 So, as I said before, welcome to my talk, actions speak louder than words. I'm gonna speak about the need for us to do better by our communities and how we can do that. So I'm gonna give some practical tips and hopefully this will help us kind of all become better members and leaders of our communities. So I'm just gonna start to talk a little bit about myself. My name is, oh, my name is Leon, apologies. I'm a developer advocate with Loft Labs. We build developer tooling for Kubernetes and I create some all kinds of content, mainly videos, talks, obviously. And I also host a podcast. It's called League of Extraordinary Tech Workers. I've published a total of one episode so far. So maybe wait a couple of weeks before you check it out. But the podcast is about people's superpowers, you know. Everyone who works at tech probably has at least one superpower and yeah, my guests and I, we talk about this. And so it's super fun. It's supposed to be super fun. If you're interested, then talk to me later. Yeah, I'm also speaking a lot, as you'd know, since you're here listening to me talk. And I organize a couple of community events or communities, among them are Kuberoki. So I'm the chief karaoke officer of Kuberoki, which is the first and only Kubernetes karaoke community. And I'm also helping to organize DevOps days Amsterdam and I started the serverless days Amsterdam chapter. So I'm based out of Amsterdam in case you didn't make that connection. So yeah, I wanna start this talk, talking a little bit about my journey and how I got here, where I am right now. So after school, I always wanted to kind of save the world, make the world a better place. So I decided to go to law school. And I did that for three years and somehow found myself to be kind of bored by the job. I still very interested in the subject matter, but just the work of preparing memos all day just didn't seem very thrilling. So I started to think back to the last time I kind of enjoyed something that could maybe become a career. And when I was 12, I used to build websites, HTML, really basic stuff and stealing some JavaScript snippets from the internet. Because this was the 90s, it was the wild west, everything goes or so we thought. And I thought, this could actually be a good job, why not? So I did an apprenticeship in Germany, became a web developer and I think I was a pretty adequate web developer. Like I'm capable of learning things. If I need to pick something up, I will do it. I will learn it. But I was never just super passionate about any specific technology or specific programming paradigm or anything like that. And one day, I joined a user group event. So this was back in VEP world. So this was I think an PHP user group. And I absolutely hated it. So I was sitting there with some members of the audience and they were like heckling the speaker with really like uncomfortable remarks. Like they were yelling, take it off. And ironically, the speaker was male and the hecklers were female. And from what I could gather is that they all knew each other. They were like friends, they were very comfortable with each other. But for me as an outsider, for me as someone who went to the very first tech event, it just felt really terrible. It felt terrifying and I just was not comfortable at all. So I stayed very far away from tech events after that. And I just thought like networking is super useless. You're here to write code. What are you gonna talk to people about? But a couple of years later, I gave it another shot. And I was working for a company where some of the folks were organizing event called JS Unconference. And these were people that I trusted very much. So I thought let's give it another shot. And the Unconference format is basically, you attend the conference and you pitch your talk right there on stage and then the audience gets to vote. So you already get a lot of feedback on the people around you and you get a chance to take that feedback and propose it again on the second day, which was great. And that experience was so entirely different from the first time. I gave my first talk there. The support was so overwhelming and amazing. And yeah, it was just a great experience. And this was the first time that I finally felt that I have a space in tech. Like me personally, the person that I am and all the skills that I have is actually, there's a space for me and my skills are actually needed. And that feeling is so important to me and was so life-changing that right now I'm just doing everything that I can to give other people the same kind of feeling because I think this was like, it can really make or break your entire career. And I personally am focused on folks who are marginalized or underrepresented but just because I believe they are most deserving of my attention. I'm nothing against white guys. It's just that I think you get other resources somewhere else. So yeah, I've been working in tech for a bit over a decade now. Been speaking at conferences since 2016 or something. I've organized all kinds of events, conferences, meetups, socials and been involved in the sponsor side, the organizer side, the attendee side, the speaker side. And of course I'm a member of an underrepresented group myself. So yeah, all that I'm sharing with you today are from my personal experiences, both working and attending events and also opinions from me being a professional but also from a more personal view. So let's talk about communities first because communities can serve a lot of functions and they can be a safe space for people to share their experiences. They can also expose us to new ideas and new people but sometimes these goals run opposite to each other. Like if you invite new people then there's always this kind of aspect that it might make other people unsafe or you just don't have this group of people who know exactly how to talk to each other. So it is on the community leaders to set the rules of engagement. And often we don't realize how even the smallest things can be life-changing opportunities. So I do organize a lot of after-conference dinners, like 10 people coming together or 20 people coming together. And when I do that I'm creating a microcosm of community and of platform. So I'm basically creating connections between my and other folks's networks and this could be maybe the igniting spark for someone's career. So what I do is when I do these dinners I always try to invite some folks that I know, some friends, but also some new people that I just met that day. Because I think it's that kind of like synergy that really makes these events special. And also, if I know the CTO of whatever this company and then there's someone who's just starting their career and they just happen to sit next to each other that will give this person access to the industry in a way that they just couldn't regularly get. And yeah, I know exactly how life-changing this can be at the beginning of your career because this is exactly what happened to me. And I still think for, you know, even though I'm furthered out along in my career I still think that these are putting me at an advantage having these dinners or social events. And sometimes also people ask me how they can become part of a community. Which is very interesting because in my opinion simply by showing up to meetups, to webinars, to Twitter spaces or maybe to a conference like this and sitting in the audience. You are already part of the community and every time you take up space if you have an opinion that you wanna share or you're asking a question, you are in my opinion a community leader because people might not necessarily agree with you but if you speak up it doesn't mean that your words don't have weight because someone else probably had the exact same thought someone else for sure had the exact same question. So you are taking up space not just for yourself but also for other people in the community that you represent. Yeah, again, I really cannot stress how important community has been for my career but also for my well-being, for my sense of belonging. And yeah, this is why I'm so passionate about making these experiences that the folks are having with communities the best ones that they possibly can have. So I think people are very complicated but a lot of things are complicated. For example, having principles and values and acting on them is complicated because anyone who has ever done any free labor for the community knows that and if you're maintaining an open source project or hosting or organizing a community event you barely have enough time to just do the basic stuff that you need to do because it's often not even your day job. Let alone take the extra effort to make sure that it's diverse and inclusive and safe. Totally understand the labor of love and community leaders and organizers deserve our respect for that. And while it's important that we hold each other accountable when someone does something wrong it's also important we cut each other some slack. I've seen a lot of people go into Twitter complaining about something that's totally valid to complain about but there needs to be room to make mistakes and to make amends for them. We're talking a lot about public learning but public learning is meaningless if we can't publicly fail. If you fail publicly and your career's over then that's not public learning at all. So if you have an issue with something or someone ideally if you can voice your concerns directly to the responsible people and give them a chance to rectify their mistake before you blast them on social media. Because if we think about this as a community then this should not be an adversarial situation. It should be an opportunity for everyone including yourself including myself to learn and grow because and this is like a little bit of a tired phrase now but we are all in this together. So the thing is that committing yourself to DNI does not come naturally to most of us. It is hard work that requires intentional action and we have to confront our own biases and shortcomings if we really want to create a place for everyone. So community needs to be actively built if we want to do it right. Sometimes community just happens but often what I see is that in these types of communities they do favor the most privileged the ones who are the most assertive, the loudest because if DNI would just happen by itself it wouldn't be here, it wouldn't have this entire track. So clearly we need to do a bit more than just thinking oh but I'm such a tolerant person. So I'm really interested in power dynamics and how folks get heard in communities or by communities and since I've started digging into this I've often said with a lot of discomfort about myself and my own actions. So for example I started following disability advocates and they constantly call out behavior that I was or still am guilty of because we live in an ablest society and even though I'm doing things that are well intended because I don't have the context and don't have the context of someone else's lived experience I sometimes don't realize that what I'm doing is actually harming them. So when you find that out when someone calls you out and tells you you know the thing that you're doing is actually hurting me and you're saying that you want to be my ally but what you in fact doing is hurting me. That is very painful to hear and yes my first instinct is often just ignore it or go on the defensive or even be offended and go to the counter attack. But I've learned that this is obviously not the best way to handle it. It's more important to learn to get comfortable with the discomfort, to just sit and think be curious. Like why do you think this way? Is there something that I'm missing? Maybe there's like systems or institutions in place that are invisible to me because they don't target me but if I had another identity I would have that experience as well. So really D&I in my opinion or being an ally in my opinion always requires you to listen more than to say. So the other thing is at the beginning all this work is really hard and it requires that to be done on top of the already demanding work that you already have to do as a community leader but over time it will get more easier. The more you do it it will become second nature to you. So when we started Serverless Days Amsterdam at our first conference we had three or four proposals from women out of a total of 70 and obviously that was quite devastating for us but what we got from that when we talked about it later was that we just didn't invest enough into the community first. So what we did was we started to run meetups and made sure to regularly invite women and people of color to speak at those meetups and the more we invited the more other folks who were marginalized would then reach out to us and say like, hey, my friend spoke at your event and I'm very interested as well so it becomes easier over time and one of my proudest moments actually was when we put on a meetup and while it was on then we realized we had an all female speaker lineup and all female hosts and we didn't realize it because we didn't we were not looking for it we weren't trying to make it happen it just kind of happened because the community to the outside seemed like a very welcoming one. So that's what I'm saying the more you do it the easier it will get. So yeah, I was once invited to speak at a women in tech event and what I would usually do when I'm getting invited to conferences or really any kind of conferences that I'm interested in speaking is I will check the lineup I will check the organizing team just to see what kind of people are calling the shots here what kind of people do they want to attend these events like how aware are they of things like gender imbalance or racial imbalance. So after I checked the lineup I realized that about 50% of the speakers were men which is quite interesting for a women in tech event. So I asked the organizer about this and she said it was because she didn't see a lot of male attendance in the event and in an effort to make the audience more diverse she thought, you know what I learned that representation matters so I'm just gonna make half the speakers men and I don't know if she could see the irony of that but I sure did. So I made a clear to her that I will not speak at an event for women highlighting women's perspectives and struggles that would be featuring 50% men it just doesn't make any sense and what she said was very eye-opening to me because she basically complained that she's just trying to make everyone happy but it's very hard and I think that was the mistake like you shouldn't try to make everyone happy. You should commit yourself to your core mission your North Star and by that you can make decisions transparently and decisively. So if your mission is giving women a voice showcasing women's issues and struggles then it's quite clear that 50% men is probably not gonna deliver that message probably not. So I think in that case it would have helped her to understand what actually makes sense instead of trying to just make everyone happy on a whim. So if you're running community event or if you're leading a community like an open source community ask yourself what are your core values? What distinguishes your community maybe from other communities and what can your audience or your community members expect from this community? So there's a lot of great stuff I learned from folks out there and one of the people that I will mention throughout this talk a lot is Kim Creighton. Yes, cause yeah she's only made me and a lot of people out there aware of the systems and institutions of oppressions but also teaches us how to be strategic about things. So this is one of her quotes intention without strategy is chaos which really speaks to me a lot because we can have all the very best intentions and plaster them on our websites and have like a rainbow logo stuff but they are worthless completely without an actual strategy how to achieve those goals and how to use your energy and your resources to then really focus on tangible goals. So when you have your core value set up you need to think about the strategy next. As an example, do you want a diverse speaker lineup for example, how will you achieve that? Because if you just cross your fingers that's clearly not enough. Maybe you reach out to folks from marginalized communities to apply to your CFP. What if you don't get enough diverse candidates for your CFP? What is your contingency plan? Do you have people that you can invite? Don't forget your own biases when you're going through a blind CFP because we're all humans and we grew up in this world and we will all have our own biases and I think it's better to recognize them, understand them, counteract them than trying to remove all the personalized information from an application like an interview or something and then hope that this will be completely unbiased which will almost certainly not be the case. It's kind of like when people say I don't see color which they often say that with good intentions but when you say you don't see color it means you're also blind to the oppression out there, you're blind to the struggles that people have to get where they are right now which you're basically silencing them and silencing their experiences and stories. It's just not getting you closer to what the goal actually is, what I think the goal is. So the more you think about these things in advance the more you have in place to increase the likelihood of having diverse speakers and that means the less stress you need to be when the CFP closes and when you have a lot of other things lined up. It's all about setting yourself up for success. You're never gonna get the perfect solution that 100% will be completely fair to everyone but you can do small things that will all get you closer to your goal because when it comes down to a diverse speaker lineup is dependent on a diverse community and that needs to be one in which marginalized people can feel safe to express their viewpoint even or especially when they go against the majority viewpoints. Unfortunately there's a lot of communities that seem to fall short in that regard. Specifically I'm talking about conferences and CFPs because there have been some issues recently if you are familiar with the Kubernetes space there is a community event called KCD, Kubernetes Community Days and they've been having some issues getting women to speak so there were a couple that had all male speaker lineups and the problem is that then the next step is oh now we're gonna specifically invite women which already kind of looks bad because it plays into the trope that women can only speak if they're invited to speak, right? And the other thing is that now you're putting the burden on the shoulders of the people who are already marginalized and it's not their problem. They didn't cause the problem. It's the majority of privileged mostly white folks who caused it and then they put it onto the oh you're a woman of colors so clearly you know all the solutions and you are responsible now to implement them. And then also this leads to the other problem that now you're putting one of the probably celebrity tokens into a space that could have also been given to someone who has not been on stage before. Maybe doesn't get the chance to travel a lot and speak a lot. Maybe has a completely different perspective on things because they're new to this space. So again you're inviting someone thinking this will increase diversity but they're not really diverse in that sense because they are already in the space and taking up space in this community. So this leads me to this quote by Jamila Jamil who is an actress you might know from playing Tahani in The Good Place. She has some problematic issues but this quote I think was really speaking to me a lot because she was talking about how the media framed the emergence of a new star in a specific niche. She was talking because she's, I think she's like Pakistani or from the Indian subcontinent I'm not quite sure. But she was talking about like a new actress who was kind of like had the same background and then people would write in the news, oh move aside Jamila Jamil, like it's time for a new blah, blah, blah. And she would say that no I'm not gonna move aside, just stand next to me and we can be here together. So we should like always make new space instead of taking space away from other people. You know I don't wanna be the only woman in the room. If I can't avoid it I just don't wanna do it. So the key here is to create more opportunities for underrepresented folks. You already have two female speakers or chairs or executives. Doesn't mean that your work is done now. Can you get even more underrepresented folks into your roster? How about a female who is disabled? You know like there's a lot of variety out there. Doesn't mean that I tick this box so I'm done now. What about first time speakers? What about someone who is not in your tech circle? If you have a Kubernetes conference maybe find a designer to speak on the intersection of design and infrastructure. Like the whole point to go into conference systems is to broaden your horizon. If you have a highlight, if you want to highlight a topic but you only know male speakers or only know men who are knowledge about it, ask this guy if they can introduce you to an underrepresented person in their network who can speak on the topic. So this is another important quote from Tim and so far I've only been talking about diversity which is about reaching out out of your comfort zone, welcoming people to your group. But inclusion is where the real sweet spot is because that is about keeping them in your communities which means creating psychological safety, giving them a space to express themselves where they feel heard, understood and needed. So many times when people ask why is there not more diversity in this space, the problem is actually not diversity, quite the opposite, it's because the only efforts have been made towards getting people into the space but very little towards inclusion and like keeping people in the space. So this is something that I'm doing from my events in my communities, this is like a framework that I've kind of developed for myself, the ABC of inclusion and if you have any feedback from me, any ways that I can make it better, anything to add, please absolutely talk to me, I would love to hear it. So the A in this case is accessibility. Is your event, is your venue, is your community accessible? And this just doesn't mean like rams for people who need mobility aids. Is your event safe for women? Do they have to go walk through a big, unlit parking lot? How difficult is it for me to get there if I don't have a car or a bike? How about folks who have children? Can they bring their kids? Can they join remotely? Is your event at a time of day that is only convenient for anyone who's single and in their mid-20s? Is it affordable? Is it free? Is there a language barrier? There's a lot of these things that all thunder accessibility and once again, if you start thinking like, okay, there's an event there and this works fine for me. This is my first thought. And then my next thought is, what if it wasn't fine for me? What if I didn't like this thing? What if I didn't like Star Wars? What are alternatives that I could offer to people who are just not the mainstream? So the next thing is B, which stands for behavior and that's about the general vibe of the community. What kind of people are present and vocal? How are people behaving? Because if you're a person who's been marginalized and overlooked and mistreated in the past, you've learned to pick up cues from the most minute details, microaggressions. You will learn about these indicators and they will tell you what kind of community you can expect. I once heard this quote, culture is everything that management allows. And it obviously lacks a bit of nuance, but then I think the chorus really hits the nail on the head because as community leaders, once again, we set the tone. Sometimes it's very overt and sometimes it's subtle. But if you will notice immediately, our folks vigilant about the language they are using, our community leaders cognizant to avoid gendered language, ableist slurs, or using mental illnesses to describe bad behavior. Are your organizer sponsors using sexualized imagery? Are they using sexually loaded language like virgin or I'll be gentle? That's the worst, I think. Are people gatekeeping? Are they talking about real programming languages or real geeks? These kinds of things. Please be mindful to tone it down with the inside jokes and being overly familiar if you are in a group of people who do not belong to your normal close groups. So again, this goes back to the experience that I had at the very beginning that I talked to you about. Sometimes something is okay for your in-group, but you risk that the language might be offensive to other people or it's just boring to them. They just feel completely excluded. The hurdle for them to join your group and to feel as part of the community is so much higher now and it's just not necessary. Just be welcoming. If someone new joins your table, change the subject. You've all been talking about last time you met and then someone new joins, just welcome the new person, make an explicit effort to welcome them and then change the subject. All of these things do not rise to something that would violate a code of conduct, but they're all subtle indicators of how much you are thinking about people who are outsiders and how much you care about them. So what about the behavior that will cross the line? Ideally when you are already creating this atmosphere of vigilance, you don't have to deal with this so much because the members of your community will help you police behavior, but it's always better to be safe than sorry. So usually you will have a code of conduct, most communities do, do you have staff to enforce it? This is the most important thing. Remember also that a COC is not there to mediate a disagreement between equals, it's there to protect the most vulnerable. So when in doubt, always prioritize the needs and safety of those who are most vulnerable, because it's not about punishing bad behavior, it's about the safety and comfort of everyone else. If you are shooting for my diversity at your events, that will come at the cost of the folks who behave in an exclusive manner. And again, it's not about punishing them, it's not about teaching them a lesson, just tell them, I'm sorry, but the community that I'm creating here is just cannot deal with your behavior. Once you're willing to change that, you are more than welcome to join. Until then, I'm sorry you have to go somewhere else. So I was part of the Global COC team for an event called Global Diversity CFB Day. This is a one day workshop all over the world. Volunteers will run workshops to help marginalized folks create their first public presentation. And yeah, I was on the Global COC team with Kim, that's when I learned so much from her. And in this group, we were acutely aware that our attendees would be largely from marginalized groups. So we wanted to be extra cautious and vigilant. So what we were doing was that every workshop runner had to take part in a COC training, and we came up with scenarios for people to go through examples of violations and how we would suggest for them to handle them. But those were just suggestions. So you can check them out there. It's a 10 minute video and like a Google doc. So I'm gonna summarize the most important points in that from that workshop, just so you don't have to watch it if you don't want to. So the first thing is make the COC visible. Hang posters throughout your venue. That just reinforces the idea that you really care about the COC and make sure that people are aware that you have one and what the rules are. Also clarify the consequences of violations as much as you can, while also giving you some space to maneuver. You don't have to be very strict on that. But just so people know possible consequences include getting kicked out of the event, maybe you'll get banned from future events or social media, whatever. Just make it clear that you list all the possibilities. Reporting incidents should be as straightforward as possible and the more channels you offer for reporting incidents, the more likely it will be that people will report to you. Also put that with the COC. Ideally, if you have a COC team, you can also introduce them. You can also say like this person wearing this shirt, you can go to them. It's also, I think personally, very important that these COC team members are just doing that and they don't have any other responsibilities because they might be competing at some point. And just to make sure that they're always available, make sure that they don't have anything else to do. When you get a report, focus on the reporter. If you have doubts about what happened, whatever, you can always talk about this with your team members after the report. But while you're getting it, make sure the reporter feels safe, they feel believed, they feel listened to. Ask clarifying questions if you have them. But in the moment, this is all about getting the story from the reporter. And if you can, be as transparent as you can to the outside. So what we would do is we would have a lock, a COC lock where we publish, there was a report and this is what we did. It was kind of vague because we wanted to make sure that people are still, to keep people's privacy, but we still wanted to just let people know that, hey, things happened and we took action. This is the action we took. And then finally, this is the most important thing for me about community is understanding that it's not about you. Because if something hinges on a single person, it doesn't scale and it doesn't grow. If you want to do big things, you need to take care of the small things. You need to make things accessible, not just for your attendees or your members, but also for your organization team. Because then that frees you up to do other things, touch other communities and scale up your influence. And eventually those small things that you put out to the world, they will all come back to you. People will give back to you. And by then you will have inspired so many people that the eventual result of it is bigger and better than you alone could have ever achieved or dreamed of. When I started with Serverless Days Amsterdam and even before that I was very active with all kinds of community work. But I tried to, I was actually also in politics for a while. And I tried for years to march on by myself. I had this vision of the perfect world. And it felt terrible because I was tilting at windmills. I felt like I didn't belong. No one's really helping me. And it was just so much and totally overwhelming. But when I started to trust in the community and really just serve the community and let go of everything else, that's when I really found the sweet spot. Like, instead of just trying to focus on or follow that grand vision that I had, every step and every decision I would just try to make the best possible decision in that moment. Because the community is bigger than you yourself. So you can't let your own ambitions and visions be in the way of achieving that. So yeah, I mentioned Concrete throughout this talk. She's been educating and supporting marginalized folks for such a long time, and I've learned so much from her. So I want to shout out her book, Profit Without Oppression. If you want to go deeper into this topic, if you're willing to sit with your own discomfort, look at your own behavior first, then yeah, check out this book for sure. And that's it. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this was really helpful. Come to me for some corporately mandated diversity stickers or for the Kubero Key Community Stickers. Thank you so much. I don't know if we have time for questions. Does anyone have any questions? I need to give you the mic. Hello? Okay, I just wanted to ask, can I find any of your stuff online? I would like to see what you've got and just be able to try to follow it myself. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you can follow me on the internet. I should have mentioned that at the beginning. You can follow me at lianmakesthings. So that's my handle on Twitter, Blue Sky, oh, I have a Blue Sky invite that I will give out to preferably a black woman or a person of an underrepresented group. So if you're interested, please come by. And yeah, so lianmakesthings or lianmakesthings.dev. That's where I also, that's my website also and I can share some other like talks or whatever I'm doing in that space is probably all there. And what was the podcast you're doing? The podcast is called League of Extraordinary Tech Workers and I'm working on the second episode right now. So yeah, again, just reach out to me. I would be so happy to talk to all of you. The whole idea of that podcast is also to not just speak to engineers, but to speak to everyone who works in tech, like also office managers, everyone who takes part in the industry. Thank you. Anyone else? Yeah, no, thank you for that. Oh my gosh, so weird to hear my voice. Thanks for the talk. I think there's a, so part of the work that I do is working with students and one of the things that we do is working about like, why should they care about inclusion and diversity, right? And one of the things that we noticed was that it go to a point that it was kind of like people were just doing, the inclusion diversity talk, just to talk about inclusion and diversity, but not really being very intentional about it. And an assessment that we started to work with students about was understanding who are doing an assessment about your context. And what I mean by that is that different regions and different countries will have different underprivileged or underserved communities. And I think if we're really thinking of making an intentional effort to build diverse communities, the first thing is understand what's in your context so that you can really find, beyond just like following the trend on inclusion diversity, you're really making an impact on your local community. And hopefully that will guide your efforts. Different countries have different like context. And I don't know that making students think beyond just like create a code of code of post-it and people will report there, really being like, hey, who are some of these people that might feel like they're not being served currently in your community? That really kind of like change the approach and it's something that I think a lot of community builders are appreciating a lot. Yeah, I think that's exactly also the point that I was trying to make with, you invite the famous people who are non-binary or black or whatever the box is that you're trying to take. And then that's not diversity. And I think that's really even understanding, as you say, like, why do I want diversity? Is it just because it will look better on my branding material? No, it's because the more diverse opinions you have the better or the higher the chances are that you are making the best decision, right? It's a pretty straightforward concept. I think at this point in time, if you don't see the economic advantages for diversity, I don't know what to tell you. It's right there. But yeah, I think that understanding also, as you say, in your cultural context, you know, like maybe there is an aspect that is just not what you would think of if you just like think in these kinds of boxes. I would be very interested to hear like what kind of tools you have in your toolbox and we can talk about this later. Yeah. Awesome. All right. We're gonna popcorn the microphone. Yeah, thank you for your talk. I am new to tech. Actually I've been in for about a year and so I'm coming, I do community for the Decentralized Identity Foundation. And the challenge here with diversity in the space I'm in is that people just don't know about it. But the interesting thing is market research is showing that this sector will grow, can grow by 89% by 2030. So there's this huge opportunity but I see all these groups unaware. And so me and some people in the community were holding a hackathon on June 5th to invite people to learn about this technology from beginner to advanced level. And so I guess my ask here in the room to you and to people in the room is help me find those channels of unrepresented people that I can tell about this event and tell about this space to invite to my community because I feel like that's just not being done right now. There are some groups out there. There's like women in cloud native, women who code and these groups exist. But I think you as someone who's creating community you need to really think about if I was on social media and I just see someone posting about hey, join our event if you are a woman or something, would you just do this? I would only do it if I know someone who I trust who's in that group or if this group has already proven to me that they are doing these things and not just talking about it. So I think in those cases it's really we are, we owe it to these modernized folks first to prove that they can trust us before we just say like, oh, just come to us. But like go to those groups that already exist first and ask them and then also ask for feedback. Like what would you need to come to my event? What are you missing? So that's how I would start. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions? Hi there. Thank you for your talk. My name's Autumn, it's very nice to meet you. You said something that resonated with me quite a bit. When you talked about marginalized folks being like tasked with solving a problem, because this happens to me very often, right? So, oh, Autumn, you're a black woman. Tell us how to fix the issues with black women or black people at our company. And if you had the experience of every single modernized person out there. Exactly, exactly. You now speak for every black person because you're the only one here. Exactly. What's some good advice that you have of declining this offer? Saying, you know what, I'm not comfortable doing that because I've declined. But then I become stamped with the, she's not a cooperator or she's aggressive or she's upset or we offended her some way. So now we're just not gonna talk to her about anything. Right. Ever again. That is a biggie. I mean, if I hadn't, if I had there's an answer to that, I would probably make a lot of money with consulting for that. I think what I'm doing, so first, if you're able to find some allies just, you know, just amongst yourself, just your friends and especially, obviously, if you can find some white men who will speak up for you, that would be ideal. Kind of sucks that you have to rely on that, but that's unfortunately how it is. So this is what I usually do. I will find some people who I know understand to some degree the issue and I will just ask them to be aware. Like if in a meeting someone's just asking you to take notes again, maybe they can speak up for you like, hey, sorry, what was it? Autumn. Autumn, sorry. Season always. It's always taking notes. Maybe someone else could do it instead or maybe I'm doing it instead. You know, like that's, I found to be most effective because in these smaller groups, in like a corporate setting, if you start calling people out for their obvious like racism or sexism, it won't end well. So it's more useful to just talk to individual people and try to make the problem first appear to be individual and then once you get a bit more by and when people start noticing, oh right, that is actually what's happening all the time, then you can start maybe talking about, you know what, this is actually a systemic issue and once, you know, because people need to first see the small, see that it exists at all before they're willing to see, oh, now I see it's actually all around me. So that's how it was for me for sure. I didn't buy into all of this when I started in tech because it's like really discouraged to talk about these systemic issues in tech. It's like, no, focus on your code, don't talk about women or something. Thank you. You're welcome. Anybody else? Questions? Thanks so much for your talk. I felt like I really resonated with that. I'm actually here because Women Who Code, which is the organization that you mentioned, actually, I won tickets to come here. I'm a student. I did a complete career change and I'm trying to get into this world of tech and in an ideal world, I would love to work for a company who cares about diversity and inclusion, has a female CEO of all of that, but I also feel like it's realistically really difficult and I'm also kind of stuck in the battle between taking opportunities that I can get, which might not be culturally ideal for me. I'm just wondering if you have any advice for someone who's trying to break into the industry. What to kind of prioritize? I've worked for previous, I was in banking and financing before, or sorry, mortgages before, and I just didn't like it. I didn't like the culture. I didn't like how the companies were set up, but I feel like it's always a battle for us because it's just never an ideal situation, so yeah, I don't know if you have any advice over someone who's trying to get into the industry. Yeah. So first, having a female CEO doesn't mean that it's going to be an equitable place because it's like, there's some, and unfortunately it's more the system as such, it's like patriarchal, so, especially white women who are very successful, probably are good at playing that game, so and they might even be more hostile towards you because now you're breaking into their space, right? You're like, now you're another woman. It could be, might not be, it's just like there's no guarantee for that. And also, the thing that I'm struggling with the most is that sometimes I'm not sure, did I get that feedback because I'm a woman, because I'm a woman of color, or is it actually because of what I did? Sometimes it's just, that's something that probably will be part of my career forever. In terms of advice, so what I'm looking for in a job is always, can my direct manager be trusted? I've been in a lot of different organizations, and bigger ones, smaller ones, and sometimes the overall culture sounds really great, like I was in a company where I felt super great in the company, I had a place, the people that I worked with were great, but my manager was just total spineless, he just never did anything for me, he never spoke up for me, so while everything else was great, I was so unhappy, and it's close to actually burned out because I just couldn't trust my manager to help me with my work. I was in other companies where pretty much everything around me was burning, but because my team and my manager were so great, and I felt so safe, just developing myself and not having to deal with all the shit that was going around me, I felt pretty good there. So yeah, that's probably what I would look for first, and then the other thing is really know your worth, know the power that you're holding, because people will make you feel like you don't have any power, like in these kind of situations, they probably will deny you your skills and abilities just to talk you down, so you're more dependent on them, so that's something that I learned quite late actually, is to really understand the power that I have and how to utilize it and how to use it, and ask for more money and ask for more perks. Yeah, if you can start early with that, I think it's gonna be really helpful for your career. Thank you. One minute? Okay. I'm glad to have this conversation later, and also I'm gonna go to the lunch, to the Women Non-Binary Lunch, so I'm happy to have a conversation there as well. Right, yeah, thank you so so much for coming and all the questions. Thank you.