 So welcome. I'm Catherine Prezner. I'm from Montreal, which is in the province of Quebec in Canada. That's about 450 miles directly north of here. So the first word camp Montreal was held back in 2009 and it was a two-day two-track event. It was pretty ambitious for a first-time event and talks were mostly in English, a couple in French. Two women gave solo talks and two women co-presented with men. And if you'll notice on the here on the schedule, two of the women's talks were scheduled at the same time. It was a really good inaugural word camp in many ways, but something that bugged a lot of people was the real gender imbalance and even the fact that you couldn't see all four women speak because of the way things were scheduled. So as a community, we went on a journey to change things. And our transformation was slow and steady. It happened over the course of years. It wasn't easy and it took persistence and hard work by a lot of people. So I want to clarify that when I say we and our here, I'm referring to the whole community in Montreal, both official organizers and supporters. And when I say women, I'm referring to anyone who identifies as a woman or a non-binary. Earlier this year, Rachel McCollum said, if a word camp has a healthy proportion of women speaking at it, that tells the women attending that this is a community they can feel part of and they too can aspire to speak at word camps and meet-ups and pass on their knowledge. My hope is that you'll find some things in our journey in Montreal that you can bring back and try in your own word camp community. 2010, our second year, Shannon Smith stepped in as the first woman co-organizer alongside founding organizer Jeremy Clark and new organizer, Brendan Sarah Schreyer. And here they are after a very successful word camp weekend. Do you notice anything? So Shannon had two of her four kids during her seven-year tenure as a word camp organizer. That second year, we again had just four women speakers. This time two of them were Shannon and me. We had attended and met the previous year at word camp and decided that we really needed a good beginner overview talk. So we created one. This time we also didn't put all four women up against each other at the same time. As a bilingual city, we also wanted to see more talks in French. And so this year there were a couple more talks in French and even one in France, which is a pretty uniquely Montreal combination of English and French. And looking back, 2010 was a very blue year. Do you notice? I don't know. I don't know how that happened. So 2011 was our third year. We're moving along now. And we had some more solo talks by women and a couple more joint talks as well. Our percentage of women speakers went up to 28 percent. And that year we tried something different. Shannon had an idea and it was to have an informal discussion to brainstorm why there were so few women making their voice heard in the word press world at the time. And we called it, where are the women? We did it bilingual style. So the room was pretty packed. There were tons of ideas flying and people of all ages shared really personal stories. We brainstormed what some of the problems were, possible solutions. Men asked how they could help. It was pretty inspiring. I used this kind of wacky mind mapping tool to try and capture the gist of the discussion at the time. Looking back, it's kind of hard to look at. I'm not quite sure how well it worked out. But looking back at it, it did bring back some of the salient points and reminded me what we talked about. And one of the things that really struck me was looking at this little cluster about how to get more women speakers. And things that came up a lot, like feeling like an imposter as being the reason why women didn't want to present, feeling like a fraud. Being worried about expressing strong opinions. 2012, we tried a few new things. We wanted to make a conscious effort to put women's images right on the website as speakers. To make us feel like we belong and that we're welcome and have our place there as speakers. So this is Roseanne Harvey, right in the header of the website itself. She'd given a talk the year before. And we even used the same image on our little badges that we gave for speakers and attendees and volunteers. Our proportion of women speakers jumped by 10% that year to 38%. Here's something Aaron Jorbin said. It's also about inspiring. When you look at a career path and see only people that look different than you, it becomes a lot easier to drop out and say, eh, it's not for you. When you look at the breakdown of speakers and you don't see anyone like yourself, you question if you even want to buy a ticket to attend. 2013. Another woman joined the organizing team. This is Alex. And something else happened. We went from two tracks to three. So now we had even more speakers to find. Shannon started doing something. We have a very active Facebook group in our community. And she started putting little reminders saying how many people had submitted so far, how many women, and do you know anyone who might be able to submit a talk. And they started to show the community that this is something we care about. Maybe it prompted someone to consider submitting who might not have considered it. I also made it a habit to get up and pitch our local community at other events for women in tech that I would go to. So we have a very active community for women in tech in Montreal. And I would always get up if there was an opportunity for announcements and invite people to submit a talk to our local meetup group, or if the time of year was right to submit a talk to WordCamp itself. I'd also keep an eye out when I went to other WordCamps in nearby communities, for example, in Ottawa or Toronto. If I'd see a really great woman speak, I'd invite her to submit a talk to Montreal. We did something else in 2013. We ran a troubleshooting workshop for women as well. And Shannon led another women in WordPress discussion session. 2014. We have about one community meetup a month, and we started doing some more participatory style meetups. So things like a plug-in slam where anybody could get up and talk about their favorite plug-in. Or we shared tips on things you wish you'd known when you first started using WordPress. Or we had a panel on the business of WordPress. And this would let people get a little taste of what it's like to get up and share something in front of a group without having to commit to a whole talk. Something else really key for me happened in 2014, and these are some pictures from it. The Vancouver WordPress community was facing a situation where they had almost no women submitting talks to the WordCamp. And they decided to do something about it, something extremely concrete. They ran a workshop, a public speaking workshop, for women, and it was a half a day. And they did things like look at how to brainstorm, how to narrow down your talk ideas, how to write pitches, and how to structure a talk, things that beginners can find very challenging. I was extremely inspired reading about this. I thought it was an amazing idea, and I thought it was something I'd like to try. I asked two of my colleagues, Tammy Lister and Kat Rimer, at Automatic, if they'd be interested in developing a workshop similar to this for our colleagues within Automatic. And they said yes, and we ran a bunch of these within the company through video conferencing since we're distributed. And then Tammy and I sort of took this on the road and continued to give the workshop at other WordPress communities, local workshops in WordPress communities and AdaCamp and Montreal Girl Geeks. And along with the things they'd covered in Vancouver, we did things like how to handle stage fright, how to avoid common beginner speaker mistakes, how to handle post-talk questions and answers, something that beginners can get very nervous about. We also created a companion site called Get Speaking, full of resources for beginners. We continued, mostly Shannon continued, tweeting and Facebooking our submission stats. So how many talks in French? How many talks in English? How many talks by women? And they started to get the community talking. So here you see in French Elise Desonnier saying that her and Kay Lynn are going to help each other with their pitches, and if anyone else needed help, to get in touch. As a side note, Elise is speaking here at WordCamp US this year. This started to nurture a really supportive environment in our community rather than a competitive individualistic one. I continued to do something a little bit more strategically that I had started to do and that was to make a list of all the women I thought would be great speakers for our Montreal WordCamp and invite them individually to submit and ask if I could do anything, if I could help them look over their pitch or anything at all. And a friend who I'd been doing this with for a couple of years gave it a name and she said, Catherine, you're so great at flatter nagging. I said, flatter nagging? That is amazing. She says, yeah, you're asking me to do something, but you're also complimenting me at the same time, so I want to do it. So I wrote up a blog post about this technique to share it with others because it was very effective. In 2015, a third woman joined the organizing team. This is Veronica. WCMTL. And we also put up a diversity statement on our WordCamp website to show the community diversity in all forms is something important to us. This is alongside our existing code of conduct as well. Continued with the Facebook nudges. And we started to get some really good results. Belinda Darcy, who'd done my beginner workshop the previous year, did her first solo talk and did an amazing job. We reached a milestone this year. 2015. 51% women speakers. This is something Shannon has said from the perspective of an organizer. Transparency lets people that you know that you have diversity on your own radar. Publishing your participation stats is really useful. We let people know how many women speakers we have, how many people we don't have, how many people we don't have, how many applied, how many attend, and we talk about how we want even more. It does help. And we talk about wanting to be diverse in other ways, too. And that also encourages people to participate. 2016. We lost our organizer Veronica to the charms of Berlin, and we miss her. But we invited Andrea Zellner to replace her on the organizing team. And if you remember this person from the top left, she was the speaker, and last year she ran a great beginner workshop the week before WordCamp, because we do a series of workshops. And we asked her if she would like to do it again this year. And she declined. But she said, I'm going to get a new speaker to do the workshop. And indeed she did. She got Alice Fia to do the beginner workshop, who did an amazing job. And Elita also really took this flatter nagging to the next level. She started really mentoring new speakers. And so this is Lara Ben-Aime. Elita helped her with her pitch, helped structure the talk, rehearsed with her, and Jess Nudo as well. They both gave their first time solo talks this year. And if you remember Belinda, who had given her first talk the previous year, well, this year she took it to the next level as well by organizing a panel on the business of WordPress and invited three other entrepreneurs to be with her. So you could say she went from being flatter nagged herself to flatter nagging her own panel. I continued my flatter nagging. Even people who'd turned me down before, I would come back to them and ask them if maybe the schedule would work out this year. And we got Lynn Nguyen-Farley and Dara Skolnik from Toronto. And Michelle Bluma in our local Montreal community got Shelley Peacock, who was here in the audience, and Jamie Schmidt to come up from the U.S. as well. And remember those speaker workshops? Well, speaker training is now part of the official WordPress.org training materials. So it's available to anyone. Some of our workshop material is incorporated in there, along with material developed by the team in Vancouver. So anyone can now give a beginner public speaking workshop in your own community. Where are we now? Well, this is a pretty cool graph showing how we got from 20 percent women speakers in 2009 to 50 percent. And it also correlates it with the percentage of women organizers and the number of women's t-shirts ordered, which is kind of a not too accurate proxy for how many women attend, because some women order the women's sizes. So this was Shannon's last year as an organizer. She retired after serving the community for so many years. We realized we still have more work to do. We need to develop diversity in other areas besides gender as well. And we need to keep working on this and it's something we're going to continue to work on. I hope you've gotten maybe one or two ideas of things you might want to try in your communities. And also maybe you thought of things that you have been doing in your communities that have been successful that you'd like to pass on. So I'd love to hear about them. Thank you.