, we very much tried to make people feel like they could take an initiative and feel confident that they understood what ADACOM was all about. And when they had understood that, they should be comfortable enough to simply do things and then after the fact tell, well, I did this thing. I think it was great, what do you think? We needed sponsors to be able to do ADACOM for free because everything that we do at FUCAFE is free. We did not break even the first time, though. That's also a really, really nice thing, a very luxurious thing that you very often don't get as people doing voluntary work, that someone else is carrying the monetary risk for what we're doing. Since they could carry that monetary risk, we could actually do a lot, lot of fun things for the people coming. And I was the coordinator the first time. I think it's probably the closest thing I'll ever get to a white wedding. Simply getting so many people to one place, it's so nerve-racking, not knowing if anybody is going to show up at all, if all those people that have said that they were going to come, it's actually going to come. It's always a big issue for any meetup that I don't think that anyone really has solved yet. But one of the international speakers came, she said to me, it's very, very important. The only thing that is important is that nobody should die. And nobody did die. So I would say that ADACOM 0 was very much a success. Since we also had only 31 days to do what we, everything we wanted to do, we already at the beginning set a loose date for the second time that ADACOM was going to be. And this time it was going to be in Stockholm, because Fulcafe is both in Malmö and in Stockholm. And we thought, hey, why don't we do this in every city that we exist in, so that if Fulcafe are in 100 cities, we're going to have 100 ADACOMs. That sounds nice. And it was really nice to have that already decided upon, because getting people to want to talk and to workshop at ADACOM, since it was such a short time, I had to work very much with my network on Twitter. And since I've been on some kind of Infosec Twitter for quite some time now, I also apparently had a very big network. I surprised myself there actually by the amount of qualified women and trans people that I could just reach out to that I was following, or that was already following me. And the ones that couldn't come this time, they said, but we would like to come the next time when we actually have a four month notice. Same thing for sponsors. It's something, well, we can't really, we can't do it for the budget for Q4 2017. And they were saying, great, then you can do it for Q1 2018, right? And so I was, my co-founder Esther, she said afterwards that she was expecting us to do maybe a one track thing with some local speakers. And it turned out to be a three track conference with speakers from America and UK coming in. I don't know why. It's like, this is the best confidence boost that you can ever have that you start something. And someone on the other side of the Atlantic is saying, I really, really want to go there. And I want to fund it myself even. We also got some great spillover to the rest of Foucafé. There is this, I don't know if anyone in this room already had thought it, but why should we have a conference for only women and trans people? What about all the men? They also want to do, they also want to do hands on tech a full day with nice people and free giveaways and stuff. And one good thing that came out of this is simply that since we were doing this, we got some really, really nice speakers to the normal Foucafé where everybody was welcome. So the spillover helped everybody. We also had an invisible track and this is something that I'm really, really, really proud about. The first time that I was soldering, I was very, very intimidated by it and I thought this is something hard and this is something really, really cool. And then I learned it and I was like, this is the simplest thing I've ever seen. If this is so simple, what else have they lied to me about? What else is there out there that sounds super cool and super hard that isn't super cool and super or that is super cool but not super hard? This was something that I wanted all the people at EDACONF to feel as well. So everybody got to do this extremely simple circuit, not in the cat ear form, but it's just a little microcontroller and some LEDs and you can use it with Arduino. It has six soldering points. It both has surfers mounted through this pinhole thing. It takes something like 15 minutes to do if you're a beginner. And I think three fourths of the attendees at the first EDACONF actually did one of these. It was such a joy for me to see. And then we had a feedback jar at the end. Change nothing, keep everything. Obviously, we didn't only get this kind of very nice feedback, but we also got some feedback on things that we can actually work upon. Since we were only working for 31 days, we had to have a very, very strong focus on the minimally viable products and to think about not taking in too much at the same time and losing focus on what's the most important things and instead focus on small specializing that don't matter at the end. But the next time, we would be able to get more time to do those things, we thought. So then we went to Stockholm and the first thing we did before we could decide upon the date is simply I reached out to one of my biggest idols. This is like the best thing you can ever have with having your own conference is that you have a reason to go and say to someone, hey, I think you're super cool. Would you like to talk at my meetup? Would you like to talk at my conference? And in many cases they say yes and in many cases they say no, but every time they are flattered and every time you feel a little bit like, oh my God, I've been poking this person. So this time we had oceans of time, three months. I had also started working at another firm, so I was now only being a volunteer. So we had another coordinator up in Stockholm and all of the success that we already had had made us a little bit cocky and thought, well, we can do anything. But now we also had to rely much more on things like Slack simply because we were now a distributed team. We were people down in Malmö and we were people up in Stockholm 700 or 800 kilometers away. Also, Stockholm is a bigger city. It's a little bit harsher for meetups. In Malmö, when we have a normal meetup, there's a dropout rate of maybe 10 percent or sometimes it's overfilling with 20 percent. But if people say that they're going to come, they usually come. In Stockholm it's the other way around that about 50 percent of the people don't come, even when we promise them free food and beer. So we had to keep that very much in mind. I don't think, I'm not sure that anyone has heard this, but one of the reasons why there are so few women talking at TIC conferences is simply because there are no qualified women to do that. I wish that was true because then we would have had a much lesser problem with our call for papers where we got way too many qualified people that we couldn't take in. That's a very much of a luxury problem. That's also something that one has to take into account, being a person doing this for fun and for passion, turning people down. That's not a fun thing to do. I don't want to do that, but we had to do that. This time at 8.com 1 also we had less volunteers, but for some reason that actually worked out really well. We had a really, really nice venue at the Internet Foundation in Sweden, overlooking a beautiful canal, and it was a beautiful weather outside. It was minus degrees, but on the inside it was very hot and nice. We actually broke even when it came to sponsors, which is a huge thing. You can see here, for example, we have Katerina from GitHub and her boss, Nia, doing a three-hour workshop on Git. They came from San Francisco for this. Imagine the confidence boost. We have one of the DNS key-bearers, Anne-Marie Eklund Lavender, who is also the Chief Information Officer of the Internet Foundation in Sweden, that honored us with our talk. We had a really, really nice lineup. One problem that we had is that the day before we found out that the venue that we were going to have, they were going to jackhammer the floors in the venue. So we had to switch around a little bit there. There I felt very much that it was really nice that someone else was doing the coordination, so that I didn't have to freak out about this. Also, the person who did the coordination simply didn't tell us until she had solved the problem, which is also a very, very nice thing to do, because why should everybody be freaked out about something when only one can be freaked out about it and fix it? So the soldering workshop, we couldn't do as an invisible track, but we had to do that five stairs below the original place, which was a bit of a shame, simply because of the fire alarm and stuff. We didn't want to have the local firearms coming back. But we did have 3D printing this time, too. And I just love the ambience that you get from having these kinds of stuff. I've been taking a lot of inspiration from going back and forth to Germany for a couple of years and seeing you guys around KAUS, how you organize things, how you self-organize things. I've seen that that's something that the Swedes think is kind of strange, especially this thing with the agile board that is visible to the attendees is something that people have been really happy about, but very surprised about, because that simply doesn't exist, that we simply say, hey, you don't have to help, but you're allowed to help. And this is how you do it. So next, Ada Kalf will be in October. Our call for paper closes on the 15th of August. And we accept any kind of talks or workshops that is on Hands on Tech or anything that you can bring with you to work on Monday. We do not accept talks or workshops about diversity. We do not talk, we don't let up space in rooms like this to talk about something like feminism or why it's hard to be a woman in tech, basically because everybody who is there already knows this or knows what's hard and what's not hard. This is also something that is naturally going to happen, that people are going to talk about this, but we say that we do not talk about diversity at Ada Kalf. We do diversity. So therefore, we accept all kinds of talks or workshops that are Hands on Tech. So I've been looking into, we were looking into a lot, what kind of vision do we want? I've been using two kinds of methods. One is called the vision mission values, OOP, I think it's called. And I also simply like using user stories. I'm just going to read them to you. As an attendee, I feel safe and welcome. We have a code of conduct. We also very much try to make everybody feel included. We also at the end asked simply whether people felt like that. And of course, if you're standing in a room like this and I say, do you feel welcome? You're not likely to say no, but then we also had feedback jars. There you can give anonymous feedback. As an attendee, I feel empowered to learn or deepen a skill. There's also something I ask at the end. And everybody raised their hand about that. That's really nice. As an attendee, I feel welcome to contribute to the conference. It's a common misconception that you can just go to a conference and be passive, and then you learn something. And that's often not the case, but simply doing good questions, meeting up with new people, networking with people. That's what makes a conference precious. And then the people who come and give up their free time and not only go to talks. These people, we really, really need to care for. So as a volunteer, I feel like I do something meaningful. As a volunteer, I feel heard, and that is possible to do the things that I'm good at. Or as a volunteer, I feel I heard, and that is possible to use my superpowers, as maybe a better way of saying it. As a volunteer, I do an inform rather than ask for permission. This is something that is really, really hard, especially in a Swedish context of people that generally are introverted and are never learned really to speak to other people. We are very, very afraid of offending people. But anyway, that's something that we're trying to achieve. As a speaker, I feel welcome, or a workshopper. I actually, we actually simply use speakers and workshops as volunteers as well. And they seem to like that. Like everybody is welcome to not do that, of course. But most speakers and workshops have volunteered to help. And we have a user story for sponsors. And it's a work in progress. We don't know, actually. But for some reason, it has been working anyway. As a coordinator, I work a reasonable amount during the ADACON zero. Malma, where I was the coordinator, they had to force me out of the room the day before, and said, Emma, you actually do need to go to sleep. You have to understand that we have this agile board. We already know, you have already given us all the information that we need. And you're not going to change anything by being here. The best thing you can do is go home and sleep. So I was forced to do that. And as a coordinator, I also need to spread information about needs and deadlines via agile boards like Trello or the visual board on site. And as a team, we celebrate and cherish each other's superpowers. And I hope that I will define what superpowers is at the end. So I also made this document, vision. ADACON is a full day conference for women and or trans people. We do not talk about diversity. We act diversity by sharing skills and competence that have relevance for everyday life as IT and tech people. Diversity is on the meta level. I think I've gone through that already. We can talk about that at the end as well. And how do we want to implement this vision? And ADACON's event always contains talks, workshop, and an invisible track of tangible DIY tech. So that has been the soldering or a 3D printing. ADACON's events are vegan friendly, basically vegan with vegetarian options on top. ADACON's events are ideally free. They have always been free. And they will probably be free the next time as well. Also including a free lunch and a free swag bag. And at first one, we even gave away a printed book, which was financially maybe not the best thing that we could have done. But it was a lot of fun, at least. Speakers did not get paid. That's also a core thing for Foo Cafe. No one, we have been doing for in five years or something like that. We've been doing 1,900 meetups. And no one has ever gotten paid for anything. People come because they want to. We also try to not buy into the idea of the rock star developers or the rock star talkers. Many people should come for the content and because the speaker is good, not because the speaker is cool. So how do we implement the vision and the mission? We also have values. ADACON has an agile organizational structure based on our harvesting volunteers superpowers. We define superpowers as what is ridiculously easy for you but hard for most. All people have superpowers, but most people are not aware of what theirs is. This is something that was very important for me because I really have no clue what my superpowers are. And most of you also don't. Simply because I think that I'm comparatively well and good at Infosec and IT security. But since I am comparatively well at that, I also talk to other people that are very good at Infosec and IT security. And therefore, I do not understand that this is very easy for me because I only look at the other people who also do this easily. I think being a part of an existing structure as we were at ADACON Zero was very, very good. I hate talking to sponsors. I'm also very Swedish, so I really hate talking to people at all. You can't tell. And I'm thankfully working that way as much as possible. But I really, really hate talking to sponsors. I really, really hate. Well, I like getting a yes, but I hate getting a maybe. So I got very much help from a sales person inside the Foucafé organization. So every time that I got something that I needed to do, I used his superpower. That is, he's really good at selling. He is really good at feeling what the other person is thinking and not being pushy, being nice, and so on. So I would simply discuss with him for seven minutes what the mail that I got said. And after that, I felt like I had the power to actually send the mail or send the answer. And then I didn't have to build up on all those not very nice things. For example, I was talking to one potential sponsor, and they gave us a very, very, very low bid. And I felt a bit offended by getting a low bid. But since it wasn't a no, I definitely had to answer it, because that's what courtesy says. So I got a lot of help with that. Also, I think that making websites is boring. And sometimes we feel like the golden rule is something that is very important to apply. That anything that another person is doing for, like treat the other person like you want to be treated. So if I would use a golden rule, I would say, I don't like making websites. That means that no one else likes to make websites. And I don't want anyone else to do something boring. Therefore, I should do the website. Instead, I just wrote in Slack, and I say, hey, I think websites are really, really boring. Is there a website ninja out there that can do this? And within five minutes, there's a website ninja who can do this task. And instead of me banging my head against the wall and procrastinating for eight hours, she does it for five minutes, and then it's done. The superpowers is something really, really, really cool to try to work with. Next value, any action or task that is in line with a vision, mission or values can be executed without asking a coordinator in advance, instead inform afterwards. It's something very important. It's kind of hard to work like this because we're not used to it. We're not used to trying to get a flat hierarchical structure. I think if we're going to have a flat hierarchical structure, it's actually very important to actually have a non-flat hierarchical structure also because sometimes there will be a conflict and those conflicts need to be solved. But most conflicts should be solved as soon as possible or maybe not exist at all. Next one, we test in production and continuously deploy. I said during ADECOM zero that this is an open beta test. That also made me feel a bit better about anything that possibly could go not the way I planned simply because we had so short time to do this. We just try and do things instead of going on for a very long time and thinking about doing things. That usually works a lot better. The next one might seem a bit provoking. CIS men are welcome to contribute in supportive roles, i.e. administrative work, sponsorship, advisory roles, catering or childcare. The thing is, we don't want to be provocative. We really don't want to be that. Just like a gay couple kissing on the street don't want to be provoking or be something cool or something special, they just want to be normal. And that's the thing. We also just want to be normal. We want to have one day of feeling like we're the majority and feeling that we can empower ourselves and get to network with new people. And there are a lot of CIS men that want to help us with that. And so they are welcome to do that in these kinds of roles. Another very important value is of course we do not sell, talk or workshops lots to sponsors simply because we want to have a good content. Without a good content, a brand will be absolutely nothing. That said, we did get sponsorship by a password manager company and I did a workshop on password management. And the reason for that to happen is simply because I'm an infosec person. So it wasn't because they were sponsoring that we did things on IT security. Actually they didn't know that I was gonna do a workshop on password security. They funded us anyway. So they got to know it afterwards. Finally, let's ask an offer. Don't be afraid to ask for help or offer help. So at ADECOM Zero, at the end, we said, you're very welcome to help us clean up. And it took 30 minutes to clean up, which was really, really cool. And I think you in the German scene, you're used to this. This is nothing strange. But in Sweden, this was really strange. And something that we got praised for. So, now we can say goodbye to the video stream and get over to the workshop apart. To reiterate a superpower is something that is easy for you and that most other thing is hard. So I would like you in groups to think about what is the superpower of a friend of yours and what might your superpower possibly be? Another very important thing that we did at ADECOM was a minimal viable product. What's the core functionality of the meetup that you would want to do? You can also define user stories as an organizer, I blah, blah, blah, as a participant, I blah, blah, blah, as a sponsor, I blah, blah, blah. And you can make, define a one sentence description, an elevator pitch of the thing that you might want to do. Like for example, ADECOM, it's a one day hands-on tech conference for non-Sisman.