 Good afternoon folks. My name is Peter Akin. I'd like to welcome you to my talk, Deliberate Direct Positive Action. To give you a little bit of information about myself, my background, I, from 2012 to 2018, I organised these two conferences, Scotland CSS and Scotland GS in Edinburgh. And now my community focus is an event called Global Diversity CFPD. The sole focus of this event is to support and encourage people from underrepresented and marginalised groups and applying to speak at tech conferences to put together their first tech conference proposal. This basically involves on a single day of the year and all tech communities get engaged and host workshops all around the world with a sole goal in mind. Just to baseline everybody's understanding, I'd like to set some definitions to start with. I'm assuming that everybody's familiar with the term global and day. But in case folks are less familiar with diversity and CFP, well, we'll try and baseline these for you. So diversity is a term that we hear a lot of in tech and it's something that is it's something that is dependent on your location geographically. From my perspective as a cis, white, hetero able-bodied man in tech, I'm part of the predominant and privileged group within the tech industry. If all of these things do not apply to you, then diversity is something that usually applies to yourself. So those things being cis, white, hetero able-bodied man. Next up we have CFP. This stands for call for proposals. This is a process that usually more community focused tech conferences use to encourage you as community members to apply to speak and share your knowledge and experience at their event. So today the types of things that we're going to cover are where does CFP come from? What happens or what can you expect if you attend one of our workshops? If you were really keen to make a workshop happen in your home city or location, what would be involved in that? And throughout these things, we'll also be covering what I learned on the journey throughout that. Let's see. So where did CFP come from? It won't surprise you to hear that this came from my experiences organizing Scotland GS and Scotland CSS. There was a pivotal moment of enlightenment that I can quite really clearly point to, which was Lena Reinhardt's closing keynote talk at the 2015 conference, which was titled, I Talk About Nothing. I strongly urge you to go and watch that talk. It really opened my eyes to the level of privilege I have as a cis, hetero, white, able-bodied man and how not everybody has that privilege. The way I tend to think of it is of a door being very much wide open for myself and people that look like me, regardless of if they have committed any form of harm to other people in the industry in the workplace, you can relatively easily get a new position. That door is very much wide open for people that don't look like myself. That door can pretty much vary from being half open or half closed to becoming increasingly bolted shut. That's where it can end up. If we fast forward to the 2016 conferences, I was very much wanting to make our call for proposals process an attractive and welcoming proposition and make it appealing in a direct and deliberate way to people from underrepresented and marginalized groups specifically. The best way to describe it is that I had an idea to put together a diversity CFP workshop. Over the course of three weeks, lots of friends, strangers all jumped on the bandwagon and the opportunity to make these workshops happen, not just in Scotland, in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Folks joined in Dublin and Ireland as well. Sheffield and London and England and Berlin and Germany, all to encourage people to apply to these two tech conferences, which was incredible. If we move further forward in time after the CFP closed, which would have been about the March time, the conferences themselves would have been in June, but around about the August time, I had an idea as my brain was starting to wake back up. This concept made a huge impact on the diversity of applicants to these conferences. There are people from all of these groups all across tech. Could this concept be shared with all tech communities to help and encourage people coming to the fore and bring new voices to the stage? Could this be shared with all tech communities everywhere? And then the scary answer is yes. Okay, so for our next section, we're going to look at what happens during a workshop. What can you expect to happen if you turn up at one of our workshops? Well, you have got all of these great people lined up to support you and in your journey to becoming a tech speaker. We start the day, you know, you get a nice warm welcome from the team that are on hand, wherever you are in the world, and they'll kick things off, they'll give you the rundown of the code of conduct and introduce everyone, make you feel nice and welcome at home. And the first task is effectively Rockbot and Sarah May will be providing a whole lot of CFP advice. Following on from that, there'll be a nice activity where mentors will work with you and maybe a couple other folks in groups to help break down and figure out or help you figure out what it is that you should be focusing on for your talk subject if you've not already got that nailed down. Next up, Danielle from Women Talk Design will be helping you with a really neat workshop activity which will get you engaged with the other attendees to help put together your bio. Following on from that, Soran will help you and work through putting together your perfect tech talk and Melinda will introduce you to the art of slide design. And finally, Jessica will close out the day by giving you a whole lot of tips and advice of what to expect on the day of your talk and handling errors and tech checks and things like that. Of course, in amongst all of this, you will have the opportunity to put your top proposal together, get feedback from the mentors that are in your workshop, and ideally by the end of the day you will have applied to speak at the tech conference, which would be incredible. So this is the point where I sort of reflect on things and try and call things out that I've learned. And the first one is to talk to people. You don't have all the answers here. And the case and point here being that Danielle from Women Talk Design and I were having a chat and Women Talk Design put on a whole host of workshops in relation to supporting anyone who identifies as a woman and become a speaker and then promoting those talks thereafter. And Danielle was going through all of the syllabus and the things that Women Talk Design provide trying to spot. We're basically discussing this, trying to figure out where the holes were on the CFP, they saw this. And you know, it was kind of like, yeah, we've got that covered, that covered. That one's maybe not too, doesn't quite fit with what we're doing here. And then I suddenly went a bit quiet in both shock and embarrassment and Danielle said, putting together a biography. So when you go to propose a talk, you write the proposal for the talk, but you also need to provide an amount of information about yourself, which is the biography. And yes, I feel a little bit silly at that point. So that, yes, very much make sure that you talk to people, because if you're putting together any, any sort of event like this, you don't have all the answers. If what we've quickly ran through there has grabbed your attention, and it sounds like something you'd like to participate in, or perhaps maybe you're a bit unsure about becoming a speaker in the future, but you'd like to find out a little bit more. The Twitter account is the bottom left hand corner of the slides there. That's GD, CFP, and we'd love to have you along. Just to give you a little bit, set a little bit of expectations. We open our call for workshop teams, as are the people that organize the workshops, September, October time, and the event or the day of the workshop is in sort of mid to late January. People can sign up to run these workshops anytime between sort of September and late December. So, and then they can then release their tickets whenever they want. So if you arrive at our website and you can't find your location, don't worry about it, just keep checking back. Okay. So now that we've got lots of people lined up to attend next year, there'll be lots of you that have been involved in speaking before that I'm sure would be really keen to organize one of these workshops. So, let's lead you through what's involved. The first thing that you need to know is that global diversity CFP is 100% free for anyone to attend. We want there to be no financial barriers to entry whatsoever. We want every to hear everyone's voice and perspective that we're aiming to encourage to come along. Nobody should be gaining financially from this event. You know, if there's people from the long to give a talk or something like that at your workshop, nobody worldwide should be gaining financially. Okay. So that's the bar and that's the starting point. That's the thing that may be an issue for some folks. So it's good that you know that upfront. So the other types of things that you need to do are find a venue and find a company to pay for catering and maybe childcare and anything else that is going to make your workshop as inclusive as possible and accessible as possible. You'll need to build an awesome team. You and your team will need to promote your workshop locally. You know that your city and the tech community is in at best. I don't. I can't promote every sort of community in every location worldwide. Let's be like holding back the sea. I have tried. So you need to reach out and engage with the communities in your area and reach out to them in the way that you know that they best like to receive their information. Finally, there's our mandatory code of conduct training. Anyone who's going to be a member of a workshop team and be the mentors, facilitators, organisers, potentially an attendee could be bringing an issue to you. You need to know exactly how we expect you to respond. We need you to know what is in the scope of what the scope of issues are for yourself. You know, is it something you should be handling? Is it something the organisers should be handling? Is this issue something that we actually need law enforcement involved for? We need to be there and be able to support in all circumstances. So we've got, you know, about four or five things that I learned at this point I'd like to share. The first one is very much don't be shy. This is in relation to asking people for time, companies for either their office space or for money for say catering or childcare or whatever it may be. I'm always a bit shy about that and I want to sort of try and turn that in its head if you're going to, if you're maybe similar to me. And I want to basically try and turn your perspective around on that. So think of things, try and imagine things like this, right? There's of all the companies in your location that you could approach, there's probably about 10% that when you say that you're putting on a workshop that's going to promote diversity inclusion and tech, 10% probably won't be interested in the slightest or they'll have their reasons for not engaging. There's a big 80 odd percent in the middle who would at least like to be seen to be doing something but haven't really got an idea of how to do that. And then you've got 10% at the far end who are actively engaged and supporting people as much and in as many ways as they can. When you're going to approach companies you don't know which one of those groups you're going to hit, but it's more than likely it's going to be that big one in the middle. And in terms of not being shy, right? This is the key bit, right? You need to get that email to the one person in the company who is interested and keen to promote diversity inclusion. They will have a line item on the list of their annual goals, one of which is to improve diversity inclusion and tech. And they probably have no idea how to go about doing that. You're putting on this incredibly actionable event by taking the 300 bucks for lunch from these people. You're giving them the opportunity to get a tick in the box for that goal. Come the end of the year, they are getting a pay rise because you accepted money from them. When I realised that I was a lot happier and more comfortable asking people for money. You should be too because as I mentioned earlier everybody says yes. Everybody is keen to support this and wants to make it happen. Next up is visibility and transparency. This is something that we are very proactive about and let's see. When you're organising and you're adding your workshop and you're adding the details of the venue to our website. There are about 35 questions that you need to supply the answers to. It's a marathon, but it's very important and this is all about access to the space that your venue is being hosted in. And there will be questions about access to the building. Is there a security process? Is it what the transports like to get there? Is it safe for children in the venue? Are there gender neutral bathrooms? There are 35 questions. By the time we host this again there will probably be more. The point of this is so that attendees don't arrive and find that the venue does not support their access requirements and needs. That could turn someone's experience from being a very positive one which we're aiming to achieve into being a very negative one for both them and yourself. What we're trying to do here is take whatever the access is provided by the venue and put this front and centre on your workshop page so that people can then decide whether they want to participate up front or not. We don't expect you to be able to meet all of these requirements that are discussed by any means because there is a lot, but what do you provide and what is available and people can always get in touch to clarify or say I would love to come along. However, there's this issue that is proven to be a blocker and maybe that's something that could easily be resolved. If it's something that is a bit more fundamental, we'd require a change of venue. That might be something that we put off to next year depending on how far out we are from the event itself. I would like to give a big shout out to Aisha Blake. Aisha very kindly when we first started running this event, provided us a list of 20 roughly of the access questions which was an amazing starting point and this was from Aisha's experience with AlterConf and Selfconf. That was an amazing starting point for us. Thank you very much Aisha. Next up, representation matters. It seems to go without saying for an event that is trying to improve diversity and representation on the conference stage, that this isn't something that would need to be called out. But the reason that representation matters on the stage is to encourage better representation in the attendees of AlterConf. The exact same thing applies to your workshop team. If you have a conference where the speaker line-up are all people that look like me, that's not going to be an attractive proposition as an event. There are certain groups of people that won't feel comfortable attending and participating in that. The exact same applies to your workshop. If you have half a dozen very well-intentioned people that look like me, yes, there are people that will attend and participate, but there are people who won't and they won't feel comfortable or safe as a result by the way that we present representation matters. Next up, promote autonomy. Again, when you're putting together your team, it's more than likely going to be made up of people who are wanting to support these efforts and have an amount of speaking experience and as a result, experience of applying to speak at tech conferences. This is exactly the experience that our attendees need to hear about. If your team has the time and availability to put together talks, workshop activities, games, anything that is going to either add to the schedule that we've provided or if it's more engaging, even better. You are fully empowered to use our schedule as much or as little or none of it as you like. Go for it. If your team wants to throw our schedule away and do something completely of your own making, go for it as long as we're all marching to the same goal of supporting people and getting to the tech stage. If this is something that you would be interested in, it is maybe joining an existing team or organizing your own workshop. Check out the website, keep an eye on the Twitter account as I mentioned earlier. Around September, October time is when we will open our call for teams. If there is a workshop happening in your location already, please reach out to the team that's there and offer to join. There can only be one workshop in each location, just for clarity. But if there is no workshop happening, feel free to sign up and make it happen. It would be very much appreciated. At this point, I'm going to talk a little bit about what I learned through a particular aspect of our code of conduct process. To give you an idea, this is a small section of the code of conduct page on the CFPDA website. The global code of conduct team is listed there, again for visibility and transparency. And if a workshop attendee has an issue specifically with the organizer, as in they want to report a violation that the organizer has made, they report that to the global code of conduct team. And they report that by pressing the orange button there on the page. And that notifies the team, which is myself and Kim Crane. There was nothing reported during the 2018 incident of that level. However, in the run-up to the 2019 event, there was about three organizers that we received a number of issues about. And of the people that got in touch, 100% of them did not use that orange button. And they all got privately in touch with Kim through her DMs. There's two people involved. Why would folk not get in touch with the team? There's only one other person there. I suspect that I might have been the problem. If we fast forward to the 2019 event, we were very lucky to have beyond Jessica and Evelyn join the team at that point. And the 2019 event came and went. And if I recall correctly, all issues reported to the team jointly, apart from one. They just went to Kim's DMs. At this point, you know, looking at the page, Peter was still there for transparency purposes, but I was very much at the bottom of the page. It doesn't matter how big your monitor was, I was off the bottom of the screen. So that obviously had an impact. But I was really concerned of what are we not hearing about? And I'm still feeling like I am very much a blocker to people approaching the group. And after that event, I specifically removed myself from that team so that people could see that the attendees could see that the people handling their issues and reports are people ideally looked like themselves. Fast forward to 2020. Nitya, Rishama and Havi also joined the team. You can see that I am now missing. And at this point, all issues during that event came directly to the whole team. What I want to call out at this point is that as a cis, white, hetero-able-bodied man, the most marginalised in our communities may not trust me. Regardless of the amount of work and effort that I put in, people don't know me and how I look or present. I believe represents those that continually harass, verbally, physically. There are people who will be under the receiving end of microaggressions multiple times a day coming from people who look like me. The people, the most marginalised in our communities have, for all of their life, from their parents' life, been oppressed. They have been kept down. There are things like pay gaps, regardless of people's qualifications. The door that I was talking about earlier about being open or how open it is, depending on how you present and how you look. The same thing happens when it comes to pay and opportunities for promotion. That door can still close in different ways at different times. So that is why as a cis, white, hetero-able-bodied man, the most marginalised in our communities may not trust me. Further to that, if you are a community event runner, organizer, or you are running an event in the company, or you are a manager, or whatever it may be, as a cis, white, hetero-able-bodied man, the most marginalised in our communities may not trust you. Take this a step further. As a cis, white, hetero-able-bodied person, the most marginalised in our communities may not trust you. This is my second eye-opening moment in the last few years. The next thing that I wanted to share, this is more in relation to how things kicked off originally with the six workshops for the two conferences. At that point in time, or from my perspective from reading on the Internet, there was lots of events, lots of people, lots of good intentions, lots of good talk. There was very little action. The things produced were effectively on the main tick lists of diversity that you can achieve this by having free tickets and a couple of other things. There was no demonstration of actual effort for change. Again, CFPD is the most actionable event in this space. So to start drawing things to a close, I'll give you some stats and introduce you to some of our attendees. So in February of 2018, in our first year, there were 53 workshops with over a thousand attendees, which I was completely gobsmacked with. That was incredible. Fast forward to 2019. There's 81 workshops. This was a massive jump with over 360 volunteers and over 2,000 attendees. This year, there's 82 workshops. Nearly 500 people volunteering to make these workshops happen around the world, and over 2,500 attendees. Over these three events, there has been more than 5,500 people attending. At this point, I want to see a huge, huge thank you to the people that are involved in making these events happen. There is far too many to list, but I would specifically like to call out our global Code of Conduct team and everyone that's been part of it. Those folks being Kim, Leanne, Evelyn, Jessica, Natia, Javi, and Rishama. I'd like to introduce you to some of our attendees as well. So this is our workshop from Johannesburg, Jakarta, Nabilis, Munich, London, New York, Sao Paulo as well. But we've not really spoken about people who have come through the event and went on to become speakers. And this is just a small selection of them. And the time that I started learning more about my privilege, that changed my perspective of how I read people's issues and complaints with white men. And still being in a somewhat ignorant mindset, I would always be reading things about how diversity would improve our products, our teams and our events by bringing different perspectives to the fore. And my ignorant question was always, well, how will that change things? And again, CFPD stands up and proves that in the most actionable way. For example, Ray at the top right is, well, what I want to demonstrate here is that there are perspectives here that I don't have, that there is no way that I could fake a talk around these subjects. So Ray at the top right has been delivering a talk about a concept and an idea that she's been building. And the talk is about our privacy first period tracker. Next we have Wendy at the bottom right. Wendy has been speaking about becoming a new mum in a startup environment and what sort of support should you expect from your company and what are the laws and regulations around that that you should expect to receive. Sue is also on there in the bottom row, one in from the left hand side. Sue's talk is all about changing career from being in the police force to becoming a programmer. These three subjects, I would be completely at loss to put together a talk on and share that knowledge around. I'd like to close out by saying that these are the people who have taken an immensely brave step forward in becoming tech speakers. Both tech and our society has a very, very long road ahead if they have to be anything like an equitable place that we hope it will be. As I said, these are the brave people taking that step forward and making that change in the world. They are the role models for those that come after them. Yes, becoming a speaker can have many benefits, things like travel and better networking opportunities which can lead to better career opportunities. We all know that the best way to get the largest pay rise in this industry is to change jobs. That will have a direct impact on these people's families quality of life. That's huge. Much as there are benefits to the individuals, by sharing their perspective, by sharing their voice, each of them are enriching all of us.